EPT========
So if you've read my previous blogs, you may or may not know, but I'm military, and I'm currently deployed. The location I'm at is irrelevant, suffice to say I do get access to internet everyday, it's not terribly dangerous. It was truly a blessing, as the day I left for the AOR, Starcraft II was released. As a result, most of the time I'm off, I ladder. The normal day essentially breaks down to work, get off, go to internet hotspot, watch day9 and anime updates, play ladder until I go to sleep. Rinse and repeat. Pretty satisfying day for a geek like me. I've even thrown in classes now and there so I can get my Associates in Criminal Justice (it might as well be given to me).
However.
There are several considerations that I must reiterate before I state my issue.
-I'm military
-I'm a gamer
-I'm here everyday
-I'm at an R&R base (Yes, I'm stationed here)
With this in mind, you have to realize something. The US military is not the South Korean military. They do not give two shits about Starcraft, much less providing a team. They'll do that for sports like Football and Basketball, but for gamers like me, I might as well be beating my meat, it's equally useless in their eyes. It's even worse that I'm here everyday in an effort to get better at something that I like to do.
Most of the criticism that I get is that I could be using this time to go to the gym. Probably. I don't care about being big, I can pass my PT test, what's the problem? I admit I struggle occasionally if I don't go do something for a while, so I started doing 10 pushups for every loss on the ladder.
I'm at about 500ish pushups. Last week.
Anyways, back to the big issue. The common scene that I see is, you guessed it, the disconnection screen.
Now, normally this is not a problem. I've played Starcraft back in 56k days. I was one of those kids who would get sad after a loss and pull the modem (lol). I do remember what a pain it was to try and load up porn in the dead of night, and praying that my parents didn't hear the dialup connection go through. I went through all that.
However, this is the age of high speed. If you have anything less than DSL, you're about a decade behind everyone else. Even my work computers work faster than 56k, and I can't complain. Until I get off of work and I want to do something competitive (whether you consider Ladder to be competitive is irrelevant to the topic). And even with the inexhaustible monetary resources that our fabulous military provides, we can't provide a connection that can handle more than 10 people using it at the same time.
I log in, and I can usually get a game or 2 in with the occasional frame skip. That's fine, I can ignore hiccups pretty easily. But then the 3rd game hits.
It's never at a point of complete passivity. It's always in the middle of the Colossus Death Ball push that will win me the game. I see his army. I see the Hydras that he made as a panic response to Phoenixes. I see the Roaches he made that he made to hold off the 2 gate. I see the Zerglings he made in fear of a possible Blink Stalker harass. I see it all, and I can roll it. Then the screen stutters.
Oh my god.
Wait for it...
Colossus shoots a beam.
YES.
You have been dropped!
And I flip out.
I actually have nightmares that end with You were dropped! at the end of it. I disconnect that much.
Nerd rage is not unexpected in the online community, but like I said above, there is an inherent lack of understanding within the military community of online mannerisms, nerd rage being one of them. This is perhaps the only exposure to "normal" people to what we know as nerd rage.
That's fine. I don't expect to be understood. I, as a gamer who also watches anime and reads manga, I fully know the social repercussions of my hobbies. I got used to it. After high school, it's little more than joking around, people are more or less understanding of hardcore gaming, after Modern Warfare.
But then the other day, I came close to getting into an argument IRL (which I would have gotten my ass kicked, but whatever).
I was sitting here on my day off. This usually means that instead of going to work, I go to the internet hotspot, and I root in the ground for 12-14 hours. Not that this would change if I was back home, I just wouldn't leave the apartment for days.
The game starts to stutter. I sigh. This occurs probably every 4-5 games now. I still get frustrated, nerd rage still occurs, but it occurs less frequently the longer that I dealt with this.
Because of the stuttering game state, I overhear the neighbor next to me. Apparently he experienced the stutter as well.
"If it wasn't for these FUCKING GAMERS, I WOULDN'T GET CUT OFF MID SENTENCE".
OK, so I guess that his Skype window with his girlfriend stuttered for about 5 seconds or so. Honestly, who cares, he reconnected immediately after it dropped the call. But I about lost my damn mind.
I wanted to go off about how he doesn't know what it's like to play something competitive and lose to something that is completely out of your control. I tried to think of a way to explain it in ways the normal person who watches sports would understand.
Essentially, it would be like playing a football game, and right before the punt, your entire team flickers out of existence and you lose the game even though you come back 10 seconds later.
I wanted to go off about how he doesn't know how bandwidth works, and it would be far more likely to be disconnected because of the fag next to him totally not downloading porn off uTorrent. Or the dude next to him on Limewire totally not downloading The Other Guys. Or the dude next to him totally not pirating the entire discography of Tupac.
It totally must be my fault, as the gamer who also got disconnected with you.
I logged off Starcraft II and went back to watching anime. The next couple of days, were less than stellar.
I also got news in those couple of days, that I would be forward deployed back to the far more busy base down the street. In other words, I will just about vanish from the internet until about.... the time I get back to the States. You can imagine the joy on my face.
