I like them french-fried potaters

I was skeptical of Left 4 Dead at first. Valve had always treated me right; I count the Half-Life games among my favorites, and I've logged way too many hours swinging a wrench in Team Fortress 2, but I had my doubts about these unseemingly quick zombies. The demo didn't do much to win me over; seemed like I was mostly just chasing chasing chasing three other people that had obviously played way more than me. I played with my brother-in-law, Bacon Loaf a few times, and that was better. He would actually stop to pick a hunter off of me, and the few times that I got to go back and untangle his ass from a smoker made me feel a little accomplished. It wasn't until I started to play with friends regularly that I realized that these little moments were what made the game. That, and I heard a rock paper shotgun interview with one of the designer who kept talking about Serious Sam, and suddenly the never-ending hordes of easily-dispatched zombies made sense. And then when our little group started playing versus mode...fuggeddaboutit. Just about every other night we'd go through a versus campaign, scrambling the teams for some variety, lining up complicated smoker, boomer, hunter combos, silently cursing when the new guy got the tank, bitching about the small size of the boomer-attracted hordes...those were the salad days.

exactly like this

And then one of our guys moved, to an army base with shite internet. There were kind of two separate groups that made up our band of plucky amateurs, and Dicky was more or less the linchpin between the two. We've tried to get it back together, especially with the new community maps and whatnot, but Left 4 Dead seems to have slipped down on most people's list at this point. Team Fortress will likely continue to keep me happy for years (sniping on KoTH nucleus has proven to be a fountain of boundless pleasure), and I'm already looking forward to Borderlands, but every once in a while, I still get a hankering to kill me some zombies. Of course, this almost always means a pub game.

I know, I know.

The pubs. You've been there, I'm sure. You know about the rampant racism/sexism/heterosexism that pervades the voice communication. You know about the severe noob intolerance. And of course, you know about the epidemic rage-quitting that makes it almost impossible to finish a game with the same team with which you started. As Bacon Loaf said, "Playing in the pubs pretty much sours this game for me." He's right. In a way, I feel like I'm right back to those early fumblings through the demo; it seems like I'm mostly just chasing three other people that have obviously played way more than me.

There have been, however, exceptions to this experience. Enter Big Texas McButtrapin'. I jumped on a pub match not too long ago and was delighted/terrifed to find that one of the players on my team was using this charming handle. As if that weren't enough, he only talked using the vocal stylings of Billy Bob Thornton from the film Sling Blade. As if that weren't enough, he was also a damned good player.

I would follow you anywhere, my liege.

Big Texas had a pretty simple theory of leadership: get pretty good at Left 4 Dead, tell everybody on your team what they should do, and curse them roundly in the voice of Sling Blade when they don't do it. We were playing through Death Toll, and we got rolled the first map, largely because we were still a little slow to hop to Big Texas's grunted commands. We started the second chapter, the drains, as the infected. It was here that Big Texas really started to shine. He had drawn hunter, and he quickly arranged the rest of us around the exit from the safe room and told us our various responsibilities. "Boomer, you better get at least three when they come out of the goddamn door, smoker, you take the first goddamn one you see, hunter you take the second and I'll get whoever's goddamn left." It worked beautifully. They fell almost immediately, or, as Big Texas put it, "Buttraped right out of the door." You can debate the man's tactics, and his articulation style, but the point is that the coordination, arguably the entire raison d'être of l4d, was handled with aplomb and sophistication.

not shown - buttrape

Which got me thinking, what is it that makes a good l4d leader? Apparently, not necessarily the same elements that qualify one for leadership in the real world; at least I haven't seen too many Sling Blade impersonators moving up the management ranks. Maybe all it takes is to be the loudest? And what definitely disqualifies one from a leadership position? Sucking? Probably not, I've played a few games where I have listened to and obeyed some dude even though he missed opportunity after opportunity.

These ideas percolated for a while and then, just a few days ago Bacon and I jumped onto a team led by "jst fukin rage quit" or, as he is now known, "token black guy" (link nsfw, unless maybe you're working IT for the klan). jst's leadership style was even more streamlined than Big Texas's...after I managed to avoid puking on any survivors three or four times in a row, I heard him mutter, "Jesus, noob," and found myself staring at a message telling me I had been banninated from the server. I was pissed at first, my pub games usually suck because of rage quitting, and now, for the first time, I had to worry about rage kicking as well. All of the usual objections passed through my head, "yeah well, at least I have a life," and "sorry if I don't live on the pubs, you asshole." Now that some time has passed, however, I'm more willing to see jst's actions as simply indicative of a different sort of leadership style. And, from dude's stats, a style that is fairly effective; as of the writing of the post, jst had a win-loss record of 152-84 (64% won). (Big Texas is currently at 57%, and interestingly, has only completed 23 of the 374 versus games he's played). FYI, I am currently sitting at exactly 50% won, but I've completed 58 of the 88 versus games I've started. Obviously, I am for real.

Which brings us to this blog. I don't anticipate that this will be a long-term thing; I don't have the motivation or the stomach to play pub games for any extended period, but I think I will try to do about a dozen posts detailing my misadventures in pub crawling, with particular attention to any sort of l4d "leaders" that stand out. Up next, "whaddaya mean, co-op?"