Week 7

This week, we continued to learn a bit more about the overall strategy of the game. In one of the maps played today, Blue Moon, vehicles were seen by the casters as highly prominent. The vehicle that was seen the most was called the Shrike, pictured below. My interpretation of the Shrike was that of a futuristic fighter jet armed with dual blast cannons. It can fly extremely high to avoid enemy fire and is many times used to assist the heavy offense. The Shrike is a one-manned vehicle driven by a “shriker” and is generated from the home base using some kind of device. The most skilled players can climb into one and never give it up or get shot down. However, in this match, it appeared as though the Shrikes were mainly used to go on kamikaze-like missions to intentionally crash into the enemy’s base, knocking out a good section of their defense.

This week was also very interesting due to the large amount of drama that ensued. The casters described this as a normal thing, stating that, “It wouldn’t be Tribes if there was no drama.” The main deal that the casters talked about was their minor qualms with some of the team captains. This ranged from their methods of playing to their general attitudes as a whole. For example, they talked a little bit about how one team liked to take too much time pre-game to strategize and get their team together. They also complained about someone else complaining about everything. One big complaint was over the actions of one particular team captain, who was told the casters that he didn’t know his particular match was being casted and that he didn’t authorize it and the casters were wrong for casting it. In general, there was just a lot of sarcasm and griping done by the casters, but it doesn’t seem like they ever have any intention on confronting anyone on the issues that they have, but prefer to just talk and make jokes behind their backs.

The biggest drama of the week came in the kicking issue. During the time before the last match, three more casters joined in to observe the game, and one of them got kicked (or removed from the server by another user so that they may neither play nor observe) by one of the team captains.

Several reasons were thrown out for this. One reason was that it was a revenge play for the caster kicking the captain during a scrimmage some time back. Another was that a lot of players were displeased that there being too many casters. (There are usually three, and at this point, there were six). This brought up a pretty good point, considering each user, rather it be a player or an observer, takes up bandwidth on the server, and too much bandwidth can cause a game to lag (which no one wants). This was brought up later after the game began when every caster except for Craig got kicked. Naturally, this caused the casters to get very upset and the ones that kicked them, but some of them decided that out of respect for the players, they would stay out of the cast.

Drama is never nice, but it may have been a good thing to see here because it’s so relatable. No matter what organization, job, hobby, etc. we are involved in, there is always going to be some kind of drama in our life. This just goes to show that while people may be different in a million different aspects of life, there are so many things that are just part of our human nature.