0verhyped

Online multiplayer achievements are already a major pain.
But what do you do if there’s no one left to even play against?

So I talked a little about boosting in my a previous pointless achievement post. Boosting is the practice of gamers colluding to get certain competitive multiplayer achievements that are usually really hard or tedious to get through legitimate means. Like deliberately losing on purpose so the other guy can get “Win five matches in a row”, shit like that. At best, boosting is considered kinda cheap and at worst it’s considered outright cheating.

But there is another aspect to boosting, colluding to get multiplayer achievements in games that have almost no one left playing their online mode. Since online gaming has become so popular this generation, a lot of publishers have tacked on poorly thought out multiplayer modes to otherwise single player games in a futile attempt to draw in more customers. This means there are a lot of games out their with online modes that nobody is playing anymore. For OCD types like myself, this creates a really annoying situation where you’re stuck seeking out other obsessive compulsive nut jobs in order to finish your silly check list of arbitrary goals for a multiplayer mode no one is left playing.

The Darkness is such a game, and after I bought it new for $5 (thanks Amazon), my crippling neurosis compelled me to immediately look up the list of achievements that went with it. And even though this was obviously a single player game first, I felt I’d be unable to proceed knowing there were all these crappy multiplayer achievements waiting for me when I finished. So I went straight to the multiplayer… I’m really hoping they find a cure for what’s wrong with people like me soon.

So all the achievements for the online mode would be a pain just because nobody wants to play a tacked on mode for a game almost no one bought. I singled out “The Don” achievement because it seemed like it would be the biggest pain. The Don achievement is for winning 250 multiplayer matches. Normally this would be tedious, but manageable. It’s a cumulative goal that you can only move closer too, and winning is something you normally want to do. The game also featured team modes, so you didn’t have to be the greatest player either.

But nobody was playing The Darkness’s multiplayer mode. It probably didn’t help I had bought the game well over a year after it was released. So even if anyone actually did like the multiplayer mode, they had long since stopped playing due to the lack of other players. I’d try to find a match and the game would start searching, and searching, and searching, and then for a change of pace, more searching. I think maybe once I got connected to a game with one other person, and I think he immediately quit before we even got started.

This is the fundamental flaw in putting achievements in a multiplayer game, you’re completely dependent on other people. Skill aside, you can’t get a great kill streak going if everyone avoids fighting you. You can’t kill four people in less than ten seconds if one of them is on the other side of the map. And you sure as shit can’t get anything if literally no one is playing. Sometimes companies shutdown servers for old games, making it literally impossible to earn the mutliplayer achievements.

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It became very obvious I wasn’t going to get any of these achievements without recruiting some help first. This is where boosting comes into play, and luckily the internet is full of other sad people with too much free time such as myself who want the same crappy tiny pictures attached to these stupid objectives as I do. My experience with “friends like these” taught me that most boosters are actually pretty passive. They’ll put their name out there, but don’t care enough to actually try and contact people to help them. If you really want to boost an achievement, then you need to just step up and be a leader, which is exactly what I did.

The first thing I did was research. If you’re planning on leading a party of fanatical point hunters, you need to know what you’re doing. I looked up some tips on getting some of the more oddball achievements, and what was the quickest way to finish a match. Turns out there’s one map in the multiplayer mode where if you kill an opponent from just the right angle while he’s standing in just the right spot (specifically from the rooftop opposite to the sidewalk where your enemy is) they’ll respawn in the exact same spot. Normally respawn points try to put you far away from whoever killed you, but in this case the killer was so far away it seemed to confuse the game and caused you to respawn in the same spot you died at. it This means you can quickly kill them several times in a row and end a match in less than a minute just by pointing at one spot and shooting non-stop. I also found out the game can glitch and not save your kills once you log off. Luckily there was a tell for this (this saving icon stops showing up) so I could safely avoid it.

The next step for forming a successful boosting party is to be proactive. Like I said, if you REALLY want a certain stupid achievement like when I do at times, you need to be the one who takes command. Don’t just leave your name in some thread full of people who all say they want the achievement, actually contact a bunch of those people. I found the most recent posts from people saying they wanted to boost achievements in the Darkness’s multiplier mode and sent them friend requests with messages attached explaining who I am and what I was doing. When I saw one of these people online I’d message them and ask if now was a good time to do some boosting. Communication goes a long way.

Lastly, it’s important to be a fair leader. If you’re actually hard up enough to recruit a bunch of people to get some pointless achievements in a subpar online mode in a forgotten game, you should have the decency to realize the people helping you probably have the same kind of obsessive hang up that’s preventing you from ignoring something that’s otherwise so trivial. Don’t forget they want the same damn achievements, otherwise they wouldn’t be helping you, so make sure you return the favor. If anyone understands what it feels like to fixate on crazy achievements, it’s probably them.

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Anyways, my memory is pretty hazy, but according to the dates on my Gamercard, I apparently got every multiplayer achievement in two days, which I do remember being faster than I thought it would be. I seem to recall people getting on and off through out the day. When there was just one person on we would just work on the capture the flag achievements since you had to actually capture the flags yourself to get the achievement. And when there was more than one we did team death match and alternated who was on the losing team each match.

I do remember finishing all the other achievements and only needing The Don achievement at one point. It was getting really late and I was tired, but it seemed like more people kept joining in. I felt like calling it a night but eventually their was five of us and, because of the system I devised, we had just the right amount of people for the fastest progress possible.

What we did was play team death match and use the trick I listed above to win the matches lickety-split. However for the other players to win somebody has to lose. When I was just one on one with another person, we simply took turns. I’d lose, he’d lose, I’d lose, he’d lose. It was fair, but slow. Basically we both only won one match for every two we played, and since we had to win 250 matches, we were looking at playing 500 matches for us both to get the achievement.

But with a third person I found we can up our wins while keeping the same balance. Basically two people would be on the winning team while one person is the entire losing team. Again we’d switch out every match. I’d lose, second guy loses, third guy loses, then me again, etc. This way we were winning two out of every three matches. Once we got up to five people we were all winning four out of five matches each by taking turns being the one loser against the four winners.

The team cap in this game was four people, so having more than five would actually slow us down. (Six people meant two people would have to lose each round, which would mean we’d only win 4 out of 6 matches.) Even though I was tired, I realized that having this perfect amount of like minded achievement hunters was a rare opportunity, so I stuck it out.

I explained how to exploit the trick to win the match quickly, kept track of whose turn it was to be the loser, and warned my teammates to watch out for that glitch that turns off autosave by occasionally reminding them to be on the look out for the save icon. It was an incredibly dull several hours, but it was made a little easier by the fact that all my teammates had mics and we could talk to keep the boredom from setting in too much.

We could all relate to each other’s crazy desire to finish things 100%, swap stories of other dumb things we had done for achievements, and just talk about other games we had played. Occasionally we’d break up the boredom a little by stopping long enough to help someone with some of the other multiplayer achievements they needed. One of them even said The Darkness was suppose to just be a single player game for the 360 and PC’s, but the publisher demanded the developers include some kind of multiplayer and port it over to the PS3 as well.

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I think it was sometime after two in the morning, but I FINALLY racked up enough wins to get The Don. I was ready to pass out by this point but I didn’t quite feel right just leaving my fellow OCD achievement hunters so abruptly, so I elected to hang out a little longer just to help them. Since I had enough wins for the last achievement already, I volunteered to always be the losing team, saving them the trouble of swapping sides each round. I think I managed to get another ten to fifteen matches before I finally felt so tired I could barely keep my eyes open. I told them good night and good luck and presume they went back to my swapping system after I went to bed.

All though my pointless achievement posts are usually about me regretting the time I spent on this kinda crap, I do have a tiny amount of pride attached to “The Don” achievement. I’m not proud about how I spent all day, night, and most of the following early morning playing a forgotten multiplayer mode of an obscure game to get a baker’s dozen of crummy achievements. But I was proud how quickly I managed to organize people to the task at hand. Sure it was pretty pointless task, but I found other people, informed them on how we can progress, then quickly thought up and enforced a system to earn wins as quickly as possible while disturbing them evenly to each person. Even though we were technically cheating, I still feel like I kinda earned The Don achievement anyways, if just because how quickly I managed to lead people in a common goal.

Anyways, with all the multiplayer achievements finished, I was free to play The Darkness for real now. How’d that turn out? I’ll tell you tomorrow…