I've been playing a lot of this game's multiplayer lately. To my surprise, despite my experiences with the previous games multiplayer components--which is primarily restricted to Gears 3 two years post release & a the launch month of Judgment--I've actually been able to improve. I'm certainly far from an ace, but it's gotten to the point where I can better understand what's happening and how to counteract it. There's been a decent number of matches where I'm the MVP even, which is a truly awesome feeling!

However what really peeves me off about the multiplayer is the game's equivalent of teabagging. It's not so much teabagging, though, but rather dry humping... What particularly scummy players enjoy doing is after you've been downed--but not killed--they'll then head over to your weakened state and will proceed to move up and down to simulate the appearance that they're humping you. While it's a little less vulgar than the idea of someone mimicking the act of dropping their bollocks on you, it's still just as obnoxious and juvenile.

It happens anywhoo, as you'd expect it to given how of course a sizeable portion of the sort of people attracted to a multiplayer scene like Gears are dickwads. However my most recent KOTH match really was one of the most embarrassing instances I can recall playing the game. For some reason during one match it was three versus four, however our team of three were never able to have a fourth join us. The matchmaking tends to fuck up in such a way I suppose. We managed to hold our own but lost because, well, we were outnumbered and of course at a disadvantage. When moving onto the next match, however, we still didn't get to have a fourth player added to our team, and so it was once again a three versus four deal. Though what's worse is my other two compatriots decided to leave (alongside one on the enemy team), resulting in it then being me on my lonesome getting slaughtered left and right by a team of three.

I decided to stick around anywhoo if only because of the ego-trip of nailing some rare kills in the face of such an overwhelming disadvantage. I never expected to win, but I didn't mind. I enjoy playing Gears to the degree that I was OK in seeing it through to the end, and because my circumstances seemed pretty funny. Though what ruined it all was how every time I was downed... the opposing three players would then rush to me and all start dry humping my bleedin' soon-to-be-corpse at once. They'd finish me off in any other way beyond simply shooting me or melee attacking, such as by sticking a smoke grenade to me, charging up the torque bow, or waiting for me to get back up only to then knock me down again...

It just seemed so pathetic. I mean, I could have just left the match ending it prematurely, but I instead decided to be a trooper and see it to the end, only for the opposition to take this opportunity to try and humiliate me. I hate the concept of rubbing it in on a downed player and snide boasting in general to begin with, but if somebody uses it as a sort of victory cry then... well, it's still annoying but there's at least some level of understanding. However for this match I was completely overwhelmed, with a high chance that I'd be killed again within fifteen seconds of spawning let alone winning, so it's not like they 'earned' the bragging rights. To have them all surround me and to initiate what essentially looks like a bloody bukkake was infuriating... at first, then it just seemed sad. That I was also playing as Anya for the match gave it an even uglier image at that...

So, why post this? I mean what's the revelation here? That an unfortunate amount of people are tossers? We all knew that already, I knew that already, hence the sarcastic thread title. But I guess the match was filled with enough infantile scummery that it took me to the point where I felt the need to air it out anywhoo.

Glad to see Gears stayed in basically the same state it was when it was originally released.

I mean, welcome to Gears? For as long as I've played there's been shitheads like that. I think part of the reason Gears is so satisfying is once you get good enough to slaughter people like that with your gnasher only to have them send you messages calling you a newb haxor. Something oddly satisfying to me with that.

Also, what a bunch of skrubs. Everyone knows the way to teabag in Gears is to push the already dead body to a tall enough wall, go into cover, click the left analog stick and pop some squats.

For some reason, this post made me think of the Great Mighty Poo song from Conker's Bad Fur Day.

Kinda gross, probably not safe for work.

In the future I would advise you to just leave the match. There is nothing to be gained from that situation, since you're obviously not going to be able to win with 4 v 1 so it's just a waste of time that leads to these sort of stupid situations.

Should have just rage quit.

Somebody sending you hate mail is usually a pretty good sign that you done well, yeah. Though frankly I think arrogant boasters are far more infuriating than sore losers. Like, somebody losing a match badly gets angry, it's an emotional reaction. But boasting and kicking someone while they're already down (literally in this case) is a conscience decision somebody made to be a dick.

If you didn't like getting humped you would have just left the match.

Hurray, you've outed me! It feels good to have somebody finally break through my lies to uncover my secret desire of having polygonal avatars dry hump my own polygonal avatar.

It's the sad state of affairs for online play, Xbox Live in particular. It's never really gotten better and why I mostly stick with friends if able. When people try to "humiliate me" it doesn't bother me at all, it's more annoyance of them holding the game up to do this "wicked sick burn bro" maneuver on me. I just want to play the game win or lose, not fill dead air with your grade school antics.

I've been playing the Rainbow Six: Siege beta and sometimes for no reason at all my teamates will just kill me (well after they know I'm not an enemy so no way they were surprised) for no real reason. They even do it in T-Hunt Classic so they can be the one to be the last man standing and get the final kill, it's dumb. I wish Xbox Live wasn't a cess pool of idiocy but that seems to be the way of things. Dark Souls was the only game I ever played that had a fairly well heeled community, sure it has assholes but even when I was invaded most of the time the invaders would bow/wave or whatever and it was more like a gentlemens duel then just straight up I'm gonna run in here and ruin this guys day sort of thing.

This is why I generally avoid multiplayer in games like the plague. I know a majority of players aren't dicks, but all it takes is that one asshole to ruin the game for me. I have pretty thin-skin, and despite the advice to just forget about it, shit like this tends to stick with me for a while afterwards and really sours my view of the game.

The first Gears is pretty notorious for this kind of scumbeggary. I see this is a very faithful re-release of this product if the same fuckheads are still mucking about.

I always enjoy reading posts like this, just because we all know there is an unfortunate amount of jerks online doesn't mean it isn't good to get it off your chest or see other peoples experiences of this shit, it's kind of a nice comradery of "Oh god I've been there."

Things like the silly tea bagging or fake humping never bother me much until they enter 'you are wasting time' territory, like as soon as they started to let you get up just to knock you down again, that's when it really starts to bug me, if I am in a match, then I am there to play, just stretching things out like that is annoying, it basically just grinds things to a halt so someone can have a laugh, just get on with it.

Same, I'll even know and logically tell myself "It doesn't matter, just let it go, it doesn't effect anything at all." but dickish behavior can really get to me, hell there are moments that have happened years ago that can still occasionally enter my mind and almost get me riled up.
It's kind of like road rage moment of video games. No matter how brief it is, no matter how inconsequential it really was it can still follow me home and make me feel kind of shit while the other guy forgot about it already.
Then again my anxiety can make playing some MP games terrible regardless. "Okay, I'm playing a game where teamwork is really required, gonna try to concentrate and help my team ou-OH GOD, I shoot one of my own guys by mistake! I'M SO SORRY, I'M SO EMBARRASSED, QUIT THE GAME! quitquitquitquitqut!"

Man, team killing is the fucking worst. That's going a step beyond attempted ridicule and is ruining the game for your entire team. Fuck those sorts of people. Though you also make a good point about the Souls games. Naturally there's still a few nobs here and there, but by and large I'd hafta say that a surprising number of players play with respect by bowing before a duel and such, or foregoing using healing items. It's the smallest of gesture but I think it goes a long way to setting the atmosphere, one where we're both just hoping to have some fun in a competitive field.

I do tend to get mildly irritated when it happens, though I can get over it pretty quickly - just part of online gaming really unfortunately. It's when it's multiple players, especially those of which are clearly in a squad, that really sets me off. There's something extra scummy when it's two or more people that are all theoretically laughing amongst themselves as they try to humiliate another player. Obviously this isn't really that comparable, but it admittedly brings to mind the image of a group of bullies all picking on a lone individual on the school playground or something.

This definitely isn't restricted purely to the first Gears. In fact it could potentially be even worse in Gears 3 because of the extended execution animations, where you can mash the button to prolong it for another, like, ten seconds or something stupid like that.

Heh, I get those anxieties, too. It's why I never play the Assassination mode in Gears because the possibility of me becoming the leader would give me a lot more responsibility for our team than I'd be comfortable with. If I were to die pretty early on as the leader then I would end up feeling incredibly guilty, so I don't even risk it.

This. The other team started being dicks to try and infuriate you and make you leave, because the final outcome was always going to be the same anyway.

I really don't get why people take offense to teabagging. Its just silly and dumb. Its not like they punch your mother or kicked your dog.

If you've ever played Gears online, you'd know why the OP was so upset. You're on the ground crawling, just wanting to die and get the next round going, but the ENTIRE team is just standing in front of you pretending to shove their virtual dicks in your face and when you're about to get up, they either just blow you apart or knock you down again and start the whole process over. It's infuriating and humiliating when it happens honestly.

In other games it's not really a huge deal, but I do find it annoying and always get the revenge bagging.

Unfortunately, dumb things such as the forward and back motion next to downed people in Gears is business as normal. I've played the original for quite some time, some six years after its release before stopping because the community playing execution got so bad. Before I stopped, it was difficult to find a game if you didn't just have eight friends online at the same time willing to play Gears. A typical match would last around two or three rounds before the losing side quit. Nobody would play unless the match was close throughout the duration. If one team fell behind by two or more points, people started to quit, causing a chain reaction. Finding a good match, let alone a match that persisted throughout its intended duration, was a rare thing.

I'm seriously sorry you had to go through that duder. Some people just seriously have no morals when it comes to online games. You took the high road by not rage quitting and sticking it out, and I salute you for that.

That's started happening a lot more now in this version too even in TDM & KOTH (I don't play Warzone/Execution), which is part of the reason why I've inevitably adopted a force-of-habit of seeing matches to the end. The act of sticking it out is almost a pride sort of thing really at this point, because of how common it is for people to leave. It sucks how so many people are too focussed on the win as opposed to just having fun.

Another common occurrence are squads as well. More often than not at least two people are teamed up, which alone puts the other team at a disadvantage if they're all randoms. If you happen to be going up against a team comprised of a full squad four... well, forget about it. Considering the small player count all it takes is two players to be in communication with one another to then have a distinct advantage over the other team. Really wish there was a playlist for randoms only or something, like how The Last of Us did it.

Though despite everything I've said here I still really enjoy playing Gears' multiplayer. Put in roughly 250 hours at this point. Fuck the Rooftops map, though!

It's been just long enough since I've played a competitive shooter on a console (Well, I guess Destiny, sorta) that your experience almost sounds quaint. But of course, experiences like yours are also exactly the reason why I'm not so into competitive multiplayer anymore in the first place.

As someone who has played his fair share of Call of Duty in the past, I'm not used to this whole *down, but not out* thing going on, but I can see the problem as of course I've dealt with salty people. Just imagining people humping my dying body when they could've killed me is really scummy. I could go into a rant about how we (as humans) see winning and losing in that we put too much stake into winning and that you can only win to succeed. I'm not going to go tooooo much into that, but yeah. This issue isn't going to go away or be reduced, at least without dealing with the aforementioned problem.

My advice is to not go into a multiplayer match with the notion that players are good sports. That's pretty bad advice, I know, but I don't have much else to say. I'm sorry you went through such a poor experience. :/

I played Gears 1-3 pretty extensively while I was still actively playing my 360. And really the only thing that super annoyed me in the game was teammates killing a dude you were clearly going to execute to get a cheap kill off you.

Psychological research has proven again and again that anonymity increases unethical behavior. Road rage bubbles up in the relative anonymity of one’s car. And in the online world, which can offer total anonymity, the effect is even more pronounced. People — even ordinary, good people — often change their behavior in radical ways. There’s even a term for it: the online disinhibition effect. Research has show, the more connected and human an interaction is the better people act, That's why people’s faces, real names and brief biographies (“John Doe from Lexington”) are placed next to their public comments in Facebook and why Facebook fights hard against pseudonym accounts, to establish a measure of responsibility.

It's quite crazy, I feel for you man.

I've started dipping my toes into heroes of the storm VS real people and all I get are people complaining about my mistakes. We are all human beings, we all make mistakes, we don't need to be told "omg why did you do that you loser" every single time.

Did I say that every time that happens, we win in the end? Huh, figure my move wasen't so bad then was it?

Now I know why I've left competitive multiplayer gaming for all those years...

Ah the Greater Internet Fuckwad theorem.

Oh god, yeah. There's an unspoken rule in Gears where if you down the enemy, and you're still standing, that kill belongs to you. Doesn't seem like much of the community actually followed that though.

I follow the rule as best I can, though if I spot one of my team members doing the dry humping shit then I will totally steal their kill, usually by doing a quick smack with the gun if I'm close enough.

You have to understand, even if CoD and Gears are well made games, they are also the favourite games of basically the dregs of the developed world. Every <30 asshole bigot you've ever met who is wildly ignorant, and just works a shitty job then goes home to drink and smoke weed, definitely plays Gears and/or CoD.

Had a very similar experience in a King of the Hill match, other team was winning by miles so instead of just getting the win they just seemed to play for kills just kept and racking them up. One by one everyone quit except for me left and then I had exactly the same experience as you I basically haven't played since.

People don't hold on to ink grenades anymore? I'd keep one on me in case someone was dumb enough to approach me while crawling. When I would play Gears 3 it was all super serious with mics and whatnot. People were killer with shotties. If you were holed up in a location hug the corner and shotty away if they were stupid enough to approach without smoke grenades.

Also, wouldn't smoke grenades auto kill you if you had one on you? Just activate while downed and you'd die.

It's still a form of disrespect. I'll never understand why so many people are okay with it. PS4 is plagued with that bullshit, too, so don't think it's just Xbox Live. I had it happen to me in several different matches of Battlefield 4 last weekend, even though I was jumping servers after each match or two. I found a solution by deleting the game from my PS4 and playing it on PC instead. Does it still happen on PC? I'm sure it does, but I can't remember seeing it happen in all the different MP games I've played on PC.

I've never played Gears so I don't know if there's something specific about this game but if I was playing a 4v4 game that suddenly turned into a 4v1 in my favor I would probably get bored of playing it the "right" way pretty quickly. I mean for sure most people are jerks, but I think people messing with you for 5 minutes is not as bad as insulting you on the mic all game. But then again I am also fine with people taunting in Street Fighter 4

I don't mind it too much because it's fucking stupid to the point of being funny but I do get annoyed when people do it instead of ending a round quickly and thus wasting everybody's time.

It's nice to hear that there's new blood online. I've mostly been playing experienced players the first couple weeks that game was out but I still doing just fine so hearing this is fantastic except I won't be back home from vacation till Nov.

I'm sure it still does happen on PC, but I can't even remember the last time something like this happened to me, or even seeing it for that matter. One of the reasons I stopped playing games on consoles altogether were the incredibly immature, offensive, and racist communities that seemed to plague essentially every multiplayer game. PC communities definitely aren't perfect and this sort of thing can still happen any time one plays games online with strangers, but this type of behavior doesn't seem anywhere near as prevalent on PC as it is on consoles. Then again, I haven't played online console games in over five years now, so maybe this has changed somewhat with the PS4 and Xbox One.

@Mike: I dunno I've seen some PRETTY offensive stuff while playing games on steam before especially with how people can just change there names to anything.

@demoskinos: I didn't say there wasn't any offensive behavior on PC, dude. But there sure are a lot fewer people telling me they fucked my mom last night, or calling me every name in the book, and so on.

The behaviors haven't changed that much to online gaming, people do these things. I just don't understand the new found hyper-sensitivity to it. Seems like people used to play online with much thicker skin. I think this sites stance on online multiplayer probably fuels much of this. I've never seen them touch on any multiplayer experience, especially in quick looks without making the pre-requisite remark about "how terrible every single person has ever been in the entire history of voice chat in [Insert online game here]". Playing online is about filtering through both good and bad experiences to find others we enjoy gaming with. We all find different challenges in real world scenarios that require a certain amount of thoughtfulness on what type of relationships we want to build. Maybe we run into some people and find them to be intolerable. This should be the same strategy to playing online. I love playing online with other people, if you make a best effort to engage on a mic, you'll find people wanting to friend you and play rounds of call of duty. People do this all the damn time, maybe we should stop being so sensitive and start gaming again.