Rainbow 6: Vegas is a game that we at Iron Realms had anticipated for quite awhile, since we’d greatly enjoyed playing previous installments of the franchise on the original Xbox. It’s pretty good (if not brilliant), but I, and likely almost everyone else playing it, have a big beef: Advancing up rank means spending ridiculous amounts of time playing in PvP matches online. Everytime you complete an online match, you get points, which are applied to your rank. One starts at Private Second Class and moves up to Major or something. I’m unsure what the top level is.
In any case, because you get points just for completing matches (albeit less than for winning matches or drawing matches), and because the amount of time they expect you to invest is absurd (one of my co-workers estimated 12 days of consecutive play to unlock all the weapons and gadgets), many people have turned to gaming the system, including us.
Right now, even though my TV and AV setup are turned off, three of us are ‘playing’ matches of Rainbow Six over and over with the headset cord tied around the 360 joysticks to make your character run in circles and avoid the pathetically inadequate idle detection. We’ve been doing this for about 21 hours straight so far, and I’m pleased to report that I just checked and am up to “Staff Sergeant.” Everytime we tie (almost all of the time since nobody is at the controller), we each gain advancement points.
This is, obviously, a very poor game mechanic and shame on the designer (and everyone he works with) for not pointing out what a backwards system this is before launch. The only fun part of this is that every few hours I’ll hear my controller vibrate and know that one of my ‘friends’ has decided to actually play for a few minutes and has managed to track me down and kill me while I run in circles. It’s kind of funny to have my console ‘communicating’ with me even though the tv and sound system are off.
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January 25th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Jeremy Saunders
Tt is harder to shoot you AFK and running around in circles at warp speed then it is just playing the regular game.
I unloaded 20 sniper rounds into you the first couple of times, until I just started throwing grenades and using a shotgun.
January 25th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
Ben
oh man, I wish I had gotten in on that. I’m still stuck at Specialist.
January 25th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
Rhyke
This is great. Like, hilarious great.
February 1st, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Fabian
The thing that annoys me about this system is that how well you do actually makes no difference - it’s a pure timesink. Yes, if your team wins you get more points than if you draw or lose, but it doesn’t make any difference whether you died first, killed the entire team by yourself or in fact weren’t even at your controller - you will get the same amount of points.
What makes the point distribution even more foolish is you get more for a longer match. So if everyone stands around talking about the weather for 10 minutes before starting to play, they all go away with more points. Finally, you get less for an entire co-op level than for an average versus session of any kind, despite the fact that co-op matches are usually at least six times longer (not to mention more difficult due to a cap of four on a team and many, many AI enemies).
The only thing I like about this system is that you don’t have to play ranked matches to earn points. Oh, and it does display new rank badges on your model at each level.
February 19th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
Zach
Ok I can’t figure out how to do this, whenever the game ends, the game never automatically resets, is there even an auto reset feature. Me and my friend have been trying this with no sucess. Please help, too wish to macro our way to major.
February 19th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
Matt
Hi Zach,
Do this:
1. Set up a Sharpshooter game with at least one friend.
2. I don’t remember what the option is called, but it’s something to do with setting the time between rounds. It’s unlimited by default, which means you have to actually start the game manually. I set it to 15 seconds (lowest available) which means it starts automatically after 15 seconds.
3. Tie cord around controller, gain rank.
February 19th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
Zach
Thanks so much we couldnt figure out what we were missing.