There are all sorts of strange, quirky gimmicks that gamers come up with in various games. From quickscoping to blackscoping to rocket-hopping to reverse boosting – some of the things people do are hilarious and fun, while other times it can be damaging to the gameplay experience.
Studio head and co-founder of Sledgehammer Games, Michael Condrey, took to the community blog of Sledgehammer Games' >official website, and first explained where the company stands on matchmaking, making it known that they are where they need to be and that people are being matched properly. Condrey shifts the focus of his post toward a new phenomena taking the Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare community by storm... reverse boosting.
According to Condrey...
“...we've seen players using “reverse boosting” with excessive suicides in online matches driving a lot of frustration within the community. Playing at home, I’ve been randomly matched with players doing this and it’s incredibly frustrating to lose based largely on my team being down a contributing teammate. We’ve also had a lot of players bring up their same concern about playing in matches with these players. No one wants to lose an objective based match by effectively being outnumbered while their teammate shoots grenades into their own forehead 100 times in the corner. It’s not right, and it hurts you and your team’s online experience.”
So just to recap: reverse boosting is where a teammate goes in a corner and repeatedly keeps killing themselves to lessen their team's score and ability to win. It's like giving the other team free experience points.
Normal boosting is where you purposefully feed yourself or your team to opponents. You just stand there while they get headshots or whatnot. This allows the opposing team to advance without putting in any of the work or effort. It's essentially throwing the match.
According to Condrey, Activision and Sledgehammer will be stepping in to put an end to this kind of behavior in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, writing...
“Part of the competition that is core to our values is that players do not adversely degrade their team's ability to compete fairly. It's not dissimilar from the bans that cheaters and boosters receive, and we have increased our focus on reverse boost banning to combat the growing issue. No one is trying to restrict the fun factor of playing Advanced Warfare with this policy, nor are we actively banning against particular styles of play, like trick shots. However, we have a low tolerance approach to people who ruin the experience for others through cheating, boosting, reverse boosting or being caught with toxic emblems in game.”
It's nice that they're going to leave trick-shots alone. While some players may utilize said trick-shots to gain a sizable upper-hand in the competitive arena, at least Sledgehammer isn't stepping too far into the thick of it to limit some of the quirks that players utilize to make the game more interesting.
By comparison, though, reverse boosting is not making the game more interesting... it's just making the game more frustrating for teammates. Essentially, reverse boosting is just maximum team trolling, but without all the funny moments associated with something like the “XboxOff” troll.
I'm curious how the team will address reverse boosting, though? Do you just report a reverse booster? Or will they occasionally drop into games and drop the ban hammer on someone killing all the fun for their team? I guess we'll find out moving forward.
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