Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Not my code, but somewhat related: I almost hurt myself when my friend used a sonic weapon on me in StarCraft.

Back in the ancient days, my friends and I would meet every Saturday and go to an Internet cafe for a few hours of playing multiplayer games over LAN. Mostly StarCraft: Brood War, with a mix of Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 Arena. During the week, we'd all play these games alone, in single player, figuring out new tricks to unleash on each other the next time we met.

One of these weeks, I've learned how to properly play Terrans against the Zerg, and was about to demonstrate my knowledge by steamrolling my friend with an army of Marines and Medics[0]. In that game, my friend went for his usual tactic of harassing me with Mutalisks[1] - an effective technique, as long as he avoided the main body of my army. Well, on that day, he wasn't careful enough.

At one point, he accidentally flew his entire (by that time pretty big, I think 24+) swarm of Mutalisks straight into my M&M army, which was just staging to launch an attack. My units took about 5 whole seconds to destroy most of his force - but the overlapping audio of dying Mutalisks pretty much saturated my headphones with high-amplitude noise. This was so unexpected that I wasn't able to comprehend what's going on around me (both in-game and in real life) for good 30 seconds, my vision blurred and my head was spinning.

Having wasted his entire army, he lost that match. But I keep thinking that this could have been a viable stratagem. If he sacrificed half of his army like this to break my focus, he could've crippled me with the other half. And ever since that day, I kept my headphones at half the volume.

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[0] - M&Ms, aka "bio", was the usual Terran army composition against Zerg players in Brood War. Zerg armies consist mostly of weak but cheap units - compensating individually low DPS and health with quick, mass production. Terran Marines are also cheap and low DPS, but in 2:1 ratio with Medics, they're healed faster than Zerg units can kill them, so a big ball of M&Ms is unstoppable to an inexperienced Zerg player.

[1] - Weak, cheap, annoyingly fast flying units. Perfect for distraction, but their low DPS makes them completely useless in a straight fight against Terran "bio" army.

Hahaha okay I have to share a similar story now of where I've actually seen this weaponized. Also not my code but somewhat related.

Somewhere in the range of 10-15 years ago I played Guild Wars somewhat competitively. I was in one of the top-20 PvP guilds, and most of the top PvP guilds were pretty friendly with each other. Very rarely, we'd be good enough friends with an enemy guild that we would know their Teamspeak or Ventrilo server credentials.

So one day, we're doing our nightly battles like always and we get matched up against one of our rival / best friend guilds. A couple minutes into the fight, one of our Mesmers says

"Hey uh guys. So.... This might be a bit much. But I know their Voice Chat login. I could spam their server right now."

"Do it."

So we all hear the "user left" voice thing, 20 seconds later, "user joined". And apparently what he did was open the text-to-speech tool, meant for users without microphones, and entered "!@#$%^&*()_" except copy pasted a thousand times.

Which means the other guild heard from the robotic text-to-speech: "user joined. User Ha Ha Got U says Exclamation Mark, At Symbol, Pound Sign, Dollar......."

They're talking trash about how could we sink so low in the global chat in-game when suddenly we hear "user joined. User Ha Ha Got U Back says Exclamation Mark, At Symbol, Pound Sign, Dollar......."

There was a way to disable the text-to-speech on your client, but none of us knew that at the time. The text-to-speech rambling continued the entire night on both our servers and neither guild was able to speak. Both guilds thought it was hilarious but agreed never again.

Love this, thanks for sharing. I'm sure I'm not alone in the HN crowd of having fond memories of BW playing days.

The sonic weapon, while accidental, feels similar to tactics used to disrupt concentration and logical thinking. E.g. taunting, trolling, cheese strategies, or your opponent getting tilted from something you didn't intend to annoy them with.

Often think of how keeping a cool head is incredibly important in games like this, specifically for the pros. IdrA comes to mind as a technically gifted player who was often his own worst enemy due to his temper. He never did crack into the top of the pro scene (hard to do as an American in general) but felt like he really held himself back.

> feels similar to tactics used to disrupt concentration and logical thinking (...) trolling, cheese strategies

Yes, we did plenty of that.

Between Internet cafe days and high-school SCBW matches, I think I've got a dozen people to fall for the simple trick of writing "[a bunch of spaces to manually center the message] nuclear launch detected" on chat[0]. Most of the times it only caused a laugh from everyone, but once I actually won a game this way.

It was the late phase of a match, myself and my opponent were in a sort of stalemate - his army held a strategic position; we both knew it, so he just held position, and there was no way I could get through[1]. Not sure how to solve this tactical riddle, I just pressed ENTER and sent the " nuclear launch detected" message. It caught him off-guard, and in a moment of frantic confusion, he decided to move his army elsewhere. Of course, there was no nuke, but I suddenly had an opening I could exploit and win the match.

EDIT: I miss the tactical depth of SC:BW. I haven't seen any other game that came close. Not even StarCraft 2. In particular, all the cheese strategies we tried against each other. Most of cheesing happened early-game, but I was particularly fond of creative abuse of Terran Science Vessels in mid-to-late game...

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[0] - For non-SC players: Terrans have tactical nukes in their arsenal. Launching one causes a warning message (and audio) to appear for every player, which gives the opponent a few seconds to try and figure out where the nuke will land, and either kill the unit that's laser-guiding it in, or evacuate from the area. People who played SC a lot develop a habitual reaction to this message, overriding whatever they were doing and thinking for a moment.

[1] - I unfortunately don't remember the details about the tactical situation and composition of armies. All I remember is that I was playing Terran, like I almost always did.

This works in Age of Empires 2, too! I've seen a number of videos where a player writes "x has arrived in the Imperial Age" at a point where it would be devastating and the other player resigns.

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