The secret of Grif Ball

well, technically the point of the game is to plant the bomb, so...

 

There's no better way to say that.
I really wish they nerfed the credits for grifball so there aren't so many people playing just for the credits. Almost every game I've ended up either with teammates who betray me so much it would be better if they quit, or people who are really good. Either way it's just a betrayal fest or ends in less than two minutes so there's almost no point to play.

 

Agreed, I think the potential for credits and commendations would be more aptly called the bane of grifball rather than the secret. I only play it very occasionally, but I still appreciate such a simple but well put together mini game with such a massive amount of depth to it.

 

I play every game of Halo to win according to its stated objective. If I can scoop the bomb and run it directly in, I will do so every time. It's up to the other team to stop it, not my teammates. Also, I get a deep-down sense of satisfaction when some knob holds the bomb for 95% of the round to give his team time to rack up kills, then loses it at the last second and the other team scores.

 

This.

If someone's holding back the bomb for a challenge or credits, then it's just selfish. The aim of the game is to plant the bomb. That's like someone grabbing the flag CTF and hiding with it.

 

But don't confuse holding the bomb for credits with holding the bomb and waiting for your team to form a moving wall that you can run behind. Which, frankly, neither of you naysayers are able to tell unless you're on that team and the bomb holder says "I'm going to hold the bomb so you can get challenges/commendations/credits." It's luck with a touch of skill and good teamwork when you can run the bomb in 10 seconds- otherwise, you've got to wait for the right moment.

I suggest playing in a team of friends on Grifball. I never play without at least one of my friends on my team, so.. you're just getting bad matches if you keep getting betrayed.

 

No it's actually pretty easy to tell the difference in many circumstances. If 3 of the opposing team are spawn killing and no one on your team can even move forward off spawn, you don't have to be able to hear the bomb carrier to tell that he's holding back so his team mates can get credits/medals/commendations. It's pretty easy to tell if someone is holding for a tactical reason or not by simply asking yourself 'if I were carrying that bomb, would I think it worth pushing?' Sure there's some give and take in terms of decision making there, but are you genuinely telling me that you can't safely say that it'd be fine to push in many circumstances just by looking at how the rest of the game is going on around you? There's a difference between naysayers and people who play the game to actually fulfil the objective, by the way.

This is true, but I always find it frustrating when the only answer to having bad games and team mates is to go in with friends. If the only way to get a good game is to go in with a full team or close to a full team, there's something wrong. Going in by yourself is an option, it should be a viable option. It's not even like MLG where the reason you don't go in by yourself is because randoms are unreliable in terms of skill, it's simply because of the malicious actions of team mates and opponents.

 

Give credits to the winning team. In the event of a tie, no credits given.

Problem solved.

 

Yes, in some circumstances it's easy to make an inference that they're holding for credits. However, they could just be doing it to piss the other team off, because spawn camping is freaking annoying to the team that's getting camped. Or the other team could just be biding their time because they're good and they know they're going to get the score, even if they wait til last second. In any case, you're never able to tell for sure unless you hear one of them say it, you can only speculate.

I've had my friends hold the bomb so we could finish off our challenges for the day, but he didn't make it obvious that that's what he was doing. He was still running around near center court, killing people when he got the chance. You wouldn't have been able to tell that he was letting us get kills, since that's what he always does with the bomb- hang around center court and get kills, dropping back when our line breaks.

So no, it's not "easy to tell," it's easy to make an inference. An assumption.

 

I don't care why they're doing it, they're still deliberately holding back. You said it's impossible to tell the difference between strategic holding back and doing it to help team mates farm something, whether that be credits/medals or just the strange enjoyment of making others suffer. And if you want to be trite about it then yes, you can never tell for sure, but even if you hear them say it they could be lying. How can you truly, ultimately know unless you are in fact them?

See my original post: I said many circumstances. If someone is making it look like they're playing properly then sure it's going to be less obvious, but your implication is that you can never even say one way or the other.

Like I said above, everything you have is ultimately an assumption, even if it's based on evidence as strong as hearing them say it. When someone is holding the bomb on their side of the map, making no attempt to push forward with it, whilst their team mates kill every one of our players off spawn and it's clear that they could plant without opposition, then I have no problem saying for certain that they're helping their team farm credits/medals/commendations. If you refuse to draw any conclusions even when faced with as conclusive a set of evidence as that, that's your business. But all that makes you is trite like I said, so don't try talking down to people who don't sit there pondering the nature of absolute truth and knowledge every time they get put on spawn trap.

EDIT: Bloo, I agree that it'd work perfectly, but it's pretty much directly against the whole credits idea in the first place. It seems like Bungie implemented them as a playing incentive, not a winning incentive, so it'd make Grifball the single part of Reach where just playing wasn't rewarded in some way.

 

Well, yea, if they're making it obvious then that's probably what they're doing. I wasn't trying to get all philosophical there about absolute truths or anything. What I'm saying is that you can't really tell that people are intentionally holding for credits and subsequently judge them ("stupid farmers..", etc) for it. If it's obvious that they're holding it and not trying to score, then go ahead and judge them as "holders" or whatever. But calling them farmers (which is the term being implied here) is another step, one that you can't really take definitively.

I haven't had a game yet where that was the case though. All the games of Grifball that I've played, they've either been holding the bomb waiting for their teammates to clear the way, all the while making attempts to score (and backing out when necessary)- aka good teams; or, occasionally, they've just sucked and never got the ball or lost it every time- bad teams. I haven't run into any teams that I could reasonably assume that they were holding the bomb for credits, etc.

 

Oh yeah that's true, you're right. There's no way to tell why they're doing it, but frankly I don't care. Whatever their motive, they're ignoring the objective of the game and drawing it out for their own benefit or sadistic enjoyment. But in terms of your actual point then yes, you are correct, apologies for the misunderstanding.

Even in my <20 games of Grifball I've had this happen once or twice, and I remember it in H3 as well. I guess you're just lucky, though I agree that it's not as if it's more common than games played properly, partly just because it relies on the bomb carrier being willing to sit there bored whilst his team mates mop up. I guess the fact that I suck with the Hammer doesn't help either when it happens to me .

 

Yea I'd call you unlucky then. It's usually me, 2 friends, and one random. Sometimes we'll get 4 of us together in a party for Grifball, but not often. Playing against other 3+random or 4-player teams, we usually have good games or blowouts. I can only recall once having the opposition hold the bomb, but that was a team full of Legends and Heroes. I think that was part being cocky and part getting kills, since they were tea bagging and spawn camping.

The only thing that annoys me in Grifball is spawn campers. They can't get kills in the spirit of the game, so they just decide to sit at either side of our spawn area and kill us. I usually just ignore them, since that means they're one man down on the fighting front.

 

Personally I don't understand why people complain about spawn camping. It's a perfectly legitimate strategy to spawn camp the enemies while you plant the bomb. When people spawn camp and don't plant the bomb, that pisses me off, but usually in that case they end up losing anyways.

 

Sure it's a legitimate strategy.. but it's still annoying. If spawn camping were an intended feature, you'd get medals for killing people as soon as they spawn. But you don't, because spawn camping is like killing innocent puppies. You can do it, but it doesn't mean you should.

 

Eh. If the game and spawn system is designed in such a way that it becomes possible, I don't ding a player for being smart enough to take advantage of it. In most games getting kills is the whole point, and this is just the easiest way; and even in other games such as Grifball, spawn-killing is the easiest way to ensure that you can complete the objective. I only have a problem with it if they're holding the bomb back and spawn-killing for minutes on end to rack up medals and increase their k/d ratio or whatever. That goes against the spirit of the game, in my eyes. But finding an easy way to get kills in a game where killing is the whole point - I don't mind. I hate being on the receiving end of it, but I don't begrudge them the effort it took to make it happen.

Getting back to bomb-holding - I agree with Pegasi that you can pretty easily tell if someone is holding back for whatever reason. It's easiest to see when their three teammates are spawn-killing like mad. But I've also had plenty of other games where it was basically a normal, competitive game, yet one guy on the other team held the bomb for the entire round, just running back and forth between the health packs and never crossing the center line. A minute or more of that is understandable because you want to wait for the right opportunity and not lose the bomb. But if you do that for a full round and then rush in sudden death, it's pretty clear that you weren't really trying to score before that. I've also seen a couple times where the entire other team is spawn-killing and the guy with the bomb comes in to help out - and deliberately avoids planting! In all of these cases, I think if you've played more than a little Grifball, you'll recognize the obvious signs.

 

The point of Grifball is to score a bomb plant, not to get kills. Still, it's annoying to me, and that's my opinion. It's not to you, and that's your opinion. So we'll agree to disagree.

I agree that it's easy to tell when they're holding the bomb. I was saying that it's not easy to tell why they're holding and to judge them accordingly.

 

There are no great reasons to hold the bomb as far as I'm concerned. There's just one that I think is somewhat understandable to me. Here's every reason I can think of:

1. Rack up kills for your team and increase k/d ratio (by spawnkilling usually, or just having a better team than the unorganized randoms)
2. Get medals and commendations for multikills
3. Get credits and rank up faster
4. Finish daily challenges (usually the close range and multikill challenges - of course ranking up and getting credits is a side effect of this)
5. Piss off the other team

All of these go against the spirit of the game, which is built around a simple idea: get the bomb and score. 1, 2 and 5 are actively obnoxious to me - you're just prolonging a game you would win anyway for your own pleasure, and ruining somebody else's good time. The only one I really have much sympathy for is 4, because I like to do daily challenges (more for their own sake than for the credits) and some of them are only easily obtainable in Grifball games that last more than a few minutes. 3 and 4 are the only reasons that don't involve intentionally turning someone else's simple recreational activity into as much as 15 minutes of agony and being spawn-killed.

 

But at what point can you differentiate between those? You can't, reliably. That was my point.