Team killer

From Free net encyclopedia

A team killer (or TKer) is a player who intentionally attacks and kills his own teammates in a multiplayer computer game. Team killers are scorned by most gamers. Since many team kills are accidental, the term team killer is usually reserved for those that repeatedly or deliberately TK. Team killing usually happens in first-person shooters from friendly fire.

Image:WolfensteinET screenshot tk.jpg

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Concept

In team-based multiplayer games, administrators are usually provided the option of whether or not friendly fire should be on. Having friendly fire enabled makes the game more realistic and often slows the tempo forcing players to think more about what they do before they actually do it, but it allows TKing to happen. Having friendly fire enabled is more common on private or LAN servers where it is less likely to be abused.

Many TKs are accidental, often committed by or against newbies. In first-person shooters, hand grenades are a classic source of accidental team kills. Grenades have a delay before they detonate and cause splash damage, often affecting teammates that unknowingly run towards the resulting explosion. Grenades can also be thrown into areas that the player cannot see, which may contain teammates. Other weapons besides grenades do not discriminate between friend or foe either, and it is possible for a player to accidentally stray into an ally's line of fire or vice versa. In FPS games that include vehicles, such as Unreal Tournament 2004, it is also possible to accidentally kill a teammate by running them over when they run in front of your vehicle. This can often happen at spawn points: poorly placed spawn locations can result in teammates appearing right in front of a moving vehicle. Occasionally a teammate will quickly appear from around a corner or other object previously blocking the view of them, startling an unskilled or trigger-happy player and causing him to shoot without thinking. Another common cause is mistaking your allies for the enemy.

Other players TK intentionally: the most scorned ones are those that do it for the fun of it or just to cause problems for other players; however some players commit TKs against cheaters or hackers to try and get them to leave the game and to show their disapproval of their activities.

Many games implement punishments in order to prevent TKers from doing more damage and possibly stop them from playing the game. One of the most common punishments is to give the server administrator the ability to kick (and possibly ban) a player from the game server. Another is to deduct points from the TKer's score. One of the more unusual methods is "mirror damage", which inflicts all damage that the player does to a teammate back on themselves. Some more sophisticated methods include programs that record how much damage players deal to their teammates and how many times they TK, and automatically kick them from the server if the number reaches a certain threshold. Since most punishments are imposed for actually killing a teammate, some persistent TKers only wound teammates in order to avoid the repercussions. Often vigilante "anti-TK" players take it upon themselves to team kill the team killer, but usually end up getting penalized for TKing anyway.

Some games do not allow team killing, and for most it is an option which can be turned on or off depending on the server. For example, the default setting for Team Fortress Classic allows teammates to damage each other's armor, but not actually diminish their health or kill them. Simply disallowing TKing is not always a perfect solution to the problem, though. Once again, in Team Fortress Classic, players can become infected (causing them to gradually lose health points until they die or are cured) and pass on that infection to teammates. Sometimes players pass the infection on to many teammates. Similarly, players might use their natural invulnerability from teammates in order to aid the opposing team, something that is more common in strategy games and computer role-playing games than in player versus player combat games. In recent custom maps for strategy games, such as for Warcraft III, players play a Team Fortress style game. An example of such maps would be Defense of the Ancients and the Aeon of Strife maps. Team killing would be possible in that context, as a player can TK his/her own teammate's character (in some maps, the designers have TK-preventive measures such as disabling the TK-er from combat). Many of these issues are confronted by computer games with an online release depending, various attempts at solutions are done, sometimes with a patch.

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