This extends to real life sports. They would all be really fun if such a huge percentage of the participants weren't enormous anger generators.

Likewise.

It's the reason my games vs bots in LoL (though I haven't played in years) far outnumber my games vs other humans. My own teammates tend to be less whiny and insufferable in bots games than pvp ones.

One of the things that keeps bringing me back to TF2 is that this almost never happens. The very few times someone reacts something like this, they either get laughed at by everyone or just kicked out of the server. Nobody takes TF2 seriously enough to get this angry.

The cosmetics help with that, I think. It's hard to take a game too seriously when your sniper looks like one of the Residents riding an ostrich.

I play a lot of Dota 2 bot games. The bots aren't great players and it often seems they are slanted toward playing worse the better you play, but at least you don't spend the first 5 minutes of every game muting all the other players.

I gave up on online games sometime around the tail end of Unreal Tournament's peak.

But TF2 is good, I agree with that. I just feel like synthesizers are the most fun games these days.

So they just flat out pulled a Hardee's* on you guys?

*That's just an obscure reference for how across the midwest one morning dozens of Hardees employees drove to work to find out there wouldn't be work that day. Or any day. Seems to be a pretty common 'fuck you' to employees these days.

No way?

What did you do?

I was big into WoD back when I was a kid.

Worst case of this I experienced was about a decade ago, I was doing freelance work (7 years of annual contracts for the same company though, so it hardly felt freelance) ad needed some extra cash so an acquaintence of mine hooked me up with about 15 hours a week at a market research call center in Boston. Three weeks in, 15 minutes before closing the Friday before Christmas, someone from upstairs came in and without a hint of advance warning told the manager that they were moving the jobs to India, he was fired (he had just had a kid and put a downpayment on his first house, naturally) and now he had to go in and fire all 70 of his employees. Classy.

When the founder of the company I freelanced for sold out without passing any of the benefit of the sale on to any of the cofounders and then all of the freelancers (about 80% of the workforce) were laid off a while later, only a few months after finally securing actual employee status (a change in some regulation or other made it cheaper for them to hire us than keep us as freelancers, only reason it happened) it was handled slightly better but only slightly.

It's been long enough that my NDA is long expired so I'll just mention here that Rovi Corp, owners of Allmusic, TV Guide, Macrovision and many other companies, had an official policy of stealing data from Netflix and Last.fm and a significant part of the flagship Rovi Knowledge Graph engine was built on that data. Stealing it was part of my job and it was official policy (before the buyout we did actual demographic research).

I did two books for the Requiem line.

I don't have to imagine.

My downstairs neighbor.

That's the justification for a lot of things on line.