Admin Griefing

Around the time when the Natural Selection mod for Half-Life was really taking off, I had a lot of free time to kill. Coincidentally, an online acquaintance of mine had recently rented a dedicated server and needed me to help him set up and configure a public NS classic server his clan wanted to host - I obliged, and a little bit more.

For the server's in-game administrative tasks (booting and banning players of their choice, server messages, scorekeeping features, those sorts of extras), they had me install an addon called Metamod. Metamod is basically a plugin framework for Half-Life that allows you to write extension libraries to add new features to any proprietary mod by hooking the behaviours of the base engine. Corollary to Metamod, they had me install the usual score tracking junk, the popular in-game admin feature plugins, and so forth.

I spent the afternoon developing my own metamod plugin to include with the bundle. The plugin verified my ID and allowed me exclusive access to a series of server commands I had coded with the express purpose of griefing. For me, wrecking the game for griefing's sake wasn't enough - I had to do it with some showmanship. I had spent the afternoon figuring out the different IDs and sequences to cause the more flashy particle effects used in the NS game so that when I struck, it would be gloriously theatrical.

It was a real crapshoot as to whether or not the server I had configured for these guys would ever take off, but luckily, my day did eventually come - a full house game. 32 players duking it out in an NS classic match of ns_bast, your usual fare of struggle and push warfare.

The marines lost - well, they would have lost. They were holed up in their base, fighting off (barely) wave after wave of successful aliens expecting to rightfully finally win after a good 40 minutes of intense play. Marines pleading with the commander to recycle the infantry portals (spawn points), as they were just getting mowed down by aliens one-by-one for easy stat padding.

*It's go time!*

Out of nowhere, my marine player model materializes in the middle of marine start in that Jesuit reference pose with the arms stuck out in a T shape. I am hovering around with an aura of blue particles flowing every which way from my origin. The "wtf" remarks begin as I peacefully zoom about like some sort of strange Half-Life 1 Messianic figure. I then start blinking around with the particle effects employed by the fade's own "blink" technique, the aliens at this point have mostly stopped their onslaught just to watch the spectacle of a marine fading around. In the next moments, I employ the next in a series of bound server commands I wrote to project lasers from my origin to the point where I'm aiming, gibbing anything in its path. I unleash this "Superman" ability on several nearby fades, skulks, and an onos before I haul out my second last parlour trick - I've bound another key to create a siege cannon-like shockwave at the point I am viewing, except about fifteen times as powerful and not just fatal to structures. The gorge encampments pinning the marines in their base are instantly eradicated and the supporting gorges along with them (I additionally zipped out and boomed two hives to play it safe). The spams of "wtf" and aliens leaving the game is getting too much at this point, though enough stay that the game continues. In my final act of divine intervention, I hover back to the main proper of the ns_bast marine start and begin spawning countless batches of HMGs, GLs, and heavy armour - the command I have written to do that spawning each individual item entity with an over-the-top phase gate phase-in particle effect and sound. I dematerialize, come back under a different name, hear an earnest show of thanks to the "marine Jesus" and watch the marines quickly stomp the few aliens with the humility to stick around after such an awesome show of outright "what. that's not even in the game"-type cheating.

I had hoped for a second pass that would have me save the aliens in a similar random losing match as some sort of Divine Cosmic Gorge, but regrettably, that evening, the game server went down for a very long maintenance period and the credentials for accessing the server shell were changed. I've yet to orchestrate such an elaborate server prank as the one I pulled on that fateful day.