You just got Joe'd!
Because this story has been burning a hole in my brain in its attempt to escape all week, I'm going to temporarily forget the whole chronological order thing right now and just tell this story. Unfortunately I will have to use my friends first names in here, but only because the title and crux of the story make it unavoidable not to use their names. Just so you guys know, I do feel guilty, but I'm only using first names, and they are somewhat common, so at least you will know it's you while other people won't.
About two years ago, I was made aware of this really awesome game named Killing Floor. It was essentially everything cool about zombie games without actually being about zombies, and had a really cool class system and monsters. I ranted and raved about how kick ass this game was, so my friends and I picked it up so we could play something together and have some good times.
Off the bat, we notice the variety of classes, and each of us pick our mains. I rolled a medic, Peter picked a sharpshooter, and Joe picked support. Long story short, we have tons of fun, we play in games with some of our other friends, kick some ass, die a ton, level up some, and have even more fun.
Along this path of slaughter and explosions, we still love the game but get weary of being low level on everything but our mains. We all essentially switch what we're doing, I go support, Peter went either berserker or commando, and Joe went demolitions. We also adopt odd quirks to how we play, as we have been experimenting with maps to find more productive and safe ways to play.
On this particular story, our adventures had brought us to the map KF_Office. Joe had been playing when Peter and I had gotten too tired of playing to continue, and had found a good group that was able to kick ass on harder difficulties. When we started to play our newer classes, we engaged in the age old strategy of turtling in the factory offices, with planks across the windows that led to the office building.
We set up camp there, with me welding the door that opened into the factory shut, while Peter and Joe shot anything unfortunate enough to believe the bridge was a good route. Along the way, we bought equipment (read: pipe bombs) as necessary, knowing that the more players you have, the tougher the monsters get. This includes the Patriarch, the boss at the end that we had a poor track record against. What makes the Patriarch hard with more players isn't his boosted health, his three medical syringes, or even his mini-gun toting weapons platform of an arm. The thing that makes him hard is the rocket launcher, which had so generously given us one of our longest running jokes.
Long story short, we beat all ten waves and next wave was the Patriarch himself, in all his mutated glory. We rushed to the vendor who had set up shop in the spot near spawn in the underground section of the map. After everyone had bought all the ammo and pipe bombs we could possibly acquire, we hurried back one by one to the bridge and threw explosive we could on the bridge.
Joe, being a demolitions class, had much more things to stock up on than we had, and had many more pipe bombs to set up. Peter and I had already retreated to inside the office, with the door welded, our pipes set up, and worriedly trying to get Joe to hurry his ass up. Our main plan of action was to lure the Patriarch across the bridge that he was quickly flinging pipe bombs onto, and watch the big bastard explode with little to no effort on our part. It was no sooner than Joe dropping his last pipe bomb than the moment of infamy occurred.
The Patriarch, in our experience, spawned somewhere where he didn't automatically have line of sight on players, and after his opening cinematic taunt would proceed to chase players down and wreck their shit. Today, the Patriarch defied all standard conventions, as he spawned at our spawn, with Joe directly in his line of sight. We thought it would be fine, and were telling him just to walk directly forward during the cut-scene and save his ass, to which we learned you CAN'T MOVE AT ALL during said scene. We watched in horror and amazement as after the Patriarch did his little spiel about us "killing his children", in which he proceeded to instantly take his revenge on Joe.
We heard the telltale line "One in the pipe!" as we were treated to seeing him prepare his rocket, fire it, and heard the biggest explosion we had ever heard in the game. Control switched back to us, as we saw the bridge in a huge smoke cloud, and when said smoke faded, all off the pipe bombs had gone off in a chain reaction with the rocket. Joe's weapons, corpse, corpse chunks, and all of the pipes had been vaporized. We looked around as long as we could trying in vain to at least find his grenade launcher, in hope it was some saving grace in the battle to come. I have never seen this again before or since, but when he had decided he was tired of being in a multi-molecular state, he apparently took all of his equipment, and our chances of victory, with him.
The fight afterward was a stomp match, to no-one’s surprise, as we heard the second worse thing we could. "One in the pipe!" the battle cry went again, as the rocket hit the door to our tiny room, blowing through it and hitting our two surviving pipe bombs. I can only imagine the look of confusion as the blast hurtled the door to wherever the hell Joe had currently taken residence, as office doors are often yield unsatisfactory results when used as blast shields. The blast shredded Peter's armor, and most likely ate plenty of health too, as when the Patriarch became visible it took very few attacks to kill him. With my gun's magazines out of ammo, I did the only thing i could do, and swung my katana at him until I fell, resulting in yet another victory for the Patriarch.
After the chaos and our laughter at the colossal flop of a fight, we decided that anytime anyone was unable to control their character and or was flat out annihilated in one fell swoop, they had just been "Joe'd."
