The Smurf Bug and the Former Pro
In a game, the act of crouching and standing over an opponent, over and over. Almost always done to provoke.
The name probably comes from how much it looks like dunking a tea bag in and out of a cup. You see it most in FPS games, and it turns up in the pro scene often enough. It is, obviously, unsportsmanlike, and if you take it too far you can be sanctioned for it.
A sanction like that, of course, only exists in the pro scene. Complain that somebody tea-bagged you in unrated, or in competitive, and nobody is coming to help. You'll be lucky if all you get is laughed at. You either win the next round and pay them back, or you sit there and keep taking it.
Between those two, what I had to do was already decided.
I wasn't even that angry. I'm just the kind of person who pays back whatever lands on me.
I had locked Snake. Their Jett killed me, and the round settled into a four-on-four.
When attack and defense trade one for one, the side that usually comes out ahead is attack. Defense has to watch A and B at the same time, because you never know which site they're hitting. Attack doesn't. You look at the two sites, take whichever defense looks softer, crash it, own it, and plant the spike. That's the whole job.
So once we'd confirmed their Jett was still playing back, the four of us left walked onto A.
The Jett who entered first was caught by a Fade tucked into the corner of site. Attack down to three, defense still four — a numbers disadvantage. But Reyna, following right behind that Jett, killed the Fade and took the revenge.
When a teammate dies at the front, the one coming in behind them uses the information that death left behind and turns it into a kill.
A trade is one of the most basic tactics in Project A. The fundamental of the fundamentals.
Jett had died without getting a single shot off, but by being the first one onto site she had passed her team the only thing that mattered: where that hidden Fade was standing. That alone was enough. She had done her job.
Reyna, fresh off the kill, hit her Q at once — Devour — and filled her health back up. Land a Devour and Reyna gets so strong that people call her the queen of the pistol round. Exactly like right now.
Drunk on the overheal, Reyna shoved straight through into their side of the map. They clearly hadn't expected anyone to crash in that recklessly. Their Reyna and their Chamber died looking almost embarrassed about it.
Three against one. We still had Chamber, Reyna, and Brimstone up. All they had left was a Jett. The spike was already planted, and thirty-eight seconds was all that remained on it. On paper, defense was hopelessly behind.
But Project A is a game where skill can overturn every advantage and every disadvantage there is.
Brimstone got careless — only one Jett left, after all — and took a bullet straight through the back of the head.
Chamber met that Jett's eyes, and his head came apart in the same instant.
Then it was Reyna and Jett, one against one. Neither of them had a skill left. Reyna was sitting on 150 health off the overheal; Jett had 100. Both of them were on Ghosts, and a Ghost does 105 to the head. By every number on the board, Reyna was winning before the fight began.
And, like I said — Project A is a game where skill can overturn every advantage there is.
Jett, having erased the last Reyna on defense, tea-bagged the body — and only then defused the spike. With a tenth of a second to spare.
God, that bastard never shuts up.
I wasn't the only one who thought so. Chat was a mess — the broadcast chat and the in-game chat, both of them.
And one of them caught my eye.
"Yangjeon? Who's that?"
"Ayy— boss qq1289, thank you kindly for the ten-thousand-won mission bounty!"
Yangjeon, a streamer whose popularity had swelled in a hurry, was broadcasting Project A again today.
His channel wasn't top-of-the-ladder competitive anymore, Master and above. These days he took an alt into newbie lobbies, smurfed them, and ran viewer missions while he did it. Kill someone with a knife. Force your KDA to land on some exact number. Missions with not a speck of respect in them for the people on the other side.
And when he ran a broadcast like that without a shred of shame, and the people cursing him got in his face, Yangjeon had an answer.
The sheer shamelessness of it pulled in exactly the viewers who had been waiting for a villain, and Yangjeon's broadcast grew hard off the back of them.
"Yeah. I should probably let this account go pretty soon."
Project A has MMR in unrated, too. Yangjeon had farmed unrated so relentlessly that his alt, without a single competitive match to its name, already sat somewhere between Silver and Gold.
"Chickening out?! Hey! Even I can't just drop sixty kills in this bracket!"
The sixty-kill mission was the hardest one he had ever taken. Getting the kills was easy. The other team just kept surrendering. The one game he actually cleared it, he had to flash his own teammates and team-kill them before the number would stick.
"Alright then. What are we trying this game?"
"Marshal headshots? Okay. Let's go."
Yangjeon bought a Marshal and light shields on the spot.
The team that wins pistol almost always full-buys. He bought a gun and still pinched the rest of the money — a half-buy. In a sense it was the kind of purchase that threw his team's whole economy out of whack. Yangjeon did not care. He had never thought of these people as teammates to begin with. Right now they were just parasites getting in the way of a mission.
Before the round started he set up on the long lane into A — the choke everyone calls A main — put his crosshair on the angle they would have to walk through, and waited.
The buy timer ended, and a Jett stepped straight out of the lane.
The enemy Jett was replaced, on the spot, by Yangjeon's five thousand won.
"Classic newbies. Eco round, and not one thought about picking up the gun they just died for. Just brain-off gaming."
The moment Jett dropped, Reyna peeked for the trade. Knowing where he was didn't matter. A default pistol was never going to close the gap on a Marshal, and a lazy peek went straight to a death.
"Wait, that wasn't the head?!"
Then a smoke dropped across A main. Their Brimstone, spending a skill just to put Yangjeon down.
If the smoke had come out earlier, Jett and Reyna wouldn't have died so cleanly. Expecting that kind of timing here was a waste. This was unrated. Jett and Reyna were already dead, so by rights the rest of them should have left the lane alone, and yet they were still stubbornly hitting main.
Yangjeon didn't give the angle up. The confidence under it was simple: whoever stepped out of that smoke, he could kill on reaction.
Pop.
A flash from the enemy Yoru burst out of the smoke. It was sudden, but Yangjeon snapped his view off it and let the blind slide past him.
Anti-flash. Flash abilities lose most of their teeth if you aren't looking straight at them, and anti-flashing is the trick of whipping your view away in that instant so the blind never fully catches. It's a difficult piece of tech. For Yangjeon, who had held Master, it wasn't much of one.
The enemy Yoru, convinced the flash had landed, walked out of the smoke. Yangjeon moved to pass judgment on the agent who had dared to challenge him.
Bang.
No. He was going to pass judgment.
He would have, if Yoru's Sheriff hadn't opened his head first.
"Huh?"