Chicken Dinner With Strangers

When all my friends are offline and I am up for some PUBG rounds, I usually play solo mode. But more recently I also started to queue with strangers to play 4 man squad mode. The idea stems from the fact that my spoken English is weak. Not only do I have a heavy German accent, I am also not experienced enough anymore to always find words fast enough. This is not the case with my blog when I write spontaneously, but when you’re under pressure in a game, with voice chat in English, it’s difficult without experience. And that’s it, I know it’s just that. You need to start doing it. It’s the exact same situation compared to when I started blogging, because at that time I had the same feeling about writing in English. Speaking in English does come too short, I barely do it. I did it in the past when I was in a English speaking game clan, but that’s more than a decade ago.

So, since some months I started queueing with strangers from time to time when my friends are not online. I actually started to do it in Counter Strike competitive mode, but that community can be super toxic at times, which doesn’t mean that I only had bad experiences there. But with such a big chance to meet idiots online, you get to the point where you ask yourself “Why do I punish myself like this?”. The experience made me a lot less nervous because if you have to listen to so much trashy people, you become hardened. But honestly, it’s not the best climate to practice a language nor did I want to be reminded that there are a lot of lowlifes out there. So, I lost interest.

But now with PUBG, I made another attempt and I am honestly surprised. There are a lot less young people and more grown up people. And the climate in the teams is very friendly even with strangers. I think I played 20 games with strangers so far, and maybe I’ve been lucky, but my first impression is really good. During these games I lost my concerns about my accent, because others have the same problem. I’ve heard people with heavy Chinese accent, Russian, Indian or Arabic accent. Or the common accents from Europe. They all do the same, trying to play a game while communicating in another language. I even had one from the UK telling me “Don’t worry, I understand you perfectly, your accent doesn’t matter to me”. That’s how it is fun, and it really helps. It’s also how you stay interested, and it really got me into gaming mood this week, since the weather is bad outside anyway.

But enough about this. As I often do, I also want to share some screenshots of the game. Today I had my first “Chicken Dinner” (That’s how it is called if you and your team-mates are last survivors, and winners of the round) in PUBG with three strangers. Most of us weren’t native speaker except one person from the UK. We dropped around Camp Charlie where a lot of people went down, but we took our time to gather equipment in the surrounding villages. Since many people went down in Camp Charlie, we heard the clashes from outside. But then we’ve been geared up and decided to intervene and hunt the remaining people in Camp Charlie. Two of us preferred close combat and went right in there, while me and another dude stayed outside on a hill as we found semi-automatic firearms, and I had a 6x scope in my virtual bag, so hell yeah!

So, we gave them cover. I was surprised how the other two guys tidied the place up, mentioned it and got one of my team-mates reply that he’s always going close combat in this game early. But after that it didn’t take a long time until I found a target too. I fired two times and got him…

Now the circle got smaller and smaller (it’s a gameplay mechanic to bring enemies into combat over time) and we went into the forest. I liked it that the whole team did a good job to move silently, and that they knew how to take cover or how to hide. Communication was very good too, so that we had complete tactical awareness. On the way and from our cover we eliminated another enemy team.

Now the circle became so small that it got hot. Apart from us, there were three other squads left as I learned later in the replay. We got under heavy fire and one of our team-mates was wounded and unable to fight. That was an intense moment in the game, but there it became clear that all of us are very experienced, because everyone threw smoke granades around the wounded person. And I got my heroic moment too because I gave first aid and brought the player back to fight. Meanwhile two enemies have been shot by the close combat experts in our squad. Ironically, the player I brought back to the fight shot the last two enemies on the other side, which resulted in a win for us. Chicken Dinner!