How to tolerate friendly players

So you're a player who believes friendly's are a plague upon this game for the notion that to not actively shoot is to engage in griefing and ruining the game. Well buckle up because i am about to list some stuff that will blow your mind.

Introduction to friendly players

When playing you will be met with friendly players at times, now it's important to note the distinction of types of friendly as not all of them are as friendly as they seem

Sandvich heavy - Most friendly out of all friendly's. They give sandvich to anyone who dare cometh near them and is generally polite and won't go out of their way to harm someone. Typically can be found near small health packs or corners.

Holiday heavy - This is actually the most dangerous type of friendly depending on behavior pattern.
To identify this type of heavy to not be a sandvich heavy we must watch them and see how they interact to someone with their back turned, if they pounce they are this type of heavy and they will attempt to pootis pow the now stunned individual. This in my mind warrants them being gunned down as they have broken the friendly creed of "Do not seek to harm players but do not let them walk over you"

Now i won't list all the friendly types that exist but in these two examples we see a trend already forming that not all friendly's are actually friendly and merely are using a facade to trick you into lowering your guard.

Some classes will call themselves friendly like pyro sharks potentially and we see the inherit problem of the current friendly system, that being "Do not seek to harm players". This is because they basically force you to make decision on if you should engage or not. Basically rule of thumb is this, if they aren't actively getting kills in the kill feed but are instead just relaxing / handing out free food then you're typically safe. But lets get onto how to cope with these friendly's

How to cope with a friendly on your team or the enemy team

This is simple, just don't acknowledge their presence. You see a friendly player strives in getting attention, so long as you acknowledge them they will keep being friendly. However, if you ignore them they can either leave or swap to something else and get the game back on.

This means they aren't free kills as that will validate them to keep being friendly because you are giving them a reaction. If you hit them with a fan of war or something of that nature yet again, not only are you validating their presence but now you have given them full credence to attack you, and you will then lose the backing of other players and may face a vote kick.

So how can we cope with such existence? Simple answer to this is just pretending they don't exist, why go out of your way to force someone who's trying to enjoy the game their way to convert to your way? That almost never works in any application in history, as forcing someone to go your way without proper logical reasoning and a good argument, and the player actually willing to listen you're basically slamming your own head into a brick wall as yet again forcing you way onto someone else is a surefire method to not get anywhere.

Another method is to just leave the server, scary i know as you will lose that precious 49 score you racked up in the match, but this can be an effective solution if you aren't getting anywhere as the chances of you running into another friendly in a different server is actually not that statistically high all things in perspective.

The last method and that will only work if you somehow convince everyone that your way of playing the game is the correct way without misinformation (Calling them a hacker) is to votekick them. Keep in mind this fails not in the general sense as you may have gotten rid of the friendly to the friendly player this only validates them further than merely acknowledging their presence.

How to cope with non friendly as a friendly player.

Simple. Keep doing what you are doing, it's a video game and you are free to choose how to play it. Genre merely suggests how you are supposed to be playing but that doesn't stop you from trying out other ways of playing.

Example being demoknight, you may say that this being a shooter and since it's a shooter demoknight is fine. I beg to differ as we are going into text book definitions here. That being any form of class going purely melee is not actively participating in the shooter. Simply put the argument of "it's a shooter i want to shoot players" falls flat on it's face as that falls into objective opinion and not fact.

Now if the players say you are griefing or idling this tried and true method can actually expose the hypocrisy in their statement. That one simple thing being "I am giving free health kits to teammates and i am participating in play". If you are a friendly near the front giving out health to teammates you're basically a less effective medic, but you are still trying. The argument they use can actually be used against medic players if we are analyzing their statement properly. Now if you confront them with this they will most likely state that medic was designed to heal people, you now have the perfect bait to basically hit them with the good old "if they didn't want my class to heal people they wouldn't have added it". You have now forced them to either double down or back off, because if they double down your teammates will most likely just vote no and kick the player trying to kick you.

How to simply exist in the middle

Just play the game how you want. Why are you letting guides or other players dictate how you want to play?

If you want to see players play the way you want to play then just stop playing as you're now trying to control other people's outlook on the game in a negative way and that's not the middle ground option.

Now the positive way to have people play the way you want to play is basically communication and team play, say your playing and you are in a push and warn the medic of a spy, that's positive as you are helping a player out, giving tips and tricks to players is a positive way to be in the middle ground as you are not advocating for one way or the other but are simply helping players play better.

The middle ground is how 90% of players play anyways, and that's perfectly reasonable. It's fairly reasonable to say to people who want to either force all friendly's out or force all non friendly's out is simply "I just want to enjoy the game my own way". That way you're not trying to force a non existent standard upon someone, and you are merely saying you just want to enjoy the game your way.

The key to the middle ground though is not targeting players outright, if you see a friendly and you subscribe to the middle ground option you wouldn't pounce onto killing them but you also wouldn't just drop everything and be a friendly as well, you simply take in the moment for what it's worth and keep playing.

Now i do say as a middle ground person that taking this route will usually get you kicked by both sides because you simply don't care or don't want to take a stance on this and just play the game how you want. This can be seen by friendly targeting players as aiding friendly's, while vice versa is true for friendly players seeing you aiding friendly targeting players, as we won't just sit down and let a friendly player just attack you because 'I'm a friendly it's a joke".

Final thoughts

These final thoughts are just me giving credit to any guide that push their ideas onto people like this one. I really don't care if people want all friendly's gone or want the whole server they are on to be friendly.

I just thought it'd be funny to basically write this guide out as for some reason people treat friendly's like they are worse then cheaters, but when confronted with the fact that casual basically died from cheaters they will state "Cheaters are bad but they are not as bad as a friendly player", the double standard on someone actively gaining unfair advantages and cheating is equivalent to some dude throwing out a sandwich to whomever they want is a preposterous proposition.

Now to clarify the definition of cheater, it means anyone using cheats from someone simply using a texture reshade to gain an unfair advantage to just straight up bots. I have no clue the mental gymnastics you need to go through to say bots are better then the friendly player.

To clarify the damage a cheater does to a game and a friendly i will break it down quite simply

A friendly player will - Not actively participate in combat and will instead just do stuff in the back line, heck some friendly's are more beneficial as an engineer friendly will just sit near their buildings and move them up occasionally.

A cheater will - Actively participate in combat, usually uses some flavor of exploit to kill the enemy.
Depending on the flavor may just be someone with ecm and aimbot. To the worst flavor which is basically using bots to attempt to kill the game.

If you still subscribe to the statement that cheaters are less of an evil compared to friendly's, i don't think arguments are your strongest attribute.

Anyways that was my final thoughts have fun typing something in the comments or something, or don't who cares i'm not your mom forcing you to do the chores on a sunday night.