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Cristiano Ronaldo in FIFA 18.
© EA Sports
Games
9 excuses all FIFA rage-quitters tell themselves
Because it’s not technically losing if you never make it through the full 90 minutes.
Written by Tom Wiggins
5 min readPublished on
As long as multiplayer games exist there will always be rage quitters. You know the type, those people who’d rather storm out of an online game of FIFA than be on the losing side when the ref blows the final whistle.
Everybody’s encountered them. Perhaps you’ve even allowed yourself to become one once or twice. You know it’s wrong, but in the heat of the moment it felt so right. Besides, you’re not like the others, are you? Are you? You’ve got a good excuse…
“The game’s against me.”
This one’s a stone cold classic of the genre. It normally comes out after your opponent has scored a last-minute equaliser, or, even worse, a stoppage-time winner. The thing is, their mood-spoiling goal was nothing to do with their competence on the pitch, and it certainly wasn’t due to your lack of it, it was because the game wanted them to win. Simple as that. Honest.
“Their bad connection stopped me playing my natural game.”
All rage-quitters play the kind of silky, sexy football that’d make Barcelona look like a bunch of amateurs down the park, but they can only do it when the connection is smoother than a buttered otter. “I can’t play in these conditions!” they’ll announce at the first hint of lag or stutter, eventually pushing self-destruct on the game when you bundle the ball over the line in what is to them, as they repeatedly tell you, a flurry of dropped frames and mashed buttons.
The Madrid derby in FIFA 18
You might pick Madrid, but Madrid don’t quit© EA Sports
“They scored with their first shot.”
You’ve spent the first half comfortably keeping the ball, calmly stroking it around the park looking for gaps in the opposition’s defence, before peppering their goal with chances, only for their keeper to make a string of frankly preposterous last-ditch saves. It’s a miracle things are still all square after 45 minutes but the breakthrough must come eventually, right? It does – just not at the right end. You don’t stick around to see how the rest pans out.
“They watch all the replays.”
Nobody needs to see endless replays of that flukey tap-in they scored just because your goalkeeper couldn’t hold on to the ball if it was made out of felt and he was wearing velcro gloves. But here we are, sitting through it for what seems like the 14th time. It was the same when they scored the first goal too. And the second, third and fourth as well. No, that’s definitely not why you quit. It was the replays. Shut up.
“They’re playing anti-football.”
When a game of football only lasts 12 minutes it should be about scoring as many goals as possible. Or at least trying to. But here we are, 30 virtual minutes into the match, your opponent has just gone 1-0 up and now they’re calmly passing the ball between their back four and the goalkeeper. You could switch to All Out Attack and throw in a few lunging slide tackles, or you could just show them exactly what you think of their joyless anti-football and vote with your quitting finger.
“That celebration’s so annoying.”
Some celebrations seem to be fine-tuned to wind you up as much as humanly possible. Which one gets on your nerves the most probably depends how often you’re on the receiving end of it, but considering the Dab is on the verge of becoming unacceptable when a child does it, let alone a fully grown adult, no doubt it’s often the last thing you see before reaching for the game’s emergency exit. Expect another spike when Harry Kane and Dele Alli’s over-rehearsed handshakes inevitably make it into FIFA 18’s celebration repertoire.
“They kept making subs.”
Nothing annoys somebody who’s losing a game of FIFA more than pausing the game to make a substitution. To any rational person that would be a compliment. It suggests your opponent is concerned they might not hold onto the lead without bringing on fresh legs, but to the potential rage-quitter it’s merely prolonging the misery. So rather than taking advantage of the pause time to make a tactical change, or throw on a nippy winger to torment the tiring full-backs, you’ll do the FIFA equivalent of instructing their whole team to leave the pitch.
“It’s not rage-quitting if you force your opponent to leave first.”
Ah, the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. If you can get them to rage-quit before you do, they’re the real bad guy in the situation, right? It doesn’t matter if you have to resort to scoring own-goal after own-goal after own-goal until they get sick of watching you run up the score into double figures. In the end it won’t be you that’s had a tantrum and quit the game, will it? Even a hollow victory ends with three points.
“I just remembered I have a wedding to go to.”
Bit of a last resort, this one, as it will mean you have to find a wedding to go to, but when playing against friends, and saving face is almost as important as not losing, a very urgent but at least vaguely plausible excuse must be hurriedly concocted and delivered into the microphone before you reach for your console’s power cable and give it a yank. If you can’t find any nuptials to attend, at least make sure you don’t go back online without setting your status to invisible, OK?
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