Railwhoring

What is railwhoring? Railwhoring is a term which refers to a type of behavior when playing QuakeLive (or the older series of Quake games for that matter). Railwhoring is defined by using the railgun as the exclusive weapon while staying as far away from the action as possible. If confronted, the person railwhoring will typically run away instead of fight. You may have guessed that railwhoring is a negative thing, what with the word whoring being part of the term and all. You would be correct.

Why is railwhoring a bad thing? It is as annoying as fuck. When playing team based matches, railwhores as they are known don’t help the team in any way. Take CTF for example. I’ve played several CTF matches where the railwhore had a chance to protect our flag had he been using basically any weapon except rail, but instead chose to run away or insist on using rail, making our team lose a point.

I understand it is an easy way to rack up kills….but it can hardly be said to be playing the game. The only reason railwhores get kills is because everyone else is actually playing the game. Most players know how to try and avoid getting railed….but when it’s a frantic match with everyone trying to take the flag and railing isn’t a typical feature of the map…then it’s just fucking annoying. Anyone can do it, but if everyone did do it, then the game would not be fun and no one would play it. It is the same as AWP whores back in the day of CS, but at least when they were taken out they didn’t respawn instantly.

It used to be easy enough to deal with railwhores. As soon as the map is changing, continually vote them off(binding it to a key works best) and get the vote to reach the server before anyone joins so it will be automatically approved. ID put a stop to this making sure that one command can’t be sent in excess…, so switch it up, alternate between a vote to change map and kick the player until the player is kicked.

Personally, I just don’t understand what motivation these kids have to railwhore in the first place. Play the game properly and get better, so you can gain skill and not run everytime someone confronts you, or join a match where railing is the whole point. Silently racking up easy kills isn’t an achievement, and just makes people dislike you.