From There to Here

I love the fact that Washington Wizard basketball player Gilbert Arenas spends halftime of basketball games playing online poker. But in the time of performance enhancing drugs and illegal videotaping scandal, Arenas is reaching a new low.

From the Washington Post’s Dan Steinberg:

Anyhow, like any good reporter, I went to Gilbert to get his response.

“Gilbert,” I said, approximately, “people say you’re cheating at Halo 3.”

“I’m cheating?” he said. “How am I cheating?”

“Gilbert,” I asked, approximately,” are you creating dummy games with two fake friends and using the wins to rack up experience points?”

“Yeah,” he said, laughing. “Yeah.”

Sigh.

“It’s a glitch,” he explained. “It’s a glitch in the game. I seen some kids that were like 600s, they won 600 Halo games and we only had that game for two weeks. And all the kids go to school. So I’m like, ‘What the hell you all doing?’ And they said that’s what they doing, two-on-two.”

I don’t play video games, and feel free to correct me, but let me try to explain, via Gilbert. The highest still rank you can get in the game is 50, and such rankings come from serious competition. But you can also rack up experience through “social” games that don’t affect your actual skill ranking, and hence, the scam. Gilbert said he three accounts have skill ratings of 42, 45 and 47, but that this free experience can drive up your title from commander to major and double major and triple major and so on. Sort of ceremonial honors, in his view.

He said there are other Halo scams that he doesn’t know how to pull off; one he described as “lagging,” where kids somehow freeze you out of the game and then kill your helpless character.

“They go around killing you and get the win every time; there’s people who’ve played the game 200 times and have 200 wins,” he said. “People do that and they don’t get complaints,” Gilbert said. “But if I go two-on-two to get experience points?”

It’s just so sad that Gilbert Arenas has the time to cheat at Halo. This really makes me hate professional athletes even more…