Kingpin! How Appropriate.

This is a tale of a man and his moniker.

Saint’s Row has an online ranking system where you get different titles as you progress in rank. You start off as a Thug and move up from there. The ultimate rank is Kingpin and this is journal of my journey to attain said ranking.

A couple weeks ago, I was playing some multiplayer ranked matches by myself as it takes a lot less time for the matches to start. This was when the lag was extremely bad and half the games you played were virtually unplayable. After waiting the requisite 5 minutes for a game to start, I am loaded into good ol’ fashioned game of Blinged Out Ride. This particular game was not going good for my team from the onset as it turns out that our opponents were most likely glitching or stand-bying. I know that they were glitching because they were invisible. We couldn’t see them and they had no problems finding and killing us. Now most people don’t have the patience for this type of malarkey and all my teammates dropped out. But I am a obstinate son of a bitch and if they were going put forth all that effort to get an easy win off of me, I was going to make sure that I made them take the full amount of time to do so. So I stayed in the game and tried to make the most of it. Of course, they started camping my spawn to get the Ben Franklin that falls off my corpse. I tried spinning around when I spawned and spraying out in all directions. That didn’t do much good so I started running into my garage when I spawned. I hopped in the car and proceeded to wait them out. When I started hearing them firing into the garage, I floored it and smashed invisible gangsters into smithereens. If they had faces, I am sure that they looked flabbergasted as I was able score kills against them even though they were cheating. I continued to drive my hooptie o’ death around occasionally splattering a smattering of semi-existent thugs. I even was able to blow up their car on one occasion. All for naught, of course, they were able to defeat me after I had wasted a good bit of time.

Saints Row uses Microsoft’s patented True Skill rating system that was developed by a group of fellows with Doctorates in Discrete Bayesian Algorithms or something like that. From what I have read, your rank is determined by your average rank minus your standard deviation. It also gives more weight when you do well against people of higher rank than you. That must have been what happened after this game because after putting up a good fight against the invisible glitchers my True Skill ranking for Blinged Out Ride soared to 31. 31 is a very high ranking and it should have unlocked the Killa and Gangsta achievements for me. I think my standard deviation was still large and thus the system did not have confidence in my abilities enough to grant me those titles. So, I knew that if I won a few more games that I could land those achievements and possibly the Kingpin achievement as well. But if I lost even one match, I would quickly rank down into the 20’s and below.

Flash forward 2 weeks, it’s a Friday night, I have been drinking, and I am looking to do a little gang-banging before I call it a night. A lot of our gang members have stopped playing the multiplayer because they are fed up with the lag and won’t play till they patch it. I thought about asking doodi and DSmooth to join me but they had both just bought the Live Vision cameras and were busy comparing asscracks. So I went into matchmaking solo. The first few matches were insignificant. But the third time I entered matchmaking, they entered me into the Blinged Out Ride loading screen. At first, I thought about dropping out because I had wanted to go for that Kingpin achievement with homies I know, not random homies. However with interest waning in the multiplayer aspect of the game, I figured I might not be able to find homies to do this with for awhile. So I decided to play the game and depend on my own skills to win me the Kingpin achievement. Besides, how bad could random homies be?

I found out pretty quick when the game loaded. Two of my team mates were silent. The third guy pipes in, “Hey man, what are supposed to do in this game type? I’ve never played it before.” Fuck. I then pressed select to see what the other team looked like. They had 5 guys on their team, we only had 4. Undermanned and outgunned, I was going to have to pull a rabbit out of my ass to win this match.

We started off well enough and were keeping up with them. I had been getting a lot of kills and was picking up a lot of loose change. Unfortunately, I got worried that my teammates didn’t know where to level the car up and decided to handle that as well. I had difficulties getting the car to fit into the garage. Did I mention that I had been drinking? The other team was able to blow up our car while I was trying to drive the car into the garage sideways. That put us behind the eight ball and catching up to them by leveling up the car wasn’t going to happen. I decided to switch up my tactics. When the notice popped up that their car was leaving their base, I took our car and zoomed to the garage I thought they would be heading to. I rammed their car and then popped out and started blasting it with the shottie. I was able to blow up their car, but mine was toasted as well. Not the best of moves, but it delayed them a little. They eventually leveled up to 4 and took their car to the show off spot. I used the same tactic again and blew up their car before the timer ran down. This went on for a couple more times as the other team was horrible about defending their car. As the game time started winding down, I knew I had one shot at winning this game. I knew that if time expired that it would go into sudden death mode and the game raises the safety gates on the other team’s base. At this point, their car is at level 3 and ours is still at level 2. At 20 seconds left, I start booking it to their base. Bullets are whizzing by me. I get to their door as the timer hits zero. I start unloading my AK into the car. I see white smoke fuming as I run out of bullets. A couple dudes on the other team get an inclination of what I am trying to do and start firing at me. I try to situate myself so that the car is in between me and those that are trying to kill me. I switch to my shotgun and fire off a few more shots at the car.

*Boom*

*Boom*

*Ka-boom*

-Game over, Saints win-

-Achievement unlocked-

-Achievement unlocked-

-Achievement unlocked-

I don’t really understand what happened. It appears that in sudden death if you blow up the other team’s car, you will win the game even though you are down a level. My Blinged Out Ride ranking jumped to 39 and that was sufficient to be awarded all online rank achievements including Kingpin. I am now #21 on the Blinged Out Ride leaderboard. I don’t deserve the ranking as I have only played a few games, but I do deserve something for pulling that last win out of my ass because there seemed to be no way in hell that we could win that game.

And so ends our sordid tale of invisible gangsters, complex mathmatics, drunk driving, asscracks, and a King who would be Kingpin.