brutal_player

I'd like to say that, today, I had a great load of fun on Zandronum on a classic SkullTag deathmatch with a rotation through each DM map (Linguica's Lair is still my favourite, followed by Some Secret Level and then Infernal Chamber!). It was a fun break from Duel40/etc., although there's just as much SSG spam (until Power Mill).

Anyway, that was entirely unrelated, but it does lead into my query. While I was playing on said SkullTag-through-Zandronum server, a player called brutal_player joined. Their name text was blue, as was their player.
The reason I mention this is because it's the sixteenth time brutal_player joined a game I was in. Two of them, in fact. One changed their name to something generic (Scorch, I think?).

It wasn't just today. While browsing DoomSeeker sometimes, checking the player list for servers more often than not yields at least one brutal_player, and sometimes up to six at a time on various servers. After joining their game, some of them change their names to generic, one-word usernames.


What's going on? Are these guys bots? They all have the same name, name colour and player colour. They even have identical playstyles and I saw one get stuck running into a wall once.

Nah, there are a ton of "brutal_player" players kicking around. Usually they aren't very good, so whatever they do doesn't surprise me.

Decay said:

Nah, there are a ton of "brutal_player" players kicking around. Usually they aren't very good, so whatever they do doesn't surprise me.

But with the same name? Same colours? I mean, the name is semi-specific, and they all seem to be a light grey-blue.

Yep! And I usually see them spread over multiple servers too.

Seems pretty suspicious to me. Maybe it's some kind of cult, spreading the word of Brutal Doom to all non-Brutal servers.

My guess would be that there is a package floating around the internet somewhere with Doom2 + Zandronum + Brutal and it is modified to have the default player name be brutal_player.

One thing that i noticed when BDv20b came out was that there were lots of BD related servers, mostly russian, with nothing but brutal_player guys on them, i'm guessing they are part of some sort of group that plays mostly BD or they are using that name just for fun.

AFAIK there was a torrent that packaged BDv20, Doom2.wad, and a port... it might've been zan or GZDoom, I don't remember which. So what Ralphis said is very likely the case; someone set up the config for the players and off they went.

J.B.R said:

One thing that i noticed when BDv20b came out was that there were lots of BD related servers, mostly russian, with nothing but brutal_player guys on them, i'm guessing they are part of some sort of group that plays mostly BD or they are using that name just for fun.

Wrong. Brutal_players are all over the place in Europe.

I feel like the Zandro + Brutal pack Ralphis mentioned is what got it started, and now its like some sort of cult thing. I've seen loads of them in servers all over the world, sometimes with different colored names too.

I find it so freaking weird that Zandronum allows free nickname changes and doesn't even forbid duplicates. So much potential for misleading, deceiving and trolling people. Also the scoreboard is usually completely unreadable due to the rainbow colors.

kuchitsu said:

I find it so freaking weird that Zandronum allows free nickname changes and doesn't even forbid duplicates.

Like mostly every other game of its ilk?

Zandro 3.0 adds a number after every duplicate name, so "player" becomes "player.2" etc

Which is handy, yes.

I found it strange that I kept seeing that name prop up in that form over and over again. I just assumed that they were simply Mr. Meeseeks as they kept on dying.