The Bunny
“Hey no fair I was typing”
New to the game, The Bunny has yet to realise that crouching does not make you invincible. The best way to educate them in this is to stand on their head and blow their brains out with a double-barrelled shotgun. The Bunny walks in straight lines, shoots the wall next to them with rockets, and often plays with keys (easily spottable by the way they fail to track you as you run rings around them). The Bunny is the larval state of 95% of the other types; only those with Quake/Doom experience tend to skip this one.
Weapon of Choice: BFG.
Weakness: Anyone with some skill.
Skill level: Laughable. The only way is up.

The Loser
“u r bot no1 cud do that shot”
The Loser has been around and seen it all. The Loser has dusted all his (key-playing) friends in deathmatch and is ready to take on the world, because he rocks! Sadly, his pond is merely a puddle next to the ocean and he’s yet to meet the big fish; when he does, he’ll learn humility or run home to play his friends again. The latter, sadly, is more common. The Loser is high and mighty because there’s no way anyone else could be as good as him, everyone else must be cheating, and anyway how can they hit his totally black skin in the first place? Often The Loser has filters in his brain which prevent him from noticing that actually he’s losing.
Weapon of Choice: BFG.
Weakness: Lack of practise.
Skill level: Giggleworthy.

Th3 L33t
“F33r my sk1ll2”
Nine tenths ‘tude and one tenth “sk1ll2”, Th3 L33t has paused long enough in his file-leeching to play some Quake2 – to the point where his skills are starting to be honed a little. Th3 L33t, sadly, is not afraid to let everyone know it. Competent with most of the weapons, Th3 L33t also knows where most of the secrets are and, probably, some of the best camping points. Th3 L33t is a member of a Clan; possibly one they started themselves, though they seem to have problems finding opponents willing to play them more than once.
Weapon of Choice: Hyperblaster.
Weakness: Spelling.
Skill level: Almost competent, on a good day.

The Skilled-in-one-Weapon Cabbage
“The BFG isn’t unfair, you just don’t know how to dodge it properly.”
The Cabbage has picked a weapon they like and latched onto it tighter than a limpet that’s been drinking glue. The Cabbage will single-mindedly head for ‘his’ weapon and every time he respawns, and you can probably hang out near the ammo for ‘his’ gun and see him there pretty frequently.
Weapon of Choice: One. And one only.
Weakness: Catch him with any other weapon.
Skill level: Competent (primary weapon) / Abysmal (everything else)

The Frame-Rate Maniac
“Ha! That looked really good at 1024×768 – the gibs were really smooth raining down. But then, I have a P2-450 and Dual VooDoo2s so of course I’m going to dust your ass.”
One thing which most everyone will have noticed at some point is that the better your PC, the easier it is to play well. Smoother gameplay comes with higher framerate, which makes those Rails all the easier to attain, and helps in ways you wouldn’t necessarily expect. As anyone who has boosted their system purely with the intention of a little more framerate can attest, it does make a difference. On the other hand, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, especially if you can’t stop yourself bragging about it. Just keep your mouth shut and win, this is a game of Quake2, not a game of “my PC is better than yours” conkers.
Weapon of Choice: Railgun.
Weakness: Overreliance on hardware.
Skill level: Fair but enhanced by his toys.

The Anti-Frame-Rate Maniac
“Shit, even with my P90 running at 6 frames I can still frag you. Man, you’re lame.”
Some people, on the other hand cling to the past. The AFRM is often a dangerously strategic player, mostly because the nasty shots are harder to pull off when people skip around your screen all the time. Explosive-radius weapons are preferred, as accuracy is not such a requirement, but sometimes the AFRM has learned to compensate for his hardware and is competent with the Railgun. When this person finally bites the bullet and boosts their system, they are often to be feared…
Weapon of Choice: Rocket Launcher.
Weakness: Tendency to downgrade (“Yeah, this is a ZX Spectrum running a 16-colour Q2 port. I had the 16kb memory expansion but it kept overheating so I pulled it out.”)
Skill level: Fair to Good but held back by his lack of toys.

The Camper
“I was not camping… I just went up there to get the weapon, and then stopped to scratch my nose.”
In a game where the action is full-on and frantic, there are still those who would prefer to stop and take things slowly. Maybe it’s a genetic fault, I don’t know, but The Camper would prefer to hide somewhere and wait for their target rather than being out and about exercising their skills. Easily recognisable by their backpack and tent, they’d often rather get the frags for standing on a spawn-point with the Hyperblaster than engage someone in a full-on firefight. This often means they’re weak in such a firefight, though not always. The Camper is frustrating when you meet them head on in their turf, but once you know where they are usually they’re easy to circumvent or winkle out.
Weapon of Choice: Grenade Launcher and liftshaft.
Weakness: Not well-practised at dodging.
Skill level: Passable, and could play if you cut off his “move forward” key finger.

The Loonie
“Hee!”
The Loonie has a wee problem with balancing humour and gameplay. Often they will do something incredibly silly on the off-chance they can pull it off… leaping off a 4-story edge into a firefight, firing the rocket launcher as they fall, so that the rockets arrive after they do, for example. Or firing grenades and chasing after them, based on the logic that by the time they get into a fight their target will already be panicked by the explosions in the room. The Loonie will also try for Railgun shots that a Quake-God couldn’t hit – and sometimes get them – merely because of the law of averages. If someone has a tendency to shoot you at point-blank with the Rocket Launcher, every time, then you could well be fighting a Loonie.
Weapon of Choice: Tactical Nuclear Rissole.
Weakness: Unpredictable in the extreme; tendency to self-frag.
Skill level: Wildly variable.

The Packrat
“My least favourite noise – ‘click’ as you run out of ammo.”
Not satisfied until he has 100+ Armour, 100+ Health, a power shield, 100+ cells, every weapon and a backpack and full ammo, preferably a Quad or Pent too, and a Rebreather, maybe a Silencer – just for good measure – this one will tend to disengage until he feels ready to fight. This may take some time. While the tradition of disengaging if you’re not ‘railproof’ (ie – able to take a 100-point hit and live, even if it’s just on 2H) is all very well and good, this is carrying it to quite an extreme. The Packrat is at his happiest when the “Auto Use Powerups” DMFlags is not set on.
Weapon of Choice: All of them. Not “Any of them,” but All of them.
Weakness: Panicky if on less than 100 armour/health.
Skill level: Not too bad, usually.

The Nice-Guy
“It’s GL_POLYBLEND 0 – and you should put your RATE down at the same time, you’ll get smoother gameplay.”
The Nice-Guy has usually got a fair bit of Q2 gameplay under his belt, and is content with his skills. However he knows that a large number of the people out there have problems with their systems or configs, even if they don’t know it, and will endeavour to help them if they need it, or even if they don’t. He’s also the first person to say “Good Game” and “Shot”, and will usually pause to reply to a “Hi all.” The Nice-Guy dislikes people who Spam while playing, and who swear online.
Weapon of Choice: Double-Barrelled Shotgun.
Weakness: Will not prey on the weak; tendency to give people a chance.
Skill level: Competent

The Tombinator – I mean Terminator
“Try again.”
Everyone’s met a Terminator – vicious with the Rail, relentless, dangerous. The Terminator is pretty consistent in gameplay, knows the levels and the secrets and the powerups, and is sneaky to boot. The Terminator will not give people a chance – they’re here to kill or be killed, after all – and will use the full extent of their skills to jump those carefully placed rockets and nail the less-accurate Railgunners. The Terminator is in the top 5% of Quake2-ers, but is just very, very good and not awesome… a Terminator is beatable, and often enjoys the competition of hanging out with other Terminators.
Weapon of Choice: Railgun, at ¾ the map’s length.
Weakness: If you play against their style of gaming long enough you can sometimes learn it enough to counter it. Of course, they’re doing the same to you at the same time…
Skill level: Nasty-ass mofo.

The Lucky Guy
“1H :-)”
The Lucky Guy survives anything with a random element in it. If he’s on 102 health, the rocket that hits him square will do its minimal 101. The one time he misses his jump, a BFG round will pass through where he would have landed. When he falls off an edge, he’ll land on the 2-pixels-sticking-out of ledge that no-one ever noticed before rather than in the lava below. Everyone at some point or another channels The Lucky Guy. When The Lucky Guy runs around the map health, ammo and armour spawns underneath him, and The Terminator’s rail misses due to a single packet-loss making him jerk sideways 3 pixels (unless he’s picked up a single armour shard). Sadly, luck is no match for skill in the long run.
Weapon of Choice: Rocket Launcher.
Weakness: A “Bad Day”.
Skill level: Terrible, or Awesome, from moment to moment.

The Mad Jumper
“D’oh, thought I had more health.”
To some people, getting strange places is everything. The Mad Jumper will jump along corridors, up stairs, over ledges, over people, over rockets, into rails. Give this person a Rocket Launcher and enough health to rocket jump and you can never quite be sure where the next attack is coming from. They’ll Rocket Jump into spaces that a mouse would be hard-pressed to call large enough to be a home and quite often they’ll blow themselves up doing it or crater getting back out again. Watch the skies.
Weapon of Choice: Rocket Launcher.
Weakness: A tendency to forget they have Quad Damage right now.
Skill level: Competent, but forgetful.

The Quake-God
“Keep practising.”
The Quake-God is everything the Terminator is, without the flaws. The Quake-God has a steady hand, an eagle eye, a death-computer and 10 inches of trouser-salami. The Quake-God takes the impossible rail shots because he knows he can make them, he triple-guesses the double-fakeouts, and knows which items in the map are presently there and which are where in their spawn cycle. The Quake-God owns your ass even on your favourite map, even if it takes unorthodox rocket-jumps to cut you off. If you manage to frag him, he frags you back twice. The pure Quake-God is unassuming; unfortunately some of them have an Ego to match their skillz. When you cross rails with a Quake-God, believe me, you’ll walk away knowing it – or limp away, more likely.
Weapon of Choice: Whatever is to hand.
Weakness: Most have a weakness; you just need to find it; for example frustration at being fragged, or an intense dislike of someone else getting the Megahealth first.
Skill level: Ouch.