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Telefrag

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A telefrag, also known as a Teleportation Frag, occurs in many first-person shooter games featuring teleporters, when one entity teleports into space already occupied by another; the latter is instantly fragged (often gibbed) and the former is said to have telefragged it. The first FPS game to feature telefrags was Doom, which was also one of the first to feature teleporters. This kind of frag does not require any weapons at all.

A similar phenomenon sometimes occurs when an entity spawns into space occupied by another; the effects are usually the same, though some programmers have taken steps to avoid this in some games, such as placing spawn points several feet in the air.

Though telefragging may occur deliberately from players entering a teleport immediately after the other, it most frequently occurs during spawning, particularly at the start of a match if there are fewer spawn points than players. In this case at least two players will spawn at the same spawn point, resulting in an immediate telefragging.

In some cases, the player that teleports into the other player survives, whilst the target is fragged. In other occasions, the teleporter dies and the player at the other end of the teleporter is unharmed. Sometimes, both perish. In some games, what would normally constitute a telefrag will only result in the two players becoming stuck together and being immobile, often, other players are oblivious to the blockage until they go through, and get stuck too. This is usually a funny situation to watch, and the players are forced to shoot whatever enemy they can see that's not completely obscured (by own body) to reduce the entities inside the teleport and become mobile again.

The telefrag effect, one or both dying, is a pre-programmed response to prevent such glitches occurring. The utilization of teleport kills as an actual weapon was originally unintended, but was picked up as part of FPS metagaming. It has since been adopted as an actual gameplay device: In Unreal Tournament, players are provided with a 'translocator' - a personal teleportation device. It is possible, with careful aim, to use this to deliberately telefrag opponents. The translocator launches a disc which will serve as a teleport when the player clicks the secondary fire button.

In the end map of Doom II, it is possible for a skull cube (The Icon of Sin launches these) to spawn a monster into the player, killing the player with a telefrag, also bypassing the effects of the God mode cheat. Final DOOM (Evilution) also takes advantage of this effect to force a more fair play on the final level.

In the end map of Quake, the final boss (Shub-Niggurath of the Cthulhu Mythos) is killed with a telefrag.

In the end map of Unreal, the final boss often kills the player character with a telefrag.

UnrealTournament 99 (AKA: Unreal Tournament, GOTY) also uses telefrag, and since recently, freestyle servers have made telefragging a whole lot more popular.

 


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