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Rush (video games)

In real-time strategy (RTS) and team-based first-person shooter (FPS) computer games, a rush is a fast attack at the beginning of the game. In this context, it is also known as swarming, goblin tactics or Zerging, referring to the Zerg rush tactic from StarCraft. It emphasizes speed in an attempt to overwhelm an unprepared opponent. It is analogous to the blitzkrieg in real-world ground warfare, in which speed and surprise are used to overwhelm an enemy before they build a sizable defense. In fighting games, this style of play is called rushdown. This also has a different meaning in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), where characters skip the usual progress path with the aid of others to reap benefits that are usually denied to them until a later time.

The alternatives to rushing are turtling and rapid expansion.

Rushing in computer games carries the connotation of being disorganized, too easy, and/or unfair, and players who employ this tactic are often considered inferior or cheap. There are few defenses against a rush, one of these few being camping. Proponents, especially in realtime strategy games, feel that the threat of a rush keeps their opponents honest, forcing them to play defense from the beginning of the match.

Strategy games

In strategy games, to perform a rush, the attacking player focuses on quickly building a large number of units with the hopes of swarming the opponents before they can defend themselves. In the majority of cases, these units are fast and cheap to enable larger numbers and opportunistic attack strategies, but they may sometimes be chosen to exploit a particular weakness of the enemy. The player who rushes may sacrifice options such as long-term resource gathering or immediate research up the tech tree to opt instead for a quick strike.

A successful rush usually attempts to disrupt the resource gathering of the defending player or annihilate that player entirely. The rush is a risky tactic. If the rush is successful, then the player may have won the game or significantly set his or her opponent back; if the rush fails, then the rushing player may have wasted valuable time and resources that would have been better spent on research, building defenses, and building more powerful units. A rush can also be considered a mass attack with primarily only one type of unit used, and depends on overwhelming numbers and force to succeed. The rush is often a suicidal attack (for the units involved); rushing units are often expected to die, but to nevertheless benefit the player initiating the rush by disrupting the opponent's operations. In World in Conflict a team will sometimes choose to rush with poorly armored, unarmed troop trucks to capture all points in an Assault game to force an early Total Domination.

The term "rush" is often preceded by a word describing the type of unit used in the rush. For example, in the game StarCraft, a Terran player may use a Marine rush (or in some cases an SCV rush), a Protoss player may use a Zealot rush, and a Zerg player may use the eponymous and infamous Zergling rush. The units used are almost always cheap, easy to produce, and weak compared to other units.

Occasionally, the term is applied to the different, but related tactic epitomized by the Tank rush present in the Command & Conquer series since Command & Conquer: Red Alert. The tank rush differs in the units are neither cheap nor easily produced, but in a sufficient group they can be nigh unstoppable. Similar to the Starcraft etymology, the term is often altered according to the units involved, such as the Rhino tank rush of Red Alert 2, the Flash tank rush of Total Annihilation and the Pitbull rush of Command & Conquer 3. This alternate application can also be found in many gaming communities. Some rushes rely on units that may not be cheap or quick to produce but have a particular advantage such as flight or invisibility that requires specialized defenses to counter. For example, a protoss player may use a Dark Templar rush against an opponent with no units or structures that can detect cloaked units. A Dark Templar rush would not work against an opponent with sufficient ability to detect cloaked units because Dark Templars are too expensive and slow to produce to be used in a rush where their invisibility is not an advantage, like when going up against Zerg players: Zerg Overlords are needed to increase the unit cap, so there are always plenty of them, all of this while being a Detector. In Red Alert 2, a tactic called a "Rocky Rush" where an allied player, without the knowledge of their opponent, quickly amasses a large force of flying infantry called Rocketeers is a somewhat common rush. The strategy relies on the idea that just as many Starcraft players may forget early invisibility detection ability to defend against more conventional attacks, many Red Alert 2 players might not have built any anti-aircraft defenses early in the game in order to defend against tank and engineer rushes more effectively. If an opponent has sufficient warning of a Rocketeer Rush, it is easy for them to build a defense to counter the Rocketeer rush for a fraction of the cost of the Rocketeers, ensuring victory for the defending player, because the opponent will be left with little money and no way of stopping a ground assault with anti-aircraft support.

In another departure from the generally derogatory nature attached to the Starcraft etymology, the term can sometimes be used to describe a rapid early game assault, intending to take the opponent by surprise. Some games even go so far as to incorporate the rush into their resource collection, such as Dawn of War and Company of Heroes.

Origins

The first common appearances of the term rush in this sense came from Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (1995) Warcraft II players used the term Grunt rush, the "Grunts" being the basic Orcish military unit.

There was a variation of the Grunt rush that involved building a barracks (the primary military structure) before building a town hall (the primary structure for collecting resources and developing the tech tree.) The "barracks first rush" was effective because in the 1.0 release of Warcraft II, the players' starting locations were bound to the players' colors. It was possible to know where a player was located on the map if you knew the starting location for each color. The color/location problem was fixed in the first patch and barracks first rushing became a losing proposition on most larger maps. Since the barracks first rush was a do-or-die tactic, it was banned in most leagues and strongly discouraged by most serious players. Players would start games saying "thf", short for "town hall first". The much later release, Warcraft II Battle.net Edition, forced players to build a town hall first.

In Command and Conquer: Red Alert (1996) so-called tank rushes were a dominant strategy for players using the Soviet forces. Tank Rushes are not true rush, as the units used are neither cheap, fast, nor produced quickly. Tank Rushing is to mass a large number of tanks and then charge them into the enemy base. Since the Soviet's Mammoth Tank is almost as strong as a Tesla Coil (the strongest defense tower in the game) in terms of power and as resilient as a construction yard, it's essentially a moving fortress and are often used. One extension of this for the Soviet forces in Red Alert 2 was a Flak Cap (Flak Capture) Rush. The Soviet player would quickly load two engineers (units capable of capturing enemy buildings) and a Terror Drone (a unit that rendered vehicles useless so early in the game) into a Flak Track (a transport) and rushed the enemy base. The idea was that either the engineers would capture the enemy Construction Yard - their most vital building - or the Construction Yard would turn into a vehicle in which case the Terror Drone would hop in. Either way, the enemy loses their vital means of production and is effectively doomed from that point on, unable to advance any further. Another method for Soviets is to continuously produce Conscripts, the cheapest and most basic Soviet infantry unit. This method is to swarm the enemy using numbers since Conscripts only cost $100, half the price of an Allied GI, and therefore are more inexpensive and expendable. A player also got more Conscripts (about 20 or so) in the beginning of the game, compared to the Allies 10 GIs or Yuri's 6 Initiates. A rush that has been widely used throughout the command and conquer series is the "engineer rush" where the rushing player would load up transports with engineers and storm the enemy base, capturing many buildings; this tactic was popular because engineers are usually slow and weak, but transports like APCs are usually faster and have decent armour and players could not tell what was in the transports; a swarm of engineers could capture many vital production structures. A cheap defensive wall around the construction yard would prevent most engineers from capturing it though.

Zerg rush

The term was further popularized by the strategy called Zerg rush from StarCraft (1998) and continued through its respective expansion pack. The Zerg race can execute faster rushes than either the Terran or the Protoss races; players consider the Zerg the race most likely to and best-adapted to rushing.

The first infantry units of Zergs are Starcraft:Zergling. They are small and inexpensive Zerg units which can be produced quickly. Zerglings hatch from eggs in pairs, although, at the beginning of a game, only three eggs can exist at one time. Thus, it is possible for a Zerg player to produce 6 Zerglings very early into the game, while the first Terran and Protoss infantry unit (Starcraft:Marine and Starcraft:Zealot, respectively) must be produced one at a time. Although weaker and easier to kill, 6 Zerglings can almost always beat two Marines or Zealots in an opened battle without support, which makes Zerglings quite deadly at the beginning of a one versus one match.

A Zergling rush is the tactic of attacking an opponent with 6 or more Zergling units as early as permissible. This refers specifically to the strategy where a Zerg player creates a Starcraft:Spawning Pool very early in the game, sacrificing his or her economy to enable creation of Zerglings. Within StarCraft, the strategy is further classified by how early the player attempts to sacrifice economy to execute the rush, for example the four pool rush is the earliest possible Zergling rush. It is called the "four pool rush" (often shortened to 4pool) because the player immediately gathers resources (each player starts out with four worker units) and does not build more workers until the player has enough resources to build a Spawning Pool.

Using this tactic, a player can overwhelm, hinder the expansion of, or even defeat an enemy who does not have sufficient defenses. Because Zerglings are quick to produce and cheap, consecutive rushes may defeat an opponent. A Zergling rush often targets an enemy's main building (the one building that each player begins with that produces workers to allow for resource gathering). This building would be the Command Center (Terran), Nexus (Protoss), or Hatchery (Zerg). Destroying the main building of an enemy early in the game, preventing the gathering of resources, can easily cripple the opponent.

On a 2-versus-2 match, it is very hard to defend against a dual-Zergling rush. For example, if two Zerg players decide to rush one enemy player, they would have 12 Zerglings against that one player. This dual tactic is efficient and easy on micromanagement, resulting normally in the destruction of the enemy player. The most effective way players can survive against the single- or dual-Zergling rush is by defending ramps or other tight areas to force the Zerglings into a bottleneck. The downside of the Zerg rush is the overall weakness of the Zergling; even worker units, the weakest in the game, are almost equally matched.

Due to the instability the strategy caused, Blizzard Entertainment later balanced this by implementing changes through patch 1.08. The patch raised the cost of the spawning pool, allowing more time for the other players to defend themselves while the Zerg player gathers resources. However, the Zerglings are still the fastest-spawning units in the game, and the rush strategy is still lethal if used correctly.

It is important to note that the overall Zerg strategy caters towards massive armies of units. Portmanteaus such as hydraling (referring to an army of Hydralisks and Zerglings), mutaling (Mutalisks and Zerglings) and muta rush (A rush of air-borne Mutalisks) have been created and are common Zerg strategies.

Culture

When the first RTS-games were released in the early to mid 1990s, and rushes were first discovered, rushes were considered to be an unskilled tactic in many RTS gaming circles. However, the design of RTS-games usually allow a rush of some type to exist. Furthermore, a rush that failed was likely to result in the loss of the rushing player, so a rush involved taking an inherent risk. Consequently, soon the opposite became true: players who could rush well became respected. By the late 1990s, in most RTS-games, virtually all good players practiced the rush, which is still considered a standard and completely acceptable strategy. Rushes that are guaranteed to lose you the game if failed, also known as "cheese", are still seen as cheap way of winning however. In some games, such as Galactic Civilizations, Some players consider it unfair for the rush to be applied by artificial intelligence players because the AI does not need to explore the map; it knows where the human players are. The AI can instantly know where to rush and is protected since the human player has usually not done much exploring. In early versions of StarCraft, players were able to quit the game within 5 minutes without having a loss filed in the official Battle.net statistics. This led to extremely early rushes where the rusher quit just before 5 minutes if the rush did not seem successful enough. The time limit was lowered to 2 minutes in later versions.

In RTS-games that have been played for a long time, anti-rush strategies are usually developed, causing most rushes to become more of an attempt at early pressure rather than a direct attempt to win the game, though the latter still sometimes occurs.

In more recent Age of Empires games, however, the developer made rushing an almost futile strategy. This was done by strengthening the settlement by further fortifying it with projectiles and, in some other cases, with towers. Another change was to make the villagers stronger; attacking the villagers with weak units was no longer a profitable business.

In such games, a rush can still be applied, but mostly to weaken your opponent's expansion plans.

Another way to avoid a rush is to enforce a non-rush rule for a particular period of time. It could be anything from 10 minutes to 1 hour; in turn-based games, the rush restriction could last for hours.

Raiding

Raiding is a currently more common variant of the rush. A rush usually implies a strategy that relies heavily on build order, has a very narrow window of time, and aims to either win the game as early as possible or permanently cripple your opponent, often by destroying his or her important buildings that are too expensive to repair or rebuild and remain competitive in the game.

Raiding, by contrast, implies a focus on "hit and run" (or "bite and flee") attacks on an enemy's resource gathering units and apparatus — while usually cheaper and somewhat less effective than destroying command centers or expensive military training buildings, it requires relatively little early military presence. A successful raid will usually destroy a couple of economic gathering units and disrupt the enemy's concentration. It will rarely cripple an opponent, but will put them at a noticeable disadvantage in the early and midgame.

Some games have units dedicated to the practice of raiding, such as the cavalry archers in Rise of Nations and light cavalry units in Age of Empires III. In Starcraft, the Terran Vulture is a very fast unit that is often used for raiding enemy worker lines. Additionally, in Empire at War, any rebel landing party of four or less units constitutes a raid party and can bypass space defenses. The Rebel Infiltrator unit, also from Empire at War, can attach a detonation device to buildings and destroy or cripple them. Another effective raiding unit is the "raider" unit from Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, a quick melee unit with an attack that is highly effective against buildings, and can be upgraded to "pillage" or steal resources from an opponent while destroying the buildings. However, because the "raider" is a tier 2 unit, it is rarely used for attacking supply lines unless the opponent has a poorly defended expansion base.

Harassing

Harassing is almost the same as the process of rushing, but being extremely cautious so as not to lose the 'harassing' units. It involves hitting valuable but unprotected targets, such as poorly-defended resources, workers that are not blocked off, or merely annoying enemy forces via the use of fast or stealthy units. It can refer to a harass at the start of the game or in its duration. It is very unlikely to occur during the late stages of the game. A good example of a harass is in Warcraft III, where you can equip a fast-running hero with a decent attack or spells (such as a Demon Hunter) with boots of speed. The hero then proceeds to attack the enemy's hero or base. A Blade Master is another example of a good harassing hero, and he can attack workers and/or enemy heroes before using his Wind Walk (invisibility) skill to escape. Accompanying a hero with only one or two trusty supporting units is sometimes called a "lieutenant rush". Harassing is much the same as raiding, involving a hit and run, but covers a wide variety of targets and uses more powerful units, often flying, to deal damage before escaping quickly. This strategy is often used to divert attention away from the attacker's base while they quickly ascend the tech tree in order to obtain the most powerful units early in the game.

In Starcraft, a form of harassment is called "dancing" your units. This involved someone who was very experienced in micromanagement or also coined "micro-ing". The process of dancing your units involved quickly climbing up the tech tree to create units that are long-ranged and have moderately fast movement. Units such as the Terran Vulture or the Protoss Dragoon are effective at dancing. The units created as fast as possible, with little regard anything other than the necessary buildings and gatherers. The units are created in amounts ranging from 4-12 (any more usually takes too much time). When the units are sent into the base, the opponent usually does not move so fast and still has slow or close-ranged units. The player dancing attacks with his long-ranged units, and when other units come to attack back, the long ranged units run away. When they get far enough away, either by running faster or when the opponent gives up the chase, they move closer and attack again, until they are chased again. This process does not work well later in the game, and is implemented as an early game strategy. Also, it does not work well with the Zerg long-ranged units, the Zerg Hydralisk, because in early game these units are quite slow-moving and, therefore, not adept to dancing.

Another good example of harassment is Harvester Harassment in the Command & Conquer series. Because of the series' use of Tiberium harvesters (heavily armoured resource collection vehicles), which are expensive and take long to produce, players have developed a type of harassment that use raid tactics to weaken and destroy Harvesters. Unlike worker harassing in other games Harvesters are usually sent out without backup, making this much easier than other types of harassment. In World in Conflict a team will sometimes choose to rush with poorly armored, unarmed troop trucks to capture all points in an Assault game. However, this has been fixed in a patch. Capture points now spawn with defenses.

In all cases of harassment the victim will inevitably send troops to safeguard the harassed unit. This is often used as a tactic on its own to divert the majority of the enemy troops away from a strategic point or from their base, which then the harassing player then can attack without fear of retaliation.

Tank rush

Tank rushing is a strategy often used in Real-time strategy video games where the focus is to amass a large amount of armored attack vehicles to attack your opponent with rather than expanding the base or advancing technology.

The first game to enable use of this tactic is Command & Conquer, all previous games had a unit limit or some other such limitation to disallow it.

So-called tank rushing is one of the main arguments against the real-time strategy genre, and is most likely a reason for the popularity of real-time tactical games. Within the RTS genre, game designers and beta testers can play a role in limiting the viability of single-type mass tactics. Mass-area damage effects, build limits, and group size limits, all of which can be observed in Blizzard's Starcraft, represent calculated efforts to limit the utility of extreme rush tactics in RTS games.

An alternative definition of the tank rush is to take your most mobile units at the very start of the game and make a strike on your opponent's base. The aim is to destroy key buildings before they are able to erect defenses (walls, towers etc). As these units face all of your opponent's initial forces, they are likely to be destroyed due to no infantry or other slow moving support. This would seem to be foolhardy as it leaves the rusher's forces greatly weakened, and these units could be helpful in scouting for resources. However the gambit is to slow or cripple the opponent's ability to expand and upgrade his forces, allowing the rusher to overtake him in technological levels and production capability thus securing the victory.

Conditions

Information is key. Early scouting determines a rusher's ability to gauge the appropriateness of a rush. Conversely, a defender who recognizes a rush in its early stages has the best chance of stopping the rush.
Small maps maximize the effectiveness of rush tactics. The rusher wants to limit the opponent's ability to attack his force en route to the target, and any time the rusher spends in transit is time a defender can use to prepare countermeasures. Furthermore, on maps with multiple starting locations the enemy's location must be determined, so rushing is favored on maps with fewer starting locations.
A player must be proficient in build order strategy. The economic and base building efforts of a rusher must be devoted wholly to the rapid, efficient, and prolific production of a homogeneous force. This requires some prior research or experimentation on the part of the rusher.
Micro-management skills are essential. The tank rush does, in fact, require command skills on the part of the player. Many games feature anti-rushing game mechanics that are designed to frustrate mass-control of units. The 12 unit group limit of Starcraft is an example of designed-in rush control. The rusher must be proficient in the use of hotkeys, which allow for rapid selection of pre-grouped units. A more significant challenge to the micro-manager is the effective control of large armies. Massed units often experience odd pathing movement around obstacles and through chokepoints, so a player must compensate for this phenomenon if the rush is to succeed. Furthermore, the rush must arrive as a mass army and never as a trickle of units.

Advantages

The primary advantages of the tank rush lie in its simplicity for the attacking player in relation to the strain it places on the defender. The attacker can streamline his build order and focus his efforts on a relatively simple attack plan. Bases can be tailored to optimize production of one unit type, thereby affording the rusher great economic and production efficiencies. The defender must counter a large number of units attacking en masse. This can be difficult under the best of circumstances but almost impossible if the attacker divides his army into multiple columns and attacks from more than one direction. A player who does not specifically prepare for a tank rush is at a great disadvantage. Players who opt for balanced build orders can be overwhelmed by players who rush. Due to the production efficiencies that can be achieved by a well-prepared rush build order, rushers can replaces losses faster than opponents and send a second wave against a reeling defender. For this reason, even a failed rush can be considered a success if the initial attack softens the target for a quick second wave.

Disadvantages

The principle weakness of the tank rush is the tendency of the rush to limit a player's tactical options. A player who devises a tank rush must dedicate himself to a specialized build order that gears all resource gathering, tech improvements, and unit production to maximize access to a limited range of weapons. In the event that an opponent of the rusher recognizes the rush tactic early, he can take advantage of the rusher's limited options. For example, a player who recognizes an incipient tank rush can build aircraft to exploit the vulnerability of ground-based tanks (or visa-versa, as "tank rush" is a generic term for homogeneous mass-armies). Many well-designed RTS games give players access to weapons that are specifically designed to counter-mass tactics (e.g. the Reaver of Starcraft or the EMP of Tiberian Sun. A rusher who confronts specialized anti-rush weapons or effective asymmetric defenses (e.g., aircraft vs. tanks) has boxed himself into a corner. A rusher's economy and production often are poorly designed for adaptation to a changing threat, and a better-balanced strategy may be able to exploit the limited options of the rusher. Another major limitation of the rush is the lopsided base construction that it encourages. A base that is geared for mass production of units may have little defense against counter-attacks. The final weakness of the rush is the tendency of massed units to behave erratically and become unwieldy. Unless a player plans the execution of his rush, the rush itself may become a chaotic parade of exposed units, or, even worse, a trickle of units that fail to challenge the defenses of the target player.

Variations on the Rush

There are several distinct variations on the basic rush. The most famous of these derivatives is the Zerg Rush of Starcraft. Like the term "tank rush," "Zerg rush" has become a generic term for an early, low-tech effort to win a quick game with basic units. The "commando drop," or "Reaver drop," is another rush strategy, albeit one that differs from the mass-tactics of Zergling and Tank rushes. The "Commando Drop," involves a race to insert a highly destructive "elite" unit into the enemy base, often with the help of a companion vehicle (i.e., the "drop"). It could be argued that this tactic is not a true rush because it does not utilize mass tactics, however, it exhibits other significant characteristics of the rush. These similarities include asymmetrical build tactics, commitment to supporting essentially one unit type, and a race against time in order to take advantage of an opponent's balanced build strategy.

In Warcraft III, the Undead can execute a "skeleton explosion" based on the rush tactic. This differs from an ordinary rush in that it requires a mix of units (necromancers and some sort of frontline combat troop - often ghouls). The combat troops hit the enemy, causing a certain amount of damage, and inevitably dying themselves. At this point, the necromancers begin to cast "raise dead" which raises two skeletons from every corpse within range. This means the number of troops on the Undead side explodes relative to the number of troops they are facing, until the necromancers run out of mana.

Another form of the tank rush is the "air rush" or "air raid". The tactic revolves around the mass construction and deployment of air units. The air rush is commonly practised in the online games of the Command and Conquer series, with the overall goal of overpowering any of the enemy's air defense buildings and units. This provides access to destroying critical parts of the enemy base. The only counter to an air rush is mass amounts of anti-air defenses.

First-person shooter

Rushing in team-based first-person shooters has the same meaning as in real-time strategy games, and the term probably originates from RTS games. The opposite of rushing in this sense is camping. In FPS games, rushing is often considered to be an honorable tactic, in contrast to camping which is often looked down upon as a dishonorable tactic. It is noteworthy that when defensive objectives are present in an FPS game, protecting the objective isn't dishonorable, however this is loosely interpreted.

A team will rush towards an objective or certain area of the map hoping to overwhelm the players there before backup can arrive. In a bodycount or Team Deathmatch game, players will often rush at the enemy in a close quarters location to effectively remove the opponent's chance to react. In a round-based game like Counter-Strike, players rush typically in an all-or-nothing attempt at the beginning of the round. In most other first-person shooters players spawn continuously, so they might wait and plan for a group of players to form a rush. For example in Unreal Tournament 2004's "Onslaught" mode (territorial control), players might prepare an organized rush to capture the last control point and win the game. Another interesting example is the Warthog or Ghost rush common in Halo and Halo 2's capture the flag matches. The strategy revolves around the common practice of spending the first few moments of the game collecting the player's preferred weapons mix. This leaves a team uncoordinated, distributed and ill prepared for a pounce by two or three high speed vehicles into their base. A carefully orchestrated rush, thanks mainly to the powerful weapons fitted to the vehicles, can usually eliminate any remaining defenders and allow an easy capture of the flag. There is a certain amount of humour to be observed in the execution of a simultaneous rush of two players, especially if they choose differing paths to their opponent's base as the teams can end up retrieving the required flag, only to return to base to find their own (a prerequisite for scoring a point) missing. In Counter-Strike, players who died in previous round must spend time to repurchase weapons at the beginning of the following round, as such, a rush by the winning team (which has fewer players who needs to repurchase weapons) can lead to decisive victory. In addition, on some maps, rushing can be used to counter an enemy rush, as such, rushing by one team can lead to both teams rushing.

Similar to and spiritually derived from the "zerg rush" is a phenomenon known in the MMOFPS Planetside as "the zerg". Organized and teamwork-focused Outfits assign this description to the masses of hundreds of players in any faction that travel from base to base in a massive, unorganized squabble - rather than cooperating with fellow Outfits or coordinating with other players, and typically winning by gross numerical superiority rather than any amount of skill or tactical expertise. This tactic is common in all empires and is generally associated with new players who lack communication or squadmates to organise assaults with, the term "the zerg" was coined by the Command Rank 5 players of the game who command the troops to describe the people who wouldn't obey their commands and would simply go to areas with action rather than particular tactical value.

Many games attempt to deter rushing in some way, as it is often not considered "the way the game should be played". For example, the Xbox 360 game Rainbow Six: Vegas offers a difficulty mode called 'Realistic', offering the player an opponent which effectively acquires targets and combats against rushes. This causes the players to use effective cover and take well placed shots. However, the enemy can be exploited through the use of smoke grenades, as the player is rewarded Thermal Imaging goggles.

Online role-playing games

Character advancement

Rushing can mean a type of assisted powerleveling commonly related to powergaming, such as an attempt to speed up or circumvent the established path of progress with the help of another player. In multiplayer RPG games, like Diablo II, low level characters can allow high level characters to complete tasks in such a way that the low level character is awarded the progress. This type of action usually is followed by the low level characters leeching off other characters and gaining rewards they ordinarily would not have access to. This enables rapid progression with characters gain rewards much faster than ordinarily possible. Diablo II, in particular, was patched by its makers to attempt to inhibit this action. Player have since found ways around the new measures introduced. Rushing, in the 1.10 patch of Diablo II, has passed into a form of currency since rushing became more complicated. Other games may have other names for this process, for example it is generally called "running" in Guild Wars.

Fighting Games

In the world of fighting games, especially those of the 2-D variety, rushdown is a play style utilizing aggressive, unrelenting attacks designed to cause the opponent to be unable to move or attack. This can cause mental intimidation in the other player (due to the visually impressive string of attacks), and force them, due to the increased game pace, to make defensive errors, leading to punishable mistakes. More importantly, most fighting games feature some penalty for blocking too many attacks in a row, such as guard crushes in most Capcom- and SNK-made fighting games, and the increase of the guard meter in the Guilty Gear series. Characters who excel in this style are referred to as "rushdown characters". A rushdown game is inherently a game of calculated risks.

Other uses

Although the term is most commonly used in MMO games, it can be applied to many other games as well. For example, a player of a Collectible Card Game can employ a strategy of flooding the enemy with small, cheap targets rather than strong, well-coordinated units.