Well then, listen up! Synergy is a Half-Life 2 modification that allows you to play through Valve's award-winning FPS franchise with other players. Over the years, this community mod has been updated with extra features and tweaks, improving the overall multiplayer experience for everyone. This mod is free as long as you have any installment of HL2 and it's respective episodes legitimately.

That's all you need to know!

Sometimes when you know a particular game very well, you would like to see how quickly you can beat it, from beginning to end.

Players, and even some admins, are absolutely amazed by such a display of skill will be furious with you if you rush through every chapter before they get to experience some enjoyment. This is a cooperative game after all, so it's not only about you. Doing so may get you kicked from a server for doing this, so that's why this is one of the worst ways to play this game.

There isn't much to explain on how to do it, just get through every chapter as quick as possible, using sprint, bunnyhopping, and/or any method that helps you the most. If you are bold enough, you can always attempt map exploitation. I've discovered some secrets during the Highway 17 and Sandtraps chapters. For example, you can skip the first gunship battle at Colonel Cubbage's hideout by doing a specific jump on the railing to pass the gate. You can also skip the next map with the crane, if you are skilled enough to scale the mountain that leads to the other side of the broken bridge. Finally, you can also skip the battle at the lighthouse by climbing the mountain you see before reaching it; this part may require some props & gravity gun to boost you over, but once up there, you can slide down carefully and walk into the level-loading zone.

There are some players in video games who, for whatever reason, just like to sit in game lobbies or servers just to do absolutely nothing.

That's right, I'm talking about you!


In most cases you'll just get ignored and people will move on without you. If an admin sees this, however, you might get kicked for taking up space.

You know the drill. Join a server, wait for it to load, then go and do something else. Perhaps open up the Steam overlay and watch a video, read a story, fap to furry porn or hentai, or probably just get off the computer to go do something else. Either way, you aren't helping those sorry souls fighting for their lives against the Combine, but they'll be fine... Right???

In this game, you may have noticed unusual barriers placed throughout most of the levels. They stall everyone until all or most players have had a chance to catch up, so that you can all finish the next section of that map as a team. How thoughtful!

Yes there is a way to do this horribly wrong, and it is suggested that you play on servers where there's only a handful of people around. Simply mess around in other parts of the map without making your way to the checkpoint. While doing this, your teammates will get frustrated as they try to find ways around the map simply because ONE person hasn't caught up yet. However, for servers with a higher player capacity, these games may only require a large portion of the players to catch up, so unless you're the only one trying to keep the game from moving forward, you'll be out of luck.

We've all been involved with jerks on the internet, and the gaming world is no exception. In fact, some of us were and STILL are these jerks.
You can try out a couple things to get everyone's attention and to make other people hate you:

• Laugh at people for dying in silly ways across each map and insulting them
  
• Spam annoying text multiple times throughout the game or play absurd music or sound files over the microphone (It's 2016 and people still have no idea what the 'mute' feature is. Go figure)
  
• <Typical "shut up kid ur 12 dont speak until youve gotten older" response>
  
• Get into ridiculous flame wars in any way possible and troll them because of it

(Added February 21st, 2017)
This method is similar to the speedrunning method, only this time you aren't benefitting anyone... Not even yourself.

Grabbing props and placing them in front of an NPC's traveling path can cause them to stall in one area for quite a while. Not only that, but it's possible to stop the NPC from moving or activating any other triggers (e.g. Alyx standing around doing nothing after mentioning Ravenholm in Black Mesa East).

Of course, most of these breaks have become more frequent since the SteamPipe Update back in 2013 and until the development team finally patches these major problems these sequence breaks, not mention constant game crashes, are going to be around for quite a while.

(Added March 2nd, 2017)
I believe this method is self-explanatory, though this is common in video games these days and anyone can do this, even a toddler!

When something frustrates you in Synergy (Trust me, there are a LOT of things), just go ahead and leave the game immediately. You don't have to say your farewells to the team if you don't want to, just go ahead and leave.

Several things that can be frustrating is server lag, unfair difficulty increases as more players join (enemies deal more damage while the player does normal single player damage, or possibly less), players hogging all item caches, or even the last player dying before anyone has a chance to respawn. Hell even the game crashes could be frustrating...But when that happens, the game quits for you.

This guide is not complete and will be hopefully updated in the future. This is all for now!

Just remember to have fun and take back your planet from the invading species!