Had it been a real Feud, at least one of us would have gotten the satisfaction of killing the other more times in a fair fight. In the end, neither of us lost anything more than a few rounds of ammunition. That’s the best way to properly shame them for what they’ve done. If you can manage, I recommend carrying a player’s corpse into battle against them. Red Dead Online even tossed up a kill counter to keep score. Once he accepted my challenge, the game invited us to run at each other guns blazing while a three-minute timer ticked down. It seems that Parleys are one-sided affairs, while Feuds must be agreed to by both parties. So I ambled over to the first player I could find, a man in black named BIG_M_UNBROKEN, and asked if he would be so kind as to kill me four or five times in a row. To test out the Feud mechanic, first I had to find a willing test subject. The Feud option, on the other hand, is a little more interesting.

He apologized for hurting my horse, and I for killing him that first time. It didn’t take long for us to sort things out. Ten minutes is a long time to jaw at a stranger on voice chat in a modern multiplayer shooter. We could pull our guns and aim them at each other, but when we tried to pull the triggers, nothing happened. When he and I squared off again, we found that the only weapons we had at our disposal were our words.

Once selected, a 10-minute timer started ticking down in the background. My first inclination was to choose Parley. It was the fourth time that he shot me down when Red Dead Online gave me an option: Would I like to Parley? Or would I rather challenge my rival to a Feud? Each time, he found me on the in-game map, rushed over and put a bullet between my eyes. Each time, Red Dead Online spawned me just a little further away from where I had died. Moments later he spawned back into the game, galloped up from behind me and my horse Wally, and shot me dead. I figured he had it coming, but it seems he saw things differently. He was thrown clear of the tangle of limbs and was on his way back to check on his own mount when I shot him dead. I stumbled onto the system of Parleys and Feuds when a man rode into me, nearly killing my horse. But what happens when someone used to a life of crime in the story mode of Red Dead Redemption 2 ambles into a crowd of unsuspecting do-gooders who are just trying to get along? Rockstar Games has baked a clever system into its new online experience to slow down griefers, one that relies on timed “Parleys” and opt-in, competitive “Feuds.” Red Dead Online invites dozens of heavily armed cowboys to share the same multiplayer space.

Online parlay