- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
Heres a more in-deph answer from LouisWu off the HBO forums.
"In answer to Combat_chuck: a 'Guardians' kill happens when the game figures out that you've died, but doesn't know who to attribute the death to. Most often, this is because the person killing you is already dead (and killed you with a non-delayed weapon) - the most single cause for Guardian kills would be a pair of simultaneous melee kills; Person A is killed by Person B, but Person B is killed by the Guardians.
For a long time, it was thought that this was the PRIMARY reason for Guardian kills - but some pretty respectable community members recounted instances of spontaneous dying in an open area, with no sniper fire accounted for. My best guess for these is lag-related (they were all on XBC, that I know of). Your opponent dies, but before he died he attacked you, with, say, a pistol. Game lag delayed the pistol shots to the point that when they reached you, your opponent was already dead - the game engine says "hmm, you should die, but I don't know where these bullets came from - the only other person on the map died 2 seconds ago" and attributes the death to the Guardians. "
[Edited on 6/21/2004 9:46:11 PM]