It’s not a party; it’s a funeral

Like many pieces of Modern Warfare 2, the party system is not fair. While it can provide a good deal of fun to those within the party, those outside of it can suffer for no good reason at all.

Generally those grouped into a party are using voice chat to coordinate amongst themselves. This gives them a very apparent edge, because while it’s true that anyone can chat within the team, in my PS3 experiences most people do not. Those who do chat are usually too busy being off topic, singing, or calling the various players and game components “gay.”

Three Domination games I played yesterday prompted this post. Of course, I use “play” in the broadest of senses as I wasn’t playing as much as I was hiding, shooting down air support all on my own, and generally being as much as of an annoyance to the partied-up enemy team as I could be.

The problem

On the enemy team there were at least three high-level guys in a party. They weren’t that good, all things considered, but they were far better than the incredibly bad players I had on my own team. Their consistent coordination and usage of UAV and Counter UAV effectively stymied the young and clueless players with whom I was so unfortunately partnered up.

The enemy team was playing Domination as Domination should be played — they would capture and hold two points and then proceed to literally dominate via spawn trapping. That’s the way Domination works — you spawn at one of your held points and if you don’t have a point you spawn randomly. So, by letting us keep a point they knew where we were spawning for the duration of the match and guarded our exits accordingly.

Between the constant harrier strikes, pave low runs, and chopper gun rapes, there was nothing we could do. One guy on the enemy team was even using a javelin to pound the area around the spawn into submission. We weren’t getting out this alive.

The setup

• P90 + silencer
• Stinger
• Semtex
• Stun grenades
• Marathon Pro
• Cold-Blooded Pro
• Ninja Pro

It’s pretty self-explanatory — Marathon and a submachine gun for quick relocation, Ninja to stay quiet, a silenced weapon to avoid pinging the radar, and a stinger to take out enemy air support. The stuns and semtex are interchangeable with whatever you’d rather use. I enjoy stunning enemies so they can’t escape my semtex. You could also employ the UMP for three-shot kills at a distance but I don’t really enjoy that gun. Its recoil, slow rate of fire, and pretty terrible iron sights have turned me off of it.

Cold-Blooded is fantastic in that it prevents you from being targeted by automatic air support. It also prevents you from being highlighted by a red box for predator missiles, the chopper gunner, and the AC-130, so if you stop moving and hide intelligently (often as far away from your teammates as possible), odds are these weapons of usually impending doom will not kill you. This makes the perk an essential part of your repertoire if your team is being constantly harassed by air support.

I joined the first game in the middle of a match on Estate and I started out using a silenced FAMAS since it’s a good setup for distance shooting. Pretty soon, however, I realized that things were going very, very wrong. We were trapped at C and we were getting destroyed. After my first death via harrier I switched to the stealth class I showed above. I tried sprinting or sneaking out of harm’s way on several occasions but never made it very far. It was then that I decided to do the only thing I could do — be annoying.

I don’t know about you but getting my hard-earned air support shot out of the sky ticks me off. That in itself is kind of sad because taking out air support should be a given. However, lots of people simply try to ignore it — “someone else can deal with it.” And then they wonder how they got beaten so badly? Gee, I wonder!

Knowing full well that the entire enemy team had its sights trained on and around the C-point area, I hid in the corner behind the garage or whatever that building is and shot down enemy air support. I couldn’t do much else. Although I did manage a few kills here and there as people tried to sneak around back of the point to capture it.

The play style

That match ended with a score of 200 to sub-100. The guys in the party seemed very impressed with themselves after the game and had a nice circlejerk. Next we found ourselves on Afghan. I’m not too big a fan of this map due to the lack of routes around it — it’s very easy to hold down defensively.

As a result, my inept team could never hold more than one point at a time. Thus, I did what I could once the never-ending stream of air support started to roll out — I shot it the hell down. I kept to our one point (either A or C; never B), guarded it, and shot as many planes and choppers from the sky as I could. I even managed to get some air support of my own a couple times. Having run out of stingers I was forced to take out an enemy chopper gunner with one of my predator missiles on more than one occasion!

I managed to walk out of that match with a score of 18-6. My all-star teammates had scores like 4-19 and 5-26. Thanks for the help, guys! The next match was on Wasteland and followed a similar path to the Afghan match. Once again I found myself doing nothing but taking out air support and hiding from it. In one instance I found myself trying to wedge my prone player as far under the broken tank tread as I could to avoid an AC-130. Those take more missiles to destroy than one player’s got and no one else was helping, so it was all I could do to hide from the explosions. I was hidden from the plane via Cold-Blooded but then my stupid teammates started spawning right next to me. I didn’t die but it got a little tense there for awhile as I watched them get blown up right in front of me.

And that’s pretty much how it all went down. I played sneakily, tried to capture points when I could, shot down another chopper gun with a predator missile, and took out quite a few UAVs and Counter UAVs. In both of these last two matches I was the only person on my team with a positive kill-death ratio.

The solution

There’s no reason at all to subject randoms to the torture of playing against a coordinated team. The very nature of pubbing goes against allowing this. Couple the unfairness there with the unbalanced remainder of the game and the resulting matches are not fun for the casual bad player. Unless, of course, the party guys all suck too, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

The best way to handle parties would be to have mercenary modes for all gametypes rather than only TDM. I don’t care that TDM is the most-played gametype. Some people don’t like TDM as the other game modes are generally more dynamic and often last longer. But if you’re hell-bent on avoiding coming up against a coordinated party, you have no other option but to play TDM.

Rather than a distinct gametype, “mercenary mode” could be an option to enable if you ever didn’t want to play against parties. Sure, that might lessen the party-goers’ pool of available games but who cares about those guys? Anyone who teams up against random baddies in order to boost their ego is an idiot not worth catering to.