Read the full post at kylegetsspam.com

If you’re wondering what’s going on, allow me to fill you in. Awhile ago I bought the domain kylegetsspam.com for no real reason. I’d been pondering what to do with it but got an idea when I signed up for the PSN with “kylegetsspam” as my alias. I decided I could try talking about console gaming things there while keeping this one to PC gaming stuff. Maybe it’ll work; maybe it won’t. I’ve already proven to be incredibly lazy at keeping this site running, so how will I ever manage to run two simultaneously? I guess we’ll just have to see.

I am a prime example of this as I’m new not only to the game but to online gaming via console as well. My overall kill-death ratio sits at 1.33 at the moment; it’s nothing too impressive but it has been steadily rising as I’ve gotten more and more accustomed to the damned thumbsticks. For the first 40 or so levels of MW2 multiplayer I had a negative ratio. Yes, I’ve got skills.

When players like me look at these assholes getting chopper gunners and AC-130s again and again, the one thought on our mind is “How do they do that?” Well, that’s probably the second thought as the first is something like “God fucking dammit! That guy got another chopper gunner?!”

The idea of managing 11 kills without dying is a daunting one, and as a result many people do not run such high kill streaks. Instead they tend to stick to the lower ones like UAV, predator missile, and harrier. That’s a nice setup — it’s one I stuck with for quite some time — but it’s not going to get you a chopper gunner.

You see, thinking that you’re not good enough to get a chopper gunner is the very thing preventing you from getting a chopper gunner. It certainly kept me from getting one legitimately (i.e. not from an air drop) until just the other night. And upon getting one I realized the truth — it’s really not that difficult to pull off. You know, assuming your team isn’t full of bad players who are getting beaten to a pulp.

Just like in CoD4 air support kills count toward more air support (provided you don’t die which is unlike CoD4). This means that with the proper kill streak setup you can basically coast your way to a chopper gunner once your air support starts rolling in. The setup I and many others like to use is 5-7-11 — predator, harriers, chopper gunner. It’s quite efficient and in many cases you only need to get about half of your kills with your gun and/or equipment as the air support will take care of the rest.

The hard part, of course, is going the initial five for the predator. Once you’ve got it odds are good that it’ll get at least one kill. About half the time I get two or more (I got at least five the other day!) which gives me my harriers straight away. Yes, that’s at least as unbalanced and stupid as CoD4 air strikes getting you a heli. Harriers are quite strong. The initial bombing run cannot be stopped via stingers so it generally gets a couple kills if you’ve placed it well. From there it’s likely the last one will zap a couple more enemies with its minigun before getting blown out of the sky. And just like that you’ve gotten a chopper gunner.

It’s simply not as difficult as it sounds. If your predator strike gets two kills and your harriers aren’t shot down, you’re guaranteed a chopper gunner by only having to get five kills with your own talent. Dumb? Yep. But you might as well take advantage of it if others can and will do so against you. Of course, it’s entirely possible that your predator and harriers miss the mark and then that last harrier is shot down before getting any kills. That’s annoying as hell but, hey, it happens.

My best example thus far of the power of this setup happened last night. I was playing Ground War Domination on Scrapyard with a silenced TAR-21. The enemy team wasn’t bad and did a good job of stealing the B point from us constantly but I was in a zone and they couldn’t do much against me. I actually managed to call in two chopper gunners in the same game and ended with a kill-death of 53-12. That’s a normal score for me in CoD4 on PC; this was a stand-out performance and the best game I’ve gotten thus far on my PS3. And the only reason it happened was because I decided to enable the chopper gunner kill streak a couple rounds prior.

Random update on 4/27: My current best match given to me thanks to double chopper gunners is 60-4 on Wasteland Domination.

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.

The problem is that it’s ultimately not that useful. At best it reduces the number of kills required to get a perk by 33% — at worst it’s only a 4% reduction. The lower your rewards the higher the percentage of kills you save by running Hardline. Conversely, the higher your rewards the less Hardline actually helps you. It’s simple math. Additionally, when running higher kill streaks it is your kill streaks themselves getting a large percentage of your kills, so having to get one less kill is not very worthwhile. Here are some handy charts so you can see this visually.

UAV	Predator missile
Chopper gunner	Nuke

Since Hardline is most useful with low level rewards, it’s best to run a class that isn’t designed for big kill streaks. Use something annoying to pester the enemy team — something with Marathon, for instance, so you can flank the other team and put constant pressure on them.

Strive to get a least two kills for every death so your team will have constant UAV coverage. Let your team worry about camping and getting the big kill streaks. A 2:1 ratio is certainly nothing to scoff at, and with UAVs overhead for most of the match, you’re much more likely to do better than that.

Less pew-pew power

Running Hardline means, of course, that you won’t have access to Stopping Power to lessen your burden in killing enemies. Whenever I’m not using using Stopping Power I tend to run a gun that can kill in 3-4 shots or one with very manageable recoil.

Any assault rifle will probably suit you fine with the possible exception of the F2000. The others are either heavy-hitting (SCAR-H, TAR-21, etc.) or easy to use (M4A1, ACR). Well, I guess the FAMAS and M16 were really designed to be used with Stopping Power but they’re still pretty strong. The MP5K is a decent choice for flanking duties as it takes three shots at close range and sports a high rate of fire, but without Stopping Power it’s nearly useless at a distance thanks to its recoil. The UMP will kill with three shots at any distance and is a player favorite. Just be aware that it shoots as slowly as the SCAR-H (and is thus tied for the lowest rate of fire) and has some pretty high recoil.

If I were running Hardline I’d probably use Marathon and Ninja and go for the TAR-21 with a noob tube or a silent UMP. Then again, I probably wouldn’t actually run Hardline. Stopping Power is quite good and doesn’t lessen in usefulness due to the kill streak rewards I’ve chosen. And if I were running a silenced UMP I might as well stick Cold-Blooded on there for the full ninja effect. Like I said, Hardline just isn’t that good.

As expected there is no balance

MW2 has, at best, a basic semblance of balance. In reality it is every bit as unbalanced as I anticipated. Air support is as ridiculous as you’ve seen in various YouTube videos. But the upside of that is most people you’ll come across aren’t good enough to abuse it frequently.

And even if you do happen to be playing with someone going harrier, chopper gunner, nuke consistently, you can always leave the lobby and find new people to play with. That’s the biggest plus regarding a lack of dedicated servers — there’s theoretically an infinite number of places to play. No waiting in line on a full server and no waiting for someone to join an empty server ever again. In a dedicated environment, if someone is hacking or totally owning on your favorite server, there isn’t anything you can do but wait until he leaves or is kicked.

Less grenade spam overall

Grenade spam has been greatly reduced from CoD4 thanks to the absence of the 3x Frag perk and the much smaller throw trajectory. You don’t see people getting UAVs with only grenades much (if ever) anymore. That said, the game does allow for some abuses.

The One Man Army and Scavenger perks both let people restock their explosives — grenades, claymores, noob tubes, etc. In a douchebag’s hand this can cause serious trouble. However, it’s generally only one guy abusing it versus everyone in CoD4 spamming three grenades as soon as they spawn. It’s probably easier to deal with the MW2 guys, especially given the infinite “servers” available to you.

Pew-pew city

MW2 has more guns and many more ways to set up said guns than CoD4. As expected many of them are unbalanced. The number of guns and whatnot is nice and all but it makes the fact that you still only get five custom class slots all the more annoying. You get new slots as you prestige but who has time to level through the game multiple times?

My favorite gun setup right now is probably the FAMAS with a silencer. The M4A1 and SCAR-H are also quite nice. In a recent match I was going 3-9 with the UMP on Afghan, and after I switched to my FAMAS class I wound up going 13-10. Pretty good for a guy who hasn’t played a console since Halo.

Knife abuse is the worst part of MW2

Running the Marathon, Lightweight, and Commando perks whilst wielding an SMG is the most annoying part about MW2. It allows people to sprint an infinite distance faster than anyone else and do a magical knife warp from ten feet out. Sometimes people use the tactical knife with a handgun to increase the speed of multiple knife slashes. It’s all about cheap kills as this setup will easily overpower even SMGs with Stopping Power.

You’ll find at least one of these idiots in every game — someone who has dedicated his MW2 experience to running around extra quickly and knifing people. It’s pretty obvious they’re terrible at the game and this is the only way they can get passable scores. Sadly, there’s not much you can do about it except try and stay away from them. This can be difficult enough on its own, but if they switch out Commando for Ninja and thus don’t make any noise while they’re running around full speed, good luck.

As I seem to die an equal amount from guns as from these untalented knife bitches, I sincerely hope Infinity Ward aren’t too stupid to see the problems with so many people abusing this setup. It would be less of a problem with a mouse in hand; on a console it’s too much. Since I encounter these guys much more frequently than good players abusing air support, I’m calling this the most broken part of the game right now. In theory the air support system is worse but in practice the knife abusing seems to rule.

Internets buddies

If you have a PS3 you can friend me. My “gamer tag” or whatever it’s called is kylegetsspam. For now at least. Maybe I’ll change it later. But maybe not; I am pretty lazy.

Update. Things are continuing to unwind it seems. FourZeroSheep posted an explanation of what the dedicated server-less system would be like. At this point it’s rocking nearly 3,100 comments. That petition I linked to below is now at nearly 130,000 signatures (whether or not online petitions mean squat is another story). The forum continues to fill up with ill will toward IWNET. Humorously, both CoD4 and WaW server admins have been changing their server names to reflect their thoughts on the matter.

It came to light yesterday that Infinity Ward is doing something crazy with multiplayer for the PC version of Modern Warfare 2. Rather than going with the usual dedicated server setup of most games (including CoD4), they’re apparently pushing out this system called IWNet or IW.NET or something equally lame. Basically, it will be a closed system that Infinity Ward themselves control in order to wrangle the multiplayer community. It’s kind of like Epic using GameSpy as the server browser for UT3… only a lot more central and (very possibly) a lot worse.

Bash and Slash conducted an interview with Infinity Ward sheep Rob Bowling. Here’s some of the things they found out:

General

• IW partnering through Steam is what you will see in the future. Match-making is not through Steam, but IW.NET is run in conjunction with Steam.
• GSP’s will no longer be renting out servers.
• No PunkBuster. VAC will be used as an anti-cheat.
• Retail distribution: Pre-orders will get a disk. Or you could order from Steam.
• DLC may now need to be paid for – not confirmed [but, of course, will definitely be true].
• Piracy was only a small reason for going to IW.NET – not the whole reason [obviously not a small reason].

Clans

• No more clan [i.e. dedicated] servers. Private matches via IW.NET replace clan servers.
• Listen servers [i.e. people's computers] will connect to each other.
• IW.NET/Steam will replace the community server admin [interface].

Modding

• Modding the game is now very much in question. fourzerotwo had no info on modding. However, it appears that there will be no mods or maps for MW2.
• Modding in SpecOps? Unknown.

Competitive Gaming

• Competitive gaming has changed forever [with respect to MW2].
• It might be possible in the future for IW engineers to load a “competitive” setting on IW.NET, but it is far from a guarantee. It might also never happen.

Why have Infinity Ward decided to do this?

Piracy is a factor. Piracy is always a factor because the higher-ups in any company (in this case Activision) are out of touch with reality. In other words, the same people that push DRM as an effect method of piracy control are the same who decided this central IW.NET system was a good idea.

A very plausible explanation lies in the fact that this theoretically forces more sales. One of the reasons CoD4 is still going strong is because of mods, custom maps, custom rules, etc. By removing all of that the game’s replayability is diminished, and it would thereby be easier to convince gamers to purchase the next game in the CoD series six months down the road.

Quite naturally, many enthusiasts are now pissed the fuck off. And this is just scraping the surface. Any forum or site that discusses MW2 is now focused solely on this issue. There’s even a petition.

Edit: It seems most of those posts on IW’s board have been deleted under the guise of “spam.” Still, people aren’t giving up. There is an “official” online petition now (it was previously a forum post that got deleted after 1500 replies) and I found this MW2 boycott Steam group.

And why wouldn’t they be pissed off? No dedicated servers? No mods? What the fuck?! If people wanted the console experience they would — get this — buy the game on a console. It appears that once again PC gamers are getting fucked, and it probably won’t end well. This comment from the Kotaku post sums it up rather nicely.

The worst part is that MW2 is sure to sell poorly on PC in light of this news, and piracy rates are sure to go through the roof. Companies will just be able to use it’s poor sales as an example of piracy, a decline in PC gaming, and whatever other bullshit excuses they use to try to force out the PC market and push the consoles even further on top.

Maybe it won’t be so bad in the end but until we know what’s going on, I implore everyone to cancel any pre-orders that you have.

It's sad that it's come to this.

I’ve attempted to cancel my pre-order from Walmart. I was unable to cancel it automatically so I had to send a message to them saying that because it was, in fact, a pre-order that I should be able to cancel it. We’ll see what happens.

Perhaps the saddest bit of all is that any boycotts and cancellations probably won’t have much of an effect. Selection bias says that there are probably far, far more people who don’t and won’t care how the multiplayer portion is handled compared to the ones who do and are currently being very vocal about these latest happenings. Statistically this could very easily turn out to be a hugely successful game regardless, and that’ll only pave the way for other developers to follow Infinity Ward’s lead in giving PC gamers the finger.

The announcement of a new game has drawn up a lot of thoughts about things I don’t like about CoD4 or elements that I feel could easily be better if Infinity Ward would put even the tiniest bit of effort into making sure bugs and balance are dealt with properly. The game is full of good ideas, but I don’t think they ever got around to fully fleshing them out. There are plenty of things that if adjusted just a tad could have a big positive effect on the game, yet CoD4 has generally always proven to be fun regardless. Thus, it makes me wonder just how good the next one could be if they approach it thinking that CoD4 could be better — not that it was perfectly fine because of its popularity (see: Halo).

I have a bit of a propensity for lists (and wordiness), so I’m about to write one about several items I think need serious reconsideration for the next CoD. I realize that the odds of Infinity Ward doing any of these are pretty slim as what they provided in CoD4 was “good enough” to net millions of sales across all platforms. Because of the following issues I have, I wouldn’t call CoD4 “great” — it has too much that could change for the better for this to be true. I’d like to see the next CoD be a great (multiplayer) game by including the following:

Better and bigger maps. It’s painfully obvious that CoD4’s maps were built with a maximum of 16 players in mind (i.e. the maximum number that can play together via the consoles). The maps are simply too small and in many cases too linear. Since the PC version can theoretically run four times that many players, it’s extremely common for pubs to be far too overcrowded. About 20 players maximum is all these maps can handle even somewhat gracefully (they’re usually best with about 12), yet many servers run upward of 32 slots. This is ridiculous and in no way how the game was intended to be played. Matches with this many players devolve immediately into spawn camping festivals of failure and grenade spam. We need more f**king space to move around (at least on PC).

Better weapon balance. Ignore the nuances between the weapons themselves for a minute (though there are tons of problems there) and consider the macro differences between the weapon types. What’s the point of using a shotgun when you can go with a much more versatile submachine gun? Why go for a machine gun and take the movement penalty and the long sight and reload times when an assault rifle is more than sufficient and much easier to handle? Why pick up a sniper rifle when they’re far too picky, boast the lowest effective damage per second ratings, and are easily countered by just about anything given their slowness, requirement for precision, and the small maps? And let’s not forget that no weapon has a range limit; they can all instantly shoot an “infinite” distance. So many of the guns gimp you needlessly!

These are somewhat large existential problems that Infinity Ward has probably never considered; their goal was likely to hit some imaginary quota of guns that would keep the average player satisfied for awhile and leave it at that. But to everyone else all we’re left with is a handful of weapons that don’t suck in comparison to others because they actually offer something uniquely useful to the player. This keeps the overall experience from being as varied as it should be, not only in that you use the same few weapons all the time, but also that you get killed by those same few most of the time. For those who know better, the game is basically AK-47 vs. AK-74u vs. Desert Eagle with the M40A3 thrown in from time to time. Not cool, man. Oh, and while we’re at it, let’s tone down that grenade chucking distance, eh?

Better uniforms. Though I’m used to it by now, it’s still fairly annoying how well the Marines blend in on most maps compared to the dark “OMG, here I am!” uniforms of the OpFor. It’s honestly not fair at all when the ability to visually acquire a camping enemy player is determined simply by whether or not he was lucky enough to land on the Marine side. The SAS and Spetsnaz are pretty even, I guess, though the SAS has the advantage on darker maps, and it’s always annoying how ghillie suits are handed out at random on grassy maps. Either make everyone blend in or stick out to the same degree; it’s not that difficult. I’d prefer the “sticking out” option, of course, because I’m a run-and-gunner who despises campers who can’t do anything else. If anything CoD certainly doesn’t need more talentless campers; it’s got plenty already.

Better spawn system. You know, the dynamic spawn system was a good idea. The theory behind it is mainly to keep people from randomly spawning behind enemy lines fully armed. It does this successfully for the most part, but it’s certainly not perfect, and what sometimes keeps teams on the opposite sides of the maps often sticks them right next to one another. The end result, thanks in part to the small maps, is rampant spawn camping, and if you overcrowd such small maps, it’s almost guaranteed to “break” the spawn system and cause one team to get spawn camped indefinitely.

But why does spawn camping happen at all, especially with lower player counts? Well, it’s mostly a problem with bad players. You see, bad players don’t move. They spawn, they park their asses in a corner in or very near their spawn point, and they wait for someone to waltz into their sights. This wouldn’t be a problem except that CoD4’s spawn system judges team spawn points based on the “safest” player on your team — the one furthest away from an enemy and/or least likely to get shot by one in the next few moments. A lone worthless camper can literally have 100% control over your team’s spawn because he is “safe,” and this is where the problem arises. If your team gets surrounded and the bad players camp in your crappy now-surrounded spawn instead of trying to get out, you will all keep spawning there. Brilliant, eh?

Better air support system. I don’t feel like harping on this issue anymore, but I will say that it’s patently retarded how Infinity Ward handled this. Bonuses for players doing better never goes well in terms of gameplay. It’s called a positive feedback loop and only serves to let the good players dominate when they would usually just win. Why make it unnecessarily difficult for the players who are already losing? This only makes comebacks fucking impossible and it ruins the experience for everyone on the wrong end of the assault. There are many ways the developers could fix this, but at the very least, don’t let kills the player doesn’t even earn himself count as if he did. That is, air strikes and chopper kills should count solely as points as opposed to actual kills. The player didn’t do anything; don’t give him credit. And certainly don’t give him more air support when the air support did all the work!

A real hardcore mode. Currently, CoD4’s two modes are misnamed — while one should be called normal mode, the other is better suited as “I suck and need it to be easier to kill people” mode. If they want to keep such a low-health mode, that’s fine, but they should name it honestly. “Sudden death by random camper I didn’t see” mode would also fit. What I’d like to see is a mode that is actually hardcore — by definition it’d be one that is either more difficult than normal mode or more pure (or both). What I’m picturing is something along the lines of no HUD, no perks, no air support, and normal health (maybe slightly adjusted for Stopping Power-esque damage). This would make hardcore mode exemplify the very essence of the core gameplay without all the frills and silliness, and that would kick ass.

Better first/third-person syncing. I don’t know about you guys, but I am severely tired of being killed by people’s foreheads. By that I mean when the enemy can see and aim at me perfectly but all I can see of him is the top third of his head. I can’t even see his gun — it’s shooting into a wall from my perspective! — yet he can kill me just fine. It’s a simple issue, really — in first person you’re “taller” than you are in third person. That is, the player models do not accurately match up to the size and perspective of everyone’s first-person view. Not only is this super annoying but it adds more benefit to camping since my target (his camping forehead) is much smaller than his (my entire body), and given that CoD was never meant to be a camper game, it fucks up the gameplay to a noticeable degree. Could we at least see the dude’s entire head or something? Even though in reality we’d be able to see a good portion of his head, shoulders, gun, and possibly some upper torso. Sheesh. Everyone gives praises to Infinity Ward for their overall abilities but they sure do miss a lot of the “small” things.

Oddly enough, even though “hardcore” mode was always filled with lesser skilled players, it seems such servers have taken the biggest hit in the skill department. Since there are far too many “hardcore” servers and not enough normal ones, I end up playing them a lot even though I’m not enthused by the idea. More often than not, things go crazy and people get angry with me.

Here’s an example of the kind of crap I’ve been pulling off recently.

I got an idea the other day, and even though it was only a few days ago, I don’t remember exactly where it came from. Maybe my aliases like ihateyou, We Are All Dead, and — dare I say — poopknuckle were too “aggressive” and that somehow made it easier for people to bitch, whine, and accuse. I’d been getting accused so much that I decided to try a little experiment.

If I alias as a girl, will people stop accusing me?

Will I cease to be called a “faggot” or “hacker” or “hacker faggot” eighteen times per match? Will the experience, in general, be nicer even though I’m still destroying everyone and pissing them off just as I would with any other alias?

Picking from a random list of suggestions from FuLLBLeeD and modifying it slightly, I decided my alias would be punkrockgrl (and later added another “r” to round it out to punkrockgrrl). After all, emo/punk/scene girls are often hot as fuck for reasons I don’t understand. Surely it’d make things go over more smoothly with all the lonely virgins I’d be beating in an online video game, right?

I don’t have a definitive answer yet, but my presence has definitely been an annoyance to people not on my team.

Results thus far have been mixed. Some people have been more sociable. I’ve had dudes saying “lol” and “son of a…” when I pulled off something impressive/annoying rather than go straight to the accusations or calling luck/spam/lag. I’ve had guys ask me questions whereas normally they wouldn’t. One even asked what kind of music I listened to. I told him rap, of course. Things started out nicely; I thought my experiment was going to be a resounding success in the realm of showing just how pathetic and predictable most gamers are.

But I’d been playing in normal mode. Normal mode tends to be where more normal people reside. You’d never believe it offhand, but in general it’s the bad players who are the fat asses, the losers, the fuglies, the virgins, etc. The good ones are quite often normal-looking, non-virgin dudes with at least some sort of social life. This has been my experience with FPS games at least. It makes it all the sweeter when one of the losers tells a good player to “get a life” because it’s more likely that he already does more away from his computer than the loser. Projection, man. It’s brutal.

Anyway, once I made my way down to “hardcore” mode the shit started to hit the fan. As my kill-death ratios started hitting 5:1, 7:1, and 9:1 — a feat much easier to accomplish in “hardcore” mode — people started getting ruthless. What started out as a slightly more calm and peaceful endeavor ended up as a noob crusade against me.

When I started one round I had eight people from the previous round spectating me. Eight! I know bad players are often insecure about their badness, but god damn! Naturally, spectating didn’t help convince some of them. Like I said in the last post, once a dumbass is convinced you’re cheating, nothing’s going to sway his opinion. He’ll look for any little thing that he can attribute to hacks and will do so with fervor. He’ll force the smallest, most inconsequential thing to be proof of foul play in his mind even if it’s entirely irrelevant or guided by chance.

As for my general findings, I’m not sure the frequency of accusations has moved at all. I’m still getting accused, but there does seem to be a bit of a change. People are either less committed to their allegations — “Are you hacking?” or “Nice prefiring.” — or more scathing and dedicated to their pointless cause — “Stop hacking, you fucking nigger.” I guess the thought of there being a girl on the other end either makes people less or more douche-like than normal depending on how socially inept they are.

Overall, I was quickly labeled a “bitch” and told to go “suck a fat cock.” Sometimes it got more personal as some guy would call me a slut and tell me to suck his cock. It was entertaining to say the least. Whereas with a guy-like alias people tend to stick with generic name calling, they seemed to get a little more creative and serious whilst I was a girl. I guess we can chalk that one up to misogyny.

I mean, if girls don’t like you in RL™, it’s pretty easy to rail on them online and try to get your ego back. Then again, when a girl’s going 9:1 on your ass, I’m not sure recovery is even possible. Most of them just rage quit, and I laugh all the way to the bank where I exchange their testicles for cash money.

I have to wonder, though. What is it with white people and their obsession with the word “cock?” “Dick” is so much nicer, in my opinion. “Cock” has a porn-like ring to it — it sounds forced and fake.

I’ve mentioned this kind of thing before, and it will probably always ring true. The clueless players of the world make up the vast majority, and if they’re convinced you’re cheating, you’re cheating. The conundrum is that they’re simply too bad at the game to ever understand that you’re not cheating. It’s simply beyond their comprehension. In response to their complete lack of talent, the only thing they can do is lash out with false accusations.

Generally, this is fine. Let the noobs vent; if you don’t they’ll probably end up too frustrated and will stop playing the game entirely, and that’s not good for the overall community. The only time whining, accusatory, talentless dorks affect anything at all is in one case…

…when the power to vote is left enabled on the server.

This is stupid, and no server admin should ever, ever let this happen. Sure, it might be useful from time to time to remove asshats, but more often than not it’s going to be used to ill effect. Legit players will be kicked, stupid maps will be voted in when half the players are having fun currently, and you can be quite assured that votes will pop up several times in every ten minute span. It’s going to be abused far more than it will be legitimately useful.

This happened to be the case tonight. So, while I quite obviously don’t hack, I was accused many times over (by the same guy), and that eventually led to my kicking. The funny thing is that the kill cam was disabled, so the idiot who did all the accusing literally had no way of knowing how I was playing because he refused to spectate me. I’d like to think that if it’d been enabled that he’d see the error of his ways, but who am I kidding? A bad player will always accuse a good player regardless of evidence that contradicts his accusation. Ego makes people retarded.

The subconscious thought process is something along these lines: I’m bad but I don’t want to admit to myself that I’m bad. Therefore, this guy who is a lot better than me is obviously cheating. This way I don’t have to take responsibility for my own lack of talent and ambition. Naturally, this is stupid, and if you’ve ever seriously accused anyone of hacking when it wasn’t blatantly obvious just because he was beating you, you are stupid.

Nothing I said in response to his claims made any difference. Never mind that I was barely going 2:1 for all the spam; I was much better than the loser who called me out and his 0.3/1 ratio. When I mentioned that I wasn’t even doing that well, he said I was merely controlling my deaths — that I was letting myself be killed at strategic times so my score wouldn’t look hacker-like.

My only response to that was (and still is), “What the fuck?” Do people actually do this? Doesn’t that completely contradict the point of hacking in the first place? If I were to hack I’d do it to piss everyone off and go 200 – 10, not to barely string together a 2:1 on Killhouse. What the hell would be the point?

Of course, I’m sure my responses to him didn’t help my case. Here’s an example of one of our exchanges prior to about the eighth time he tried to get me kicked.

• “Come on, guys. Kick this hacker fuck.”
• “Dude, I’ve been playing [this game] for a year. You just suck, bro.”
• “I’ve been playing [games] for years.”
• “Badly.”
• “So I think I know a hacker when I see one.”
• “Obviously you don’t. Obviously you’re just a delusional fat loser who lives with his mom.”

Lucky for you guys, I have found this guy on the Internet. It’s not really him but this guy is exactly the kind of idiot I’m talking about. He’s bad at the game, whiny, accusatory, and a self-admitted 30-year-old virgin. Seriously, look at him delude himself. Psychological projection much? These are the types of guys who accuse good players of cheating all the time. It’s mostly because their lives suck and they can’t take the mental stress of also sucking at video games, the only things that haven’t rejected them.

Sigh. Gaming would be so much more enjoyable if noobs would just shut the hell up. Take your beating and go cry to yourself afterward.

It’s now somewhat difficult to find a decent normal-mode server without mods and the player limit set low enough that the game doesn’t devolve into this pointless… spamfest. A spamfest where skill is mostly made null and void and camping/playing a zone is the only thing you can do lest you die by a grenade to the groin for the fourteenth time in the past five minutes. That player limit is roughly 20 — any more and the game ceases to be a battle of talent and turns into Halo.

…Where was I? Oh. “Hardcore” mode. This might just qualify for misnomer of the year. There is, quite literally, nothing hardcore about “hardcore” mode. It’s merely a different way of approaching the same basic game, and while the changes are small — no radar, no HUD, 30 health — the overall effect on the gameplay is quite large.

I’m really bad with being terse, so I’ll summarize things first with a list in attempts to keep those with attention span problems around. Longer-winded explanations follow.

Ways “hardcore” mode makes CoD4 easier.

1. Explosives are overpowered with huge killing radii.
2. Health is so low any gun can kill with one bullet.
3. Many weapons become needlessly obsolete.
4. You can run the ideal perk setup every time without penalty.
5. Aim isn’t required to do well.
6. Camping is much more effective.

1) In normal mode all explosives have both a kill and non-kill radius that varies depending on the type. For instance, the noob tube has the smallest kill radius because it’s the easiest to use by way of its explosions being unavoidable. “Hardcore” mode does away with this non-kill radius balance because all explosives kill within it anyway, so the tube becomes quite overpowered. All explosives now gain a huge kill radius, making grenade spamming that much more effective, especially since there’s no icon to let you know one is nearby.

2) Every single gun in CoD4 has the ability to kill with a single bullet in “hardcore” mode, a feat that is supposed to be reserved for highly specialized weapons like shotguns and sniper rifles. The range for one-bullet kills varies, of course, but some of them will always be a one-bullet kill. I don’t know about you, but rapid-fire instagib isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I bought this game. “Hardcore” mode even makes shot location more useless than it is already — within a gun’s one-bullet kill range, a shot to the foot is equally as deadly as one to the forehead.

3) This is related to the last point. A gun’s power is almost entirely obsolete in “hardcore” mode. Why use a sniper rifle when a Desert Eagle is just as deadly from the same distance? You can completely avoid all difficult-to-use weapons and their annoyingly high recoil and stick with all the easy weapons that are suddenly overpowered — M4, P90, M16A4, etc.

4) In normal mode you’re given a choice — do you run Stopping Power for the brute force or do you try something else? By going with another setup, you willingly make your gun less powerful in the hope that you’ll make it up elsewhere. Same goes for using a silencer — is it worth it to take the range hit and thus make most of you kills take an extra bullet? None of this matters in “hardcore” mode. The notion of “power” is completely irrelevant, so you’re free to use the best perk and weapon setup in every situation. A silenced gun, Bomb Squad, UAV Jammer, and Dead Silence. No one will ever hear you and you’ll never get a face full of claymore. Use the M16A4, G3, or M14 and you’ll also have a silent one-bullet-kill weapon with unlimited range. There is absolutely no penalty to this setup in “hardcore” mode. In normal mode your weapon would be considerably less powerful, but since power is no longer an issue, you get to play the ninja without any repercussions whatsoever.

5) Aim is nearly a foreign concept in many firefights due to the ease of downing an enemy. Inaccurately sweeping your sights over a target while holding the fire button nearly always results in a kill. In effect, “hardcore” mode is no longer about out-playing or out-aiming the other guy. In most circumstances it’s merely a matter of who was more prepared to see an enemy in that instant. If you shoot first, odds are you’re golden.

6) Without a radar to betray your position, and with the ridiculously effective perk setup above, the effectiveness of camping skyrockets. Camping can be tactically useful, but most people overuse it because they can’t do anything else. “Hardcore” mode tells them this is okay because they don’t have to do anything else — just sit there are spray your one-shot kill bullets. No aim or skill required. Just wait for some poor sap to make the grave mistake of moving and he’s all yours.

In the end, it’s obvious to see why “hardcore” mode is so popular. By requiring less talent to do decently and feel useful to the team, the community’s bad players, newbies, and old people naturally gravitate toward it. It is, in fact, the only way they can hope to keep up. The end result is that “hardcore” mode is generally paced a lot slower because most everyone is either camping to pick people off or moving cautiously worried about the fact that they die with a single bullet.

This is fine in theory, but in the end it’s nothing more than an annoyance to people like me who regularly lay waste to public servers but have no desire whatsoever to do the clan/competitive thing. Whenever I can’t find a decent normal-mode pub, I’m forced to hop into some “hardcore” ultra-ninja bullshit mode and go 5:1. I can only hope that Infinity Ward has half a clue about gameplay balance for the next CoD and can create a hardcore mode that is actually hardcore, but I’m definitely not holding my breath.

After all, with today’s gamers, a game that requires individual talent is a dead game.