04 December 2009

Call of Duty and Gaming News, 4 December 2009


Don't worry. You'll grow into it...

   I've been playing with some guys younger than me. They're college age, mostly. And it's a mixed bag. A lot of them are good players. And they're more mature than the average Timmy, for sure. But they're impetuous sometimes. With a 1000 point lead, they sometimes decide to go out and finish off the enemy. (One guy, otherwise OK, said he'd rather do personally well in a game than win. I like to win, and doing well, even just breaking even, takes a distant second in priority.) Hmmmm. In a game, anything can happen. If you've got a lead that's decent, lock down your area and wait it out. The enemy is always 3-4 kills away from a care package that can contain anything but a Nuke. A lot of those items can really FUBAR your day. Sure, most of the Care Packages are low level items, but the ironic Hand of Fate might toss the enemy something like the Chopper Gunner.
   Part of the problem is that, when we play as a group, there's rarely a designated leader who can give direction to the chaos. It's pretty minimal compared to a pub match, which is actually just Team Free-for-All™, instead of Team Deathmatch. But sometimes a decision has to be made whether to regroup or try to go on the offensive and retake the advantaged position.
   My philosophy is that almost any area short of an open field can be made defensible if you have a couple of players who will communicate and co-operate to do it. On one match on Invasion, one pub player and I held a long street approach for half the game. He was on my left hugging a wall and I was right-middleish crouched down behind the cover of two burned out cars. We racked up a lot of kills at long distance while the enemy probed and rushed. By tipping each other off on enemies out of each others' line of sight, we survived a lot longer than a solitary would have.
   I was a peacetime soldier, and I was never a Ranger, but I believed, heart and soul, in Robert Rogers' standing orders. The orders were common sense admonitions to preparedness, caution, cooperation, and stealth. That's pretty much the exact opposite of the way most pub players behave. And a lot of them get royally indignant when you don't play the game the "right" way, such as by camping. Some über-players carry their whole team by twitch-shooting their way through a map with a wake of virtual corpses in their wake get pretty snooty. Such players are rarely in the "if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all" school, and they're even more rarely gracious winners. Give me a team full of determined campers, tho, and über-shooter turns campo-phobic with a vengeance.

   Games let us do a lot of things which we can't or wouldn't do in real life. I guess it's OK if people want to Rambo it up and be dumbasses. It's not polite to expect others to be dumbasses along with them.

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