Screw this game! This Sucks! I keep getting spawn killed! If you have a current gen or last gen console, and a head set, you've heard these statements verbatim. You've also probably heard them in any of the numerous Call of Duty games on the market and will hear them in the one's to come. Just like you, I sucked. Hard. When I bought Modern Warfare, I couldn't understand how death could happen in games so fast. How could my digital gun and grenades fail to work time and time again? I tried different things. Maybe staying in one place (Camping for the uninitiated) and picking people off would be the best stratagem:
Nah....too boring for me, and still dying. Maybe running around like a maniac and just trying to shoot faster than my enemy would work......Nah I get team killed, shot in the back, "Random Grenaded", or "noob-tubed". Everything was a wash, everything was ineffective. I skipped out on World at War, because I had no interest in old-timey weapons. But there was hope when I saw MW2. Boy, if I thought I was getting my ass kicked in part 1, I continued to stay in my penetrated, butt-hurt state.
It was worst in every way you could think of. The weapons were impossibly unbalanced. For Instance,"The Models", an akimbo pair of twin sawed off shotguns was the stuff nightmares were made of. Oh and then the noob-tubes and grenades! Boy did they get markedly worst! I needed answers. I needed them fast. Enter YouTube, the place for video everything! I tried hard to find MW2 vids, anything that would give me a bead on how to be better. I found what I was looking for in a YouTuber named BoB Godz. Now a quick YouTube search will show that most of his videos are gone, but watching his videos made one thing abundantly clear: This guy kicked ass. Major ass. With everything. It wasn't his strategy that stood out, but it was a question one fan asked him: Bob, how do you get better at Call of Duty? It was his answer that changed the way I looked at things and would look at 1st person shooters forever. Bob's answer and I am paraphrasing went something like this: "You won't get better until you start to understand how the average COD player thinks. Step into their shoes. What positions on the map do they occupy? Where does everyone want to go? How would they respond in different situations?" Of course these seem like obvious things to anyone from the outside, but nothing became more apparent to me than the fact that I had been going about this all wrong. This was a changing point, and my "Light Bulb Moment".
I started to apply this ideology to my game play. Being cerebral about Call of Duty actually made the game fun to me. It was like a puzzle I needed to figure out. It certainly helped that I got to do this in the presence of some amazing friends, but I did a lot of field testing on my own. For starters, I learned that human nature plays a big part in the way people played COD. Most players want to kill everything. Fast. So I started running away from the action in the beginning and picking other angles for engagement on the maps. I also learned that I could use camping and people's natural inclination to come back to the scene of the crime to rack up numerous kills by playing the "Shell Game": Most rooms you engage in have 4 corners. Kill them in one corner and move to another corner of the room. 9 times out of 10, the average player will come back into the room and immediately look in the corner you killed them in. Shoot them in the back and move to another corner, or stay in that corner and wash, rinse, repeat. This could net you a few easy kills, and also gets you closer to streaks that would help you kill more folks.
But wait! There's more! Like I said earlier, camping isn't for me so this works, but I still felt like doing more. Another stratagem that shaped my game play which doesn't seem like much but does wonders is this: The longer you stay alive, the more kills you will likely get. I say that to say this, sometimes it pays to disengage and run away. What I would do and what most players will do, is even if they enter a battle they can't win, they would still mindlessly try to out shoot other players. More times than not you are going to die. I found that if I knew I couldn't win a battle, better for me to run away and heal and approach from a different angle, than run straight to my death. And lastly, assists and getting a good synergy with a teammate, or your team in general, meant living a lot longer and getting great streaks. I know the average gamer rages about people stealing their kills, but if you really pay attention and put your ego aside, you will realize that teamwork makes the dream work:
By getting assists and running with teammates, you will: a)eventually get kills and more than likely go positive (More kills than deaths), b) Be considered an awesome person to play with c) Jump out to gigantic leads, which in turn allowed me to experiment and get better with a plethora of weapons. On that note, I learned that reloading automatically after every engagement was not wise, and once stopped, lead to some of the most glorious double and triple plus kills I have ever attained. With the help of Bob Godz, and these simple ideas, I ended my MW2 career with a KDR (Kill/Death Ratio) of 1.67, which considering I started at 0.6, and have a rather aggressive play style, is pretty good. I also maintain a 1+ KDR in every subsequent COD, as well as games like Destiny. So there you have it folks, the secret to 1st person shooters, and Call of Duty specifically, is to think like the average COD player....... then do the opposite. You will be a better player for it. And I would like to thank BoB Godz. Without you, there is no me.
Follow these tips and ascribe to this way of thinking, and pretty soon, you'll be like this guy:
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