lol, wow. I still fail to see how that strategy is fun for people. I'd rather go 5-30 than stare at my screen for 10 minutes hoping someone walks into my sights.
Exactly. I brought it up on the IW forums a week or two ago and got flamed to hell and back, with idiots saying I was just making excuses for "sucking". I have a screaming high ratio right now - higher than I ever had in COD4 - so I'm not making excuses. I know the maps well, I have great classes set up that work well for me, etc. The problem is simply the fucking camping; there's no two ways about it. People are camping their shit off, and if you've not resigned yourself to either a) camping too, or b) moving at a snail's pace throughout the map, you're going to get your head blown off from someone hiding in one of the infinite camping spots on any given map.
What was so nice about COD4 is you could play it in one of 3 (general) ways: camp/snipe, pseudo-camp (camp until you get a kill, then move), or be aggressive. There is absolutely no room for aggression in MW2; it is punished and punished severely. Your choices are to either camp or, if you prefer to be mobile, move 1 inch/minute. On most maps, there is just so much foliage, so many buildings/nooks/crannies/etc, that no matter how careful you are, you can't possibly reduce the randomness to enough of a degree to justify NOT camping.
My frustration isn't with camping itself... blah blah blah, I know it's a valid strategy blah blah blah. I know the maps, too, thank you very much. My beef is that it's just. not. fun. I can beat the campers at their own game; I can win and I can do well. My frustration isn't performance-related: it's that the game has been largely reduced to camping, since camping is so much more rewarding (from a success standpoint, not a fun standpoint) that to do anything else is, frankly, silly.
This was actually a fear of mine before I got my hands on MW2. The one and only thing that WaW did better than COD4 were the truer-to-life maps and pretty eye candy. Not to be outdone, Infinity Ward outdid them at the sacrifice of good gameplay. Spare me the bullshit about how "in real life people camp all the time bleh blah bleh blah". If I wanted real life warfare, I'd join the fucking army and get paid for it.
The maps are beautiful, I'm certainly impressed by what their engine is capable of on an aging Xbox 360 platform with limited memory, but MW2 is more work than fun. COD4 had - and still has - a crack-like quality to it. I need my COD4 "fix" on a weekly basis, and have needed said fix since I participated in the public beta in August '07. Frankly, I'm already tired of MW2. Getting shot by some chump hiding in the grass while you're trying to examine 7 windows across 3 vertical levels to assess your cover is bloody stupid.
Some notes about a few maps:
Invasion would be great were it not for the side with the US base, but that position is so dominating that people are slowly realizing that's really the only place on the map worth contention.
Highrise is good; not really any complaints here.
Rust and Scrapyard were obviously designed with the single purpose of dethroning Countdown as the worst map ever made in any game on any platform for any genre, and they might have succeeded.
Rundown just plays weird, like someone else already mentioned. I think it has potential, though.
Karachi is probably my favorite, but it's ruined by 92934 camping spots all concentrated along Main St, the Shakar Market/Chicken Market, and the Clock Tower.
Quarry is runner up to Rust and Scrapyard, and Underpass is runner up to Quarry.
Sub-base breeds quite a bit of camping, but good placement of choke points saves it. The same is true for Derailed.
Skidrow is basically Bloc on steroids. I liked Bloc; a lot of people camped, but it was possibly to flank without getting shot by some other camper who happened to be warming the right piece of ground at the right time.
There is simply nothing that can compete with Crossfire, Backlot, Strike, and especially Crash. I've read where some people have said "thankfully IW abandoned the 3-4 chokepoint design approach", as if that was a bad thing. It made CQB actually possible. Gameplay was organized chaos, and it obviously worked.
We have none of that in MW2.
