One Man Army Whoring...

 

    In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, like every other online game, everyone has their axe to grind. Some folks, as noted in yesterday's blog and anonymous comment and this Terminal Gamer op-ed, have the infamous One Man Army perk on their mind. As the Terminal Gamer article puts it: "One of the higher level perks is ‘One Man Army’. Normally players need to die and respawn as a new class. This perk allows players to change classes while still alive. A side effect of the class change is an ammo refill. By changing back-and-forth players can now receive infinite grenade launcher ammo. When combined with the perk ‘Danger Close’, which increases the radius and damage dealt by explosives, abusers of ‘One Man Army’ dominate matches." I can only vouch for my experience in hardcore TDM, since my usual crew and I don't play other modes. I really haven't seen any of these attachments or perks dominate any match I've been in. In hardcore TDM, a single player using OMA, Danger Close, etc. will not usually "dominate" the match. He can't, since he can't just indiscriminately spam grenades all over the place; if he does that, he'll spend a lot of time in punishment respawn limbo for killing team-mates. As I've blogged before, what causes a team to dominate is teamwork thru communication and co-operation. Anyone's use of a particular attachment, perk, or strategy dominates the other team, then it's not really a team at all. It's a group playing Team Free-for-All™ instead of whatever play mode they're in. End of line.
    For the record, I pre-ordered the Xbox 360 flavor or Battlefield: Bad Company yesterday. It's a win/win, since the single player looks like a lot of fun. If I like the multiplayer, that will be there, too. The jury is still out on that. I ran into my first griefer on my third game. A guy on my team using the Recon (sniper) class followed me everywhere I went on the map shooting at me and knifing me. There's no friendly fire on the current demo's Rush mode, so it was an annoyance only. (I gave him the venerable Avoidance Achievement™ I award outstanding douchebags on Xbox Live.) Years ago on a CoD4 non-hardcore game on Backlot, I had a similar experience with a player with the gamertag bomberman57, who went everywhere knifing me. (To this day, all I have to do to crack up Matt64 and Reibo is to mimic the "Swish-swish" sound of the melee knife.) I wonder if this was the same douchebag now playing BC2. Anyway, the way I took care of bomberman57 was to lead him to the enemy and fire off my weapon so they could find and kill him.

On to the links:

• Iniquity Infinity Ward: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 PS3 Euro patch rollout.
• Late-to-the-party review: TorrentBomb News.
• This 17 year-old MW2 player wants to give you some tips to excel in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer
• Macleans.ca: Canada wants an Olympic event for Call of Duty. Whisky, Tango, Foxtrot, over?
• YouTube humor: Real-life Glue Gun Sleight of hand glitch

    More Gaming Links:

• From Jockyitch at BASHandSlash: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 PC beta impressions. Gaming Target: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 first impressions. VideoGamer: Bad Company 2 Interview with EA DICE's senior producer, Patrick Bach. Worthplaying: Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Preview. GameTrailers: BC2 PC Beta mission fail & mission win.
• GameTrailers: Aliens vs. Predator Ultimate Experience Interview with Project Lead Tim Jones.
• GameTrailers: MAG video page.
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• LA Times: Army of Two: The 40th Day review.
• Examiner.com: Xbox Live boasts 23 million registered users

• . (And I'm 2 of them.) It's a good question how many people have multiple registered accounts. A lot of the people I play with have at least 2 which they use for different games. A lot of the griefing timmy douchebags seem to have multiple accounts.

• JFK in reverse: We're not going back to the Moon. Constellation program ditched.
• Slashdot: RIAA confusion in the Jammie Thomas and Tenenbaum cases?
• Mashable via majornelson tweet: Best iPad Video (with Pee-wee Herman)

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