Since when is camping illegitimate?

[OmarFW]

A lot of people tell me they think camping is cheap in any FPS. I can’t help but think this is simply because they are killed by campers a lot and because they game on a console.

I see nothing wrong with it. There is nothing about constant running and gunning that gives you a significant advantage in a game like CoD. Whether it’s defending a particular room or just waiting for someone to come around the corner, camping is handy near constantly.

Like with many other things, I blame consoles and CoD for this recent anti-camping trend. It’s another virus that has infected the FPS genre born from the CoD franchise. On consoles it is harder to aim and shoot when you’re on the move; much harder than with a mouse and keyboard. In fact many PC FPS are so fast paced that it is more beneficial to be on the move constantly for aiming than it is to be dormant.

When camping in a console FPS like CoD you actually do gain a significant advantage since you gain the element of surprise and more precise targeting since you don’t have to worry about location and movement. Therein, camping is a tactical style of gameplay since you are adapting to the game you are playing. The reason this conflicts with games like CoD on consoles is because the typical run & gun style that people typically utilize is a non-tactical style of gameplay. It is chaotic and only requires reflexes and accuracy.

The problem is that someone employing tactics will always beat someone who is not. People only dislike camping because it works. It only works so well in CoD though because CoD is geared around strictly run & gun gameplay rather than tactical gameplay. There are no anti-camping deterrents in the designs of the maps and the gameplay itself as they were designed without camping in mind. Therefore campers can take full advantage of that and dominate.

Aka, Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops are horribly designed games and if you are someone who plays them and dislikes campers then you can only blame the developers and not the campers themselves since they are actually smarter than you with how they play. Say what you want about camping but some people don’t care about childish things like disregarding certain tactics because they are seen as noobish. If they get more kills than you in the end without hacking or glitching then you are clearly using an inferior tactic and should probably mature a bit before you consider yourself a good CoD player. Good FPS players learn to adapt to the game they’re playing. While you’re at it you should also move on to a game that isn’t unbalanced and doesn’t give campers a massive advantage.

In a more balanced game such as Battlefield, campers do not have as much of an advantage. Sure, there are ‘hot spots’ in Battlefield maps that are ideal for camping but the element of surprise does not guarantee you a kill and there are plenty of anti-camping methods you can employ. This keeps someone from staying in one spot for too long. Someone may have a much more powerful weapon than you and overpower you despite getting the jump on them. This is not the case in CoD as the weapons are essentially all copy pasted with very little difference statistically between each one.

It is also much more likely in Battlefield that if you stay in one spot you may go quite a long time without seeing anybody since the maps are much larger. Only the most dedicated of snipers can wait that patiently and frankly, snipers should be camping in the first place since they are usually ill-equipped for run & gun combat. So while everyone is off completing objectives and getting kills, you are waiting around in an empty area not knowing if any enemies will even show up any time soon. This is not the case in CoD as the maps are tiny and there are guaranteed enemies at many points of the map at seemingly all times.

In the end the main lesson you need to learn is that there is no style of gameplay that is superior than another to the point where you can use it 100% of the time and expect to win all the time. Run & gun only works in CoD if everyone else is doing it as well. Balanced games require balanced usage of both camping and movement while games like CoD reward camping and other games like Unreal Tournament that make it almost impossible to camp for very long.

Aka I do not endorse camping anymore than I do R&G but I obviously do not consider it a noob tactic either. It is only noobish to camp 100% of the time, but it is equally noobish to do the opposite 100% of the time.

If you want to be a good FPS player, you have to adapt. When you let the opinions from other players about your tactics influence how you play, you lose. If you can’t deal with it then stop playing a crappy game filled with idiots who shun a perfectly legitimate gameplay tactic simply because they can’t stand losing to it and are unwilling to adapt.

-Jesse Leigh aka OmarFW via Gamer MC

[Zach]

I have no problem with defending a room or something, but if the player stays there for a significant amount of time it is a little annoying.

[pspman]

True I play CoD and BFP4F, and Campers get it hard from me ;)

[Himbo]

If they're camping in the same spot, it sounds extremely easy to prefire them and kill them... I don't see the issue.