You’re on my friends list. It never really twigged that you are a doper 
Edit: On checking it appears you are only on there because you’re in the SDMB group, which is on my friends list.
I never really tried to play the game with any of the SDMB people because I assumed the ping would be too bad. But there seem to be a lot of people from USA and Canada in the games I join/am part of.
If you are really serious about anti-air, run Sleight of Hand/Cold Blooded/Stinger with C4 as your equipment. With Sleight of Hand + a no respawn timer you can get an AC-130 down by yourself about 1/3 of the way into its time - you Stinger, reload, Stinger, C4 yourself, Stinger 
Your deaths look bad but doesn’t actually count against you.
You can also scavenger stinger.
3 Stingers will take out an AC-130?
I’ve fired 2 at it and seen the flares both times. Never tried a third shot tho…Will try it again.
Will a Javelin work also? I love killing groups of people with a Javelin.
I take out ac-130s with two stingers all the time. Slight of hand is all you really need.
Well, either you’re mistaken, or you’re incredibly lucky (or I’m misreading you). The AC-130 has two flares, so under normal circumstances, two stingers alone will not take them down. What is probably happening in your case is that some other team member gets a shot off at it between your two shots.
You might just be getting incredibly lucky however: there are documented cases of someone firing a stinger at a Pave low, being deflected by the flares, and going on to hit another killstreak. (There are also documented cases of a stinger being deflected by a flare, and then circling around and killing someone on the map by direct impact. cite)
EDIT: Ike Witt: Any three lock-on missiles will work to take down an AC-130.
No, with slight of hand it definitely shoots down an ac130 with a stinger – sometimes.
Really? I’ve never seen it, but I suppose I’ll have to concede it’s probably true if multiple sources confirm. Very interesting.
IN OTHER NEWS:
What do the people in this thread use for their callsigns? I know that nobody will admit to paying any attention to his own callsign, since they’re such petty little diversions. But I also know that 99% of players are secretly obsessed with them, and are constantly working on challenges to get a particular one.
Right now, my title is “Neutral” / Swiss flag, and my emblem is the gold WA2000 medal. But within a week or two, I’ll be able to change it to the gold WA2000 skull title, and something else for the emblem. I’m kind of partial to the Grim Reaper tiger for the emblem, but it’s a little overused, I think. For a while, I had the STD title and the tactical insertion emblem. Get it? Har har.
Default. I don’t need a sticker collection.
Maybe you don’t need one, but you want one. You see, even the default callsign is a statement of vanity: “I am too good at this game to worry about your piddling little ‘callsigns,’ so I shan’t change mine like the common masses.”
I know a guy who I actually believe doesn’t care about callsigns. His callsign is the default title and the second unlocked emblem. He’d messed with it for a minute when it first unlocked, but hadn’t gone back.
Yes, it’s a hipster caring so much that you don’t care vibe that I’m going for.
I didn’t even play the campaign mode. Straight to multiplayer.
My call sign is commander and 5-Star general, the rest of them are meh.
Just for the sake of sharing…
My current play style is drastically different from what has been my play style for the majority of my time owning the game ( the style referred to as ‘run and gun’)
I must confess that it’s a bit of a ‘cheap’ style, and probably annoys a lot of people (but hey, it’s about time I became a giver after so long as a receiver )
It is primarily designed to achieve a good KD per game. Anyone who says KD is not important has (forgive me for being a wee bit presumptuous here) either a KD higher than 1 and thus their claim that it isn’t important is a manifestation of false humility (like when a good looking person claims that looks aren’t important) or their KD is so low that they pretend it isn’t important in order to save face.
(Or maybe you’re one of those rare people who genuinely don’t give a toss about it)
But I do, for a couple of reasons -
It’s a statistic. One of the points of playing computer games is to achieve things. And I think acheiving a certain KD ratio is a worthwhile aim.
My KD is currently very very close to 1. Therefore it is tantalizingly close to a ‘significant’ point - the point where I’ve killed more people than have killed me.
Giving rough figures - with approximately 15000 kills I am just 173 kills away from a KD of 1.
Once I get comfortably above 1, (say 200 more kills than deaths) or even just above 1, I may very well stop caring about it (unless it drops back below 1)
Anyway, back to the point: My current play style is defensive (to preserve a low death rate).
At the beginning of a game I pick a class with One Man Army and an assault rifle (ACR with silencer). When I spawn I head for the nearest bit of known good cover for the particular map I’m on. I set a claymore, change using OMA to gain access to another claymore, set it at another entry point, then either pick a spot within that defensive zone to aim at people going by with the assault rifle, or change with OMA again to a class that has an LMG (and also OMA) to use the better range of the LMG. I also have a spare claymore if one of them should be tripped.
If I hear one of them trip I anticipate a run-and-gun, run-and-knife, or cold blooded (delay claymores) to run at me by pointing in the direction I expect them to be coming from (if they think to avoid that, they’ll likely trip the other claymore and I will just point there instead, having replaced the first claymore.
I’m also using danger close to increase the effectiveness of the claymores. So far this tactic is working. In the space of a week or less I’ve reduced the gap from about 500 to 273.
Originally I intended to use these OMA classes to set the two claymores and then go off and be a run-and-gunner, but almost by accident I have found myself settling for staying with the OMA classes and the comfort of my claymore-protected zone. It’s less fun but more satisfying to have a high KD at the end of the game (nearly always the highest in the game)
I know this is probably a cheap way to play, but I’m not hacking. I’m not OMA Noob tubing.
I use this tactic in both TDM and FFA (it’s more successful in TDM)
Where it falls down is when someone has sit-rep. In which case I simply adopt my older play style. (watching the killcam will tell me when there’s a sit-rep player, or simply reading the more obvious signs) But sometimes even they will fall foul of my second claymore.
Holy crap. You’re one of *those *people.
Just for a bit.
It’s very much a free for all-oriented playstyle, for sure.
I don’t know about that. It seems to enable me to help my team quite a lot in TDM. The good KD helps their overal score (remembering that each time I die is a point for the other team) and I can provide protection for my teammates. (either by them sharing the protection area of the claymores, or by watching out for enemies who are pursuing my teammates.
In one game I was able to protect a care package such that only my teammates were ‘allowed’ to get near it.
in TDM I’m less inclined to hunker down. In FFA everyone else is the enemy so I feel a greater need for the protection.
Eh. In the cirlce of folks I played with, there was one that we played with that did something similar. He’d just Scavenge/Danger Close claymores and “watch our backs”, but he did it because his internet connection sucked balls, he liked to (at least think he was) getting a rise out of folks, but if there was a challenge game or something, we wouldn’t ask him to come along (and, also, to be fair, he’s not a very competitive type).
If you really want to raise your KD, you need to stop camping and go prey on the other team’s weak players.
That’s kind of what I did when a ran-and-gunned, but it was more of a gamble where KD was concerned. I’d often get owned badly by akimbo g18s and hackers. Half the matches I played would have a good KD (‘good’ not ‘great’) and I could even win [i.e. be the top player in] a handful of them, but the other half would be terrible and frustrating.
At least my current play style seems on the surface, to keep me safe from those.