I’m willing to admit I don’t have the fastest reflexes. I’m willing to admit I don’t spend every waking hour playing Modern Warfare 2 to discover every possible weapon/hidden nest combo. I’m willing to admit I don’t play and communicate with a gang of friends that also do these things.
Still.
I’ve gotten to 50th level and when I get shot I watch the kill cam to see where I went wrong. Often where I went wrong is coming around a corner when the guy was ready or someone seeing me through near impossible circumstances.
So how many do you think use aimbots and the like?
Modern Warfare 2 was released across two consoles and PC. Because the PC modders were able to get into the game, using a soft mod to pretty much export that to the 360 was relatively easy. That’s not an inevitability, just the nature of Infinity Ward being horrible developers. It’s the JTAG mod that causes all sorts of problems (the JTAg mod, which is about 5 years old and practically useless, but not if you’re Infinity Ward.) Compare this to Bungie, who learned a great deal with Halo 2. Halo 2’s lifespan on the 280/360 also coincided with the release of it on PC. Halo 2 got modded and was bad only on maps that were loaded on the hard drive and only if you forced having the host. Bungie learned. Halo 3 still isn’t on PC.
Are you playing Modern Warfare 2 on the consoles?
Also, to actually answer your question, it’s the nature of the medium through which you’re playing. Playing online will ostensibly create ping and/or lag. What you’re seeing is that disconnect; the one between where you actually are to the host and where you think you are.
I play MW2 on an Xbox 360. And it runs smooth, I just get the feeling they’re seeing me before and better than I can see them. I’ve seen hacks on YouTube where you can see guys through walls and such and I was just wondering how common that is.
Presuming that they’re not cheating, they’ve probably got good headphones and are listening to your footsteps. I’m not big on MW2 - but this was absolutely vital for CS and CS:S. Learning to listen was the transition from average player to expert. They’ve probably cut down all the extraneous sound effects - dialogue, music, etc - in order to hear people approaching as well as they can.
Some players must be cheating on 360. For starters, there’s a certain emblem (the rotating skull coin) which apparently can’t be gotten through legitimate play. It’s amazing how many players have it. Many times, too, I’ve watched a kill cam where the opposing player locks on to the target immediately when they come into view, even if it’s almost on the other side of the map. If it’s not aimbotting, I’d love to know what it is.
On the other hand, some of the “impossible kills” must be down to luck. Once I had a winning kill because I saw the flash of a gun from just inside a window. I was at a very tight angle to the window but I shot at it anyway, and managed to hit the shooter. When the winning killcam came up the other players were shouting “fucking cheater, aimbot”, but it was really just dumb luck, and the game physics, that made that kill possible.
Sometimes those impossible shots are pure luck. I play on PS3 which is apparently much harder to mod, and I remember one time in GTA IV that I got an absolutely impossible kill - I was driving down a road, got riddled with bullets by someone behind me, hit a car, spun out, and fired wildly as I was spinning out - and killed the guy in the car as he passed me.
I must have got a headshot (or two) on him while spinning madly - mind you I’m pretty good at that game, level 10 (which is max) but I’m not THAT good. It happens. I think most of those kinds of things are related to lag rather than cheating but I’m sure some cheating does occur.
I play on the PS3 (level 70, first prestige – somewhat obsessed, not apologetic). I watch my killcams almost religiously, and I can’t remember ever seeing one (in 10k+ deaths) where it looked like cheating.
The leaderboards on the Playstation Network, on the other hand, are hacked all to hell. But nobody really cares about the leaderboards–except to check your friends’ K:D ratios–so it doesn’t bother me that much.
On the PC I would guess that roughly 15-20% of games has at least one player with a hack. I am fairly sure that many players have the hacks and don’t always use them.
Just last night I was playing and a player went 76-4. Next best player was 41-30.
For sure lag can make it seem that some players are hacking, but not always. Some people are smart with their hacks. The really noticeable ones are those with aimbots and wall hacks. When you see one player get more than 5 headshots in a row, they are likely hacking. Hell, I have seen one guy spam the URL for site that sells hacks.
The game is hacked. The host of that room has all the soft mods going. Yes, you can jump high, but he can’t kill a damned thing, is lagging like crazy, and sees the extent of what they’re doing in the killcam. Notice, after the first and second death, the enemy has the red boxes around the opponents at all time and the ACR is shooting out some explosive rounds. The chopper gunner is firing a lot faster and is locking onto targets with autoaim.
I’m willing to put up with scores like that, because I used to have a buddy in college who could pull easily 130-5 scores in Team Fortress Classic–and I knew he wasn’t cheating because he could do it on my computer, too.
(Aside from that one 95-0 game I had in the most lopsided 3v3 in history, I was more of a 60-30 player).
As far as I can tell from MW (I have never played MW2), seeing cheaters is the same as always: their movement patterns are just robotic/unnatural. I didn’t see too much issue with MW cheating, to be frank. (certainly less than 5% on the well-adminned Hardcore servers I played on)
Also, LOUNE, the viewpoint you report makes me want to punch babies. I am STILL waiting for Halo 3 on PC because I perpetually can’t justify spending $300 on an XBox when I could spend it on not-an-XBox.
You *might *see Halo 3 after Reach fizzles off on the Xbox. I’m all for keeping it off the PC. It makes life a lot easier. There were zero glitches and problems with Halo 3.
Like others have mentioned it may just be luck or tactics…although I admit to thinking more than once after being killed, “he has to be cheating!!”
Some may frown on such tactics, but sometimes I fire shots where I know people like to hide or I often see people emerge, like down a long hallway or alleyway. Or if there’s an elevated balcony or room that people like to snipe from, i like to toss a grenade up there even if I don’t know if anyone is there. Sometimes those shots get lucky.
This is a little off topic, but I have noticed that it is perfectly acceptable to ‘camp’ nowadays. Back in my college years with doom, quake, and quake II… camping was a tactic that was majorly frowned upon. Man, those were the days!
Camping is still lame. The problem is that the maps are made so people can camp and the weapons in Call of Duty are so lethal, it behooves you to sit behind a crate with a shotgun.
And Modern warfare 2 is the worst offender of them all. No thought at all to any balance, just everything turned up to 11. I sold that game back in January when the glitches were still rampant. Just a bad job the whole way through.
This is called “playing smart”–you had to make the decision, after all, that the expenditure of a grenade was worth the chance you’d hit someone.
See, I feel about camping like you do about grenading likely hidey-holes or preemptive shots in likely spots–it’s a calculated risk with good reward potential.
Personally, I feel like MW and other such games have essentially robbed camping of any significant utility–there’s generally no more than one or two locations on any given modern FPS map where I feel like a sniper rifle has any utility (that is, where I have a useful 100m+ line of sight and good concealment)–and then I either need someone to watch my ass or I need to use a slot on Claymores or something, and even then I’m STILL vulnerable to your tactic of throwing a grenade in that window just in case.
As for the case of camping behind a box with the shotgun, well–good luck having THAT work more than once before someone grenades you out, and if you’re not back there for 45+ seconds, I don’t think you’re really camping so much as “pausing behind cover”.