The Omnivangelist

If you’re like me, then you’ve been playing a playing Modern Warfare 2. And if you’re like me, you’ve been trying to up your game through all means necessary, including reading online blogs, guides and watching youtube. No doubt there’s some help to be found there. In fact, I’ll post a few links to the best stuff I’ve found.

1. This is the link to the weapons damage charts and a downloadable pack for all maps, etc. A must have staple to get anyone started: http://denkirson.xanga.com/715966769/modern-warfare-2/

2. The gamefaqs guides page. Read the multiplayer ones, and the sniper one, among others.

3. A good general reference Wiki Page.

4. My fave youtube player’s channel, Mr 360 Beast.

Ok. The above should definitely help you if you haven’t caught onto to some of that material yet. For the rest of the post, I want to condense lots of stuff I’ve discovered and summarize it, and also post some stuff I’ve learned that I haven’t seen anywhere online.

Weapons and Perks. You’ll see lots of advice on these topics, and lots of heated debate. I see lots of big attitude on the boards about this stuff and it’s lame. Everybody callin’ everybody a noob and very few people actually helping contribute to other people’s game. So I’ve filtered hours worth of reading and searching down to the following.

Assault rifles: It’s basically come down TAR and SCAR for the best assault rifles, based on damage rate per second, ease of using iron sights, range, recoil, etc. Both of these guns have pretty ideal iron sights, compared to others. The TAR has more ammo capacity, which is a weakness with the SCAR. As for attachments. If you can master a weapon with iron sights, do it, and use your attachment for a grenade launcher, heartbeat sensor, or what not. If you don’t care or need for attachments, then feel free to put the holographic or red dot sensor on your weapon. I’m a killcam watcher, and I always look at the setups of the pros who ace me. I’ve seen many pros using the SCAR/TAR with holo sites or red dot. So even though many pros say iron sight is best since it leaves your slot open for something else like FMJ, many top runners are using holographic sights. Personally, I’d always prefer to have such a sight on my weapon over an iron sight, if I could. It’s definitely easier to target with.

SubMachine Guns: The UMP45 owns the game and is considered overpowered (OP) by many. So use it, and always silence it. The MW2 forums link has some stuff on this.

The MP5K is considered the next best, since many consider the UMP45 an assault rifle. The MP5K has massive CQC damage, and can be used for run and gun. I don’t use it much however.

Shotguns: Use the SPAS-12 or the M1014. Most pros prefer the SPAS with FMJ as it has a bit more range. Don’t ADS (aim) with the shotgun - always hip fire. Here’s why. If you need two shots to drop a foe more often than not, then the 1014 is likely preferred.

Sniper Rifles: The Barrett .50cal is the only way to go. It out classes the others in most every way, rate of fire, clip size, damage, range, scope wander. The intervention is loved by pros since it’s supposedly cooler - but I was never much of one for such fluff. Let the pros do what the pros want to do. Whatever. For regular games, go with FMJ and Stopping power. For hardcore, you can silence it, and/or drop the stopping power for cold blooded or hardline. The silenced WA2000 becomes another possibility for hardcore, a fun gun, although the scope obscures the right side of the screen when you’re not running.

Some optimized setups on all the above guns can be found here. You’ll find that much of the advice online will suggest what to use for your setup, but really doesn’t tell you what game they are really optimizing for. If the recommendation is to use stopping power, then the game must not be  hardcore. Hardcore can be a lot of fun since it doesn’t take have a clip to kill each enemy. Also, since the heads up display, maps and other things are off-screen, you learn to rely on your senses more when playing hardcore games - which helps you build your other senses up and kick your dependency on radar.

Secondary Machine Pistols: M93 Rafficas or G18’s, both in akimbo are loved by pros since they churn out the most damage. Handguns take some time to get good with, so at first you might suck. Trial by fire is the only way here.

Equipment: If you use riot shields, stun grenades are very helpful, toss them to slow your enemys then go in for the kill. But riot shield is really only best used in team games. When you use stun grenades in a room, always run in the room passed your enemies forcing them to turn. You only get an advantage if the enemies have to turn to shoot you. Semtex is considered best all purpose, especially to stick to riot shielders.

Flash grenades are powerful. Listen for the scream of the enemy to know if you scored a hit with your flash. Throw them in rooms that you suspect campers in often. I see many pros using their grenades/flash unsparingly for this purpose. It’s a way to test what’s up. Also use them for campers using claymores. Throw the stun/flash, listen for the scream and book in for the kill before the claymore isn’t dazzled anymore.

Lots of places will tell you that Claymores are used less now, but I found the claymores score me more kills than I can ignore. Claymores easily upped my K/D ratio once I reached the level to gain access to them.  If I’m camping for a moment, I place a claymore at a strategic location behind me. Even if I don’t get a kill, I get a click to give me the warning someone’s behind me. I’ve been knifed in that back. enough times to care. Many times, even if someone does knife me, they die along with me, 1-1. Also, make sure to let the killcam roll all the way since your claymore doesn’t disappear until you actually respawn. You can pick up many post death kills by watching killcams while letting your claymore have a chat with your killer.

If I score a couple kills (2-4) in a location, it’s time to move on. I leave a claymore for the pissed off player who will be scoping for me. And don’t forget this golden rule: Players you killed from a location that have a good idea where you were WILL come for you. It’s as certain as can be. It’s human nature - they just have to come back for you. Take advantage of their revenge-lust, leave them a claymore as a parting gift.

When you place claymores, if it’s a doorway, place them in the corner by the door facing toward the doorway in the direction the enemy will be moving once they pass through the doorway. You want to place them so the red beams don’t show so well if they game is slow paced. For fast paced games, you can almost plant claymores in clear sight and still get kills since people are too busy moving and watching their radar.

For staircases, if the enemy has to turn 90 degrees as they move up the staircase, then just place the claymore facing down the stairs right dead in the middle of the staircase. The enemy will have to turn to come up the stairs and won’t see the claymore til it’s too late. If the staircase has no turns in it, then I place the claymore at the top of the stair case (or bottom) just like I would if it were a doorway.

Few sites will tell you how to use smoke grenades. I wish I could find more on this. I use them in an area in between me and a close range attacker if I’m sniping, so I can get the hell out of dodge. You can throw them in high traffic areas to allow you and team to pass through, or you can throw them and use a thermal scope to pick people off. They are also useful in demolition type games where you can throw them on the bombsite and sneak in and defuse/plant the bomb while all hell is breaking loose.

Perks: Sleight of Hand Pro (SoH), Stopping Power Pro, and Steady Aim Pro are considered the best for regular games.

I do love Scavenger, since I run out of ammo on the SCAR, and if I’m at a distance, and run a map effectively, you can compensate for the loss of SoH. For hardcore, you can drop Stopping Power for Cold Blooded, or Hardline (or Danger Close if you are playing OMALOL).

Many people knock Scrambler, and I’d agree with them for deathmatch, FFA type games etc. But scrambler can be cruel on demolition and other objective based games where you might be defending a location (you’re position is fixed) and the enemy is forced to approach your area. This will leave them in the dark for a good majority of the game. Most average players use the radar and rely on it quite a bit. So this can mix up their game.  Having said that, I don’t often use scrambler. I just think it has some advantages on certain game types that are often overlooked.

Scavenger is great for the Claymore users. You can run infinite claymores and hold an area quite well (like the rooftops in Karachi) with this setup. Scavenger and Claymores go very well together.

Cold-Blooded Pro (CB+) has some big advantages. MW2 is horrible at helping you discern friend from foe. I often can’t tell if someone is the enemy since my partner is near or behind him and his name is covering the name of the enemy, or the name simply doesn’t show up in a mix of other graphics. So play this to your advantage. When you use CB+ your name doesn’t show up. You also don’t show up on thermal scopes, and air support ignores you. This reduces the times you’ll be killed by a lot, especially on open maps (Wasteland, Afghan). Take advantage of this time the enemy will need to make a judgment call on if you are friend or foe. Either book and get the hell out of there, or press the advantage and fire first and ask questions later. (The average human reaction time is about 125ms (1/8th a second). This is based on your drivers-ed course where they showed you how far you should space yourself out behind the next car if your doing 55 mph, etc. It takes about 1/8th second for your brain to react and press the brake pedal. Knowing this, if your ping times to the server are 100ms+, you’re at a big disadvantage to your lower ping enemies). Cold blooded also lets you go prone and spam the weapon switch button. Many enemies will walk right by you thinking you are dead.

Hardline is considered poor by many, but it’s beauty lies in that when you run a killstreak such as Predator-Harrier Strike-Pave Low, you get there much sooner. Once you get harrier, you have a good chance for the pavelow. So it’s not 9 is reduced to 8, it’s really 7 is reduced to 6.  6 kills for a 50% chance of pavelow. It’s often a winning gamble, but better leveraged be more experienced players.

The other killstreak most pros run involves chopper gunner. So Harrier-Pavelow-Gunner, or Predator-Harrier-Gunner. I run Predator-Harrier-Pave Low on deathmatch, and on game like demolition, which are much faster paced, UAV, Counter UAV, Sentry/Predator.

Most pros will tell you to call in the Pavelow only after the Harrier is done. This makes sense since you want as many kills as possible, and if two machines are killing, there’s less people on the map (they are respawning, or prolonging re-spawning by watching the killcam - sometimes a smart thing to do). However, I often will call the Pavelow in before the Harrier left, so that the Pavelow can enter the space and start controlling things while the area is still well dominated. I don’t want anything with a stinger to have breathing room to get the shot.

Also, when air space is dominated by your team. I’m MUCH more aggressive at moving about outside - PRESS THIS ADVANTAGE. I’ll often go from building to building clearing them out. Since my Pavelow is already out, even if I die, it’s no matter since a death will just allow me to work my killstreak once again. (Many players will suicide after getting Pavelow for this purpose). Be sure to use killstreaks that you will get often, at least every few matches. For games like Domination, and Headquarters, consider using UAV, Counter  UAV and other killstreaks that give leverage to your team.

For Deathstreak, Final Stand is considered the best since you have a decent chance at a second life. I have to agree. If I consider all my deathstreaks, I’ve scored the more kills and return kills from Final Stand. I use this on all setups except those which run and gun on small maps like Rust, where I’ll definitely be in the rice patties again within 10 seconds from death - in this case Painkiller holds up better.

Outside the Box thoughts.

Ok. That was the summary section. Now for some outside the box thinking. These are things I’ve learned the hard way, or from watching pros, or from just thinking about strategy. Some of you may have seen my strategy guide for video games in general from the previous year, but the comments in this section discuss topics and ideas I haven’t been able to find elsewhere, though I wish I had.

1. Flow - Each game has it’s own flow. Each player has his/her own flow. Don’t sweat the flow. As a beginner, and seeing the Mr 360 Beast videos, you will see he’s always running around getting mad kills. So you naturally think, if I run around I’ll get some kills too. Then you try it and get owned. This is all about flow. Each game has it’s own rhythm and each type of game has it’s own rhythm. Team Deathmatch (TDM) or Mercenary TD have a slower flow than headquarters and demolition. So take the time to get a sense of your games flow. Smaller maps will have faster flow, and larger maps more punctuated flow. Hot spots on the map will have faster flow than colder spots. I played about 65 levels of Mercenary Team Deathmatch. So I gained a sense of the flow of this game, for each map. I learned not to just run and gun on every map. You may have a feeling - “I don’t want to be a camper, so I better keep moving”. Then you move and some one flanks your ass or you get sniped from across the map.

Sometimes camping is just the thing to do. Camping and waiting for the next chump to come into the territory that is at disadvantage to the territory you control. Press the advantage, take him out, and make sure his buddies aren’t behind him (or you), then move to your next spot.

If there is some action, such as a scuffle for control for a room, sometimes it’s better to hang back and just pick off the newly spawned enemies racing back to the area of contention since they want to assist gaining the territory they just died over.

When you hear some gunfire and see the flash on your radar, if some team mates are going to that location to score some points, join them - but don’t necessarily be first in line. You’ve probably learned by now that 2 vs 1 is often death for the 1. And also don’t line up single file behind your buddy. Stagger yourselves and choose different attack angles if possible. Flank.

On a more philosophical level, Miyamoto Musashi, the famous samurai discussed about the natural rhythm (flow) of encounters. I wrote about it here.

Flow can also be quantified on a map by tallying up all the deaths for a given match amongst all players. The higher the deaths for a given map, in a given mode of play (TDM, FFA, etc) indicates a higher rate of flow. Games like demolition have higher flow. You might see the average player have 15-30 deaths in a given match where the average TDM might only have 7-10 deaths averaged across all players.

2. Food Chain - Those pro players that are getting like 25-1 on TDM games are there because they’ve learned the game through trial by fire. They are obviously better than you. They know the maps better, they have their setup mastered, they may be organized and communicating with their team, they probably even have faster reflexes, and can throw a semtex on your face from halfway across the map. So don’t walk into their GRINDER. Go find a target that is lower than you on the food chain. If you want to dominate players, it’s always easiest to find players less skilled than you on the game. When I watch 360 Beast videos, I always marvel at how oblivious the players are on his games. Where are these noobs coming from? Meanwhile, in my TDM matches, even at level 70, I’m often the lowest ranked member in the matches. I’m up against 1st prestige minimum to 9th prestige players almost overwhelmingly in my games  (perhaps it’s the PS3 network, which is smaller then Xbox 360’s network). So I’m often lower on the food chain than my competitors. This means to manage a positive K/D for a match, I need to press whatever advantage I have. For TDM , or Merc TDM, use your team. Put that 25-1 guy on your team which raises your team’s rank on the food chain (I talk more about this next). I stick with the team as much as possible, and I often follow the veteran on my team to see where he posts himself on each map. You can learn a lot watching the vets on your team matches. Just follow them and watch. See where they run to first in a match, and which areas they try to control.

Often you can use your team to cover your back, and if one of them dies ( a green arrow drops off the map), you get a free heads up to where there is an enemy is that I have some advantage on.

Merc TDM is better than TDM proper if you don’t have buddies to play with and/or a headset. If the opponent team is communicating and you aren’t with your team, you have a huge disadvantage. So go Mercenary unless you have a team.

Teamwork can’t be stressed enough as a way to move up the foodchain. You’ve probably had dozens of times where you killed a guy coming through a door only to be killed a split second later by his flanking buddy, or even by a second (or third!) bastard coming through the door. They are grouping up and you weren’t. Fix that and get with your team, or at least one other team mate. Or position yourself in a cluster of your team such that anyone who makes it close to you will likely be engaging with your teammate as well - you’ll have the advantage.

Don’t go into the hot areas of the map. Go to surrounding areas where you can pick off some kills.

Getting back to this idea of “the grinder”. The grinder is when the enemy has complete domination over a piece of the map or an entry point on the map and they are just waiting for people to step in it so they can get the kill. Don’t be a sucker and give it to them. Either flank them, or make them wait and get bored. Anything is better than stepping into the grinder. Why do they do that? Because there are so many saps who just have to get revenge and keep walking into their grinder like moths to a flame. As long the grinder scores them kills, they’ll keep doing it.

I have a good 6th prestige player on my friends list. His K/D ratio is 0.92 with about 45000 kills and 48000 deaths. That’s a lot of deaths and kills! He’s in the top 58000 players online at that stage he’s at. So you can see few people have prestiged to such a high level, if you consider 58000 a small number - but out of 5+ million it’s a small percentage. So if you get experienced to first level prestige or higher, you’ll be moving way up the food chain. It gets narrow at the top.

3. Pick and Choose - I have a Win/Loss ratio of about 1.2 (318/265) at the moment. Looking at the global scoreboards, there are 17 players shown per page, and over 10 pages, only 16 players, including me are at 1.00 Win/Loss or higher. That’s 16/170 players. That’s only 9.4%! So why is it that only 1 in 10 players at roughly level 70 experience can manage to win as often as lose? This is very telling. Someone has to be on the other side of this equation and be the winning side. Likely, the winners are those higher on the food chain. There’s not as much we can do about that - it’ll always be this way, so I recommend a different strategy. Pick and choose your games. If I see the other team is stacked with the top 2-3 dominating players from the previous matchup, leave the lobby. Once the match starts and counts down from 10, at about count 8, you’ll see the teams. If you’re paired with 1-2 of the top performers from the previous match, stick around. If not, think about jetting. I feel very comfortable doing this - because I see lots of pros doing it! I’ve seen hundreds of good players leave a match when they get set on a loser team. Fuck it - this is MERCENARY death match - you can do whatever you damn well please, including getting the hell out of a loser team. Why subject yourself to a loss and domination when you don’t have to. Sun Tzu said to know they enemy (and thyself) and if you know your enemy is superior, don’t engage. Go find a match better balanced, or against lower food chain. By doing this, I was able to go from sub-1 to 1.2 fairly quickly. Don’t feel poorly about it at all. The pros do it, and Mercenary means mercenary. It’s like poker, if the hand sucks, fold. If it’s a good hand, then play. The matchmaking system appears to just balance out the teams based on the previous matches scores, so it’s not like the matchmaker is very intelligent. The fact that I can be in the 9.4 percentile compared to my experience level is a testament that you controlling your engagements can be done to your advantage.

4. Know when to press advantage - based on situation and location. When you’re enemy is far away with an assault rifle and you have a UMP45, don’t press the engagement.  Press the advantage instead in the space and terms of engagement which you have the advantage - either a weapon better suited to the combat situation or a position on the map better suited for the engagement. I’ve found that many (most) players feel that once they’ve exchanged fire with someone, they are committed to pressing the engagement until either them or the enemy dies. Not true. It’s a mistake. Sometimes it’s better to throw a flash and high tail it out of there. Or duck around a corner plant a claymore, or back up and wait for some team mates to arrive.

If its 2 vs. you, then don’t press the engagement unless you have a stronger position on the map (like if you are on a rooftop or obscured behind cover, or have a direct bead on them).

If the enemy walks into your area and has to turn before he can hit you and you have to turn less, press the advantage. Don’t engage with a sniper at a distance if you have an assault rifle.

If you have a team with you, press the advantage. 2 vs 1 is typically to your advantage.

When you are have air support, it’s also time to press. Even during counter UAV, I will press a bit more.

Do not engage in 2 front wars. Our history classes taught us this. Put your team to your back and engage on one front, if possible.

The key here is that choosing not to engage once fire has been exchanged is sometimes a viable and often smart option. Don’t feel commitment to continue an engagement just “because because”.

Another thing. Try increasing the sensitivity on your controller to high (setting 4 from 3). This will allow you to turn faster, but you’ll take some time to get used to it. Increase gradually if you end up changing sensitivity.

As for map control, when you watch vids like Mr 360 Beast, you can see there are places he often posts himself on the map, there are circuits which he often follows (like the outskirts of a map centered inward) and there are areas he avoids to go. This is map-knowledge, and comes with experience, but watching videos often helps you find the better places to post. This the equivalent of owning the d4 square on the chessboard, considered a strategic advantage. Watching videos and following veterans is the way to learn these positions where control is key.

5. Displace! : Newer players will often camp, and while many people knock this, I think they just are missing the whole point. Campers don’t often camp because they want to. Often they are newer players who can’t control a map like the pros do and when they venture out, they get shot, and shot and shot. So they turtle, since it’s the only way they seem to survive more than 10 seconds. I mean, how many pro players camp?! Not many. The campers are the lower food chain players and their hesitation to run the map is justified and understandable. So they opt to control a minimal size area. As you become a better player however, you will naturally get a better hang of using your team, and using cover, and feeling the flow of the game, and know when to venture out and when not to. You won’t always remain a camper.

People just knock camping because it doesn’t play into their game - into their grinder. If they don’t like it, they can come and try to kill you, or go join a more pro team match. Whatever.

Having said that. If you want to get some killstreaks going, you will have to learn to displace. I recommend after 3-4 kills. In hardcore games, maybe more since the killcam is gone. But rotating places on the maps is important. Moving when there is loud noises in the distance is a good idea, so attention is drawn elsewhere.

Some of the best killstreaks I get are when I take a few out in one place, plant a claymore and go to the next place usually closer to my team, or in the direction of retreating from my previous position. Some vengeful soul will eat your claymore and then you can pick off a few more from the new position to get your 5 for the predator, then get 1 more with that, then one more gets your the harrier. Then you’ve almost been guaranteed a pavelow. Sometimes I wait to bring in the harrier until someone grants me UAV. Then I can set the harrier right on top of the enemies and have a better liklihood for the pavelow.

6. Pro videos will show you techniques that the authors don’t even realize their using.

It’s amazing how you can watch a video on MW2 play and the player kicks ass, no doubt, but their commentary fails to get at the heart of any of their true competitive advantage. I always try to understand in any play video, how is it that this player is dominating the others. Here is a collection of observations,

a. The players dominating the game are those that maximize the potential of their killstreaks. The players who get killstreaks have much higher K/D ratios than the rest of the MW2 population, therefore, optimizing your killstreaks for your skill level, for the map, the game type is leverage. The better players can make full use of that leverage through predator, harrier, pavelow/chopper gunner. That level of killstreak is the goal of the marqi player.

b. Many of the better players are playing Domination to get kills. When their team has two flags and doesn’t capture the third, the enemies spawn in a predictable way. They understand the advantage and milk this situation, when present, to get many kills. They know on each map where the enemy will spawn and where the enemy will travel to get back into the action. Then they post and pick them off, over and over. Playing domination and realizing this can really up your K/D. Other modes like Capture the Flag, Headquarters, and Demolition have similar ways to milk the game type to the advantage of your K/D. I haven’t divined specifically for these game types the strategy, but in general you want to stay as far away from your team as possible, at a distance from the enemy - picking off lone wanderers and avoiding fighting groups of multiples. Secondly, as your team dies and respawns elsewhere, this causes your enemies to also spawn in a different area of the map. As this occurs, you will want to make sure to transition the territory on the map you’ve occupied accordingly, which often means displacing to another area of the map to lock down. There is usually several points in each area of the maps that dominate over the surrounding, adjacent areas. You can often see better players posting in these positions.

c. In free-for-all, you can often see pros use silencers, so they don’t get more attention. You only want to deal with one enemy at a time. Claymores and scavenger are common and are used to lock down a territory on the map. You then hold that territory as long as possible. The territory should have a situational advantage over the entry points to that area. Here is an example of this on Underpass. Additionally, many of the videos you will see will have more players than you might see in some of the default matches (I never see 9 person per side team deathmatch games). Public matches, and matches the pros will play in with many of their extensive friends lists will sometimes vary.

d. Pros know the maps, and as you watch pros walking the maps, their gun sights are usually aiming at where the threat is likely to come. That way, when the enemy walks through the doorway, or around the corner, they are already 75% aimed. Either they just pull the trigger as is, or go into quick ADS and dial in their aim before firing. In either way, the person who isn’t already trained on the threat will take longer to aim. They’ll lose most of the time. Watch the killcams when you get toasted and see who was more prepared in their aim. Campers have a huge advantage in this department. Having those white line cross hairs on your screen centered on the threats ahead of time is important to master. Snipers are excellent at this, especially the no-scopers. For this reason, getting some sniping experience is worth while just to up your regular game.

7. Use the data. Modern Warfare has a leaderboard. Most people use it to brag. I use it to calculate probability.

For example. I described earlier the benefit of using the hardline perk. But you can go further than that. You can quantify the benefit. My K/D ratio is 1.12. That means, all else being equal, my games consist of me killing one opponent, and then getting killed, ad infinitum. More specifically, I kill 9 people for every 8 times I get killed. That’s my average (mean) performance. If I’m playing better that day, or my knowledge is better at some map, I might perform better. In the extreme, for my skill level, based on all statistical samples of my performance (5000 or so deaths), my best kill streak is 19 kills before I got killed. So 19 kills/death might approximately be my +3 sigma performance (1/5000 = 0.0002 of 0.02% which is actually beyond 3 sigma). What is the probability of me getting 5 kills before dying? (mean=1.12, variance=(19/3)^2), integrate from -20 to 5 on this chart using that data. The calculator returns a number 0.72951 which means 72.95% of the time, I’ll get 5 kills or less before dying. So I have a 27.05% (100-72.95%) chance I’ll outperform and get greater than 5 kills and get my predator. What about the probability of getting the predator in 4 kills with hardline? My chance is increased to 32.5% of the time, about 5% greater chance of starting my killstreak. Is that benefit worth losing a perk like stopping power or cold blooded? It’s up to you to decide, but if I knew for example that 20% of the time I got my predator missile, I’d actually get the harrier, and 70% of the time I got the harrier, I ended up with the pavelow, and that the pavelow on average kills about 5-7 people, (the same thinking could go for chopper gunner which depending on the map can give you outrageous killstreaks - on wasteland for example), you could calculate the probability of getting an additional X number of deaths on average per Y number of games. In the end, the best best to increase your odds with hardline is to have your mean kills/death ratio increase. But my point with all this is that you can use the leaderboard data to calculate some pretty decent predictions about performance of both yourself and the population of competitors and teammates.

How do you stack against competitors?

At level 70, I’m ranked in the top 3.8 million players on global lists. That means that 3.8 million people are higher level experience than me in terms of kills. They may have lower or higher K/D ratios, but 3.8 million is a large number! There are lots of experienced players out there.

As for Score, I’m at 3.5million globally. That means that 300,000 people have a lower score than me, but have the same number of kills. This is likely explained that many people are getting kills on game where they score less, like Domination and Headquarters. On TDM, you can higher scores per kill since the match bonuses aren’t as high. (It seems that since the stimulus package came out, this might have been modified, I’m not sure).

I haven’t compared the scoring between all modes, but I can’t help but feel that Demolition ranks you up much faster than TDM, especially if your team wins Demolition. Playing demolition therefore will rank you up faster, but perhaps at some disadvantage to your K/D ratio. In Demolition, often your team won’t always try to meet the objective (some players play any game more like TDM no matter what… win/lose, they just don’t care) so you’ll end up engaging more and dying more often if you are one of the team actually playing toward the goal.

In terms of Win/Loss, I’m placed at 2.5 million. So a full 1.0 million players have more kills than me, and/or a higher score, but have fewer wins. That’s interesting. In my surrounding competition on the global ranking boards, only 11/170 have a Win/Loss ratio above 1.0, or 6.5% of players. This is very telling. Again, someone is on the other end of this equation, and it’s likely the pro player, and boosters (those who get the tactical nuke), and hackers. But if you manage to get a Win/Loss ratio of 1.0 and/or a K/D ratio of 1.0 at a level of experience around level 70,  (~3 days of play, 72 hours), then you’re above the 90th percentile of your peers. That’s pretty damn good, so don’t hassle it.

One last point, I see about 7 player out of 170 that have a rank way outside the range for expectancy for kills that they’d have at my comparable level. So at least for the population of players near my level, boosters appear to comprise only a few percent of the population. However, since boosting can get you about 2 prestige levels per day, the population of boosters is likely best observed  at higher levels of experience. I’d estimate only a few percent of players are boosters, overall. But that many (more than a few percent) level 10 prestige players are boosters.

Having said that, I’ve seen so many good players get OWNED. They dominate one match 30-5 or something, then fall down in the ranks in the next game to K/D < 1. There is always someone better than you. Tough guys grow on trees in MW2.

Some players own certain maps - either their style/setup works on that map or they know the pressure points to press on that map. On Afghan, I can often own that map just by holding down one sniping position (assault rifle works maybe even better) on the western rim near the lower artillery gun by the sandbags, lying prone. As I hold that location and my teammates die, they’ll often spawn by me since my area is deemed safe by the game engine since either no one has died there yet, or I’ve just killed an enemy there. So eventually, if I hold this area enough, most of my team will end up there when they re-spawn and I now have some cover. I then pick off people coming up the path from the southeast, and sometime to the north. Just in this position alone, I can rack up 13+ kills a game and get in some air support to put me over 20. That’s the power of holding a superior position on a map. Any position is assailable, and IW made it that way, but taking over such positions comes with a cost. They have to press hard - especially if I have back up.

I hope this information proves useful to others. I tried to mix up a bit and put some thoughts that I haven’t seen anywhere else. In the end, experience is the only true way to get good at this game, but you can avoid many of the mistakes if you know about them and work on good habits early. In the end, if you have fun with the game and improve your game, I can’t see you as anything but a winner of MW2.