The Act of staying in one spot in a map in a first person shooter video game to gain a tactical advantage over an enemy or group of enemies.
Note the point 'tactical advantage'. I'm here to argue why camping in an online FPS game is an intergral part of successfully outwitting your opponents while supporting the team effort. Of course, I'm not about to say there aren't negative sides about camping, but it's the positive aspects that I'm here to put forward.
The title itself is contridictory to my argument as it seems to point out that I'm against campers. Yet this is the view the majority of people seem to take when confronted with a camper in an online FPS - although many of these seem to be moaning 14 year olds who can't take being outwitted by a more resourceful opponent.I'm still one to get frustrated at a camper sometimes, just like any gamer get's frustrated, but I tend to put it down to my own negligence in not looking hard enough to spot them in the first place.
Let's take Call of Duty 2 for an example, a game I frequently play at the time of writing this. The game has a mode called Search and Destroy, where one team has to plant explosives at either point A or B, and the other team has to defend those points until the time has expired or the opposing team has been completely eliminated. I prefer to be on the defending team personally, but I play as the attacking team quite often. Now somtimes you get people complaining that a sniper is covering one of the points and killing anyone who tries to plant, and it amuses me that people can complain. The sniper is defending the point, which is what his team has to do. There's little point in the defending team pushing forward onto the attacking team and getting killed in the process, since the attacking team can just push through the gap and plant. Therefore you have to camp to defend the points in order to win.
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The attacking team shouldn't be camping because the whole point is to plant the explosives, although one or two members of the attacking team should be permitted to camp - mainly the snipers - in order to cover their team members as they try and break through the defending teams defenses. Of course, there's nothing more annoying than watching your remaining team members, when on the attacking team, sitting in a building hundreds of metres away from the planting points. However, there is a tactical advantage here. If there are two or three of the attacking team left on the map and the defending team has around eight members then the defending team will be forced to come out of hiding and track down the remaining enemy. They could just sit it out and wait until the round is over but not many people are content to waiting around two minutes without any action, and there isn't any glory in winning a match through this tactic. By flushing the defending team out of their hiding places the attacking team can then take advantage of the situation by picking off the isolated defending team as they roam the map for survivors, or even sneak by and plant while the points aren't being covered due to the defending teams resources being concentrated on eliminating the enemy. Of cours, if the attacking team manage to eliminate the defending team through camping then they win the round through this tactic, although you can bet it will cause much anger within the defending teams ranks.
Another point to consider is snipers. Most servers have a limit of one or two snipers per team (I used to play an Omaha beach map on Call of Duty: United Offensive and when no sniper limit was in play then the match could just be one big stand off which wasn't terribly exciting. The American team should have been attacking up the beach not sitting in the sea sniping at the Germans on the cliffs. The Germans had the right to camp on the cliffs since they were defending and going down on the beach would largely result in certain death) which is the decent thing to do since in real life you'd hardly have a regiment made up of snipers. People complain when a sniper sits on the top floor of a building and picks off anyone stupid enough to pop their head up without scanning the upper floors of the building first. A snipers job is to camp, are these people suggesting that a sniper should run down onto the main battlefield and enter close-range combat with only a sniper rifle and a pistol for company? It's just stupid to suggest that.
Call of Duty 2 is a representation of the real World War II, and while I'm not suggesting for one minute that it should be entirely realistic the moaners should realise that you didn't have bunny hoppers or a defending force running across the battefield to confront a staionary attacking force. Of course there were times that an attacking force could retreat to re-group at a certain point and a defending force to do a counter-attack and eliminate the attacking force before they have a chance to launch a fresh wave, but most opponents of camping are suggesting that the defending force should move forward straight away and clash with the attacking team thus resulting in major confusion and the deaths of most of each team.
Campers usually tend to complain about 'spray killers' who will charge their position armed with a machine gun and riddle them with bullets while the camper has to be content with the slow firing rate of his or her rifle. If you're going to camp then the opposing team has the right to use tactics to try and overcome the campers tactic. Although the main tactic seems to be to camp them back thus resulting in a stand off where the two teams fire at each other across the battefield. Probably the best tactic to overcome a camper is to rush the campers suspected position. It's more or less certain that many will die in a rush but a single camper won't be able to deal with the sudden onslaught and will only be able to take a few down before he or she is killed themselves. If you have a bunch of campers then it'll be easier to deal with the onslaught, but combined with smoke grenades and normal grenades tossed through windows the attacking team can easily overcome a campers position if they work together. Further more, if you distract the camper by throwing men at their position you can sneak someone around the back to shoot the camper in the back. Unfortunately, on public servers we don't tend to see this level of teamwork so people remain to lamblast the campers for using an actual tactic that can swing the course of the game.
There is one form of camper I am against however, and that's the 'spawn camper' - a person who watches over a teams spawn point and shoots the opposing team as they spawn. In Search and Destroy you don't have this problem since a player only get's one life per round, but when you do it can cause utter confusion and frustration. There's also players who only camp to further their kill-to-death-ratio, which is pretty pathetic in itself as I go by the mantra that score doesn't mean much in a match when teamwork should be the norm.
So the moral of this is to not complain about the camper, they're just employing a tactic that will allow their team to win the match. Don't rant about a camper after being killed because you couldn't be arsed to check your surroundings before you foolishly ran across the open ground, there only doing their jobs and trying to protect their own lives. When employed correctly opposing tactics can easily overcome the camper if the team is willing to work together. If not then the camper will be sitting their smirking because you've presented him with a bunch of aimlessly wandering men with their own agenda and your team will get elimimated one by one.
Categories: Call of Duty2, Camping, Gaming, Gaming Tactics, Online Games, Video Games
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