Sometimes You Just Have To Stand There

If there's one thing I've always believed about succeeding in online deathmatches (such as Resistance: Fall of Man, the Halo franchise and now Resistance 2), it's this: don't stand still! You're an easy target if you're not moving, so don't let anyone catch you making like a tourist! And yet...

I've recently been having a very hard time achieving any kind of positive results in the Competitive arenas of R2, and so today I tried something different. First off, I should say that my favourite metric for this sort of thing is kill-to-death ratio. If you're killing more than being killed then, no matter where you may happen to finish in the standings at the end of the match, at least you dished it out better than you took it. When I started play today, my KTD ratio was around 0.92, meaning that I was "underwater" in terms of "giving as good as I got." Specifically, I had died about 70 times more than I'd killed. And it was going in the wrong direction, as each new game would see results like 8 kills and 10 deaths. Not good.

So my different approach this afternoon was to fly in the conventional shark-like wisdom of "keep moving." Instead, I started staying very still each time I'd spawn (at the start of each game, and after dying). The advantage this provides is that, like many First Person Shooter online games, Resistance 2 provides each player with a small map on their HUD (heads up display), and on that map you'll see any nearby enemies as red dots... but only if they're moving or shooting! I knew that about the game, but hadn't really considered just what a target I'd always been presenting with my old strategy of run-and-gun. Sure, you're harder to hit like that, but you're also way easier to spot on the map! Not only does anyone standing still see you heading toward them on the map, but at the same time you have no clue that they're waiting for you... until you start taking hits!

Today's strategy was to flip that approach around, and sure enough: it started paying dividends almost right away! Especially with the Bullseye in hand (a weapon whose secondary fire is a tag that sticks to whatever you fire it at and then draws all subsequent primary fire toward it), this more subdued style landed me lots and lots of easy kills (of the sort that I'd been providing to others, up to that point). After an hour or so of play, I'd finished 2nd and 3rd a few times (still no actual WIN yet) and reduced the differential between kills and deaths (which has been negative, and growing) down to around 45. I might actually be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel as far as posting a KTD ratio of 1.0 or better in the near future!

And it's just that sort of experimentation and reward that keeps me playing this game, nearly a month-and-a-half after it launched!