The Art Of Not Being A Liability To Your Team

As we work our way through the second week of Call of Duty: Black Ops, I'm already reaping the benefits of having played some Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer just before its successor came out. In the past, when a new game has arrived and I've ventured into its online arena, I've always seen the same pattern: my kill-to-death ratio takes a beating while I learn the game and its maps, and eventually have to make a concerted effort to push that stat up over 1.0 (meaning, have more kills than deaths). I've chronicled this in the past with Resistance: Fall of Man, Resistance 2 and the aforementioned Modern Warfare 2, , and it's often a long, arduous journey that requires me to play quite defensively in order to keep my deaths low. In fact, I've had some very frustrating sessions within each of those three games where I've been trying my damnedest to simply knock out a few more kills than deaths, only to hit a dry spell where I'm just spawning and dying.

With Black Ops, though, I only briefly fell below the 1.0 KTD mark early on, while I was stuck with a substandard gun (M16) and had yet to unlock my preferred perks (Ninja, Ghost and the quick reload one). Once I'd upgraded to the Famas assault rifle and adopted those perks, I quickly got back into the positive and am already up over 1.2. I think he highest I ever got in Modern Warfare 2 was 1.24, and that took ages to achieve. Besides the recent warmup with MW2 (which is a very similar game with identical controls), I've also been doing some Combat Training sessions in which I play the same maps but against AI opponents. That's helped me to learn the maps more quickly, and I've ramped up the quality of the enemy AI almost to the top, which has forced me to play better even while training.

As a Team Deathmatch fan, I like the fact that I've rapidly moved from liability to asset, in terms of doing my team more good than harm. That's a great feeling that this team player appreciates achieving so early on.