In Defense of Campers

This is a response to a blog about Multiplayer Shooter tips.

My argument is for people afraid to camp or associate camping with a bad playstyle. My advice is: CAMP! Don't listen to the whiners who have to use your playstyle as a scapegoat for his loss-- chances are he is just sore because he ran into a room unprepared or actually expected you to be on the other side of the map as he attempted to infiltrate your objective.

Too many players play aggressively and think they can run from one side of the map to the other and mow down everybody. They become predictable. So what better way to deal with them then simply aim your gun at the door they are likely heading to, and blast them as they run in?

A good player ought to be using the arsenal of tactical nades, smokes, teamwork anyway that the game ought to give players.

I do not see any game where camping has been a problem to the point that a camper is unbeatable.

People use COD as a camper's game. However, you have kill cams, flash, smoke and stun nades that show even the direction of a player's position, UAVs, Blackbirds, motion sensors, deep impact bullets... what more do you need?

Too many times people blame deaths attributed to campers when they are simply defending/playing cautiously. And there is nothing wrong with that.

On one end of the extreme you have run and gunners and on the other end campers. Yet nobody yells at a run and gunner. Why? Because chances are, if you die by a run and gunner, you too were run and gunning. And blaming a run and gunner when you are doing the same comes off as hypocritical. But dying to somebody who used a totally different end of the extreme? Well of course, if he is lying in wait and surprises your momentum, of course you are going to blame him!

Do anything within the rulebook to win. If you are a poor camper or a poor run and gunner who just mindlessly runs around that is when I have a problem.

As for objective games, one can argue campers rack up killstreaks to protect objectives in COD. And one can also say that this is a design flaw. A more better system would definitely be a "Point Streak" system for objective modes.

But as you can see, a game like COD offers a good amount of counter-camping methods and anything that inherently promotes camping (silencers, motion sensors, claymores, ghost perk, etc) has a counter to it: motion sensors, hacker, blackbird, etc.

Speaking of design flaws, In other games like Killzone my problem with campers comes from the design of the marksmen class. I do not think Killzone 3 promotes fluidity like K2 did. Too many snipers simply cloak and do NOTHING towards objectives, nor are they equipped with team-helping abilities, etc. In Killzone 2 a sniper had no assault rifle, and had a spot and scan to help teammates. In K3, a sniper is pretty much disjointed from the team. In a game like Killzone 3 you are given abilities TO camp with the marksmen class-- the best assault rifle with invisibility for permanent use if using the secondary machine pistol.

Now I said do anything to win, but Marksmen do nothing towards objective games (unless they are defending a room) and in Guerilla Warfare they ruin games because a full team of snipers has no counter (Play a clan match in certain maps to see what I mean)

As for Battlefield, never really had an issue with campers in this game, everything flows dynamically as it should, and you are given tools for countering too (motion sensors, grenade launchers, etc)

And in the case of Halo, while there is no effective way to deal with a camper programmed into the game, I've generally found that campers haven't been given specific advantages to camp, and if something like invisibility were to be chosen as a armor ability it'd be countered with the annoying scrambler-- and I know this is in Killzone 3 as well, however, it's actually an optional ability that some gamers do not choose to upgrade to because it gives away the position of a sniper. It's too bad because it's the one team-oriented ability of a marksmen class in Killzone 3 yet it's still not used properly or at all in some cases because people wisely choose to be completely invisible and have that element of total surprise.

MAG is perhaps one of the few games campers have never ever been an issue. It's simply the design of the game.

So perhaps it depends on the experience and design of the game. For the most part however, campers have rarely been a problem for me, unless the design of the game didn't allow for a good set of tools (flash nades, motion sensors, etc) to counter a camper who was actually given camping-promoting tools by design (invisibility).

Even when campers have existed in games I've never felt prone to blame them in the long run-- sure, an immediate wave of anger places the blame on the enemy strategy, a teammate, lag, etc., but I never hold it against them for long simply because I readjust.

Campers will always exist. And while some camping (camping for kills in objective games, camping and not doing an effective job, etc) is counter-productive, I find that most GOOD players stop complaining about use the tools of a game to their advantage to outsmart campers. So long as a game supports those tools I do not see an issue with campers.