While we all wait for the highly anticipated release of Black Ops 2 this November, some of you out there may have only just picked up Modern Warfare 3 as it will have begun its price drop being almost a year old now.
So, if you’re a newcomer to Call Of Duty and are looking for some essential multiplayer tips that you can use to stay alive longer and just have more fun, then here’s what I’ve learned since picking up the game on its release last year.
Open the Black Ops 2 Strategy Guide now by clicking the image below:
It took me a few months of frustration before I learned some of these techniques for multiplayer gaming on CoD, but once I had a few of them down it was like an epiphany – “yes, I can compete!!”
Whilst I still manage to get completely crucified occasionally, I do come out of most TDM or Kill Confirmed games with a two or three to one K:D (kill to death ratio).
So lets jump in to some of the basics.
Multiplayer Tip 1: Hold down areas, but don’t camp!
Long gone are the days of just backing into a corner and popping off whoever is unlucky enough to walk in front of you. For one, it’s a terrible tactic that won’t earn you any friends. Secondly, MW3 has done a pretty good job of eliminating these kinds of places where you can hide.
Wherever you are on any of the maps, there is always a way for someone to come up behind and stab you while you’re looking the other way.
Camping comes naturally to new players because it gives the illusion of safety. It can be quite scary getting out there in the middle of all the action when you’re still getting used to the game. But you must resist the urge to do it.
This doesn’t mean you have to go running around like a madman just to have a good game though.
My favourite style of play is to pick an area of the map and hold it down, which means rather than literally hiding in a single spot pointing your gun at a corner waiting for someone to come around it, you patrol the section, get to know it and kill anyone who tries to enter it.
This could be a room, or group of rooms in a building, it could be a particular corner of a map or just some area that has just two or three entrances which you can cover by constantly running between them. The key is to just pick it and stick with it, holding down all the entrances. If your enemies don’t seem to be coming near your sector, you can venture out slowly and increase the area that you are controlling.
Kill a few folks this way and they will undoubtedly cry “camper” but there is a big difference between this tactic and camping, so just keep sticking it to them! Screw those guys haha!
Multiplayer Tip 2: Stop Running Around Corners!!
For the love of all that is good on this green earth of ours, if you are a new player and are constantly getting capped every time you turn a corner then STOP RUSHING AROUND THEM!
It’s probably the simplest yet most effective tip that I can give you. It will save you countless deaths and you will suddenly realise that you can stay alive a lot longer and maybe even get a kill streak or two.
Of course, it can be funny seeing a stream of opponents going full throttle around a corner towards me from their spawn point only for me to mow them down with my machine gun but I am always left thinking, “why are they just making the same mistake” especially when I see the same name doing it three or four times in a row.
Every corner should be taken with caution, slowly either crouching or with your sites up, depending on your gun. Unless you know 100% that it’s clear you should treat every corner as if there is an enemy waiting around it ready to pop a cap in your face.
This kind-of brings me on to my next point/tip:
Multiplayer Tip 3: Learn from your mistakes
Be honest, when you die playing CoD, how often do you just hammer the re-spawn button and just run hell for leather back into the action only to get killed by the same player in the exact same way?
I bet it’s more than you care to admit, if you play anything like I did in my early days.
So this tip is more of a way of thinking than a specific strategy. My advice is that every time you die, wait before you hit that re-spawn button. Watch how the other person killed you and you will probably realise how easy it was for him to do.
Learn from this. For example, if you were standing out in the open trying to pick him off from a distance with a submachine gun whilst he was hiding behind a box with a Sniper rifle, then it should be clear to you what you were doing wrong. But the important thing to remember is to not do the same thing again. If you re-spawn, don’t head back to that same spot and try to pick him off in the same way with the same gun, because he will just kill you the same way as he did last time.
Change your approach. Maybe start off by chucking a flash bang in his direction, or try flanking him and killing him from behind. Or if you can let your frustration and need for revenge go, then leave him there, warn your team mates and go kill someone else!
This goes back to tip 2. The number of times I kill the same person in the same way because they kept attempting the same faulty tactic to kill me is unbelievable. So if reading this you realise that you are that other person who is making the same mistake over and over, then just calm down a bit, take your time and try to realise why it was that you died.
Get this down and it won’t be long until you’re able to stay alive long enough to work your way nicely through your kill streaks. There are only so many ways you can die, so if you take the time to realise what’s happening when it happens to you then you’ll soon master the art of avoiding these types of situations in the future.
Multiplayer Tip 4: Kill and Move
This tip links in with tip number one to some extent. It involves the habit of changing your position every time you get a kill, or couple of kills if they are close together.
If you are holding an area down and get one or two kills the chances are your opponent will have realised exactly where you are and will come for revenge.
Many times they will get it because you will have maintained the exact position from which you killed them. They will simply sneak up on you and kill you from behind.
To prevent this and to make sure you keep the upper hand, when you get a kill from a position you are holding down, move instantly to an alternative position. Even if its just another corner of the same room, just move. They will be expecting you to be standing where you were before so while they enter the zone with their eyes on where they think you are going to be you can move in from the side and stab them in the back.
Multiplayer Tip 5: Watch your radar at all times
It is probably only a slight exaggeration when I say that I spend more time looking at the radar than the actual screen when I’m moving around a map. One of the best things you can get in the habit of doing is paying very close attention to it when you are moving around too.
Unless someone is using a suppressor then they will be marked by a red dot on the radar every time they fire their gun, and when you or a team member launches a UAV every opponent (who is not running with the Assassin perk) will become visible. This gives you an amazing advantage when entering rooms, turning corners or just knowing where to throw a grenade!
It seems like an obvious technique to mention, and I almost didn’t bother here but so many new players neglect the HUD for whatever reason so I thought it worth bringing to your attention.
Multiplayer Tip 6: Keeping a steady aim
This is a bit of an advanced tip inasmuch as the idea of it, but it’s actually very easy to do and will give you some great benefits.
Have you noticed that the longer you look through the sights of your gun, the more it will start to sway and wobble around? This makes it obviously more difficult to hit your target.
Well, you can reset this effect and return to a steady aim by simply letting go of the “look through sights” button for a fraction of a second and then quickly holding it again.
You can do this as quickly as you possibly can and the sights will return steady. You don’t have to wait until your gun is completely lowered for it to take effect. It’s hard to describe without being able to show you what I mean so maybe I’ll do a video at some point.
Summary
Well thats all for todays Call of Duty multiplayer tips. I wrote these specifically with Modern Warfare 3 in mind because thats what I’m playing right now but there isn’t really much in here that is specific to that particular game. You can take most of these tips with you into and CoD game, especially the upcoming Black Ops II that we are all waiting for!
