Okay, why not engage in a little bit of harmless armchair game balancing? While looking at Netcode and matchmaking and all of that is an easy scapegoat, I'd have no idea how to fix it. Instead, why not focus on elements of the CoD franchise that can be altered in ways that we can understand?
What 3 changes would you make to the "core" CoD experience?Here would be what I would alter. Granted, some people might not agree with this, but if I suddenly became a silent partner over at IW/SHG/Treyarch, this is what I'd be pushing hard for in the next franchise as changes I feel are long overdue.
1. No knifing if you've been shot first.Ideally, the knife is a stealth weapon. In every action movie, people only bring out the knife when they're sneaking around and have the drop on someone. If you stab someone, you know where they are (presumably) and they don't know where you are. Silent One Hit Kill. I'm fine with that. But ever since I started playing with BOII, having people soak up two or three rounds to stab me is the epitome of stupid. If you're being shot at as you go to knife, it means your opponent KNOWS you're there. And if you win that fight, it means you've just beaten a rifle in a gunfight.
So basically, you can't knife if you're not at full health. I'd switch it up so that if you're closing in on someone from behind, you commando lunge and shiv them. I just hate the Reflex Blade idiocy.
2. People who are flashed or stunned cannot ADS.This one has always seemed like a no-brainer to me. Non-lethal grenades are a cool idea, but nobody uses them because they can't do diddly-s
hit. Every game, I try to make non-lethal equipment work for me, and every game, I give up on it. I LOVED the effectiveness of concussion grenades in BOII, even after the nerf. It GLUED PEOPLE DOWN and disoriented them. The damage was to their reaction time and mobility, and good players took advantage of that in objective modes.
Here we are in AW. They did one great move: combining the flash and stun together into a single grenade type, which makes all kinds of sense. Too bad it still doesn't actually do anything. If a tac grenade just makes your screen bright for about three quarters of a second or makes your view a little wiggly, it's caused no meaningful change to the person on the other end. I can't actually think of an instance in AW where a stun placed me at a significant disadvantage. I just drop back to cover for about 500ms and re-engage. That's not a lot of value for the grenade runner.
I think a lot of good could be done by removing the ability to fire
precisely. Hipfire is a fine method of last resort against someone who's gotten the drop on you. You might win by literally spraying and praying, but you probably won't. A rusher should be able to severely hinder your ability to precisely shoot him down as he closes the distance, and at least hinder your mobility to make a retreat. It also gives SMGs as a whole a big plus against ARs, since they're easier to hipfire. And, if people get sick of it, guess what, use one of those immunity perks that have existed in the game since the dawn of time.
3. Loosen the rules of class balance.
Having a 200ms ADS time for ARs and 100% run speed for SMGs seems at this point like some kind of law chiseled into a stone tablet somewhere. Why? I liked the fact that the USAS-12 in MW3 had unlimited sprint, and I liked that certain guns like the VEPR in Ghosts had a fast sprint-out at the cost of a longer ADS time.
I think part of the problem with the weapon balancing is that there are only two parameters that are ever looked at: damage (which includes range, really), and recoil. What about all of the other possibilities open? I'd like to see ARs that are EXTREMELY sluggish to counterbalance other pluses, SMGs that substantially increase your mobility, guns bundled with some kind of "mini-perk", perhaps beginner-friendly guns that are poopy statistically but have a higher degree of aim assist, etc. I think at this point we're basically locked into the system we have, and any gun that's on paper is going to be statistically similar to something else in another game.
I could talk a little more, but let's limit this to 3 things. I actually think the design discussion is a fun exercise and would like to see what other veteran CoD players would do if they had the chance to make some changes to foundational mechanics.