care package & emergency drop rates

[mannon]

I know this is an OLD dead thread, but I dug it up because I got to play a little more MW2 over the weekend and was thinking back on my KS's. I was mulling over what KS rewards to use. I know all the cool kids use pred/harrier/CG or AC130, but I always have trouble making my KS on that and get annoyed playing whole games I don't so much as get a single one.

Anyway I started thinking about CP and EA and what the value of each one really is so a little math later simply multiplying the kills needed to earn a KS on its own by the odds of getting that one and viola the average value of each CP and EA crate. Turns out CP crates are on average worth 4.92 kills worth of KS rewards, just barely under 1 more kill than it takes to get the CP in the first place. BTW keep in mind that I did not give the ammo crate any artificial value, but just left it at 0 pretending it's basically worthless rather than assigning an arbitrary value to it.

Interestingly the EA crates are only worth on average 4.78 kills worth of KS rewards, actually slightly less than the CP crates. Of course, the fact that you get four of them dwarfs this, bringing the total value of EA up to an average of 19.12 kills worth of KS rewards! O,O That's pretty damn good for an 8 kill reward.

Of course the downside is you can't really use KS's from crates to build other KS's so technically they are worth slightly less than their non crate versions. Anyway I just found it interesting. I may have to roll with EA as my top KS some just because.

Then again I tend to usually hate the ones where you have to go pickup a crate. For some reason I'm just not any damn good at dropping those when it's safe and nothing makes me rage like fiiiiinnally getting a KS only to lose it. Not that I blame them for taking them. heh I don't roll with the Kleptomaniac tag for nothing. ;p

I think going UAV or CUAV/Pred or Precision/EA would be a lot easier on me because even if I don't do great in a game I'd at least get some UAV's and CUAV's, and if I really wanted to I could hold onto a few and maybe stack them to build up to the next KS, increasing my odds of getting my top KS at least once in a game.

Which brings up another idea... I wonder if it could payoff to take UAV and CUAV and another higher streak, but save them up for when I'm already up many kills. The idea is since they are passive and low KS's I could probably build up a cache of them more reliably than hitting a 5 or 7 KS on my own. It would be harder to earn my top KS in a single life, but might be easier to hit it at least once in the course of a game, which would pretty much make me happy. Really tempting me to go 3/4/8. I don't think I'd try to push it up to an 11, though. Even with a supply of UAVs and CUAVs in the sky it'd be tough to hit 11 without screwing the pooch at least once and dying to a lucky respawn or grenade or something.

Then again with Emergency Airdrop I'd have about 15% odds of getting at least one CG or AC130 which is almost 1 in 7 odds. Considering how much more likely I am to make an 8 KS than an 11 I think I'll take those odds... At least until I get better. ;p

I should probably reunlock Precision Airstrike if I get to liking Airdrop, though.

[oTradeMark]

Except MW2 Killstreaks stack... So you are much more likely to get a 7 killstreak harrier which you can then drop for good chance of it getting your 11 killstreak for you.

If you want just line it up 7-8-11, or 5-7-8/11 for a safer bet.

[mrboo2501]

With UAVs and CUAVs, I can't store them up as ideally I would like to think. I always tend to initiate them based on the ebb and flow of the game. In some cases, I'll earn a double kill and I won't get a chance to launch the UAV - at which point, I launch the CUAV just to get to the UAV. For what it's worth, when I run the UAV + CUAV, I typically go with Predator as my last KS. Not ambitious at all - in fact, I don't mind dying with this KS layout cause it gives me another shot to earn a UAV + CUAV.

Also...agreed - picking up crates is no fun at all.

[tacit]

Mar 8, 2011 9:06:53 GMT -5 mannon said:

I know this is an OLD dead thread, but I dug it up because I got to play a little more MW2 over the weekend and was thinking back on my KS's. I was mulling over what KS rewards to use. I know all the cool kids use pred/harrier/CG or AC130, but I always have trouble making my KS on that and get annoyed playing whole games I don't so much as get a single one.

Anyway I started thinking about CP and EA and what the value of each one really is so a little math later simply multiplying the kills needed to earn a KS on its own by the odds of getting that one and viola the average value of each CP and EA crate. Turns out CP crates are on average worth 4.92 kills worth of KS rewards, just barely under 1 more kill than it takes to get the CP in the first place. BTW keep in mind that I did not give the ammo crate any artificial value, but just left it at 0 pretending it's basically worthless rather than assigning an arbitrary value to it.

Interestingly the EA crates are only worth on average 4.78 kills worth of KS rewards, actually slightly less than the CP crates. Of course, the fact that you get four of them dwarfs this, bringing the total value of EA up to an average of 19.12 kills worth of KS rewards! O,O That's pretty gosh darn golly gee whiz good for an 8 kill reward.

Of course the downside is you can't really use KS's from crates to build other KS's so technically they are worth slightly less than their non crate versions. Anyway I just found it interesting. I may have to roll with EA as my top KS some just because.

Then again I tend to usually hate the ones where you have to go pickup a crate. For some reason I'm just not any gosh darn golly gee whiz good at dropping those when it's safe and nothing makes me rage like fiiiiinnally getting a KS only to lose it. Not that I blame them for taking them. heh I don't roll with the Kleptomaniac tag for nothing. ;p

I think going UAV or CUAV/Pred or Precision/EA would be a lot easier on me because even if I don't do great in a game I'd at least get some UAV's and CUAV's, and if I really wanted to I could hold onto a few and maybe stack them to build up to the next KS, increasing my odds of getting my top KS at least once in a game.

Which brings up another idea... I wonder if it could payoff to take UAV and CUAV and another higher streak, but save them up for when I'm already up many kills. The idea is since they are passive and low KS's I could probably build up a cache of them more reliably than hitting a 5 or 7 KS on my own. It would be harder to earn my top KS in a single life, but might be easier to hit it at least once in the course of a game, which would pretty much make me happy. Really tempting me to go 3/4/8. I don't think I'd try to push it up to an 11, though. Even with a supply of UAVs and CUAVs in the sky it'd be tough to hit 11 without screwing the pooch at least once and dying to a lucky respawn or grenade or something.

Then again with Emergency Airdrop I'd have about 15% odds of getting at least one CG or AC130 which is almost 1 in 7 odds. Considering how much more likely I am to make an 8 KS than an 11 I think I'll take those odds... At least until I get better. ;p

I should probably reunlock Precision Airstrike if I get to liking Airdrop, though.

The problem with Emergency Airdrops is:

Getting eight kills without dying
Finding a suitable place for them to hit the ground
The inherent problem of the crates dropping to where you can't reach them
Teammates stealing your crates
Enemies throwing explosives at your crates/stealing your stuff

If it's a tight game [say you're on TDM and you're up 500 points with 1000 to go] and the enemy manages to steal your airdropped Pave Low, you'd be absolutely spitting chips at that stage, 'cause it's entirely likely that your team would lose the lead and subsequently lose the game if you didn't take it down in a real hurry.

Due to all of those inherent problems in the game, it's unlikely you're going to get full value for your four crates.

[mannon]

To some extent that depends on how one uses them. It's quite possible to actually use them as bait to ambush enemies.

As far as them dropping where you can't get them it does require more space to drop them in, but both the placement and direction of the line they are dropped in are in your control. So as long as you're smart about it and have the room you should be able to minimize that.

With the teammates I'm actually not too worried about that one. You pickup your own crates very quickly, while a teammate trying to pick it up has to sit there for longer. So even if they start to grab one before you do it's usually quite easy to yoink your own crate right from them. On top of that I was actually thinking I would prefer to share a lot of the crates anyway and probably only personally take the top 1 or 2, especially if any UAVs or CUAVs drop as I would get the full benefit of them regardless of who uses them. (Just wouldn't have control over the timing.)

Not saying having to pickup crates doesn't suck or isn't rage inducing... it is. But there are some ways to mitigate it, and if I did run UAV/CUAV/EA I'd basically be in a support role for the team more than just pushing my own kills, but it might also grant me some variety in KS's if I play it right.

Getting all 8 kills on UAVs and CUAVs alone would be risky, but I don't think I'd mind terribly as each death is another opportunity for a fresh UAV and CUAV.

Going 7/8/11 or 5/7/8 or 11 is not happening. At least not until I get back in the groove, but even so I've never had much luck with KS rewards. I'm sure as hell not making 7 my lowest reward. I have only rarely managed a 7 KS on my own even when I was more in practice. My KDR was pretty decent, but for some reason I can't manage to get all the kills lumped into a single life, they tend to get spread out over the course of the game. Usually I will get several UAVs in a game and I'll get a predator about once every two or three games ATM. I usually roll with 3/5/7 and only get to build up to Harrier once in a while. But I'm A bored with that loadout and B frustrated with it. Predators for me are really damn random. They are great on some maps, but for some reason I tend to get them off pretty often and wind up looking at a seat of B/W without a single target in sight, and there's not really enough time to sweep the whole map searching for targets. I'm usually lucky to get 1 kill off a predator. Maybe I just need to play Ground War more often. At any rate just getting the pred is enough of a hassle and getting it to earn me a Harrier is kinda rare. Usually I have to supply at least one if not both of the kills to get the Harrier myself.

Still, yeah... I think for TDM I could manage to make Airdrop work for me, particularly on larger maps, but not so much for Groundwar due to the higher traffic.

On the other hand, when I was playing groundwar the other night even in the big TDM games it felt like there was actually less in the way of respawn BS than there was in the strait TDM games... Could just be me, but it felt like the spawns actually worked better with the larger number of players in the game.

[tacit]

Yeah, I wouldn't go with a 7 streak for starters unless I was opting for a Nuke - which I've never actually tried to get, and probably won't ever bother with unless I'm feeling really facetious.

I did the "Airdrop Inbound" Challenge where you get 1,000 crates [it was on the 2nd prestige, and I'm doing the Radar one this prestige] and I found that I could do fairly well doing Care Package, Sentry Gun and Emergency Airdrop. It was difficult to get into, but even though Care Package kills don't accumulate towards your killstreak count, they often throw up UAVs or Counter UAVs, so it's pretty helpful and adds to the crate count for the challenge.

It took me the entire prestige level to get to 1,000 crates , and I never really have much success with Sentry Guns, but I managed to scrape a few kills together if there wasn't someone right behind me when I called in the SG crate to knife it when I laid it out. Between claymores, silenced guns and the Sentry, I would fairly often get to the 8th kill.

I don't consider myself a great player, but if I wasn't going with a Care Package/Sentry Gun/Emergency Airdrop, and I realistically wanted an Emergency Airdrop as my final streak, then I'd probably opt for:

1st streak - UAV/CUAV/Predator [preference for UAV]
2nd streak - Predator/Sentry Gun/Precision Airstrike

The 3rd streak is the EA, obviously. The 1st streak would almost exclusively be a UAV, unless I'd played against the team previously and knew our team had the wood over them. I wouldn't get cocky until I knew the enemy was genuinely not as good as we were.

So the question is really the 2nd streak, and the answer depends on the level - if I'm playing Favela, Highrise, Invasion, Karachi, Skidrow or Sub Base, I have a preference for Sentry Guns.

All the other maps I'd take either the Predator or the Precision Airstrike, depending mostly on the relative number of buildings on the map that the enemy can quickly go to. A map like Afghan has less vertical cover than Quarry, so I'd be inclined to take an airstrike to the former and a Predator to the latter.

Happy hunting.

[mannon]

Hmm...

When HL is used it changes the average value per crate, reducing it quite a bit, of course, but then when you compare that to the investment to get the crate different things happen.

For Care Package
Value W/O HL = 4.92
Kills Investment = 4
Value Difference = 0.92

Value W/HL = 4.07
Kills Investment = 3
Value Difference = 1.07

So for a Care Package using HL is a net gain of 0.15, though that isn't a lot. Things are quite different for Airdrop, though.

For Emergency Airdrop
Value W/O HL = 4.78 * 4 = 19.12
Kills Investment = 8
Value Difference = 11.12

Value W/HL = 3.9 * 4 = 15.6
Kills Investment = 7
Value Difference = 8.6

That gives you a net loss of 2.52 for using HL to get your Airdrop! O,o That's not to say you're worse off for using HL, it just means that it devalues the KS rewards you get from the crates more than it does the kills investment to get your airdrop. But I thought it interesting, anyway.