[finnrogers]

Right I've got a problem with this article. In my opinion, it is wrong to put campers in the same category as cheaters. I think it is important to differenciate between exploiting a design flaw/bug and exploiting a strategy that works (albeit irritating for everyone else).

Exploiting a design flaw/bug is more about boosting your score, unlocking difficult achievements, gaining an unfair advantage by doing something which, by design, you're not meant to be able to do. This is cheating; Plain and simple. There are, of course, other forms of cheating. However, camping IMO does not fall into this category. Camping is more about trying to adopt a strategy which is repeatidly successful. I think it is worth mentionning though that this is rarely the case. In my experience from most games, camping can have some short term gains but eventually leads you to become a primary target and ultimately fails to reap (m)any rewards. To top that off, alot of games make it arguably harder to win by camping and sniping. Battlefield Bad Company is a perfect example: you might be able to pick a few people off and laser designate tanks, but stick in the same spot for any longer than a couple of minutes and you'll either be sniped by someone who you've just killed or someone will walk up behind you and casually carve their initials in your back and claim your dogtags!

I agree that some of these tactics are irritating, but I just wanted to speak out to make sure that we don't confuse irritating tactics with cheating as the latter is a far worse problem.

In response to the bit about "what can we do about it", I would like to see the categories on xbox live reinforced with rules: "recreational" players should be allowed to play without all of the above cheaters and campers and people who are clearly out to boost their score, win win win, etc - Maybe the feedback system could incorporate some extra options to say "this player is trying too hard" sort of thing - if the user gets 5 of those then he's penalised by being put in the "professional" category for 2 weeks. Of course for this to work, games would have to have the option of being able to play only with people in your category of choice.

Basically, I think the system of dividing players up depending on their style of gameplay just needs beefing up. Although realistically, I can see this problem being one that will never really go away.