If camping is too effective, then the map or weapon balance is what needs work.
For example, of people are camping spawn points, why is the spawn point so easily accessible at all? Why don’t players spawn behind cover with multiple exit points? Do they not get temporary invulnerability?
Or camping objectives. Why is there only one, easily defended path to the objective? Why isn’t there a path for you to sneak up and just stab the camper in the ass while he’s staring down the scope? Or just walk around him and ignore him completely?
Watch some professional CS:GO. Those maps have been refined and balance-tweaked for decades. You can’t just camp one objective because there are two objectives. Every good camping spot is still leaves you exposed to getting flanked. Even with arguably the most OP camper’s weapon in any competitive game - the AWP, teams still only run 1 AWP, maybe 2 at most. Simply because camping alone isn’t effective.
It is the designer’s responsibility to make the game fun. If the optimal strategy is to camp, and it isn’t fun, the game has a design problem. Players shouldn’t play games that aren’t fun.
In any good game, every valid strategy has a valid counter. If camping doesn’t have a valid counter, then that just means it’s not a very well designed game.
For instance in CSGO, “camping” is one of the main parts of the game for both teams during different phases of each round. There are dozens of strategies to clear campers out. You can lob a grenade, throw a flashbang, or throw a smoke to block their potential line of sight. You can send in two or more people at the same time to try to overwhelm them. You can wait til you hear them reload or unscope or walk away. You can try to come at the site from a different angle and get a flank on them.
Most of the time I find that if people are getting killed over and over to campers when so many valid strategies exist, it’s less that the other person is camping and more so that you can’t overcome that.
I forget which map it was, but Battlefield: Bad Company 2 had a particularly broken area where a medic class (machine gun and 4x scope) and assault class (ammo drop) could pin down the opposing team at their spawn point, from a distance, indefinitely.
Took me and a buddy around a minute to find it, so we weren’t doing something particularly unusual.
Good design could have rendered this tactic inoperable. I don’t know if it ever came.
As long as the game is balanced and there are enough counterplays to camping, I’m fine with it.
If camping is a problem, it’s almost always a system issue.
I was in the Army, and camping was like 99% of combat. Sitting quietly and waiting for the enemy to walk into your line of fire is a tried and true military mindset.
Its part of the game. Some people just want to run around mindlessly rushing to get the jump on people then complain when someone was watching that door or corner
“Go into a room too fast, kid. The room, eats you.”
The players are just doing the best strategy. If that’s the best way to play, then the game is designed badly and is on the designers. I never blame xxgigaguy420xx for just wanting to win.
I’m a fan of spot check camping where it allows the player to rotate through strong flank spots. If you stay in one, you get caught, if you stay active you can get quite a few kills.
Like others said it’s a balance issue, but there’s definitely something to be said about the toxicity of staying in a single corner to spawn kill, or taking the tank and going 31-0 the whole game, but failing to push any objectives.
No problem. Its a legitimate tactic. There are plenty of ways to deal with camping.
If people can do it but it doesn’t make the game fun, then it’s a poorly designed game. Find another game. It’s not up to the players to follow some unwritten rule. It’s up to the devs to put appropriate rules into the code.
A fun target for grenades.
It really depends on the game. In Counter Strike, this is essentially how to play in any kind of competitive way. In a game that rewards aggression in some way it might not be viable at all. Anything people to do to win is fair as long as it’s not blatant cheating. If the best way to win at a game is doing things you don’t want to do or deal with, it’s the wrong game rather than the wrong players.
It’s the natural outcome of a skill mismatch. My favorite solution is get gud
I’m generally fine with it besides aggressive spawn camping
not in a shooter, but one of my favorite past times is chilling out camping a route between places with friends and “guild” mates in an mmo and just chatting and drinking while we wait for someone to stumble in. Sometimes people bring enough friends or heavy equipment to make it a fight. Its chill.
