Recently a new trend has appeared among select first person shooters. And I say trend because this certain aspect is not dying off but instead is growing and for obvious reasons. But that doesn't necessarily mean it is a good thing. In fact, it is bad for gamers.

Probably the first game, if not then at least the first popular one, to possess this trend is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and can be summed up by it's name. Perks. Yes, perks. A little feature tagged onto a game to increase its depth and to encourage the players to play more and try new things to get more stuff/abilities. The more perks you get the better you are, right? Maybe not all the time.




How it works is you simply play the game and by winning a match, headshotting, killing, firing a gun, and walking around you get points. Okay, those last two were a bit of a gross exageration but you get the general idea. All you have to do is play the game to get XP to go up levels and unlock new perks. It is that simple. Therein lies the problem.




It is simply too simple. This topic comes refreshed in my mind after recording Podtoid when Topher was talking about RPGs and grinding. He summed it up nicely when he says he wants to be rewarded for beating the game using his mind instead of depending on how much time he has (paraphrased, I forget the exact words he said). Basically, players should be rewarded for how much skill they have, not how much time they play. That's my problem.

If a new person were to just randomly jump into a multiplayer match, he is going to get owned so badly by people with all these perks. That person's only hope is to get a few lucky kills and/or be on the winning team in order to get more XP so they can get some perks to stay alive a little bit longer. An incident such as this might not be as extreme but it still is fact.




Now here is where Matchmaking should come into play. Honestly, I've never seen good match-making online ever. Even when I tried Halo online on ranked matches, they either sucked or have some wierd armor that required me to hit them three times with a stupid sword cause apparently the only idiots who play Halo multiplayer play "swords" or worse, that race rocket game where you can't kill people. But I digress. And another issue with matchmaking is, you might but I personally do not go online to play games with strangers. It has happened but I enjoy playing with friends a whole lot more. Now I don't know a lot of people who actually plays CoD4 but among the few that I do know, their matches would be on a much higher level of experience that would leave me with the inability to compete effectively.

Call of Duty is not the only title to feature this aspect of multiplayer. The next installment of CoD has it as well as Resistance 2 unfortunately. I am not fully aware of how it will be implemented and all the details but I have no doubt it will mirror what Infinity Ward started which leaves me a sad panda. More games are likely to jump on this new trend and it is very discouraging. So much for rewarding skilled players.




But there are some titles that stick to the basics and not have perks based on amount of play time you have. At first glance someone might say Team Fortress 2 is suffereing from this fate with their updates but that is far from the case. To earn these balanced new weapons, you have to do stuff. Granted you could spend a lot of time to unlock them but they aren't unlocked by killing people. They require you to do specific tasks that range in difficulty, therefore rewarding your skill as a player (or blind luck in some cases). Plus, all the weapons have advantages and disadvantages. Can someone tell me what the disadvantage of having bullets that shoot through walls is?

I'm afraid most FPS games will wander down this line leaving mainly the likes of wonderful Valve to give me a pure, good multiplayer experience based on merit and not how much of a life you don't have. I mean I already own up on people as is in TF2, do I need that much more of an advantage? I'll get back to you on that one.