The latest patch might have added some beautifully free maps (thanks nVidia, it’s nice to get 1% of the money I’ve given you over the years back in trade!). The new kill cam might let 360 players know what it’s like to be nothing but a helpless human grenade that only kills people by dying (though with Martyr, most of them know that already). But a number of urgent PC flaws remain unaddressed:

1. Lack of “Get out of the damn way!” button

He’s killed us all, on every Call of Duty server we’ve ever played on. You know him - he’s found the perfect spot with a half-millimeter gap to a doorway on the other side of the map. Any day now somebody’s going to come through it, and this time he won’t miss, then he’ll get a WHOLE KILL to himself and until that point he will NEVER MOVE. Especially when you and two other players are desperately trying to get indoors before a little thing called an “Airstrike” immolates the entire team.

This guy is proof that there is no such thing as latent mental powers, because if there were, his stupid immobile face would have been punched into paste by rage-fueled psychic blows by now.

2. Spawncampers on Shipment are still not teleported directly to hell

Ah, the great game of skill that is Shipment. Appear, get shot in the back, die. That might be a wonderfully bleak cinematic vignette on the futility of war, but a fun CoD4 server level it isn’t. The enemies ability to ambush you as you teleport into the theater of combat doesn’t do the game’s claims of realism any good, and the fact that some syphilitic skill-lepers camp in those angled gaps behind the spawn point adds cheap, sportsmanshipless fuel to the terrible design fire.

Luckily this is only a problem on Shipment, so it’s not like it damages a real, non-”utter dogs breakfast of a flesh-blender” map.

3. Martyrdom still a perk

In a shocking oversight which at this point can only be attributed to a psychotic blind spot afflicting the entirety of Infinity Ward, the abortion of anti-skill that is Martyrdom remains a perk. This despite the numerous suggestions I’ve sent them, including
a) Remove Martyrdom from game
b) Players who select martyrdom are sent directly to the singleplayer training mission; not allowed to rejoin multiplayer until they learn to shoot
c) Team with most Martyrs loses instantly
d) Every time you get a Martyr kill you lose XP, as it is the exact opposite of the normal “gain XP by improving skills” idea

4. Frag x 3 kill weighting

Watching the Killcam on CoD4 servers that allow it can be very educational - you can learn from your mistakes, or from the skill of the player who bested you on the field of digital combat. Which makes it all the more galling when your 15-kill streak is ended by some idiot on the other side of the map with the Frag x 3 perk, unable to see a damn thing and just flinging the things out like incredibly-less-festive confetti before somebody who actually knows how to aim a rifle puts him out of his misery.

A simple script would fix this problem - if a player gets kills after flinging out three grenades immediately on spawning, he only gets half points. If he hasn’t actually killed anyone with his gun he gets no points, and a small insulting message pops up on the screen. Or if Activision doesn’t want to insult him directly, I’ll be happy to do it for them: “You are a cheap scumbag who fails even at pretending to succeed in a game.”