I'd like to start off this blog by saying that pickups are the backbone of the top tier of the competitive community of this country. Nearly every single player in one of the top teams (mint, bvd, sg, pantheon, bfb, sec8 e.t.c) has got hundreds of pickups. Overseas they play "elite" mixes or clannies pretty much all day long but here our community is simply not big enough.

Pickups also serve as an elevation-system for someone who is a completely new at competitive gaming or to CoD. I only got anywhere in cod4 locally because of pickups. You could say that I'm a product of the pickup system

If you want to get into one of the top teams it is pretty much as simple as playing a lot of pickups

Anyway, to the problem I have:

There are tons of new guys playing pickups, which is really great and which I'm sure no-one is unhappy about. Personally I think it's fantastic that we have more people interested in playing competitively. However, these guys are getting into one really bad habit in pickups because they don't really understand the game. Basically, they have learnt that if they camp they get kills. Aiming in CoD4 is really easy and camping will almost definitely get you kills. While this might be all well-and-fine in a pickup, it really does teach you a bad habit - let me explain with an example:

*Player A on defence is the last guy alive, the bomb goes down. 5/4/3/2 players on attack are alive.*
Now Player A just camps and waits for the attacking players to try kill him, instead of going for the objective. This often works out for Player A because he is just camping waiting for them and they end up rushing at him one by one because they want an extra kill. Because he's camping he sometimes kills all of the attacking players and still has time to defuse the bomb. As a result, Player A may think he has played well. While this might be the case, I don't really think so.

The reason being that I've seen a lot of these new guys play for a few months and start dropping 30 bombs in pickups, but then they get into a real clan match and go 2-22 or something similar. I think one of the main reasons for this is that they have learnt to only camp in pickups because it gets them a nice score but then when they get to clan matches it simply doesn't work. In the above scenario, I can almost guarantee you that any top team would not try to attack the guy by himself, they would simply wait for the bomb to explode and win the round. Even if one or two players did try attack the defending guy they would make sure one or two camped back to ensure the round win.

Anyway, I thought I would write this blog to remind some of the newer guys that at the end of the day all that matters is the objectives. I really don't care about how you play in pickups, I just think you need to understand that there is a transition between pickups and proper clan matches. You need to be able to make this transition and adapt to the different style of play in order to succeed