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Head shot… Boo-yah; 50 pts for using a pun in the title. For those of you that may not know what I’m talking about… in the latest release from DICE; Battlefield Bad Company 2 (known in forums, social media, and irc channels  as BFBC2) continues the enhanced feature of completely leveling a building during game play. Don’t let the blog title fool you though, this post isn’t really going to focus on that aspect. My intention is to show you how to level your character in the multi-player section of this game. I don’t have a nextgen gaming console so this is specifically related to the PC version of BFBC2.

Familiarizing Yourself with the System

The F2000 is a modular weapon system; its principal component is a compact 5.56x45mm NATO-caliber assault rifle configured in a bullpup layout.

Seriously; take your time and look at the multi-player interface. Understand your limited control system, take a look at the game modes, maps, etc. The game interface allows you to view who’s playing on any given server, but I really question the point of it. It doesn’t give you a synopsis of what the player ranks are or kits being used.

This was the biggest hurdle for me as a player coming from the good ol’ days of the earlier Battlefield series. I didn’t understand how the multi-player layer worked. I spent a good amount of my time in single-player mode and got a bit cocky as to how easy it was for me to get head shots off the AI. When I stepped onto my first multi-player server, it loaded “conquest” mode for Arica Harbor. OMG; that was a bad experience. It was NOTHING like the single-player game (except for crouching, my pinky finger still hurt). I had a horrible weapon and no 4x scope. I was basically shooting in the dark.

So; after dusting myself off and trying other game modes and maps, I came to the conclusion that this game is TOO HARD for me to play. It was very discouraging to log on and get my arse handed to me on a regular basis. I tried searching for tips, but they only lead me to ginormous and unreadable forum posts. This post will probably be no different, but at least it’ll be legible.

I might try and do a series of post, but we’ll see how that really turns out. For the time being just try and grab the concept of what I’m trying to say and not really the letter. For the most part, I chose to level up the Assault kit. My main goal was to get back that 4x scope I was so used to having in the single-player game.

Get Used to Being Pwn’d

An opposing player sneaking up behind another player. Looks like someone might get "knifed".

Don’t believe the hype! People will tell you that you can join “noob” servers to get familiar with the game. I believe the level cap is at 50 and I’ve seen plenty of level 30-40′s pwn’in noobs left and right. There’s no way of enforcing a level cap on a server. The server title will say “Noobs Only (No one lower than 20)”, but enter at your own risk.

At first I was concerned about my playing history – my game stats. Later; I realized that I will never make it to the top 10 list, so why bother. Just get in there and have fun, learn the game. My death-to-kill ratio is laughable. I will tell you, though, what ends up happening is after a while you’ll figure out how to stay alive longer.

The Silver Lining: Awards System

So; keeping in mind that I’m aiming for my 4x scope, I focused on playing with the Assault kit, just about all the time. You have a couple different game modes:

• Rush
• Conquest – not a big enough platform for points (explained below)
• Squad Deathmatch – very close combat. Too many good players… playing against your squad.
• Squad Rush

Recently; I’ve figured out that a small group playing in “squad rush” mode is the best way to level your player.  There is a player-cap of 32. You’d think having 16 targets would make it easier for you to get more experience points.  From my experience that only means that there are probably 10 players on the opposing team that have better equipment to pwn you with. It became really frustrating. Since I consider myself a decent first-person shooter (FPS) player. I’ve seen that playing a server with 6-10 players (on a 32 player max) is a great way of racking up some points.  With fewer players:

1. You have a better sense of who’s on the field and their possible skill set. Once you figure that out, you can then see who you can dominate.
2. You have a better chance of making more kills. More kills means more time on the server actually playing instead of respawning.
3. You have a better chance of earning more awards and experience points.

This is where familiarizing yourself with the award system works out to your advantage.

For every kill you make you earn 50 points. You also get points if you did heavy damage to a player, but didn’t kill him. When your squadmate does kill him you get assisted points. In “rush” mode the objective is either to attack a set of bases and set a charge (which you get points for setting) or defending a set of bases and disarming charges. The advantage over “conquest” mode is in conquest mode you only get points for capturing a base, instead of a possible two or three sets of points for attacking or defending a base. Along with those points you also get points for actually having a decent game via insignias and pins.

For example: If you kill 7 enemies with an assault rifle, you get the “Assault Rifle Efficiency Pin”. It’s worth 100 pts. If you’re apart of the best squad for that round you get “Gold Squad Pin”. It’s worth 200 pts. The real gems are the insignias. If you spawn off a squad member instead of a base 200 times you get 5,000 pts. These points aren’t related to your kit though, it’s for your overall ranking. What this does is get your “specification” skills up-to-par. Allowing you to gain access to using a red-dot scope instead of the generic rifle scope, gain a “grenade vest” thus giving you twice the capacity of 40mm and hand grenade ammunition. Most of the skill set in the single-player game is taken for granted. You have NONE of that when you enter multi-player.

Checking Your Stats

The biggest part of leveling is having the ability to view your progress at any time. The in-game system is pretty decent, but I really like the web site: www.bfbcs.com. This site is able to queue your account for an update, MUCH quicker than the official www.battlefieldbadcompany2.com site. I’m really baffled as to why that is. They also have a really neat signature system (for forums, etc). It’s totally customizable and they have plenty of templates available.

I hope this post is helpful to you. If you like what I did, let me know and I’ll really consider posting more Battlefield-related posts. Enjoy the game and most of all, don’t give up! It gets easier as you level.

You like my mathematical equation for dead playtime with World of Warcraft on a linuxbox?  When I first installed Fedora 8, I ran Wine 0.9[something] with nVidia’s proprietary drivers.  I had no problem playing World of Warcraft.  I did notice something though – that every time there was a kernel update – when I restarted my Xserver that things would be kind of haywire.  I would normally have to reinstall the video driver and then I’ll be back to status quo.  So; now I’m a bit more seasoned with linux and open source or non-proprietary software means a little more to me than before – and getting that to work with WoW has proved to be quite difficult.

The Free-be Process

First I’m going to talk about the natural progression of a user migrating from the “Windows/Mac” world into this vast ocean of the “linux” world.  I heard on a podcast that most folks come into the linux world for various reasons, but the consistent reason is for the FREE software.  It’s awesome NOT having to pay anything anymore.  As for me, I’ve been used to not paying for software for a very long time… I’m a digital pirate.  There; I’ve come out of the closet (on that issue, I’m really a heterosexual).  I haven’t paid for software in over 10+ years.  But over the past couple years my conscience has gotten the best of me and my escape from the underground is linux.

So; the natural progress is people want free software, later on when they become familiar with all this software – they are exposed to GNU and the fight between proprietary and non-proprietary software.  And that is where I am, my friend.  I wish to run linux with no proprietary software – well except for the NEEDED ones like Flash, etc.  If you’re running open source/non-proprietary software – you will have less complications as the kernel and operating system progresses and improves.

Getting WoW Installed

Ok; back to my dilemma at hand.  I installed Fedora 9 (F9) and I was stoked to see that Wine released their stable version, which is “one point oh” (1.0).  It’s a great milestone to release a 1.0 version and Wine has been in works for years.  I was happy to see that F9 had this in their repos.  I installed it and immediately installed World of Warcraft.  I had no problems with it.  I also installed the kmod-livna drivers for my nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card.  It worked because I was able to apply “Desktop Effects” and get the whole cube and wobbly windows effect.  But when I try to run WoW nothing would happen.  So; I ran the command in my terminal to see what the error messages were and it seemed to have not registered something with the Wine/Windows Registry.

I’m not certain which component is the culprit, but so far I can’t install any of my games using Wine 1.0.  GTA: San Andreas, Battlefield 2, etc.  I always get some freaky error and I usually just move on to other things I have to do.  So; I’ll try and keep a log of what happens, but this is my situation at the time.  I’ve done some Google searches and WIne forum searches, but no luck yet.

This game looks like lots of fun. I’m a big Battlefield 2 fan, and I recently found out that this game will be free. Can’t wait to get my hands on it. Visit www.battlefield-heroes.com for more information.