But the skill gap is so compressed, that itGÇÖs like a slot machine. You might as well just sit down at a slot machine and have a thing that pops up an says GÇ£I got a kill!GÇ¥ TheyGÇÖve taken individual skill out of the equation so much. So you see these guysGÇöI see it all the time, they come in to play Red Orchestra, and theyGÇÖre like GÇ£This gameGÇÖs just too hardcore. IGÇÖm awesome at Call of Duty, so thereGÇÖs something wrong with your game. Because IGÇÖm not successful at playing this game, so it must suck. IGÇÖm not the problem, itGÇÖs your game.GÇ¥ And sometimes as designers, it is our game. Sometimes we screw up, sometimes we design something thatGÇÖs not accesible enough, they canGÇÖt figure it out, we didnGÇÖt give them enough information to figure out where to goGǪ but more often than not, itGÇÖs because Call of Duty compressed their skill gap so much that these guys never needed to get good at a shooter. They never needed to get good at their twitch skills with a mouse.

Players like Elliot [Cannon, Lead Designer] and I, back in the Quake and Unreal days, you know, we had to get good at aiming. These guys donGÇÖt have to anymore. The skill gap is so compressed that like, GÇ£The game makes me feel that IGÇÖm awesome.GÇ¥ These guys, when I actually watch them play, theyGÇÖre actually very poor FPS players. And I donGÇÖt think itGÇÖs because theyGÇÖre incapable of getting good, I think itGÇÖs because they never had to get good. They get enough kills in Call of Duty to feel like theyGÇÖre awesome, but they never really had to develop their FPS skills beyond that.

And when you try to get them to branch out, their knee-jerk reaction is GÇ£The training wheels have come off, IGÇÖm gonna fall!GÇ¥

...just going to leave this here.

I don't think 'ruined' is the best word for the guy to use. It's kind of like saying "Star Wars ruined a generation of sci-fi fans" by shifting the community away from hard sci-fi.

There are too many subjective tastes involved for anyone to make a claim on tactical or arcadey shooters being superior. People are going to like what they like, and it's absolutely unfair to call them 'broken' because they prefer one style over another.

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Also, I'm not much of a CoD player (I generally avoid non-sci-fi "military shooters"), so I'm a little lost regarding how 'easy' everyone refers to it as. Aren't you just as likely to be somebody else's easy kill as you are to rack up kills of your own?

I suck at CoD but own at dust....then again i have a sagaris.