Time to Kill, Part 1: Aiming

Updated 2/12/2012. That's a lot of 2s.

I thought that I would bring up a topic I've found pretty useful for thinking about weapons and playstyle in general: time to kill. Basically, how long does it take you to go from "encountering a dude" to "dude full of bullets"? Whoever has the shorter time to kill will win firefights. A lot of things go into it, and I'll leave weapon-specific stuff like accuracy and rate of fire to other posts, but it's also good to consider stuff like technical skill, situational awareness, and yomi. This post will focus on one of the most fundamental technical skills: aim.

The contribution to time to kill is pretty obvious: if you aim slowly, people who aim faster will shoot you. So, the first thing to do is set your sensitivity to 10. If you're at 4, or whatever, you will be literally unable to aim quickly because, with your stick mashed as far as it will go, it will still take too long to get through the angle between where you're starting and where your target is.

Higher sensitivity also teaches a few good habits like using finer movements to aim. If you're having trouble keeping a bead on targets, try using the left stick to make fine adjustments by moving, rather than changing your aim. It's worth noting that scoping in slows down your look speed in proportion to how much magnification you get: pistols have no magnification in ADS, so you can turn faster in ADS than you can with an ACOG scoped assault rifle. One way of looking at it is that you can pick a sight based on how much you'd like to drop your sensitivity for fine adjustments to aim. As I mentioned in the post on the Type 95, you may also want to pick up a burst fire or semiauto gun to practice aiming accurately and quickly.

There is another approach to aiming:

We all love this guy.

Annoying loadouts aside, there are a lot of guns the steady aim/hipfire playstyle work with (e.g shotguns, PP90M1, akimbo pistols) and it teaches a slightly different style of aiming than using ADS a lot. In particular, you get even more practice making fine movements, since you don't have the effective sensitivity drop ADS causes. Moreover, since you'll be working at closer ranges, enemies will move through your field of view faster, so you'll need to track them faster, as well. It's also worth noting that you get more practice accommodating the autoaim algorithm.

Basically, there are a lot of people who run around willy-nilly with FMG9 akimbos out, and a lot who camp in corners peering down their ACOG scopes. If you feel like your game with one of those options is plateauing, try switching to the other playstyle, or a less forgiving gun - swap that ACR out for an LMG, or the FMG9s for some revolvers. Once you're not relying on the power of your loadout to reduce your time to kill, switching back to good guns is a snap.

Update: I was thinking a bit more about aiming, and it's important to say that in the end, you need muscle memory acquired from practice. There's no silver bullet that will double your K/D overnight, but thinking about/changing up how you play can definitely help - especially if you have specific weak spots like quick aiming at close range or zeroing in on tiny targets across the map.