Totally true. I'm not bagging on his play style, but I do want to point out that the guys capping points behind him are helping him immensely so he can stay on the front lines where he's most effective. Teamwork! If everyone ran out to the front like this guy, his team would get triple capped and would probably lose. That being said, his work is totally keeping pressure off of his teammates who are capturing the zones - it takes all kinds.

Eh, I dunno anymore with control. I've seen videos of teams winning control games while never capping a point; one of my lowest stats is zone captures/neutralizations, and one of my highest is win percentage. Holding positions of strength, and funneling enemies into those positions, seems to be the best strat; this guy can kill people from positions of weakness, and I guess he really doesn't need strats when he's as good at it as he is.

Cheers, indeed! Let's see...

I'm going to play devil's advocate here, just for the sake of argument. Also because my personal anecdata refutes some of yours.

But, but... I was playing devil's advocate! I think you have to play God's advocate :)

1. He gets a grenade thrown at him what?

He's spending most of his time doing the following things: 1) moving. He's always moving, always looking for the next enemy. He rarely camps for more than two kills before changing position. It's highly effective, and I'll wager that more than a few grenades are thrown at places he recently abandoned over the course of the game. 2) attacking enemies en route to a control point, rather than waiting for them to attack the point directly. This is also tremendously effective. He gets the drop on them almost every time, and most of these enemies are probably saving grenades to throw at the control points rather than at some solo guy.

Unless in the act of taking a control point, who in their right mind isn't moving? Even the guys he takes out are moving. And he sits in wide open spots all the time and is almost never attacked from behind or sniped. I like the idea of staying out of the way, in unusual spots, and attacking people en route, but he doesn't do that. He is in fact in the middle of the map most of the time sitting on choke points. Heck, at 8:08-8:15 he effectively has 3 enemies surrounding him, and not only do they take him one at a time (bloody hollywood ninja syndrome), they don't even do damage to him. They aren't distracted, he is on their radar, and he did nothing fancy besides have a machine gun.

Well, lots of players spend time guarding a single choke point rather than moving between them all. Also, especially on Shores of time, the current prevailing strategy seems to be to hold B and C and snipe them both from the jungle-ish area. Contrastingly, this guy is constantly advancing on the enemy spawn, moving choke point to choke point, and never stays in the same place for more than a couple of kills. I did this last night, with great results, and it's far more intense than when I decide "I'll guard B." When I say he's moving, I mean actively changing his area of engagement. He's seeking enemies rather than waiting for them to come to him.

As for grenades, since when do people only use them on groups? Perhaps I'm more grenade happy than most, but I use them to get kills. I'll especially use them to make someone go away (AOE grenades) or to hopefully win a fight I'm likely to lose (stickies). Take 3:16 for example. The first guy was hosed, but that second guy would have done well to toss a sticky or AOE grenade up there, either to get the kill immediately or hopefully push him back until golden gun expires, because that player should have known they weren't getting out alive by simply using their gun (which, of note, they didn't even use).

It makes sense for a warlock or titan, maybe. Hunter grenades all suck except for the trip mine, and that's not so good at "panic" situations. Regardless, the key here is that the enemy isn't expecting him to attack in most of these positions so they aren't looking at him half the time. Unfortunately, the cues for an ally dying aren't as obvious as for getting shot yourself, so if your buddy dies next to you, you aren't likely to know where the bullets came from and which way to look, so you'll look where you expect someone to be. But this guy isn't there; he's just to the side of that, or down, or up, or... And then you're dead.

2. The enemy can't snipe worth beans.

Possibly true, but he's also really, really good at sniping. I know I'm a pretty good sniper, and I can't get the quickscope headshots this guy is getting. That being said, in most of my games, I feel like I encounter enemy snipers who are this bad in almost every game. It didn't seem special that he wins the sniper duels, so much as that he's quick-scoping the guys who are between him and the enemy snipers.

There were a few good sniper kills on his part, but he only had 13 kills with a sniper, and two of those were by explosion, not direct hits. Also, on half his shots he used two shots to kill. Perhaps I'm comparing him to dedicated sniper videos which isn't fair, since that's not what this game was, but I didn't find them outstanding. In part because of that, I routinely watched him sniper duel and wonder why the enemy didn't kill him.

That opening volley was beautiful and is a hard thing to pull off. But yeah, the enemy snipers weren't good. Still, that's consistent with my experience as well - I'm almost always the best sniper on the map, bar none, so it didn't surprise me to see him chewing through them.

On the other side of the fence, I count 9 shots taken at him, only 3 hit, and he dies once. And those are just the ones I could see, which means he could see them. I would expect snipers he doesn't see to land shots more often, but as far as I can tell that never happens.

In most games I play on that map it's a death sentence to step out between Point C and B. You will have half a second to live, because the area snipers will not spend two bullets taking you out.

You're playing against me, that's the rub! Seriously, I'm not sure if you're having bad luck or what. As a hunter, it's harder to enemy snipers to track me because I move more quickly than the other classes, but the difference isn't that huge.

3. He gets supered all of once. once. I'm lucky if I go a game, a winning game where I crush the enemy and not get arc bladed twice.

As with #1, most people in control use their supers at the control points. Since he's using choke points rather than control points as his hunting ground (and moving a lot), few people are likely to burn supers in those situations just to kill the one guy. Also... his teammates are terrible, so it's likely the enemy is supering 3 or 4 of them at a time all over the place. When you know you're gonna land a Triple-Down, why burn a super for that one good guy?

Because that one good guy is getting half his kills from golden guns and a bigass machine gun, both of which can be robbed from him with the use of a super. Personally, the frequency of my getting supered goes up 10 fold the moment I lay down a time based super. It also goes up if I waltz around with a machine gun.

Your logic is logical, but since the players on both sides seem pretty bad, it's more likely that they'd rather be greedy with their supers for more points than kill this guy to shut him down.

4. He is rarely flanked.

Again, he's rarely flanked because he moves so often. He's almost never waiting for the enemy to come to him, but is aggressively advancing his position, meaning he picks the point of engagement, which is a huge advantage. It's very hard to flank a moving target. Also, if you watch his radar as he plays, he's definitely moving towards whoever is closest (and falling back if there are people on opposite sides), which means he's usually taking any potential flanker head-on.

Great idea in theory, but can hardly be used on that map. When I say "flanked" I don't mean intentionally flanked, I mean the chances of two enemies converging on his central location. He spends most of his time in the middle where flanking from at least 3 protected directions is possible. One way to guarantee someone puts a sniper bullet in one ear and out the other is to do what he did at 2:44-3:00, 5:38-5:46, or 7:29

See my note on constantly advancing. The enemy spawns are changing all the time in this game and this guy is there immediately. The result is that they are off balance (clearly) for the whole game, and never really get their firing lanes squared away.

5. He couldn't do this with the DBO crew. In other words his team mates helped him out by sucking. The game would have been over at 30 kills if his team mates had been doing anything. With the DBO crew playing with him he'd be lucky to get 20 before the game cap of 20K :)

I agree. Couldn't do this with my regular group of friends either. I have one friend who routinely gets 7+ K/D ratios, but he laments playing with us because he rarely breaks 10 kills during a game. Having a team full of great players means everyone gets mediocre point totals. I had one game where my team got a 3 cap and we won 20k-4k, and no one on our team had above 3500 points.

While this doesn't apply so much to pre-made teams, I think that is part of my point. Not only was the enemy significantly worse than him, so was his own team. I have a hard time believing those were the best players Bungie could match him with. Thus my comment about Trueskill getting reset.

You are probably right about this one.

And why didn't someone fire at least ONE rocket at 4:45? For pete's sake they ALL had heavy ammo, and in games I play the first thing my team does is unload a rocket at that center point, immediately followed by 2 more that are redundant.

You get more points with MGs? That's why I use an MG, and it seems like most people in this game are using them too.

Also, that use of dropped heavy ammo the entire game? People like him are why we can't have nice things.

Exactly. And I'm glad for it. So OP.

Agreed :)

Fun little back and forth. My knowledge of all these sorts of things tends to go up when I discuss it and am forced to spend some time contemplating it. Cheers :)

Totes!