Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare players have a new problem: blackscoping. This technique allows snipers to be scary accurate with their rifles.
Blackscoping is a bit like quickscoping, a trick used in past Call of Duty games and other multiplayer shooters. A quickscoper fires their sniper rifle when their crosshairs meet right after they zoom in, giving them a fast and accurate shot before the scope can start to sway. This allows the sniper to be deadly even at close range or on the move - situations during which they're supposed to be at a disadvantage.
YouTuber Daniel Kross notes that Sledgehammer Games has tried to combat this technique by adding more sway to sniping. However, that change doesn't affect blackscoping. The player fires almost immediately after bringing up their scope (a window of only a couple frames). In other words, they're firing before they even really look through the scope. The sway hasn't kicked in just yet so the shot fires perfectly straight ahead.
"You can do this up close, you can do this mid-range, you can do this as far as you can see across the map as long as you have your center screen positioned on their body," Kross says.
He adds that it's very hard to zero in on players on the other side of the map without looking through the scope. It's more likely that players will be using this for closer range kills. However, really skilled snipers who can learn to blackscope at long range will be a force to be reckoned with. He uses the trick to great effect for one-shot kills at all distances in his video.
Kross says that he's known about this trick since Advanced Warfare's launch. He was worried that it would become widely used and throw off the balance of the game. Now that many people have figured it out on their own, though, he thinks the video will do less harm.
This blackscoping definitely doesn't seem like an intended mechanic. I hope that Sledgehammer Games notices its use and decides to patch it out. While this trick admittedly takes some skill, there should be a trade-off in mobility and close-range deadliness for someone who wields a sniper rifle.
The sooner they can fix this blackscoping, the better. Sledgehammer recently released a sniper-only One Shot Mode. Every player has a MORS rifle, reduced health and no secondary weapon. I can't help but feel like this trick would wreak havoc on those matches.
