Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer screams at you to slow down if you want to go farther

gamesradar.com:

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is doing everything it can to make you slow down. It's quite the shift, particularly as Infinity Ward (and the litany of Activision studios that have followed in its footsteps) has spent the better part of 17 years conditioning us to navigate online battlefields with highly specific tactics. We were taught to sprint between firefights with two eyes glued to the mini-map, to reload our weapons the second a single bullet is fired from the chamber, and to aggressively press every opportunity to push at a frontline – as it was in Call of Duty 2; so it remains in Vanguard.

If you played the Modern Warfare 2 beta, you'll know that engaging in combat as you would in any other Call of Duty invites a frequency of frustration to play sessions. Improved audio fidelity ensures that sprinting sounds a death knell, signaling your position with impressive clarity to surrounding soldiers. Mini-map functionality has been drastically altered, and using it as a navigational guide will lead you to stumble clumsily between engagements. Checkpoint reloading has added additional consideration to swapping out a magazine at first opportunity, and the time-to-kill (TTK) is so drastically fast that firing at the first sight of an enemy invites little more than swift retribution.  

To survive – let alone thrive – in the core 6v6 Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer experience, you need to slow down, check your corners, and carefully place your shots. It's a defiant change to a long-established pace of play, and I'm a big fan of it. 

Unsurprisingly, such fundamental changes have already sown division amongst the more vocal corners of the Call of Duty community. But the truth is, something fundamental had to change. You need