Spawn camping is the practice of camping near a spawn location with the intention of killing any player who spawns there. This occurs mainly in first-person shooter games such as Combat Evolved, Call of Duty, Quake, Unreal Tournament, and the Battlefield series. It is a common tactic and controversial issue in online gaming communities, where many consider it to be a form of cheating, or, at best, an unfair tactic and bad form.

As with other forms of camping, spawn camping in public, informal games is generally seen as unsportsmanlike and unfair. In competitive gaming leagues, on the other hand, spawn camping is usually accepted as part of the game and the result of player(s) failing to prevent dominance by their opponents.

Spawn Camping Styles/Types

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• Simple spawn-camping: A camper uses regular weapons to kill players as they spawn.
• Spawn-sniping: A player camps at a position where they can easily snipe a player soon after they spawn.
• Loop bombing/strafing: Where a flying vehicle is continuously flown over spawn points.
• Vehicle spawn camping: Popular in Halo and the Battlefield games, involves parking a tank or other large vehicle around spawn points to acrue kills.
• Spawn-mining: Where proximity mines or other explosives are used to kill spawning players.
• Shotgun-spawning: People who invade the base with a shotgun or other close-range weapon to efficiently kill players at point-blank range.

Reactions

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Game developers are now aware of this particular style of play and have developed balance fixes for the problem, including:

• Life Buffering: A player may spawn slighter tougher than is otherwise the normal default 'healthy' state, such as in Quake 3.
• Invulnerability: A player may spawn invulnerable to damage for a limited period of time, although this is typically not the case in First-person shooters. This brings another problem of attacking players being unable to defend themselves against invincible respawning players.
• Player choices: A player can choose where and when to respawn.
• Level Design:
  • The spawning areas are made too numerous to cover.
  • The spawning areas are in 'safe' places:
    • The spawn places cannot be returned to upon leaving.
    • The spawn places are inaccessable by the team that typically has an advantage, e.g. most of the spy spawns in the Splinter Cell series' versus multiplayer modes (in which the opposing mercenary team cannot reach the spawn due to character movement limitations).
    • The spawn places are in friendly territory where non-hostile players are likely to be more numerous than hostile ones.
    • The spawn is protected by automatic defenses which eliminate most enemies who come too close. (Day of Defeat, Renegade, Live and Reloaded)
    • The spawn places have easily accessible weapons to defend oneself with.
• Dynamic spawns: In some games, such as the Call of Duty series, the spawn points change depend on where players are concentrated on the map, allowing players to spawn away from direct enemy threats.

See also

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• Camping
• Corpse camping
• Spam

Competitive computer and video gaming techniques | Computer and video game gameplay