There’s no debating that the Ghost perk in Black Ops 1 was a huge point of controversy for the title. Some people argued that because of things like the Blackbird and how easy it was to do well in BO1, that Ghost wasn’t that big of a deal. Other people argued that Ghost made the game play incredibly slow and enabled campers like no Call of Duty has ever enabled them before.

I felt that reality was somewhere in between the two. The Blackbird made BO1 a fast-paced, gun-on-gun killfest, but until you called one in, every match was a drawn-out campfest.

The solution most people supplied for the imbalances presented by Ghost were typically either include Stopping Power in the same tier as Ghost or make it so Ghost users appeared every 3rd sweep of a UAV.

In my opinion, however, the upcoming Black Ops II has hit the stealth perk dead center.

No perk should reward a player 100% of the time, especially if that perk affects the enemy team. BOII’s Ghost perk only protects players from enemy UAVs when the player is on the move, planting/defusing a bomb, or controlling scorestreaks. To me, that is perfectly balanced. Now Ghost only rewards players that stay on the move (which you can’t do 100% of the time) or play the objective. Side note: Ghost working while standing on a Domination flag is pointless because if you’re close enough to capture a flag, 9 out of 10 times the enemy can see you, in addition to getting a warning that the flag is being captured.

Playing the objective in COD has always been risky behavior. BOII’s Ghost is going to make it easier for players to minimize the risk that comes with playing the objective. This, in combination with it not working when stationary and objective points being worth more than kills, is going to get players moving and playing the objective. Of course there are always going to be campers, but at least now they won’t have the luxury of being invisible.

Why Stopping Power isn’t a balanced counter to Ghost

Stopping Power, like Ghost, rewarded players 100% of the time by making every bullet they fired a little more deadly. Not running it put you at an immediate disadvantage to anyone that was. That’s the baseline definition of imbalanced. Stopping Power was just as imbalanced as Ghost. Perks shouldn’t require other perks that act as counters to create balance. All the perks should be balanced within themselves in addition to remaining balanced when combined with other perks.

What are your thoughts? Are you worried that the seemingly endless possibilites of the Pick 10 Create-A-Class system are going to be too easily manipulated to combine perks in ways that will cause imbalances? Do you think Treyarch is taking the balance of the perks in the right direction?