FCF Glossary

Blob Spawn Strategy

This is a spawn layout that spawns opposing players next to each other, essentially creating an intentional kill cluster. It is a strategy sometimes used on Deathmatch maps where riotous play is desired. In general, this is considered a bad strategy, since it inevitably leads to SKD gameplay.

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Death Room

In Far Cry 2, the Death Room describes the state where a player's character has died and is waiting to respawn. Players in the Death Room cannot hear or be heard by players that are not in the Death Room, but can talk to other players in the Death Room state. Each team effectively has its own Death Room, meaning you can't communicate with players from the opposing team in the Death Room.

Players in the Death Room will respawn into the game at the time indicated by an on-screen countdown timer. While waiting for respawn, the left and right bumper buttons can be used to cycle through various cameras to watch the action in the play area.

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Kill Cluster

A kill cluster is an area of the map where spawned players immediately enter into an area that is densely populated with enemies. These are usually found on Deathmatch maps where the spawns are placed too closely together or are placed near a choke point. Leads to SKD spirals.

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Monte Carlo Spawn Strategy

A strategy for placing spawns around the map in a seemingly random, but fairly even distribution. Especially good for Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch game modes.

The name is derived from a statistical method for generating random data values, which, in turn, gets its name from a popular French gambling capital.

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Shotgun Topology

This refers to a map or major map section that either has two choke point exits, or due to game mode flow, has only two effective choke point exits at either end. The term originally described tunnel-like battle areas with choke points at either end. But it has been discovered that even more complex maps that boil down to having choke points at oppositte ends tend to suffer from similar gameplay issues, even though they don't appear, at first, to be anything like the classic shotgun map.

[Insert point graph of classic shotgun topology]

[Insert point graph of extended shotgun topology]

Note that it is possible for a map area with multiple exits to still qualify as a shotgun topology for a particular game mode if the only paths to the goal points are through opposing choke point exits.

[Insert point graph of a map that exhibits shotgun topology for CTD]

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SKD or SKD Spiral

SKD is an abbreviation for Spawn, Kill, Die. It describes the situation where a player repeatedly spawns, possibly gets a quick kill and then immediately dies, sending the player back to the Death Room. This situation usually occurs due to bad spawn placement, intentional SKD spawn placement, or as a result of spawning near highly contentious areas of a map. Generally, SKD is considered to be a bad thing, as it frustrates players who end up spending more time in the Death Room than they do playing.

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Twin Spawn

Spawning two opposing players near each other at the same time. Twin spawning is a bad practice that usually leads to kill clusters and SKD behavior.