If you’ve played Bad Company 2 for awhile, you may be developing some bad habits that you’ve carried over from previous first person shooters. Hopefully, this list will allow you to notice some of the bad habits you might have and fix them. At the very least, you might get a laugh from noticing them in others.

Rocket Overkill

So you’ve an AK74 and an M2 Carl Gustav at your disposal. There’s an enemy in the distance who looks like trouble. You could just as easily take him out right now without too much difficulty. Instead, you run up to him and blow him away with the M2CG just to make sure you get him in one hit. It’s cheap, and it doesn’t work as well as it used to ever since DICE weakened their splash damage.

Not only will you make yourself the bane of everyone on the server (including other rocketeers, the hypocrites), but you’ll also be wasting your rockets on human targets instead of saving them for the vehicles. What are you going to do when a Humvee comes by and you have no rockets to fire at it?

Sniping in Port Valdez

It’s Port Valdez. You know the map. Your team needs to take out the enemy’s M-COM stations. Instead of taking one of the buggies to head down into the battlefield, you and the rest of your team decides instead to camp up at the top of the hill that looks out onto the field below. You might think it’s a battle of attrition, but the attacking team’s the one with everything to lose and nothing to gain by camping way up there.

On the one hand, you might think you’re supporting your team by offering covering fire to the attackers below you. But on the other hand, so are the 10 other snipers perched next to you up on the hill. All it takes is for one lucky commando to rush the hilltop to kill half the team.

Saving Grenades

There’s a couple of guys holed up in the bunker up ahead, taking pot shots at your buddies and laying some heavy cover fire on the field below. You’ve managed to outflank them. A grenade would clear the place out quickly, but you decide instead to run in with your gun blazing. Your head is promptly blown clean off. The grenade would’ve been a better idea, but you decided to save it for later. Too bad for you, there was no later. Your team just lost.

Reloading!

You just scored yourself a kill. There are 20 bullets left in your magazine. You’re still in the middle of a firefight. There's a couple of guys ahead of you who haven’t yet spotted you. You could use the situation to your advantage by taking them out with the remainder of your ammo. Instead, you decide to reload your weapon. Big mistake. You’re dead.

Checking the Score

You’re on a killing streak. You know your team is winning and you’re feeling good about it. What do you do? You hit the Tab button to check your score and in that instant, you’re killed by a sniper.

If you were any good, you wouldn’t be worrying about your score every few minutes. It’s not as if your score managed to jump a thousand points when you weren’t paying attention. After all, you were too busy checking your score sheet instead of playing the game!

You can worry about the score when the battle’s over.

The First Time Wasn’t Enough

Ever get killed by a sniper while walking up some hill? It pisses you off, doesn’t it? Instead of thinking, “Hey, there’s a sniper here and if I walk up this direction I’ll probably get killed again,” your rage takes over and you decide, foolishly, to walk up the same damn hill thinking you’ll be able to fire a shot off in revenge before the sniper spots you and kills you for a second time. That’s never what happens. Rinse and repeat.

Rookie Pilot

You’ve seen the YouTube videos of exceptional Apache gunship pilots hovering around the battlefield, taking out their targets with pin point precision and skillfully avoiding rocket fire like dodgeball players. What those videos don’t tell you is that those pilots practiced their skills for dozens of hours, if not longer.

As for you–well, you just bought the game a couple of weeks ago. Practicing on a public server during a live match isn’t the best way to hone your skills. It’s a great way to render the chopper useless for the duration of the time you’re in it, though. Well done!

Switching Teams

Your team’s losing. What better way to deliver the killing blow to your own team than by switching teams and hoping no one notices? Traitor.

Where I come from, we call that a dick move.

The Heavy Medic

Just because you’re a medic equipped with an M249 that dispenses bullets like nobody’s business doesn’t mean you’re as strong as the Heavy is in Team Fortress 2. Remember what game you’re playing. You’re going to die just as quickly as any other class and you’re not going to be able to hit the broad side of a barn if you don’t bother to aim.

The Friendliest Fire

There’s no better way to check to see if friendly fire is enabled on the server than by testing out your sniper rifle on the guy right next to you.