As far as COD4 is concerned (assuming that your hypoisis is correct) unless you could monitor changes in ping (through some sort of anti-cheating software like Punk Buster), it would be very hard to dectect and prevent this from being an advantage. They there is the question of what do you do to people who have bad pings just during loading?

For future games however (or a future patch to COD?) this could be reduced or eliminated by waiting for all players to finish loading before randomly assigning spawn points around the marker you have identified.

In conjuntion with this maps could have 4 or 8 different spawn points randomly selected by the game (in matched pairs).
This would allow players to learn the map but increase the time for all of the sneaky places to be discovered and even out the play for a longer period.

This would make map design much more difficult for smaller map based games like COD (the larger map based games may not benefit due to the size of the maps).

The addition of multiple routes, routes with lots of cover/ limited line of sight and developer made map tweaks based on player feedback would round this out.

Sorry to go a little off subject

It’s an interesting idea. In practice a lot of people take pride and satisfaction in fully learning the “ins and outs” of a particular map, and it is considered fair game to win because of your superior understanding of the map. Randomly generating maps would be a problem because a lot of random maps might be a bit dull, or give an unfair advantage to one side. I like the idea of perturbing a map say by randomly blocking off or opening windows of buildings on a map which is otherwise structurally static.

Personally, I much prefer shooter games with much larger map sizes, where although the layout may be static there is so much more terrain that learning it to that level of detail is impossible, and no two games play out in *precisely* the same way.

Mike.