Agility as defense in FPS games

[Kingmaker]

Can you name any modern game that uses 'hitscan' weapons?

MW, MW2, and BLOPS, for starters. I believe that Team Fortress 2 also has some hitscan weapons.

If playing a twitch shooter is 'hard work', is it surprising most people don't want to? Next we'll hear rocket-jumping is avoided by today's lazy, wimpy gamer.

B-b-but its easy and requires no skill! Noobs can kill the srs bzns players just by outmaneuvering them!
Twitch shooters tend to engender a larger gap between serious and casual players, in my experience, with less skilled players needed quite a bit of luck of score a kill on a significantly better player. Since people generally don't enjoy partaking in the losing side of horribly one-sided massacres, casual, mediocre gamers (i.e. most of them) are going to flock to games with a narrower skill gap rather than contend with hardcore gamers.

Score per minute is a much more interesting way of comparing performance, and it's hilarious that it's pretty easy to have three or four times the SPM of a sniper idiot in an objective based game.

This is part of the reason I hate snipers. You get some idiot who sits in the corner of the map, goes 16-2 (in a 300 ticket game), masturbates over his kill-death ratio, and is completely, utterly worthless to his team, to the point of being a negative because he's taking a slot that could have been filled by someone useful. A bad assault guy is at least another body to distract the enemy, carry ammo, and soak bullets.

[Stark]

SPM is only as meaningful as the score mechanics, and primitive gametypes like TDM aren't really involved enough to count. Games like BC2, War for Cybertron, Brink etc all enable players to do non-killing things that are significant and rewarded, but most players drop into Blops and start doing laps of their favourite map.

[Exonerate]

Personally, I think you see less games with more demanding movement skills these days simply because the learning curve is steeper and amplifies differences in skill between players. Better FPS players will positively curbstomp worse players, who then have a bad experience, give the game up, and won't recommend it to their friends. That combined with sometimes non-existent matchmaking and core playerbase who have been playing for years can be demoralizing. I understand QuakeLive has made the transition more tolerable with tutorials and ranked matchmaking, but still, it mostly appeals to the more hardcore segment of the FPS market. TF2 had the potential for this problem but largely bypassed it by building in mechanisms that allowed even bad players to feel a sense of accomplishment, entertaining cartoony violence, and limiting the impact of a single player in a large game.

I guess one potential outcome to increased agility and slower projectiles is that combat beyond a certain range becomes ineffective, as players can just see what's coming and move out of the way.

[Stark]

You don't have to speculate; you can choose to play games in the circlestrafing, rocketspam, bunnyhopping tradition. They just don't sell as well.