Selecting the right settings for a competitive shooter can be crucial to your success, as slight tweaks to key settings can drastically improve your overall gameplay experience. This settings guide for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will help you select all of the best multiplayer settings that are often hidden within the menu system.

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Beyond the default layout, you'll find 13 different button layout options. These layout options change the button mapping for weapon fire, aim down sight, melee, tactical and lethal equipment use, and more. While it will ultimately come down to preference and your playstyle, one of the most popular options is Tactical, which swaps your Melee and Stance buttons, offering a much better gameplay experience.

Again, if these don't work for you, consider trying out the other options available to see what best works for you.

We recommend turning off Controller Vibration. It will save you battery life, and the vibrations can often throw off your movement and act as a distraction.

For those with PlayStation 5 controllers, we highly recommend turning off Trigger Effects. Turning off this feature will help prevent any resistance or vibration when pressing L2 and R2. In addition, playing with Trigger Effects can significantly impact your performance from a competitive standpoint, as reflex time will be vital in winning many encounters.

Like most settings in this category, Horizontal and Vertical Stick Sensitivity come down to personal preference. While there's no one setting to fit all, we recommend that you test out several different sensitivity options. Adjusting your stick sensitivity is one of those minor tweaks that can greatly impact your gameplay, so much so that it could be the difference between hitting your targets before your enemy.

The game defaults at four, and while it will take a little while to get used to, we recommend running your sensitivity somewhere between 6 to 10; however, it's not uncommon to see some players using settings as high as 12. While moving at a much higher sensitivity will feel strange initially, try to give each option at least a few games.

We recommend running Automatic Tactical Sprint, which allows your character to sprint automatically when moving. This reduces the need to press other buttons to toggle sprinting, increasing your reaction time during encounters.

There are many things to interact with in Modern Warfare 2, whether it be picking up weapons or opening doors. To avoid any accidents, we recommend selecting the option to Prioritize Reload. This means that if reload and interact are available simultaneously, tap to reload, hold to interact.

Alternatively, if you're playing game modes such as Search and Destroy, you may want to opt for Prioritize Interact, as it'll make interacting with objectives much more accessible.

While there are no armor plates in the MW2 beta, selecting Apply All is recommended. This setting will simplify the need to press and hold each plate to apply them one by one; instead, the process will be automatic after the initial press and hold action.

Here's where things get juicy, as you'll find several helpful settings nestled within the Advanced settings for the Controller menu. To access the Advanced settings, press RT/R1 when using the Controller Settings menu.

Having Target Aim Assist set to on will allow the camera to slow down when the crosshair is about to move over an enemy.

If you're new to aiming on consoles or not typically a fan of the traditional aim slowdown used in Modern Warfare games, you may want to consider testing all the different options available within this setting.

Again, this will all come down to personal preference.

Try lowering the Left/Right Stick Min Input Deadzone to prevent your character from drifting and moving unwantedly. While the setting defaults to 0.10, we recommend changing this to somewhere between 0.1 and 0.5 if you're looking for your analog sticks to be more responsive on touch.

However, this will, of course, depend entirely on your controller and if it's currently experiencing any drift.

There are plenty of opportunities available to mantle objects in Modern Warfare 2, which can create some rather interesting tactics and strategies. However, sometimes it's easy to get caught in the mantling process when you're simply trying to peek over walls and objects.

For this reason, we recommend turning Grounded Mantle off, which means the Jump button won't make you mantle while on the ground. Instead, you must first tap to jump, then tap again to begin mantling. While it's an extra button tap, we found it outweighs the gameplay advantages.

Given the relatively quick pace in some of Modern Warfare 2's maps, we recommend that you turn Quick C4 Detonation to on. This will mean pressing the Lethal Equipment button will detonate any C4 on the map before throwing another.

However, if you like to plant several C4 bombs at once, you'll want to keep this off.

Be sure to turn off World Motion Blur and Weapon Motion Blur. While this setting is mostly designed for a more cinematic experience, you'll find it makes the environment and your weapon very blurry and significantly more challenging to see what's happening around you. Obviously, this is not ideal if you're looking to play competitively and win encounters.

Much like the motion blur settings, film grain is essentially the filter that applies visual noise to your game. Again, you'll want to set this to 0 to ensure the game is as crisp as possible.

We recommend setting Depth of Field to off as it'll make any out-of-focus regions appear blurry. With this setting left on, you'll be playing at a disadvantage.

As mentioned above, you'll want to utilize the AMD technology by turning this feature on to ensure your game runs as sharply as possible. While we have ours set to 40, it all comes down to personal preference, so be sure to give a few different values a try.

Set to 80 by default, we recommend adjusting your FOV to somewhere between 100 and 110. While we found 120 to be a little too high for our liking, we believe 100 to 110 offers a nice sweet spot and still provides plenty of extra screen space. Remember, as you increase your Field of View, you'll also increase your chances of experiencing a lowered frame rate and graphical artifacts.

Lower your music volume to ensure you never miss a footstep or incoming enemy. While some may set theirs to 0, we found somewhere around 30 was a nice balance.

You may want to turn on your Telemetry settings if you're struggling with lag issues and framerate drops. This will allow you to display your Server Latency, Connection Meter, Packet Loss, and more on-screen.

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