Game types
Let me preface this section by saying that gaming is meant to be fun. If you don’t enjoy a game type, don’t play it. That being said, there are many game types within Black Ops for you to choose from and some of them offer a distinct leveling advantage over others that I will cover with you now.
HQ
The fastest game type to level within when playing with a winning team is Headquarters. Headquarters is an objective game type where 2 teams fight over a certain area. Once the area is controlled by one team they become the defenders of that area, and the opposite team becomes the attackers of that area. The attackers are trying to break the HQ by killing the enemy team and regaining control of the area. Once your team captures the HQ, you only have 1 life and if you die you will not respawn until the enemy team breaks that HQ.
Headquarters earns your entire team 50 experience for every 5 seconds that you have the HQ controlled. The game ends after 20 minutes or after a team controls the HQ for 250 seconds total. 50 XP for every 5 seconds that you control the HQ turns out to be 2500 XP per player on the winning team not including task specific bonuses like kills, captures, challenges and contracts.
It is not uncommon for players to earn 10,000 XP for one game of Headquarters, in fact I was able to earn 44,451 experience for one game of Headquarters alone! (That is like leveling through all of level 41 in one game!)
S&D
The second fastest game type to level with is probably Search and Destroy. S&D is a one life bomb based game type which is played in rounds (Best out of 7). The main advantage of S&D is that you earn a ton of experience for kills and objectives when playing. A kill in S&D is worth 500 XP, an assist is worth 250 XP, and a plant or defuse is worth 500 XP. As you can see if you had a really good round and killed all 6 players plus planted/defused the bomb you would earn at least 3500 XP in that round alone. The downside to playing S&D is that it can be a double edged sword. If you are bad at S&D and don’t get very many kills/plants/defuses you will hardly earn any experience and end up just watching other players for the majority of the game.
I personally don’t like Search and Destroy because I tend to rush a lot and die early to a strategically placed claymore or frag grenade but some of my friends almost exclusively play S&D and level really well when they play it. One more thing to mention about S&D. Search and destroy gives round bonuses not match bonuses and the round bonus multipliers are bigger than in any other game type. (x2 for a win, x1.5 for a tie, and x1 for a loss)
All other gametypes
Now all the other game types have their pros and cons. In fact I enjoy playing a variety of game types when leveling up as it keeps things fresh and allows for different play styles depending on the game. But I would reserve all the other game types for situational circumstances only.
For example, if there is a demolition contract to win 1 game without allowing the other team to detonate a point, go ahead and spend 10 minutes completing that. It is worth it in the long run. Also, there are game type specific challenges that can be completed when you unlock them. For example, did you know that you will earn 3000 XP for completing 2 challenges just by winning 2 games of sabotage in under 2 minutes? (Sabotage is one of the fastest game types out there when you have a good team)
There are also certain challenges that are much easier to complete on certain game types. For example, all of the final killcam challenges are much easier to get when playing free for all. Because FFA ends at 30 kills simply race to 29 kills with your best weapon and then call in all of your killstreaks at the end to try to get the final killcam with your killstreak. Each final killcam challenge is worth 2500XP, that is a very quick way to get some massive XP at later levels.
Class setups & weapons
Class setups are extremely important to leveling up quickly. One of the biggest mistakes players make when trying to level up quickly is that they pick a weapon and perk setup that they enjoy and stick with it through an entire prestige. Not only does this seem boring to me, it also leads to a whole slew of potential experience that you are missing out on. I am going to outline the main ways in which you earn experience through your class setups below:
Weapon Challenges
Each primary weapon in the game has 2 basic weapon challenges, the marksman challenge (kills) & the expert challenge (headshots). These challenges are progressive in that you start off on tier 1 with only 10 kills required to earn 250XP and then each tier the amount of kills required to complete and the XP rewarded increases. Looking at the chart below you can see that the XP per kill is the best at 1000 kills per weapon. Weapon types and weapon attachments also have a similar tier challenge. Weapon types reach it’s peak XP per kill at 2000 Kills and weapon attachments reach their peak at 1000 kills.
| Kills | XP | XP/Kill |
| 10 | 250 | 25 |
| 25 | 500 | 33.33 |
| 75 | 750 | 15 |
| 150 | 1000 | 13.33 |
| 300 | 2000 | 13.33 |
| 500 | 5000 | 25 |
| 750 | 7500 | 30 |
| 1000 | 10000 | 40 |
| 1500 | 10000 | 20 |
So what’s this all mean to you? Basically, try using a primary weapon with the same attachments until you get the 1000 Kill challenge for your weapon and the attachment. Then move onto a new primary weapon using A DIFFERENT attachment until you again get the 1000 Kill challenge for your weapon and attachment.
