Limi

I see it more as temporary weather, rather than a complete switch. Say each purchase lasts for 3-5minutes so that you use it strategically. If it was a permanent switch you could perhaps could allow the survivors an option to reset it back to normal for points? Presumably if you change weather on an indoor map like Dead Center not much happens?

Did anyone find a way to get the big instruction sprays back without causing problems for Macs? (Think it was Macs?)

If I think I can do more damage to a player, or move them further away than you can before someone comes to save them, I'm just going to do it. There shouldn't be a rule about this. For the not standing next to another player as a boomer, I do this all the time for chargers, as if I get blown up it resets their charge allowing them to charge again. Likewise for charging into walls next to other chargers when they have someone pinned (but not incapd).

Buying a heal while charge pounding someone can mean the difference between an incap and not. Remember that an infected heal is only 3 points and you can get that back from an incap, or 1 point every time to hit someone as a charger. You can pretty much permanently hit someone to death as a charger once they're in-capped if you time it correctly. Anyone know of a way to disable the quick buy prevention? Regularly trying to heal more than once every 3 seconds lately.

Should also make the tank music start ;P Another buy option could be to have disabled tank music, or disabled HUD messages (ie. remove the "Tank 1/1 alive" ones) so it's hard to tell if a tank is actually still alive or not. But back to weather, I think that this could make playing maps quite refreshing, certainly make them different and creates some interesting team work buying tactics for infected. So then not only would it be, get unannounced tank then buy, but also have someone with enough points to create a storm and *then* buy a tank. Could be that you can only buy so many, like how survivor re-spawns work to avoid them just being spammed over and over or just have a cooldown, once every X minutes.

Is it even possible to have purchasable weather? Ie. like the storm you see on the passing, the very heavy rain and wind. Would be an awesome thing to for the infected to be able to purchase. Even possible?

This should improve things massively, thanks crasx

Looks like some movement in that sub-forum now, some potential dates. Once those get confirmed i'll probably look at booking flights.

On the note of helping new members, can we get the big howto sprays back?

Ah right, I'd probably suggest that only occurs if the player hasn't used the point system at all. It's just to get points that are locked up in players who don't know or don't care.

If that's the case, you could just white list those you trust, if you abuse it you lose it, while also disabling it while an admin is playing. Not having the ability to votekick has made the server very un-fun at times. I've been on there with multiple people rushing off, ignoring comms & chat and generally not caring at all. At that point I try looking for an admin, but if there are none around, what do I do? My only real option is just to stop playing until one is. I'm playing in Europe/London time zone (fully aware that this is a US server). The only admin who's usually around when I play is Maestro until it gets later into my evening and Merc and Peanut appear. I know your looking for more admins, and if they're active then it solves this problem. But it's the times when no admins are around are when it really sucks. My current solution is to only go on the server when an admin is playing, just because I don't want to have to deal with the disaster zone it is when one isn't there.

Yeah that would be a nice adjustment. I'm having trouble following the thread here, second option? I'm not suggesting this replace the !sp system.

I find typing is faster, especially since I have to visually scan the menu to find then, then 2 more options for points. Think 4 menu navigation options to actually send?

I find sometimes that a lot of people are asking for points and I just don't have the time to type it out or use the menu quickly (on my lag it's about 1 second per menu option), especially when its 3-4 people at the same time say during a tank fight. I'd like to see a way for me to just !giveaway (!ga) as many points as possible, and it can attempt to distribute my points through to people who have used !np. Example... I have 20 points, player A, B have used !np 5 and player C has used !np 2. I type !giveaway, it gives 5 points to both A and B, and 2 to C, leaving me with 8. However this has to be done in a specific order, the player asking for the least number of points goes first, this is so that instead of one player say asking for 15 and getting a full 15, you could distribute 15 points across as many players as possible, the theory being that it's better to distribute as you may get more people standing instead of one standing. It will also have to take time asked (for same point value) in order, so a player who asked for 1 point 10 seconds ago gets it before the player who asked for 1 point 5 seconds ago. (If someone !np 2 10seconds ago, someone who !np 1 5seconds ago would get the 1 point first.) Dying should reset your (auto) !np to zero so that the system won't accidentally give points to a dead player. If players want to do that, they should use !sp manually. As an extension I'd like to see this happen periodically for dead players that have points. Every X seconds (after a threshold has passed so that if a player is trying to collect points they won't be given away) it attempts to !giveaway their points until they have none remaining. We've had a lot of new players, and regularly seeing 20+ points while dead gets frustrating. I think this would be a good addition, what do you guys think?

*edit* nevermind...

Think the only other thing I've noticed is missing are the sprays which explain the points system in the spawns.

Ubuntu LTS all the way!

I think just small changes would have a large effect, hazmat hordes would slow down fast moving teams quite quickly. Essentially right now a 5 point purchase is completely defeated by a 3 point buy, it does mean survivors have to spend those points, but more often than not you'll get 2 for a killing spree back pretty much immediately, plus then maybe another point for pistol/sniper round etc. Obviously fireworks hurt the person who dropped them (which has meant I no longer just drop them at my feet and just stand there), so I'm a little more hesitant to buy them on a whim any more (which is good). --- As for changing the spawn timer, it really depends on why a team is losing. If it's because you've got X people on your team who don't know how to use the point system, if you just have genuinely bad people making bad choices, or just stacked teams. There's almost nothing we can do about the point hoarders, other than trying to explain to them how to use the points system. I've been in more than several games playing survivor lately where I've seen the team losing but there are roughly 150+ unspent points. The only thing I can propose is a mechanic to re-distribute points automatically to your team once a specified time frame* goes past, but only if you've *not* purchased something, *not* interacted with the buy menu or *not* a member. This way it can only really affect the people who don't know what they're doing, and really won't notice the points are gone. * this could be anything, rather than game minutes perhaps percentage through the campaign, number of people alive. I've also seen teams lose due to disconnections, or spectator slot kicks. Mainly on infected rather than survivor, but seeing someone try and build up tank points, only to lose them if a member joins or they crash can be disappointing. Perhaps again, point re-distribution to the team, just splitting it between the remaining team players. It's not particularly fair, as you lose that banked state of points on one player, but it seems to be better than the complete loss of them instead. It also means you can't get strategic point dumps. For people making bad choices and just generally being bad, really nothing we can do, short of imposing some arbitrary hours played limit to join in the hope to only get experienced players, if anything I think this will reduce new players to almost zero. But on reflection of the L4D2 free for life sale that happened yesterday, even a limit as low as 5-10 hours playing verses might be needed. If hours aren't favourable, could be achievement based, ie. you must have achievement X, Y and Z. Either/or perhaps. Stacked teams could be solved by scrambling at the start of each round, it does defeat the L4D overall score system at that point. However by the time the finale comes around, teams should in theory be pretty much even. If you think at that point it's had probably 3, in some cases 4 attempts to balance the teams and make it right.

I'm getting tempted to fly over and attend next year, however I don't really know anyone in GC apart from you lot who play on the L4D2 server. How many of you are considering going?

\o/

I know it's probably not going to come back any time soon as its Boxing day, but the servers been offline for quite a few hours now.

Wouldn't mind seeing something to make purchasable hordes useful, right now they're completely useless. Increase the count, flame retardant and more hp maybe?

Still crashing occasionally when people buy tanks. Can we disable tank purchases until this is fixed, it's getting very frustrating, only seen maybe 1 finale in the past 3-4days

When someone buys a tank it's randomly crashing the server, not every time someone buys will it crash out

Any chance of getting this removed from standard rotation? It just empties the server when its on. Usually we can get an admin to switch it, but when none are on the server just goes from full to empty almost instantly.