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Changes related to the community balance poll results: I hope you are all excited to see what is changing, have fun this weekend testing these changes and share your experiences and opinions here! Changes will be live shortly after this post, go play! Survivor Pills Results: 66% balanced, 34% too cheap. Proposed change(s): Pills cost +20% (5→6). Drug Pills cost -20% (10→8). Comments: Players who can get a lot of points know pills are abusable. Drug Pills is a great idea, but 10 points is too high to encourage players to use. 8 is more affordable, but still not insignificant to infected players. Tank Heal Cost Results: 75% balanced, 25% too cheap. Proposed change(s): Add tank visible HP bar. Will look as shown: Comments: As most players fall into the balanced category, we don't feel like a change to statistics may be necessary right now. That said, the main issue with tank heals is when it can feel like it is invincible for the survivors - which can be quite unpleasant. This plugin should help reduce that feeling, as survivors (and infected) will now know the condition of a tank, as well as how much impact they are having on it. This doesn't actually change the balance of the tank, but it does provide players with useful information that people may or may not like, so I look forward to seeing what everyone thinks after trying it. Rocket Jockey points & damage Results: 33% balanced, 67% too strong. Proposed change(s): Max Impact damage: -33% (15→10). Max impact distance +30% (1000→1300). Max damage impact point gain 4→3. Fix jockey ride damage per second: 12/13→8. 2 damage per interval, 4 intervals per second. Reduce interval start delay: 1s→0.25s. Comments: Jockeys have clearly been too strong, both for dealing damage, gaining points, and being hard to punish. These changes keep rocket jockeys as a unique player in the infected kit, and keeps them hard to deal with, but brings them to a level where the infected shouldn’t be able to farm them so effectively and reliably. Smoker Effectiveness Results: 83% too weak, 8% balanced, 8% too strong. Proposed change(s): Remove smoker i-frames via plugin. I-frames prevent survivors from taking damage upon smoker grab and release. This results in infected effectively working against their teammates when it happens, and prevents proper chain attacks like hunters pouncing a choked survivor doing no damage (even though it says it does). Movement speed +10% (210→230). Tongue range: +7% (750→800). Tongue hit recharge time: -40% (20s→12s). Tongue miss recharge time: -40% (15s→9s). Tongue miss recharge delay: -40% (2.0s→1.3s). Tongue drag damage amount: +100% (3→6). Choke damage interval: -33% (=0.75→0.5). Drag max speed: +8% (175→190). Drag acceleration speed: +10% (30→33). Comments: Smokers are clearly very weak compared to the other specials, and these changes intend to bring it to a stronger position, making it a more common pick for players who rarely play it, while also enabling players who have a lot of practice on it to have a more rewarding experience. The move speed enables the player to reposition or get to cover quicker after being spotted or having their victim cleared, hopefully without being overkill. The small buffs to many stats intend on improving many quality of life aspects of the smoker, and should give the player more opportunities and variety of how to engage survivors, while reducing easy punishment by survivors. Hunter Max High-Pounce Damage Results: 33% too low, 58% balanced, 8% too high. Proposed change(s): Bonus damage start range: +17% (300→350). Bonus damage max range: +20% (1000→1200). Air travel speed: +5% (700→735). Sky Diver / Parachute: Incapped pounces no longer can count towards the achievements. Max bonus points: +25% (8→10). Bot divide ratio: 0.00→2.00. Incap divide ratio: 1.75→2.00. Less points for pouncing bots and incaps, even less for incapped bots. More total possible points. E.g.: 25 damage on a player → 10pts. 25 damage on a bot → 5 pts. 25 damage on incapped player → 5pts. 25 damage on incapped bot → 2.5pts. Comments: Hunter has been a common pick by many players for its mechanical skill floor and ceiling, but it has not been as rewarding as other specials which have lower mechanical demands. Another consideration for hunters is that they can be killed in the air with relative ease, are deadstoppable, and are not always usable in many areas in the maps which don’t have access to rooftops, or many indoor areas. Thus, the special should be adequately rewarding those who have taken the time to train their skills and take advantage of opportunities to use the hunter. And in allowing high rewards, we also are increasing the distance required to hit maximum damage, encouraging riskier and more challenging attempts by hunter players.

@JackieChan I might be mistaken, but it almost feels like the damage is applied twice. I'd have to actually record it to be sure. It's funny though since it feels worse having a jockey land on you than a hunter, especially considering the jockey is nearly unskeetable and about 2-3x more difficult to deadstop. @swatfishy that's an interesting idea, I certainly hadn't considered something like that. I know I can hit an AWP shot on a rocket jockey somewhat consistently, but it takes either a headshot or two body shots (I think only two) to kill, otherwise the lil dude still landing on you for half your hp bar. I'll have to think about this for sure.

Smokers are indeed painfully weak compared to every other special. Of course they still have use cases even being so weak, but I'd like smokers to actually be fun to play like chargers and hunters are. I'll be posting again following this poll some possible changes to the gameplay of different infected, and the community can decide what sounds good to try.

I hope this thing works as I expect 🥴 I'd like to see what people think about a few different topics in the balance of the server in its current state. This poll is set to close automatically on April 12 @ 12pm (unknown time zone). Pretty sure votes are anonymous. The results of this poll will influence where we focus our attention, so your vote is very important!

GC Rules: Preface: There shall be no special treatment to admins. If anyone notices an admin breaking rules and not held to account for it, reach out to any of the Board Members with evidence. Forums: 1. Inappropriate posts, comments, statuses, or pictures should result in posting and commenting privileges being revoked or flagged to require approval prior to posting. a. Includes targeted harassment, obscenity, or other obnoxious behavior. b. Posting privileges should be revoked for up to 30 days, depending on the severity and frequency of the offenses. c. The post in question may also be removed, if necessary. In-Games: 1. Chat language should be family-friendly. a. Same way GC has been for many years, keep it clean. i. Admins shall first warn the offender, if they offend again within a short period (~2 hours), they will have their chat restricted from use for up to 24 hours. ii. If someone has a continuous issue follow this rule, admins should apply the following repercussions after each time: - 1 hour chat restriction. - 1 day chat restriction. - 1 week chat restriction. - Beyond this, we will consider bans or extensive chat restrictions. 2. Excessive trolling (including stacking), griefing, suiciding, harassment, spamming chat, and obnoxious or obscene behavior (inappropriate sprays, racism, sexism, etc.). a. This rule requires some discretion and careful judgement by admins, since some things are fine between friends when it’s mutual, but when it’s one-sided, that’s not acceptable. b. The offender must always be warned once after the first occurrence. i. If it occurs again in a short period (~2 hours), further actions should be taken. - If these offenses are taking place via the in-game chat, the offender should have their chat restricted (aside from commands) using the same guide as Rule 1. - If the offenses take place in gameplay, they should be banned for up to 7 days at a time, depending on the severity of the offenses. # If you can't follow the rules of the game, you can't play the game. Note: Rushing shall be handled by plugins. * In cases where a player intentionally circumvents the system, admins can warn, kick, or ban for up to 24 hours, at their discretion. c. Inappropriate usernames are not allowed. You will be renamed and asked to avoid using such names in the future. i. Failing to adhere to this rule many times will result in a ban of up to 7 days, at the admin's discretion. 3. Cheating. a. This includes macros, addons, software, etc. that provides players with an unfair advantage over others. b. Certain exploits in games can also be considered cheating, such as: i. Attacking from an area where you cannot be hit back, like under the map. ii. Going out of bounds of the typically allowed map. c. Other exploits which rely on individual skill should not be considered cheating, unless enabled by the methods mentioned in (3-a). These exploits include: i. B-hopping (single keypress). ii. Quick-switching etc. iii. Fall damage mitigation using explosives, revives, etc. iv. Ledge-prevention (by holding jump). v. Tank Haymakers. d. The offender should first be warned if the offense is minor. i. Like noticing a player b-hop scripting. e. Cheating should result in a ban of up to 14 days, depending on the severity of the offense. i. Aimbotting and wallhacking would be the most severe. ii. Scripting or attacking from unreachable places are relatively minor. Off-platform / outside of official GC spaces: No rules, go crazy. We believe people have a right to express themselves as they see fit when outside the domains of the GC community. Admin-Specific Rules and Notes: We do NOT punish, kick or ban for: 1. Not using points. a. Try to educate them on it but do not insist they use them. 2. Not buying a tank, witch or upgrade you want them to buy. 3. “Stealing points” by shooting infected or stealing kills as infected. a. Yes it’s bad sportsmanship, but sometimes it’s not on purpose. Just play the game. If a user joins with an inappropriate name, rename them and warn. a. This should not result in a ban 99% of the time for first-time or rare offenders, and especially not a permanent ban. b. Follow the guide of In-Game Rule 2 for punishments. Regarding bot vocal spam: a. Use the /vocalize command to be sure someone is really spamming. If the vocals fill your text field, it might be spamming. Otherwise it is not. Do not kick or ban another admin without bringing evidence to the board for a discussion. a. You may do this anonymously if you wish. Do not argue on the server with another admin.

Hey everyone! This post intends to provide information on what has been going on with GC and what to expect in the future. Change in Board Members (BMs). All previous BMs have been transitioned to GC Alumni, so they no longer shall be expected to be involved in GC, however their contributions in the past ought to be recognized and respected. The one exception here is FlitterKill (FK), who remains as an active BM for the time being, with hopes of fully transitioning things over and offboarding in the future. Cici, Looneypumpkin, and myself have been onboarded with FK's support as the new BMs. For any GC-related ideas, questions, concerns, etc., we are the people to go to, assuming it isn't something that game server admins are able to answer/action. Updates to Memberships. We have been working hard at getting the Membership system back and operational. As of right now, Memberships can be purchased with Paypal only, with options of one month or one year, and you can optionally set it to auto-renew if you would like to. We are working on getting Stripe and Google/Apple Pay options operational as alternatives, so we aim to provide an update in the future on this. We are also working on automating the handling of active/inactive Membership in game servers, in hopes to have a Membership become active immediately upon purchase. This will likely take a lot of work, so I cannot speak to an estimated completion at this time. More updates on this should come in the future. For those wanting and willing to support the community above the regular Membership cost, we are looking at updating the Donations to make this as simple and effective as we can, so please stay tuned. Updates to Forums and Website. As I'm sure you can already see, we have been working on updating the forums both in terms of user experience and relevancy. For visual, this means fonts, colors, layout, etc. are being worked on. For relevancy, this means that many old pinned posts are being archived if they no longer apply, and some will be replaced will updated posts. E.g. Rules will be updated in L4D2 forum soon. We are also looking at the forum structure and relocating or renaming topics and forums as necessary to help everything flow as logical and user-friendly as possible. That's all for now, I hope this finds you all well and hope you are as interested excited about GC's future as I am! Let us know your thoughts and comments under this post as well. Stay safe, healthy, and have fun 😁 If you would like to contact me for any reason please feel free to reach out on this website, or via Discord or Steam.

For context, I was referring to the updates from the server on my net graph while playing. I think we had at least 12 players on, and I was noticing that the incoming updates got as low as 20-30, when on 60 tick you of course are looking to send and receive 60 updates per second. My outgoing updates were solid around 60, as I assume it is for most, if not all players. Note: I was playing with cl_interp_ratio at -1 and cl_interp at 0, which, to my understanding, sets your interpolation rate to some calculation that I can't recall at the moment. I checked the server statistics and did not see anything alarming, but they weren't as informative as I would prefer, so I'm interested if others can confirm or deny having similar experiences.

My main focus isn't so much on balance changes, more so performance and stability improvements first. That said, assuming the server performance is in a good and stable state, I'd probably look at adding quality of life to either the points plugin (like allowing a buyable ammo refill for the whole team, or a set of boomer goggles for the whole team), or other aspects of the game, like the 'worldmodel turn rate fix' plugin I posted about in the L4D2 section. If those two areas of focus are in a good state, then I'd look at balance and actual gameplay changes. Of course, I'd want to hear community opinions regarding balance changes - so I'd probably propose my ideas and gather feedback prior to changing things. My general philosophy for L4D2 versus is that the game should be fun from all perspectives, regardless of winning, losing, survivor, or infected. There's a couple tweaks I made to infected messing with my local server, such as making smokers more of a threat by increasing their survivor pull speed and reducing the latency of the tongue, or increasing the damage a boomer does when it scratches a survivor (they should be kept at distance 🤓). Stuff like that is what I'd be looking for community opinions on. Another thing that I think would be interesting would be setting up a fast download file server and have it linked to the game server, which essentially enables custom content to be used on the server and all players would automatically download it when joining (FYI - I have proven it works as a concept already). E.g. custom sounds (like a radio playing to all players), weapons, maps, etc. - lots of possibilities there, but more of a back-pocket idea for now. One more I almost forgot about - stats and stat tracking. I know source stats was used previously for GC, and I've experimented with reading and writing stats to a database in my local server. I did actually get it working, and I could track as many stats as I wanted, enabling things such as 'personal bests' for round performance, or time to earn a certain achievement, for example, and could even track stats by map, if desired. Players would be able to check their stats in game in real time, and track their development over time. That's all I can think of right now. Let me know anything else you may be wondering, or what your thoughts are!

Throwing my hat in the ring, as I'd be happy to maintain the web and/or game server(s) into the future. I'll list a few things about me that I believe would be relevant for people to gauge whether I am suitable. For the forums and web server, I have experience building and maintaining websites either from scratch in with HTML/CSS/JS, from templates like Bootstrap, or on Wordpress or similar web-building services. When I graduated from college, I made my personal and portfolio website that I still maintain to this day, and it is built on a Bootstrap template. For game server(s), I have experience working on Source servers (L4D2 mostly) and developing plugins of my own, or working on other people's plugins built in SourcePawn. For accountability and leadership, I have a full time job working as a software analyst specifically working in corporate compensation systems. I also am the Chairman and leader of a professional growth network for the IT sector of my company, through which I've initiated and hosted virtual events to over 900 people at its peak, and many smaller events with around 40-120 attendees. I also am a co-leader of a Manhua Scans (Chinese comics translated to English) group for over two years, which has around 30-50 volunteer staff at a given time. In that group I have been responsible for assigning work, delegating tasks, maintaining our website and discord server (~4k members), all of which I enjoy very much. For finances, I don't mind having to provide funds when required and reasonable for site and server upkeep. That said, it would be my preference to have the community fund itself through valuable products or services, similar to the membership system. I like engaging with individuals or communities and working on cool and interesting projects, and creating spaces that I can enjoy with others. I've been in and around GC for many years, playing on the L4D2 servers for the first time back around 2014. I was quite a moody teenager for a while, going through some bans and fights, all while playing games a bit too much back then. My personal philosophies and priorities have evolved quite a lot since then, and since returning to the community in the last few years, I've been supporting cici and Archer where possible in maintaining the L4D2 server and its plugins, and I'm happy to help foster a good community here in GC. I'm happy to chat when time allows, and I am quite fast in responding most of the time, so please feel free to reach out! Discord (best way to reach me): xxnoobslayer Steam: Link

AlliedModders Link - WorldModel_Turnrate Basically this just makes it so players models face the direction they are actually looking. The vanilla L4D2 turn rate is super slow and makes players seem less responsive than they really are. I think it would be good to add as a simple quality of life addition to the servers.

AWP only needed an ammo count nerf to be balanced. e.g. 20 -> 10 bullets / mag Only a few players could perform better with an AWP than an AK in the past, considering the difficulty of landing shots on moving targets like rocketing specials. You'd get one chance to land the shot or you missed your chance, whereas other weapons like Hunter/Military or AK/M16 you get plenty of chances to land the shot(s) you need. My opinion: AWP should do 250 damage - therefore 1 shots spitter and boomer anywhere, smoker and hunter in the chest and head only, and requires multiple hits to kill jockey and charger. Should have 10 - 15 bullets / mag, 10 would probably be best. Alternative method of balancing would be increasing AWP bloom while moving/jumping.

That looks 1000 times better, nice work I'm not sure which application you stream through, but in OBS it looks like you can boost Mic volume: Just click the three dots next to the level and click Advanced Audio Properties: Here you can increase or decrease either the Desktop Audio or Mic, either by Decibel or Percentage: Hope this helps

That's what we like to hear!

I just made some changes to the code and tested it with Archer, should hopefully be more responsive and consistent once it's live.

Carlos mate I BEG YOU to stream in at LEAST 480p - if not 720p30 - I see you getting decent frames in game so I think your system can manage That was tough to watch lmao, if you want some help with OBS reach out to me I'll help u out no problem For the emerg, yea idk what happened there - isn't there usually a confirmation after you purchase that says you activated it? Looks like it subtracted your points but didn't activate for whatever reason.. Could be an issue in code with how it's being activated and executed.

NEW VIDEO WITH INSANE COMMENTARY COURTESY OF THE ONE AND ONLY I wasn't developing over the last few months so it took me a minute to get the server set up and start working on it. This video covers some of the tweaks and changes I have made to date on the infected side. This server plays and feels really good with the higher tickrate and my custom buy options. Changes like the tank balancing and hunter/smoker tweaks would make GC so much more fun in my opinion - personally I can't stand the tank heal spam lol but anyway that's just me Things like Team Boomer Goggles would be super nice to have in GC, so feel free to reach out if you have any questions! If there's anyone who wants to play on it for themselves, let me know and I will make sure you get a chance to try and break stuff - considering I have no QA Testers, so I am the only one testing things lmao https://discord.gg/zwbGzFmwM8 - this discord is quiet but it's a place where you can always reach me and discuss anything server-related

SI Fire Extinguish Showcase:

Fire extinguish showcase and uncommon chance increase showcase coming soon. Been focused on helping with GC's plugin recently so haven't added many new features to mine. If you have anything you'd like to see added as a proof of concept or to see how it plays, let me know and I can probably make it happen. I'm going to be adding infected bot point storage and usage soon.

Wake up babe, gifts just dropped: This thing taking forever to process so if it's not 1080p60 you can prob just come back later and it'll be done

My latest creation, took me a whole 10 mins to write the code thanks to an SDKTools function and a L4DStocks function lol.

Playtest #2 on my server :

Copy that! For now this is a project aside from GC, but if it is accepted by the community to be a suitable replacement for the existing server, I'd be open to merging it into GC. Will keep you in the loop as things progress! I started this project about 2-3 weeks ago, and I would say things are getting quite close to shippable-product level by my standards, so I think having it sorted by July is doable