I logged in and said it was not released yet. :mad:
ETA: Dunno what is so difficult about this for them. It is computers. A switch should flip that at the designated time and all is good to go.
ETA2: How do I join games with you all? I am very unfamiliar with Steam controls in this respect.
They could still be fixing bugs, plus it likely isn’t really as simple as flipping a switch. It was part of my last job to release software, and it was never that easy. And we had a user base that was much, much smaller.
Valve time strikes again.
Take out your friends list. Click on the little triangle next to the name you want to play with. Choose join game from the list (if he’s playing the game).
Wonder if this will be a first Godwinizing a gaming thread 
Hitler Learns of L4D2 Demo Delay (was about demo but seems appropriate for this too)
One would presume they know what they all need to do. They know the start time. I would think final release of the software was in place long ago (hence preloads).
If it takes them 5 hours to turn it on then they should start six hours ahead of time and leave the lest button push for the actual time.
If something goes way fubar then they need to own up.
They are coked up and buried under a pile of hookers at the moment, unable to get to the release switch.
Well, if that were the case I would actually forgive them.
From a post on Valve forums about 10 minutes before this one here:
Its released. Anyone for a game?
No it’s not! Try!
They’re just taunting us.
Aha. Restart steam if it won’t decrypt for you.
Restart Steam and it will start decrypting. I presume it will work after that. 
If anyone is having issues with decrypting, restart steam, and it will go.
I am clueless at forming a group in Steam. SenorBeef has others he has committed to playing with. Anyone else know how to get a SDMB group going? I am Whack-a-Mole there too.
I heard this rumor that if you restart Steam, it will start decrypting.
Decrypting files?!?! WTF does that mean?
Their pre-releases encode the files so you can’t just apply a crack and play them early, so you need to decrypt them when launch day comes around after a preload.
Anyone had this working yet? Steam was not responding when I turned my computer on this morning.
Yeah, it’s been working since about an hour after it was supposed to be released. Not sure what issue you’re having.
So far I’m liking it. I’ve only played a campaign and a round of scavenger so far, but the new features are cool. The melee weapons are fun, but probably overpowered. Killing the zombies is more detailed and violent… you can shoot off limbs or chop someone’s head in half. The new boss infected add new types of dangers and the AI uses them together cleverly sometimes. The running events where you have to get somewhere rather than just camp a corner somewhere are more fun (and probably way better in versus) than camping a corner somewhere. The finale event of the first campaign is significantly different than the L4D1 standard finale and pretty good.
Scavenger seems like it’ll be pretty fun too. I only played one map, and it was like the finale in the first campaign - you need to run around the map and pick up the fuel cans. But it’s a 4v4 game mode, so the other players are trying to stop you. You start with a minute thirty on the clock and if it reaches zero, you lose. Every time you return a gas can you get 30 seconds added to your time. When they finally get you, the teams switch roles.
Oh, they also added 4 vs 4 matchmaking for versus and scavenger which is a feature the first game should’ve had at release. It used to be that if you had 3 or 4 people together and you wanted to play versus together, you’d have to just let random people fill up a game - but since you guys were familiar with each other and the random players weren’t, you usually just stomped them which was boring. Now you get 4 people together and it matches you up against 4 other people who are attempting to find a game together too.
I haven’t played much with shotguns yet so I don’t know if they’re ridiculously dominant like they are in the first game, but they did make submachine gun/assault rifle type weapons better, both by giving them more ammo and making them more accurate to fire on the move. There are more weapons in general. I actually don’t like the approach with more ammo - I’d like to see a game where scavenging and conserving resources was necesary, rather than just a straight shoot em up where you can blast away all day, and this is a step in the wrong direction. But at least if they toned down the shotguns somewhat and buffed other weapons you’ll feel like you have a choice rather than being forced to take the autoshotty every time.
Weapons now spawn individually too, and the AI director can change that up. I wish they’d have changed it so that individual weapons spawn, where if you picked it up - that was it, you actually picked up the weapon, like it does for throwables and melee weapons. I don’t like the weapons being essentially infinite spawn points where your whole group can take the same weapon 4 times, or grab a new instance of that weapon to reload.