The wife got me L4D for Christmas, and just finished the campaigns on Normal last night. Anyone have the patience to play with a L4D n00b who has no experience as the infected, and an itchy trigger finger as a survivor?
My gamertag is Enuak. I’ll send a request to the SDMB alias and post my 'tag in that thread as well.
We’ll get you wherever you need to go. I can’t see the Steam folks having a problem with fresh meat either.
Shark, I take it you’re on console? Well, even if I can’t play with you, here are my newbie tips:
If you follow these guidelines, everything else can come as you play, as a survivor.
As infected, a couple hints:
Boomer: Boomer should usually attack first, then other infected attack in the chaos. Spawn ahead of the survivors, and (as Senor Beef has pointed out) wait until the latest moment possible to spawn, or they will hear you a mile away and cap you with a maximum of one person getting biled.
Smoker: pull survivors away from the group, preferably off high areas so others will have to jump down to save them. In areas that Boomers can’t get a good angle, it can sometimes work to pull back the last person, then the Boomer can vomit on them and their rescuers.
Hunter: spawn ahead of survivors. Use hordes and Boomer attacks as cover for pouncing. Don’t forget to use a claw attack if there are other infected to blend into, if pouncing will likely just get you killed.
Tank: go after people with yellow health or worse. Hit them till they’re incapped. Hit cars and stuff at faster survivors. If they all have autoshotguns, lobbing missiles might be a better way to go.
Thanks for the tips, Cinnamon.
Look forward to playing with you all.
Not at all, as long as the fresh meat is attentive and cooperative. Nothing like the new guy who swears he knows what he’s doing, charging in head first, and causing the whole team to get killed.
Shark, just listen to what your team mates are telling you, and make sure they know if you’re in trouble, and you should be good. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve shaken off boomer bile only to realize a teammate has bee smoker’d half to death without saying anything.
Sadly, I’ve got it on PC so I can’t really play it with you, but I’m sure the 360 folks will treat you good.
So a few friends and I are running a blood harvest campaign going for the safety first (no team damage) achievement.
We run the campaign perfectly, we do the finale, and we’re going out to the rescue vehicle. We get swarmed at the rescue vehicle, 2 of us are in, the other 2 are blocked by a swarm of zombies. Instinctively I flip around and let a burst go - it took me about a tenth of a second to realize it was a bad idea, I stopped, but not before 2 or 3 rounds were launched. The very last round hit my teammate. They got in the vehicle and the campaign ended less than a second later. The very last round, 1 second before the campaign was finished, was our first team damage 
We ran no mercy afterwards and got the achievement.
Yeah, I tried doing that with my girlfriend. That didn’t go well. She has a penchant for blasting Francis with the shotgun.
But really, who doesn’t?
She also has a knack for getting barfed on. I call her my “Vomit Queen”. We’re such a cute couple.
Interesting. Someone has compiled some statistics on Left 4 Dead damage.
Apparently the Uzi is slightly faster than dual pistols, but dual pistols do slightly more damage. Something to keep in mind.
We had a bit of a debate come up tonight.
We were playing a versus game. We were at the building right before the parking lot section of no mercy map 3 when a tank spawned. We didn’t want to run out into the uncleared area, so we waited for the tank to come to us. We kept waiting… for longer than it’d take for the frustration meter to give it to someone else and the tank still never came. So we went out to investigate, at which point we got ambushed and the tank attacked us.
So afterwards I learned that the tank did this by hitting the lift - it turns out if you hit certain physics options like the lift, or cars, the frustration meter resets.
I accused him of exploiting and he disagreed, saying that it was just a smart tactic and if it were unintended by the developers it wouldn’t be possible.
I think that the frustration meter mechanic clearly shows that they intend it that the tank must attack soon and constantly and can’t camp out and wait for the perfect spot to attack. The fact that certain objects reset it is an oversight - there’s no reason they’d create a frustration meter and then give tanks a way to bypass it entirely.
What do you think?
It’s certainly a debatable topic. I think the reason it resets the frustration meter is because you are presumably hitting it to attack the survivors, so it simplifies the “is attacking survivors” calculation.
I don’t necessarily consider it exploiting if, for example, you spawn half way across the map, and by time you get to the survivors, someone else is taking over. It gets grey and murky if you’re waiting for a fire to go out or a boomer to spawn a horde. Deliberately camping an area seems to sort of circumvent the whole idea of a tank, though.
Maybe we should come up with a set of agreed upon guidelines for vs. matches?
Also, on a completely unrelated note, I really miss being able to set versus mode to advanced difficulty. It made for some really fast paced, intense games.
I’d say it’s an exploit for sure, since it allows you to do some pretty nasty things. For example, we had a tank spawn later on that map in the sewers. The controller ran the tank backwards, away from the survivors, and up the ladder at the end of the map. He waited up there knocking cars around until the survivors got tired of being tick-damaged down by the rest of us and came up the ladder. At which point, he killed them all instantly with a car at the top of the ladder.
There is nothing you can do to stop this and the developers went out of their way to stop the whole hide-the-tank thing by having the AI take over after 2 players.
I have mixed feelings on this.
On one hand, doing things like running backwards and camping a better kill area (like the end of nm3) is crappy and should be avoided in friendly games. Clearly an exploit in my opinion.
However, I don’t think the tank should be forced to run head first into a bunch of corner camped auto-shotguns either. The tank is supposed to be ultra powerful and frightening. But if you have 3 or 4 auto-shotguns, he goes down in a couple seconds. That may be ok for co-op, but in versus it doesn’t seem right for the infected to be forced to throw away a valuable spawn like that.
IMO, one is an exploit in one direction, and the other is an exploit in the other direction.
That said, yes, I would love the have advanced versus again. I stand by my belief that the survivors should rarely get to the end of a level and the scoring should be based mostly on percentage of ground covered. It just seems to me that having all 4 survivors go all the way more than half the time throws the scoring off dramatically. As people have improved, the difficulty needs to be adjustable to account for that.
This is Gambit here, the player who was the tank that SenorBeef mentioned. This is my first post, so go easy on a long-time lurker 
First of all I’d like to say that it not my intention to do something that anyone in the game would consider an exploit, had I known SenorBeef’s opinion of that tactic I’d have refrained from using it. I’m not too hung up on using that particular tactic and if people consider an exploit I will naturally not use it.
That being said, I do not think it’s an exploit. To take the developer’s intentions first:
It seemed like it would naturally have come up in Valve’s play testing, and if they had been bothered by it, they would probably have fixed it.
I don’t really know what Valve intended with the frustration meter, but it seemed to me to be a game mechanic to improve ** public**
games, discouraging players in public games from wasting the tank by being overly cautious.
Since I haven’t read anything about Valve’s intentions with many of the game mechanics, I did not consider my own rather unsubstantiated guessing to be really that important in determining whether something is an exploit or not.
All the games I’ve played competitively differed greatly from the developer’s intentions, partly due to the fact that the developer’s can’t consider how strategies evolve. It was the community (with important input from the developers) that decided from a gameplay perspective what was or wasn’t an exploit.
(One rather interesting example is the “bunnyhop” in Quake where players used the quake engine’s rather odd physics handling to achieve speeds much greater than normal. This was, if I’m not mistaken, not part of the developer’s intentions, however it quickly became a legitimate tactic, to the point that the vast majority of all players used it, including all competitive players)
I can’t really see difference between this and other tactics that are considered legitimate, leading the witch by pouncing her as a hunter, or instantly incapacitating survivors by tanks hitting cars/logs and flinging them at the survivors.
For what it’s worth, I asked one the administrators of the upcoming Left 4 Dead CAL league whether they consider they considered it an exploit. They didn’t.
What I’m trying to say is that I think it’s better to judge potential exploits from a gameplay and competition point of view.
I think resetting the frustration meter increases the strategic options in the game, it makes many strategies possible that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. It requires team work to be really effective, and the tank is just as vulnerable as before.
It also reduces the often unfair randomness of the tank spawn somewhat.
This would be an exception IMHO, since it’s pretty much uncounterable, unlike just staying somewhere with a forklift.
All the above reason, however, pale compared to what I consider the most important concern in casual games, does it make the game more or less fun?
I would argue that it makes it more fun since the tank is rather weak against a coordinated team, this makes the tank a bit more useful and it makes the game more interesting since the infected can now ambush as well as rush in with the tank.
This might be a good idea, perhaps using the CAL rules (since it’s a fairly respected league) as starting point might be a good idea.
While you’re at it, see if beating the doors down and circumventing the Horde by the lift and moving the construction equipment to block the elevator/doorways qualifies as lame too. Both are in No Mercy.
The way I see it, a competitive league is doomed to failure with this game unless there are some “fixed” spawns. It can’t be as random as it is currently with the AI Director.
Circumventing the crescendo event in NM3 is clearly lame IMO. I absolutely refuse to take part in any team that uses it. It’s worse than closet or corner camping.
We’re a fairly casual bunch, and I think we need to define rules somewhat differently from any sort of CAL guidelines because we’re looking for a different set of criteria. Leagues like that, from my UT experience, aren’t focused on the ‘fun’ aspect as they are in the in ‘balanced’ aspect. I tend to think we’re the opposite. Balanced is important, but fun is clearly what drives us to get together and play so often.
So, looking at the tank, I ask myself how was the fun affected?
Do I think Gambit’s move removed fun from the game? Not really. His move mirrored the survivors move. They pulled back to lead him into a killing box. He pulled back to force them into the open. The only difference is that he had to use a trick to keep his frustration meter from falling to zero. This does seem contrary to the purpose of the developers, but I equally don’t feel that the devs expected survivors to light tanks on fire and then run all the way back to the safe house waiting for the tank to die without bothering to fire a single shot. Or to corner up and auto-shotgun the tank to death in under 4 seconds.
As I said earlier, I do believe that running the tank off into other areas of the map in order to set up ambushes or impossible situations for the survivors is unacceptable. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to use the trick to maintain the status quo. And I don’t think it removes the fun aspect. I’m not saying that everyone should rush out to die by tank. But I do think we should try to maintain some of the fear of the tank by not forcing tank players into no win situations. The fear factor of the tank increases the fun of the game, in my opinion. And by that criteria, it seems to me that gambit’s move wasn’t an “exploit”, though he may have used an exploit to achieve it.
I bow to the will of the group, but that is my personal opinion.
With regard to the tactic used at hand, if the survivors want to lure the Tank into a trap, then the Tank has carte blanche to not fall for it. After all, it’s not a trap if it’s not sprung. Why would you walk into a trap if you knew it was there? It’s also lame to shove the car into the escape hole in No Mercy 1.
Essentially, we’re at the SDMB credo: “don’t be a dick”. Someone will argue that sitting in a corner to make the Tank useless is playing fair, but it’s not necessarily playing to the spirit of the game. Therefore, the game is broken and unbalanced, which VALVe knew coming into it.
I haven’t gotten to play much since before Christmas…but “human director” game?
Huh?
Oh, and has anyone found a frickin’ PC manual yet?
-Joe
There isn’t a manual that I’m aware of. Not via steam at least. Not sure if the 360 version came with one or not. Even if it did, it may not be useful for the PC players. http://left4dead411.com/ has a lot of useful info about the game, but it’s not official or anything.
AFAIK, human director games can be done with a single spectator using cheats to spawn zombies. Not sure if there is a mod or anything that does it too, but that’s the only way I’ve heard of doing it. Personally, it sounds like a blast… among friends. But hellish in any sort of public game setting.