During the night the beaver slaves at Valve have been adding all sorts of fixes and features to Left 4 Dead. At this difficult time of year, we at Rock, Paper, Shotgun are asking you to think of the beaver slaves, held by the tyrannical Valve because of their dedication to hard work and comical teeth. To find out what this cruelty has resulted in for the game, look below.
At the bottom is the complete list, but first the bits I venture are most interesting. I’d say the best bits are the Tank and Witch changes. The chances of a Tank or Witch spawning have been increased, and are now the same for both teams, which does away with those crazy matches where one team finds themselves facing three in a row while the other breezes through. Plus they will both now spawn directly on escape routes. Ha ha. Sadly, the ability to trigger the Witch on the Survivors has been declared an exploit and prevented.
Hunters are getting more power to their pounce, with increased damage, and an easier time jumping on meleeing Survivors. Smokers are getting more powerful too. To break the tongue you’ll now need to either kill the Smoker, or destroy his tongue completely, and it’ll be doing damage every second when dragging a Survivor. Tanks are more resistant to shotguns, and will have a clearer idea what to hit – that which can be bashed will glow red. Meanwhile, their frustration timer will now only be reset by hitting Survivors with rocks or fists.
Most of the rest of the changes are exploit fixes or tweaks for balance. Of course, both these factors will affect how the most dedicated play. All these updates will appear by auto-magic when you run Steam. Here’s the complete list of what’s been done:
General
- Fixed Survivors being able to climb surfaces marked for versus infected only.
- Fixed a class of SurvivorBot bugs dealing with rescuing downed players.
- Players can no longer grab ladders while flying through the air after a Tank punch.
- Shooting near a car with an alarm that has already fired the alarm will no longer make chirping noises.
- Improved loading time.
- Fixed mini-gun physics exploit.
- Fixed propane tanks (and other physics objects) causing players to fall through elevators.
- Fixed rare achievement bug issues.
- Fixed several map exploits.
- Fixed various match making issues.
- Fixed NAT traversal issues.Versus Changes
- Added HUD elements to show status of other infected players.
- Changed color of infected player name in chat to red.
- Fixed exploit where players could spawn infected bots
- Fixed instance where a Survivor changing to the infected team would be attacked by infected bots.
- Normalized special infected melee damage.
- Made the following client commands cheat protected: “Kill” and “explode”.
- Fixed exploit where infected players could run away and teleport back to gain health.
- Players can only change teams once per map.
- Players can’t change teams while other players are still loading.
- Tank spawns at the same % through the map for both teams in versus mode.
- Made the Tank and Witch spawn directly on the escape route.
- Increased chance of getting the Tank or Witch.
- Fixed team swap issue.Hunter
- Easier to pounce a Survivor who is meleeing.
- Increased Minimum damage a Hunter pounce does.Smoker
- Fixed Smoker tongue tolerance.
- Smoker now has to be killed or the tongue destroyed for the tongue to break.
- Survivor’s cannot bash someone off the tongue until the Survivor being pulled is paralyzed or hanging
- Tongue attacks that fail to paralyze or hang a Survivor will use the shorter ability delay timer.
- Fixed cases where the ability timer was not using the correct time.
- Fixed case where you could point at a Survivor but not register a tongue hit
- Fixed Smoker tongue not targeting and landing properly through PZ ghosts.
- Smoker tongue does damage every second while dragging paralyzed Survivors.Tank
- Bashable objects now appear with a red glow.
- Tanks hitting a car with an alarm disables the alarm permanently.
- Tank frustration timer is only reset by hitting Survivors with rocks or fists.
- Reduced autoshotgun damage against Tanks.Witch
- Witch spawns at the same % through the map for both teams.
- Avoids spawning within a certain % of the tank.
- Fixed an exploit where the Witch could be woken up and tricked into attacking Survivors.
I don’t like it.
The hunter slash being nerfed is terrible as you get hunter the majority of the time. The added pounce damage is very small. A hunter pouncing a player in a group will now get maybe 6 damage from the pounce and then be immediately hit off or killed. While previously slashing was a viable tactic on a tight group of survivors, it is now less so and pouncing is still near useless.
The smoker tongue is a little better but it doesn’t stop closeting. Now teams just need to have a person shooting instead of everyone meleeing and anyone grabbed will instantly be freed.
The tank and witch spawns (especially with the addition that the with cannot be incited by a hunter) give the second team a huge advantage.
The tank is now forced to charge survivors instead of engaging them on his own terms and the lower damage from autoshotties is negligible so he’s forced to run to his doom.
Boosting smoker and boomer melee by 2 is negligible and just makes it less satisfying to incap someone with a boomer melee.
The only plusses are the fixes to map exploits and the infected cloning bug.
I’m heading back to campaign now, which is sad, as I’d started liking VS.
The Infected HUD is great, you can see what you’ve got active, and how long before others spawn. Very useful.
The Smoker update is much needed. I never had problems getting the tongue to latch it was just that it would often go like this:
pull, pull, pull, pull, melee, aw zero damage.
I like the concept of everybody getting the same Tankage (your team not getting a tank on the building site section when they do was a f*cker), but it does mean that the second team has a big advantage. You know exactly when he’s coming and can explore every closet making sure you have Molotovs and are ready.
I think the Tank control bar change was the way the Tank was always supposed to be. It was done to ensure you don’t lay in wait, you run in and charge.
You’re supposed to be a ball of hulking rage.
The second survivor team will have an advantage, but the team to play infected second will know almost exactly when the tank is coming as well, and they’ll be able to set up in spawn mode for an optimal ambush.
Likewise (and maybe even more so) for the witch.
Edit. With those control bar changes, I expect to see more people putting the tank somewhere inconvenient and letting the AI take over and wait for the survivors, now.
lol @ Anonononomous (if that is your real name).
The way I see it is this – it takes more than one or two bullets from a gun to kill a smoker, and if you read the update fully, you’d have realised that you have to kill the smoker or destroy the tongue to release a survivor being dragged.
With that in mind, if the smoker can better split up a group, hunter pounces will be more effective, and the extra damage there means something.
The same tank and witch thing is a little annoying, but with a simple tweak they could make it so that both teams go first twice in a game (as other commenters have suggested).
My favourite is where you say that the auto shotgun debuff vs tanks is ‘negligible’. In my experience tanking is a lot less futile once the survivors have the better weapons now. And what kind of player sits around as a tank? Tanks attack players! They don’t wait around like pussies.
Actually, I have a new favourite:
“Boosting smoker and boomer melee by 2 is negligible and just makes it less satisfying to incap someone with a boomer melee.”
Makes it less satisfying to incap someone with a boomer melee? If it is so negligible surely it will still be satisfying?
I just find it funny that for someone who thinks that most of the fixes don’t really change the way the game is played, you have quit playing vs mode in outrage.
I’m glad that I will not have to play on your team in vs mode now!
Alright, as far as first and second team, why even have teams sign up as “infected” in the selection screen?
Have them fill up as player type and “home” or “visitor” team. Visitors go first. It’s called home field advantage. This translates competively where servers aren’t neutral either. A league can balance “home” and “away” games, and figure out from there. Groups of four who want to challenge random people should play as visitors.
In short, a slight handicap is a useful thing, as long as everyone recognizes it’s a handicap.
I hadn’t thought of letting the AI take over the tank. If you leave it out of some range from the survivors does it stand idle?
The patch has done nothing to alleviate ragequitting though, in fact it may have made it worse, by making Hunters and Smokers better. 3 randoms and I thoroughly whupped 4 friends/clansmen twice in a row. They all simultaneously ragequit halfway through the second map.
Managing the expectations of the enemy in VS games becomes a significant challenge. You want to beat them, but not too much!
These look like good changes. Particularly like the increased damage for the Smoker, who was a class I always hated getting bar, in a few locations. The only way to use him most of the time was in conjunction with a Boomer, which rarely worked on a team that was sticking together well.
Really, the Infected needed to be really buffed compared to Survivors. Lowering the chance that a team can make it all the way to the end makes Versus much more competitive, with people rushing to get as far as possible and tighter scores. It would also probably stop people being so quick to hit the quit button when they have a bad Survivor round.
Edit: And Valve, hurry up and get Dead Air and Death Toll into versus mode. I never play co-op any more and would like some variation with the maps I play. I would imagine Death Toll (with its town setting and lots of roofs to hide on) would be fantastic as Infected.
Adam,
Shooting the tongue is easy. That’s how I did things most of the time already. If it was changed to keep people from closeting and meleeing, it now simply forces a person to be shooting during the closeting and he will easily break the tongue. It does make the rifles more effective, as the shotgun isn’t good for taking out the tongue, though, and that’s nice. That also makes it so that the tank is less likely to run into 4 autoshotties.
I have always been a fan of the idea that teams alternate positions. Then the tank and witch spawns wouldn’t be as big a deal. Of course, if they;’re going for parity between teams, they also need to address the fact that the director often gives one team tons of medpacks and the other team gets few to none.
I’ve seen tanks still go down to shotguns ridiculously fast. Maybe not as fast, but it’s still suicidal. Not being able to bat around physics objects and wait to engage the survivors where you have space to avoid the molotov and shotguns still ends up screwing the tank, even with the lowered shotgun damage, I feel.
It was funny to incap someone with the boomer because he was so damn weak. Now he’s twice as effective in melee. You used to have a 1 in 50 chance of doing it. Now it’s 1 in 25. Still amusing, but only half as much. Or, think of this this way: he used to have 1/5th the melee power of a hunter. Now he as 2/3rds.
And I don’t see how you got the impression I thought the patch didn’t change things. I think it makes things a lot less fun for any survivor other than the smoker.
I dont see it as much of an advantage that the second team knows where abouts the tank is coming. You can hear the tank anyway. If the first team is competent they should be well ready to deal with a non surprising event like the witch or tank.
The second team could be more prepared or they could just be more cautious and fanny about giving the infected’s more chances to kill them.
I miss the early Farmhouse finales. In the beginning before everyone else decided to always go autoshotties there’d be a lot of movement through the house and it was fun. Since people worked you could just stand in corners by the ammo with autoshotties and mince everything in seconds it got no fun at all.
There are still some big flaws. If all else fails backing into a corner and spamming melee is still unstoppable.
I think long term something needs to change with the melee. It’s important that it’s there, but it becomes an impenetrable forcefield button. Maybe there should be a finite chance that a regular infected will grab your gun and grapple with you for a few seconds, like a brief tonguing. It wouldn’t do direct damage, but other infected could hit you?
That (infected grappling) would be interesting. It would need a lot of work, though.
A simple solution would be to have some melee fatigue. For example, you have some sort of stamina meter and you can constantly melee 10 times before it is depleted and then it needs to recharge some. You wouldn’t have to wait for it to charge all the way before hitting again, but it would run out faster if you didn’t. It would be just like reloading the shotguns. I know Valve apparently playtested melee fatigue and decided to take it out, but I have no faith in their playtesters. They only make the games dumbed down from what I have read.
A melee fatigue would force teams to either figure out a pattern for meleeing and trading off or it would make people shoot more when being attacked by a hoard instead of just sitting in a corner and meleeing.
“smoker tongue tolerance” is an amusing phrase.
That’s all I have to say.
Gave the new patch a test run last night, and damn, it’s fun. It feels far more balanced and fair. Nothing was more frustrating when you played smoker, than losing your target because you dragged him over a tiny pebble. Boomer bile seems to hit a lot more consistently now. (Before the patch, it seemed like only the last half of the burst actually mattered. So you had to spray someone for quite a while before it took effect)
All in all, it seems infected is a bit more powerful, which is good, because that makes the scores a lot more meaningful. When both teams consistently win as survivors, it’s basically random who ends up with the highest score. When actually getting to the safehouse is unusual, it depends much more on how far you got, how soon the infected killed you.
They also fixed a few other exploits, such as closet camping on the No Mercy finale (under the ramp. They stacked a few crates under it to block it)
Good stuff :D
I disagree. This is what the smoker is intended for. Pull a single survivor away from their cozy little closet camping. Of course, before the patch, that didn’t work because you just meleed the tongue along with everything else. Now, it’s a bit more viable, because you have to actually break the tongue before it releases the survivor. Which means he’ll most likely be dragged a bit away, at least. Similarly, hunter pounce stuns nearby survivors, giving the infected a few moments to act in. And guess who just became harder to melee? HUNTER! I sense a conspiracy here. Seems like Valve is well aware of the problem with meleeing, and have already changed it. Perhaps it’ll take a bit more tweaking to fix entirely, but from the games I’ve played after the patch, it already seems far better. It still takes skill to deal with surivors who are closet camping, but now it’s no longer hopeless.
It can still be a major advantage. Hearing the tank doesn’t tell you which direction he’ll be coming from, and it doesn’t give you as much warning. In some cases, of course, it doesn’t matter, but yesterday we got a tank in the alley around 30% into No Mercy 1. That’s right, tight, enclosed space, no grenades, no T2 weapons, and lots of cars for the tank to throw at you. We got the first round as infected, so we killed them all by throwing a few cars, while the survivors tried to retreat back to the house.
On our turn, we knew the tank would be coming, and we knew this alley was a bad place to fight it, so we ran straight for the street, where we could dodge the cars more easily.
Guess which team won…. ;)
I think the melee has been slightly diminished with the Hunter and Smoker changes, and that was the point, but I don’t think it’ll change things dramatically (Valve MP updates are usually about small corrections).
One person spamming melee can be pounced more easily, but 2+ in tight formation meleeing are still pretty untouchable.
The smoker can now drag someone a little way and do damage until people shoot instead, whereas before it was impossible when people were huddled meleeing.
The boomer is still fairly screwed damage-wise, if you actually look at the effect of the boomer it’s really only a distraction (allowing a pounce/pull while they can’t see), backing into a corner and meleeing removes much chance of infected attacks while vomit covered. Maybe that’s the point of the boomer entirely, but it’s pretty frustrating to see a 4 person vomit go to waste because the rest of your team don’t attack and the regular infected get thrown around.
@ jonfitt – That is why you boomer people when they are in the open and not in tight areas ;)
I personally find Boomer to be the most effective of all the Infected, lacking the very limited uses of the Smoker and the fiddly nature of the Hunter.
Oh God I’m so excited. As to the smoker, I find it a bit disturbing that one can melee the smoker off if the person is hanging. Doesn’t that discourage smoker players from getting high up vantage points where the survivor will be quickly hung?
A-Scale: To a certain extent, perhaps. The smoker is meant to separate the survivors, rather than deal raw damage. So if you use it to pull a survivor 8 inches just to hang them somewhere, you’re doing it wrong. ;)
It’ll still keep them occupied for a few seconds, of course, a deal a few points of damage, while making you pretty hard to see and kill, so I don’t see how it’s discouraging anything.
Well, they’re 2 vs 1 then, what did you expect? ;)
But if one hunter can get a pounce in (should be easier now that hunter is harder to melee), that stuns all survivors for a second or two, and a smoker then has a perfect opportunity to pull a survivor out of melee range. And of course, if you have a boomer around too, bile them to keep them busy so they can’t easily free their smokered friend.
It’ll still take practice and coordination, of course, but it’s too early to say that more melee nerfs are needed.
I like the changes for the most part, but frankly i think the infected are already better than the survivors in vs mode. Seems like few survivor groups will get to the end, it will be a race to see what team can kill the other faster.
Well cowboy, I don’t see why it should be the other way.
Survivors should have a hard time surviving. Ofcourse it shouldn’t be expert level with human infected players, but it should be a manageble challenge. And besides, I don’t think it’s that hard if you just keep it fast :)
L4D stats are being implemented now, check your L4D stats page to see what they’re doing with it. Theres a “Finales survived” PERCENTAGE stat. Not Good!
Sadly Valve also fucked up Radeon cards with this patch (at least older ones). My brother who used to be able to play at moderate levels suddenly was crashing anytime he got control of a character. They’ve since hotfixed that, but the entire game lags horribly now for him. He gets 14fps maximum.
you guys are talking as though knowing when the tank coming is a massive advantage, you still cant account for its unpredictable devastation. it all lies in the ability of the players, a poor survivor team will still be no match for a well organised infected team with tank.
hmm… I noticed some pretty bad slow down on TF2 the other night and possibly on L4D last night (although it may have been lag that time.) TF2 was ranging from 130 FPS in start locations down to about 30-40 in busy locations and that was on a HD4850. Maybe related.
Enjoying the changes very much. Really like the Smoker now, although he hasn’t been made unstoppable. Still fairly easy to melee his tongue when the Survivor has been paralysed and shooting at the Smoker quickly releases them too, but he is much better at separating.
The major improvement is the HUD for the Infected. Really helpful knowing how long it will be for team mates to spawn and being able to quickly gage what class each person is makes a big difference.
I’m really delighted with the changes.
Although from early play I say that melee is still possibly slightly too good, and like either Anonononomous’ or jonfitt’s ideas about fatigue or grappling
Its still much too easy for 4 decent survivors to get to the end and I do much prefer the dynamic of how far you can get in the level before being overwhelmed rather than who can get to the end witht he most health. Although this is possibly linked to the way I play (with 3 friends vs 4 randoms) but certainly we very rarely struggle as survivor (and if we do its down to our fuck ups rather than the other team).
In terms of Tanks and Witches spawning in the same place, on the whole I think this is ultimately a good thing however it does give the 2nd team something or an advantage but no where near as much of an advantage as they get from knowing where the L2 weps are.
I like the idea of team switching order for each level although this would further encourage infected whoring (people who play as inf and then leave as soon as the round is done to find new server)
Agree with the others that they need to hurry and give us more versus maps, because as great as the maps are they’re starting to wear thin.