Why Left4Dead sucks (a rant)

I only play with hl2.netters. Or their friends.
 
I thought a massive update was coming to fix the game for christmas
(yes fix is the right word because it's far from perfect, but it's fixable)
but it hasn't come
 
Gordon-Shepherd said:
I thought a massive update was coming to fix the game for christmas
(yes fix is the right word because it's far from perfect, but it's fixable)
but it hasn't come
Click to expand...

Sauce? I didn't hear anything about it. Then again, I don't really go out looking for news on the game... \=
 
CyberPitz said:
Sauce? I didn't hear anything about it. Then again, I don't really go out looking for news on the game... \=
Click to expand...
http://www.kotaku.com.au/games/2008/12/a_very_special_kotaku_holiday_podcast-2.html Download it and then go to 36:42. Chet actually says that the SDK and DLC details were supposed to be mentioned before Christmas. In his defense though he said it's the holidays so nothing might not be announced. Frankly it's BS that every game dev put out a patch or DLC but not Valve. What about Episode 3 too? The Halo 3 movie recorder system is gonna be another lost project as well. The Kotaku guys were like "WTF" when he said that too. Valve has been getting really sloppy and lazy recently. It's not Valve time neither! :p Like yesterday the store front was down for 6 hours and they lost a lot of sales, not to mention that the pound is equal to the dollar to Valve.
 
hool10 said:
http://www.kotaku.com.au/games/2008/12/a_very_special_kotaku_holiday_podcast-2.html Download it and then go to 36:42. Chet actually says that the SDK and DLC details were supposed to be mentioned before Christmas. In his defense though he said it's the holidays so nothing might not be announced. Frankly it's BS that every game dev put out a patch or DLC but not Valve. What about Episode 3 too? The Halo 3 movie recorder system is gonna be another lost project as well. The Kotaku guys were like "WTF" when he said that too. Valve has been getting really sloppy and lazy recently. It's not Valve time neither! :p Like yesterday the store front was down for 6 hours and they lost a lot of sales, not to mention that the pound is equal to the dollar to Valve.
Click to expand...

Do people really care about how long Valve take to release things? We all know that in the end the update is going to be well worth the wait because Valve put a proper spin on their products, so give 'em a chance to breathe over Christmas as they're in for a well deserved break after what, releasing L4D little over a month ago, if that.

Though to be honest, I'm a 360 player and the game hasn't got any of the bugs I've heard people saying about in this thread and other places (that isn't a gloat - I'm just saying) so I'm not as desperate to get a fix. I wouldn't mind a server selection, but I've actually had no problems finding games. The only problem I have with L4D is getting into a lobby with people with no mics, and that isn't much of an issue as it's really a personal preference thing.

/me dreams of a server selection that enables 'Mic support is a must' option

Also, the Halo 3 render to video thing? That isn't lost. Bungie are working on it and have not said otherwise as to it's release. Bare in mind they're creating a piece of tech that is going to have to cater to THOUSANDS of people every day who want to render their file share videos.
 
Only bug I ran into: two of my team got stuck in a door. Literally, in a door. It wouldn't open, wouldn't close, wouldn't splinter.

Then a swarm, a hunter, and a tank spawned and beat the shit out of us.
 
Just wondering, is the glitch/bug at the top of the elevator in No Mercy on Versus in the PC version aswell as the 360? I dont know how many people are aware of it, but its where the special infected players block the doors with objects that the humans cant move.
 
It hasn't happened to me yet. It may be do-able, but I haven't seen it done.
 
A nice exploit I found with my friends.

By using the minigun boost trick, you can get ontop of the plane in last part of dead air.

Up here, the only danger was smokers, and tanks would be harmless.
 
giant384 said:
sounds more like a performance rant then about left 4 dead......come back when its about the game and not your outdated pc.
Click to expand...

x2
i've had zero performance related problems since release
as far as gameplay goes, it varies from game to game and, obviously, it's much more enjoyable when played with friends
it's a great game and hopefully it will only get better with additional patches and content releases
 
Maybe next time you shouldn't try to close Left4dead.exe because there's no such thing.

It's almost ALWAYS hl2.exe
 
[RE]Leon said:
Maybe next time you shouldn't try to close Left4dead.exe because there's no such thing.

It's almost ALWAYS hl2.exe
Click to expand...

Except when you're not playing a Half-Life 2 build, but Left 4 Dead, in which case Left4dead.exe would be running in the stead of hl2.exe...

:D
 
chimpmunk said:
Okay, first off: I am a fan of L4D and I love the game but I believe some aspects of the game are disappointing. I am not trolling or anything, it's just a rant about what I see as the weak points of the game.
I am also aware that some of my gripes with the game can stem from ignorance or misunderstandings of how the game works, so If it happens, feel free to explain what I have missed or if there are any fixes.

-So, here it is: my rant about Left4dead, well... Where to begin?
I'll just explain my usual play session of left4dead:

***

So I click the L4D icon, wait for it to load. When it's done, I decide that I'm just gonna do a quickmatch as I don't want to wait for the game leader to actually start the game if he ever does (and if it ever finds a server anyways). First "quickmatch" click, I wait for a few seconds before getting a "server is full" message. I'll try again, same thing. Again? Same thing. After about 8 tries, I decide to just hit the lobby, even if that means waiting for the game to be started.
So I'm the lobby, chilling and text chatting with people when someone uses his mic to voice cha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-t-t-t-t-t-t-t-t. Oh, great, stuttering, a flashback from Half life 2.

So the game crashed. Allright, I'm back to the desktop, I click the Left4dead icon but I get a "you cannot run more than one instance of the game at once" message.
I ctrl+alt+del to kill Left4dead.exe but it never works.

I'll reboot (the only solution). Wait a minute or two for my computer to be fully loaded, start steam, start Left4dead.
Ok, it works.
I'll try quickmatch again. Nope, "The" game is still full. Maybe on a second try? Fast forward to the 10th time, I join a game.
Game is full but I get a dead survivor slot, and it's the finale anyways. Let's start again.
After 2-3 tries, I manage to join another server. All's going well, it's early in the campaing so I can hope for a lengthy and fun game.
What's that? What happened? I shot that zombie many times. Why don't my hits get registered? I'm dead.
Okay I'll wait for next round.
I'm now an infected. I spawn as a hunter, not my favorite infected but whatever, I'll do my best. A "melee spamming" later and I'm dead.

Oh great, I got a boomer, even more great: I boomed them all. Let's just sit back and watch the score go up and the survivor's health go down.
But all I get is a 5-6 zombie horde. Needless to say, the survivors don't even get scratched.
Maybe next time I'll be more "lucky".
Oh great, I got the tank! I'll try to incap them all or at least kill one or two. Oh, there is a death timer when you are on fire? And survivors can outrun you?
Maybe next time I'll hit one.
Fast forward to the second tank: Great, this time they will pay, plus my teammate that has the tank seems to be a pro, they'll be dead for sure.
Unless the survivors hide under a tank proof staircase.
After two useless tanks and unfixed exploits, my team ragequits. But I decide to stay, after all it's taken me to finally join a game, i won't quit like that.
Okay, I maybe alone but I can still at least kill one survivor left behind. It's time to attack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack. What happened? I didn't see but I'm dead again. Thanks to stuttering.

The survivors win. I'm back to being a survivor and they become infected. They are four and I'm alone with three AI's. I ask that at least one player joins my team so it's more fair but all I get as an aswer is "SHUT UP FAG".

Let's try this.
So I'm all alone, against 4 infected. What is there outside the spawn? A witch and a tank.
I die while the AI players watch the walls.

The infected win. I'm back to being an infected.
The other team has 4 humans playing survivors. I'm alone on the infected team. There are no tanks or witches.

I think the director hates me.

Ok, maybe I should try to join another game, one with even teams. So I hit quickmatch: "the game is full"...

Then it's the same thing all over again.

***

It has started to feel like Left4Dead is more a game of chance and that skill does not really matter as it's more about: will the tank die for no apparent reason? will you get 18 second respawns as infected, or will it be 30 seconds? will boomers really work or will you get small, 5 zombies hordes? will your attacks register? will you get game destroying stuttering? etc...

I must add though that most of those gripes do not apply to games with friends, wheter it is because we are all on the same skill level, are having fun and not noticing the flaws or for some other reason, I cannot say.
Click to expand...

From what i skimmed (**** no i aint reading that entire thing), your complaints seem like it may be you computer or some minor glitches.. I dont encounter any of those. Whats your CPU? GPU?

I wasn't to clear on your last complaint, im ASSUMING your talking about rage quiters. Thats not the games fault, thats the players. Thats why playing with friends or really cool people who are playing cooperatively with you is an advantage. Its an unfortunate thing, but luckily random people join the game and replace the bots whenever i play.

About the bot rant, seriously, no matter how advanced and good a bot is, people will always complain about it. But in all honesty, the bots in left 4 dead are very impressive to me. They arent like the CS bots that like to hug walls, come around corners, look around and shoot people. The left 4 dead bots are pretty much like human players, they'll melee you if your being pounced or smoked. My only dislike is they use a med kit when a player still has 50 health left. This can easily be fixed if they program it to only heal when a player is below a certain point.

And also, left 4 dead really has no gameplay-interference bugs. Sure you can glitch and skip a crescendo, but the game runs great the entire way for me. Your stuttering is clearly your computer so its a pretty stupid rant.

The only bug that i know other people get and i get that needs fixing, is sometimes if im in a lobby and i have the voice chat key activated and running, then when the lobby leader starts up the game, my computer crashes. Other people have complained about this and it should be fixed.
 
There are no bugs in L4D. (follow that link)

The bugs/problems from that thread that I experienced myself:

- Various sound problems with mic in lobby or full game. [confirmed]

- In a lobby, hitting "Start Voice" and "Stop Voice" quickly crashes the game and drops everyone from the lobby. Original thread [confirmed]

- Sound loop crashes for several people. [confirmed]

- Sometimes dropping down a height will get you hanging from the ledge where it should not. Screenshot 1/////Screenshot 2 [confirmed]

- Reloading the weapon sometimes glitches so you have to meele or reload again. Pistols seem to be the most effected weapon, but others show this glitch as well. [confirmed]

- Forced spawns in finales may be in sight of survivors or on deathly ledges where you will fall no matter what. [confirmed]


etc...
 
Yeah but most of those bugs are confirmed. If you can remember a prior blog update they said they were in a bug squashing phase. They said this is one of the rare times in which everybody stops working and plays the game. They made it sound like they were doing it 24/7 and having fun playing. I think they were having too much fun instead of bug squashing. I mean have you ever seen TF2 for example have hundreds of bugs upon release? Many of these were blatant like matchmaking during the demo. *Just tried to count them and lost count at 300.
 
Eejit said:
chimpmunk said:
I don't have enough gaming friends to always be playing with friends only. So I have to resort to "public" gaming.
Click to expand...

Play with hl2netters.
Click to expand...

I'm in the same boat as Chimpmunk & want to take your advice Eejit. However, I have no idea how to play with others from HL2.net.

I have been searching these forums for the answer & can only find a sticky about a server for playing versus.

I wasn't about to start a thread on this coz I'm not in the mood to be called a noob & endure insults that always follow my posts.

Could someone kindly post directions on how to play with other HL2.net peeps? And YES, I am a member on the Steam group.
 
Ask em in the steam group. Befriend them and send invites etc.
 
Ms. Red said:
I'm in the same boat as Chimpmunk & want to take your advice Eejit. However, I have no idea how to play with others from HL2.net.

I have been searching these forums for the answer & can only find a sticky about a server for playing versus.

I wasn't about to start a thread on this coz I'm not in the mood to be called a noob & endure insults that always follow my posts.

Could someone kindly post directions on how to play with other HL2.net peeps? And YES, I am a member on the Steam group.
Click to expand...
Anybody who takes interest in playing with a fellow hl2.netter is a [HL2.net] friend of mine. ;) I'm here btw: http://steamcommunity.com/id/hool10 The only reason I will remove you is if you're like Shakermaker or joule who hasn't been on in almost 2 months.
 
In all seriousness L4D is probably the buggiest game of Valve's I've played. Okay so there aren't that many showstopper bugs, but there are a lot of smaller bugs and exploits - just look at chimpmunk's link for the large and comprehensive truth.

Having said that I'm still having a blast, the only regular issue I have that affects my enjoyment is the lobby issues (lobby full of Australians, browser shows 30+ empty servers in Australia but the lobby fails to find one or puts us in a US server).

It's only been 6 weeks since release (jeeze only 6?, feels like ages) and it's a bad time of year to get much work done. I fully expect to see a lot more updates in the next couple of months.

[RE]Leon said:
Maybe next time you shouldn't try to close Left4dead.exe because there's no such thing.
Click to expand...
Not true. Easy mistake to make since, to my knowledge, L4D is the first Valve game since before HL2 to have a exe that isn't "hl2.exe".
 
My real gripe with the browser system is that I can't choose servers (obviously).
My first language is not english (french for those who wonder), with other source games I can browse servers and find a french one so I can game in my language. Now, unless I'm lucky (which never happens), I'm always gonna have to play with english speakers.
(Not that it's a big problem because I'm fully able to speak english but still... I'd like to be able to game in my own language. That's just one more reason to be disappointed in the game and its matchmaking system.)

And I guess the russians, polish, japanese, spanish, etc... feel the same way, that's why we need a real server browser.

That's just one more reason, for me, to go back to the other source games such as TF2 where I can easily find a server with gamers speaking the same language as me.
 
Hell even we English have that problem, i got put on a Japanese server and couldn't understand a thing not to mention my ping sucked because of it.
Does anyone know why L4D doesn't use GCFs like all the other Source Games?
 
I know that it's the holiday season but even then Valve are doing things weird. They know that these bugs exist yet they aren't making any type of announcement. A lot of people including me feel that Valve took their Mexico trip and just left the game in this state. Also a lot of newcomers are wondering about an announcement of DLC. They should at least say what they want to do and people are starting to believe it will be another TF2 console fiasco.

Btw the last update came out on 12/5/08 giving them at least 2 weeks to put out some updates. I think they took like a month vacation or something. From the stories I hear about Valve, they are really laid back as well meaning we won't see anything until 2 weeks into January. None of the new players know how to play as the Infected side neither which is understandable. *I'm surfing the steam forums more to find out about the bugs but every topic title are people pleading with Valve to release updates. http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=130 Valve are supposed to be with the community and they don't have any community managers neither.
 
I'd like to be able to game in my own language.
Click to expand...
I'd like that too, but really, there's less than 10 servers from this country. And my solution is to play with real-life friends. This game is best when doing so, and at least 1 player has a microphone (and uses it). Obviously that doesn't work for versus (not enough friends that plays L4D), in which case I'll just join a random server.
 
At the end of the day, we all sound like a bunch of angry old men who bitch about the smallest little things.... lets settle at that :P
 
Who are you talking to?

We're not griping, these are bugs that can, and have effected gameplay for many of us. Making them known is not griping, it's possibly helping Valve to fix them and make the game better, so no worries about "griping." ;)
 
Van_Halen said:
Who are you talking to?

We're not griping, these are bugs that can, and have effected gameplay for many of us. Making them known is not griping, it's possibly helping Valve to fix them and make the game better, so no worries about "griping." ;)
Click to expand...

Psst, im just being the guy in the middle laughing at everyone. Anyway, the only real bug that drives me nuts is having the game crash while talking in the lobby. Otherwise, i feel like complaining about things like "being able to see a few zombies spawn" is 'griping'. And i don't encounter bugs at all, just exploits for crescendos and what not. Also that link chipmunk posted is from the demo, since then Valve has fixed those issues.

Considering i played Stalker Clear sky not to long ago, left 4 dead seems bugless. You guys are just letting everything 'bug' you too much. haha lol
 
There a few annoying gameplay bugs, such as not being able to reload while being healed. But they are rather minor.
 
toaster-man said:
I like how when threads like these crop up about any Valve game, people take it as their opportunity to soapbox about how Valve really dropped the ball this time or how they're totally slipping or how they're just lazy, selfish, greedy ****s in general who don't care about players and just want your money.

I realize that L4D has plenty of glitches and I hope they fix them soon as well, but you guys need to stop being ****ing drama queens about it.
Click to expand...


I hate how valid criticism or telling the game Hey, he just aint that into you is met by posts saying everyone is a drama queen.



Hello, INTERNET.
 
nurizeko said:
I hate how valid criticism or telling the game Hey, he just aint that into you is met by posts saying everyone is a drama queen.



Hello, INTERNET.
Click to expand...

No, he has a point. Internet or not, bitching about everything, and scapegoating Valve like a high-ping really is just being nit-picky. Some people seem like they are trying to find bugs whenever they play a game...
 
Fiberawptic said:
No, he has a point. Internet or not, bitching about everything, and scapegoating Valve like a high-ping really is just being nit-picky. Some people seem like they are trying to find bugs whenever they play a game...
Click to expand...

Perhaps....perhaps.....but there are bugs there.


Still its not a big deal, its a good game overall, but if you don't want to play, then don't.

Thats my philosophy.
 
nurizeko said:
Perhaps....perhaps.....but there are bugs there.


Still its not a big deal, its a good game overall, but if you don't want to play, then don't.

Thats my philosophy.
Click to expand...

And i shall settle on that, because that's a philiosophy I can agree with. :cheese::cheese:
 
nurizeko said:
Perhaps....perhaps.....but there are bugs there.


Still its not a big deal, its a good game overall, but if you don't want to play, then don't.

Thats my philosophy.
Click to expand...

We can still talk about it, yo.
 
toaster-man said:
That's not what I'm talking about. Read the thread, people are bitching about how Valve have forgotten/don't care about its customer base because they haven't fixed the bugs yet.

I acknowledge that there are bugs and I want them to be fixed as well. I never said everyone is being a drama queen, just a few people.
Click to expand...

Yeah but everyone bitches about game devs abandoning them on the internet, I just try and ignore it, until they invent interactive holo-consoles so I can actually hack the safety protocols and kick them in the face.
 
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