Left 4 Dead 2 Workshop Is Live

[Omnomnick]

That's right - as of yesterday, January 17th 2013, the Left 4 Dead 2 workshop has gone live on Steam's community hub. The game is the fourth of Valve's titles to receive integrated workshop support and will provide a directory for the wide variety of skins, maps, campaigns, weapons and scripts which have been created for the game since it's release back in 2009. A member of the L4D team explained the functionality of the game's Steam workshop integration in a blog post on the official Left 4 Dead blog.​

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Content creators have been hard at work creating content for L4D2 but they have just gotten access to the new Workshop, so give them some time to upload their work. But with over 1,000 community campaigns and thousands more items and skins already created for the game, we should see many of these pop up in the Left 4 Dead 2 Workshop in the coming days and weeks

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What are you waiting for?! Get on out there and kill some zombies...or make some new campaigns - either works!​

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[Lubci50cal]

I only hope that next Valve game receiving workshop will be Alien Swarm

 

[William]

Finally... I seriously think this is one of the more useful workshops. With the amount of campaigns and now custom mutators... this will be awesome. I might start playing L4D again.

 

[Barnz]

Oh great, there are no example models.

 

[Hectic Glenn]

Agreed with Will, definitely needed. This will really benefit, as will CSGO. Wonder if the L4D map sites welcome this? Partial conflict of interests perhaps.

 

[jsparakov]

Agreed with Will, definitely needed. This will really benefit, as will CSGO. Wonder if the L4D map sites welcome this? Partial conflict of interests perhaps.

From the l4dmapper mailing list... I remember one mappers account with a Valve employee when he had a chance to meet for lunch. Valve was not happy with what L4DMaps.com was doing with fans of the game. So I find the workshop a great way to let that site slowly die or turn into a dumping ground for workshop-ToS-violating add-ons. Then there was l4dmaps.net, a branch of tf2maps.net, but it ran into technical problems that lasted for months at a time. This drove people to l4dmaps.com. This might also explain why Valve stopped directing downloads to l4dmaps.com and hosted featured campaigns on their own servers after a few times with them.

edit: I don't like the fact that it took them a long time to get workshop for the game that needed it the most. I'm still optimistic that it'll bring back more players in the future.

 

[Dr.IndianaJones]

Time to say goodbye to L4DMaps and other websites... Looking forward to finding some new campaigns to play! The biggest issue I had was trying to install mods for survivors (due to coding and such) But since this came about I don't have to worry about that any more!

 

[ríomhaire]

From the l4dmapper mailing list... I remember one mappers account with a Valve employee when he had a chance to meet for lunch. Valve was not happy with what L4DMaps.com was doing with fans of the game.

Could you elaborate on this? I'm curious.

 

[Dr.IndianaJones]

Could you elaborate on this? I'm curious.

Yeah same here.

 

[jsparakov]

Could you elaborate on this? I'm curious.

Yeah same here.

Here's a quote from one of two people that met up with some of the devs at GDC 2011. It's kind of vague, but I agree nonetheless. l4dmaps.com is not an ideal experience and workshop is a fantastic direction.

We actually talked about l4dmaps .com quite a bit.

The the Valve guys were pretty upset about some of the stuff that goes
on there, and that it's basically become the norm for distribution,
driving out all sorts of other methods.

I get the feeling a better distribution method might be in the works
sometime down the road a bit. Perhaps something built into steam.

edit: one thing l4dmaps.com does, or did(?): pay to promote maps. Not sure if they changed recently. The company behind l4dmaps.com is seen as a company that drives out other sites for a certain topic and then profit from it in the long run. So a non-profit community driven site like tf2maps.net has a competitor from afreeinc http://www.tfmaps.com/. Here's another quote:

I don't want to derail the topic, but I cannot pass up bashing l4dmaps.com. Its business model basically the same one that turned Planetquake into a smattering of shitball sites.

Need further convincing? Here are the people who own the network sites:

http://www.afreeinc.com/services.php

I mean look at the list:

"afreeSupport -- Keep your PC Clean and Optimized,"
"afreeOCX -- Download and restore missing .OCX files for windows."
"Buy Ant Farms.com -- Buy the latest ant farms and ant farm accessories."

Their entire business model is to become the DE FACTO content provider for a certain market, and build its wealth and credibility based on the volume of community members who have nowhere else (realistically) to go. All they do is pay for the servers, bandwidth, a very shitty design template, and minimal staff moderation.