First I might as well introduce myself.  Most of you know me by Craptor, I used to run the Left 4 Dead section of gameriot (left4dead.gameriot.com) due to problems with my contract (read: them not paying me when they were supposed to) I decided I'd write for comml4d for L4D2 as I've always worked with them on many articles and editorials and I fully support the efforts they've put towards improving the competitive scene.

One thing to note is that because of the new special infected, I do not believe quad caps are possible anymore, as there will always be at least a boomer or a spitter in every combination of spawns. If anyone has gotten a quad cap spawn please feel to correct me (proof preferred as I don't like taking people's word for it who I don't know).


Aside from sounding like a 40 year old cave dwelling pervert, I feel like he is the red headed step child of the bunch not having much of a use for anything. He's ok for causing seperation but we already know the smoker does a much better job of that (since he can do it from a distance). He can knock people off ledges, however they just end up in hanging mode unlike the charger who will kill them.

All in all I feel like the jockey doesn't really do anything special to give him an important role over the other special infected.


Boy o Boy is this guy a beast. Holding down small rooms is truly a thing of the past with this loogie hocker roaming around. With some good coordination you can really wreck the survivors, and I've found some combination of anything but the jockey/smoker with the spitter works wonders if you can pin 1-2 survivors down in the area where the noxious goo lands. I've found it is not uncommon to take half of multiple players health if you get a good boom, or charge and pounce off in a tight quarters.


This guy is a real treat to play, as many people enjoyed playing the hunter in L4D1 I feel the charger will garner similar joyous feelings in L4D2. Literally the first time playing the charger I charged someone off the ledge in the hotel on Dead Center 1, and from then on I knew the charger was
going to be something special. One of the awesome things about the charger is that if you catch someone out in the open you can charge them half way across the map until you run into something, which can really mess with the survivors rhythm. Props to the steam forum poster who originally came up with this idea, great to see quality feedback is being put to use by valve.

 
Valve really knocked their redesign of the special infected out of the park (with the exception of the jockey). All the weaknesses of the special infected in the original L4D have turned into huge advantages with the addition of the spitter and charger. Gone are the days of shiva stacking and closet camping as a spitter/charger will ruin their day really quickly. On a side note I am sad quad caps are eliminated, but I feel like with the spitter/charger in the mix chip damage has become so massive that you don't need to rely on quad caps anymore.

This is part one of my first impressions series of L4D2. Some of the following parts will include the redesign of maps/objectives/scoring from l4d, other game modes, and new survivor items/guns

   Hello all.  So this will be my first of many articles in Comml4d.  I'm excited and nervous to say the least.  My style will be familiar to some, but to others a foreign approach to editorials.  Every week I will tend to rant and rave over various aspects of Left 4 Dead and the competitive atmosphere surrounding it.  This will not be a news section, as we have plenty of places to find that.  I will not be doing many interviews of that sort, as this isn't that type of article.  I will however be discussing on going issues that many in the community are either aware of or not.  I will be praising on some aspects and ripping apart others.  Some of you will disagree with what I say and others will applaud.  The idea behind this is to get the community to think about situations and truly explore all avenues.  After each weekly segment, I will be taking emails and reading forum post of people who either agree or disagree with my opinions.  I will start each article with a recap of the last and emails from both sides.  This will help maintain an unbiased approach hopefully.  Still some will tend to disagree and that is fine because the overall idea is to entertain.  So I hope this will work well with you guys, and you can always hit me up at #communityl4d on IRC if you want to chat or talk about an issue.

    So with that being said, I am going to keep this weeks article short and about a common topic that has hit close to home for most of us here recently.  Community.  What makes a community?  I'm not here to give you a paper on it, this isn't middle school, write your own papers.  So lets skip straight to what has been happening lately.  Communityl4d is considered the backbone to competitive L4D, and with good reason.  It helped spawn the slew of tournaments back when L4D came out.  Its been a home to many of the top teams who come here to discuss many aspects of the game, and also a little shit talking from time to time.  Part of the backbone of this community was its old IRC channel, #L4D,  which at its peak had over 300 people idling.  The channel was slowly being poisoned by ads and people trying to profit off of the lowly, usually poor, gamer.  The site became clustered with news ads and special promotions.  10% off this server and 20% off that mousepad.  Sure these deals were great, but at what cost?  People started to give up on trying to converse in a centralized location known at #L4D.  A small battle pursued because of this and the community began to split.  Comml4d seeing a need for action created #communityl4d and started bringing people to a new haven.  

    I have to say I was against this from the start.  I felt this fragile community couldn't chance being split.  L4D2 was around the corner and to start moving everyone over now could potentially lose a lot of fresh blood.  Unfortunately, the cold hard truth has and always will be, #L4D is the Left 4 Dead channel and Communityl4d is the competitive L4D website.  These two needed to go hand in hand.

    So this brings me back to my question, what is a community?  Here in L4D, we are a group of people who share two things in common.  We all love playing L4D and we all pretend that we hate it when were losing.   As luck would have it, we were able to reacquire the channel from the demons of industry.  But our problem was not solved completely.  To be a community channel and only that, unfortunately, CommL4D could not come with it.  CommunityL4D is still a website with sponsors and have commitments to them.  So they will maintain #communityl4d as a place of official business.  CommunityL4D events, tournaments, and information will remain in that channel as to allow for a simple place for people to stay in touch with the competitive scene.  #L4D however will now be the hangout spot for all those interested in Left 4 Dead.  Find scrims, Ringers, Players all in one channel.  Just talk smack and hangout on L4D drinking nights.  Not a single AD will be allowed in the channel.  This channel is about the community for the community.  No more l4dscrim channels or ringer channels.  Everyone in one spot, one area, talking about one thing, Left 4 Dead.

    And honestly, that's the best option out there.  So take it or leave it.

Never thought I’d be saying typing those words before August when I bought Left 4 Dead… Valve has been at Comic-Con this weekend showing off the new “Swamp Fever” level of Left 4 Dead 2, scheduled to ship November 17th of this year.  In addition to the new level, Valve has revealed some new weapons, Special Infected, and gameplay changes.  Regardless of whether or not you like that Valve is releasing Left 4 Dead 2 so soon after the original, it’s about time to take a look at the future of Competitive L4D.  I will mention, before I start, that everything in this article is highly speculative based on what I’ve seen through media coverage of Left 4 Dead 2 in various videos or interviews.  The game can (and probably will) change dramatically even within the next month, so take everything from this article with a grain of salt.   

Right then, with that out of the way, I’ll move on to the new weapons and items that have been mentioned in the last few days.  One of the first new items that has been announced is the Adrenaline Injector.  Adrenaline will take up your Pill slot (meaning you can’t have both Adrenaline and Pills at the same time) and gives you a small boost in health (+20) in addition to allowing you to run past any zombie hitting you without them slowing you down.  I still can’t wrap my head around this addition, besides the obvious question of “where the hell do you find Adrenaline in a swamp,” the bigger question I have is why was this added?   Because Adrenaline shares the Pill slot in your inventory, there’s also a very good chance (in my mind) that they also share spawn points in the maps.  So, because we have to convert health-kits into pills in Competition, the chance of teams getting Adrenaline Injectors increases, because Kit spawns are Pill spawns initially.  This results in teams stocking up on Adrenaline and popping it at the right time during a crescendo event to breeze by the zombies (BH2 style) making +190 health bonuses even more common than they are currently.  Adrenaline also seems to be a direct counter to the “moving crescendo” events that we saw Valve pimping so hard at E3 earlier this year.  When they were first announced, I was really excited about the moving crescendos -- because I thought that’s what the game needed -- but now I’m not so sure it’ll even make a difference… besides having players hold down their W key instead of the crouch key during them.

In addition to Adrenaline, Valve also announced a few new weapons.  A cricket bat, an AK47, and finally a grenade launcher.  From the video, the grenade launcher looks severely underpowered (at the moment) and probably won’t find a place in pub play even if it is buffed (except for grieving), and the AK47 will likely be a reskin with some new sounds of the M16 that’s currently in L4D.  There most likely won’t be any big gameplay changes with any of these weapons, but it’s nice of Valve to give us some variety (at least as far as the AK47 is concerned).  The main problem I have with a lot of these new weapons (FN SCAR, AK47, SPAS-12, M79, G3-SG1, Incendiary Ammo, and Adrenaline) is I find a lot of them to be ridiculous additions to the game.  The original L4D wasn’t without its fair share of “wtf” kind of items and such, but at least you could sort of believe them.  I find it extremely hard to believe that you could find an AK47 in a swamp… and even if you did manage to find one, you’d have a pretty hard time finding a measureable amount of ammo anywhere else than where you found it.  But hell, we’re playing a game concerning the zombie apocalypse… I suppose anything is possible.    

When Valve first announced Left 4 Dead 2 earlier this year at E3, one of the first things they had to show off was the new Charger.  At first it was believed that the Charger was going to be a Tank-esque Special Infected, only showing up once or twice per map, but since then I’ve noticed the Charger more frequently in gameplay videos.  Whether or not the Charger will be a common-rotation Special Infected or a rare SI still hasn’t been clarified, but for arguments sake I’m going to assume it’s a common-rotation SI. That said, from what I’ve seen of the Charger, it seems like it would be useful for creating separation among the Survivors, especially in corner-camp situations.  One of the problems I fear will plague the Charger is his charge.  After seeing an AI Charger charge off the side of a bridge in a gameplay video, it occurred to me that there’s a good chance the Charger will resemble a bull when it charges.  It will be able to charge forward in a straight line, but you will have very little maneuverability while Charging, making it extremely hard to use against good teams without a substantial distraction.  In addition to the Charger’s… charge, the Charger can also pick up Survivors and slam them into the ground, acting exactly like a Hunter’s pounce or a Smoker’s pull.  In this video, the Charger picks up the player and slams him into the ground about 6 times before the video cuts out, which is more than enough times to incap him from around 40 health and get about halfway to killing him.  This leads me to believe that the Charger will pound a Survivor into the ground until they’re dead, making Chargers viable for quad caps.  It remains to be seen how well Chargers will mesh in with the current Infected dynamic that the Smoker/Hunter/Boomer make up currently, but I can see the Charger meshing better than the next Special Infected that Valve has revealed. 

That second Special Infected is the Spitter, a ranged attack class that will spit a boiling ball of ooze that will splash on the ground and start doing damage immediately, and keeps doing damage as long as you stay in it.  There hasn’t been a lot of information on this infected yet, but from gameplay videos I’ve gathered that the spit does about 10 damage every 0.5 to 1 seconds (I’d guess 0.6-0.7, but it’s hard to tell exactly) and lasts 5 seconds.  While I think that this would work wonderfully in pubs and such, I’m having a hard time convincing myself that it will be effective in competitive play.  Things like pouncing Survivors and then using the Spitter to contribute extra chip damage would be nice, but it would be very dependent on things such as how the Spitter’s friendly-fire works and how good the Survivors you’re playing are.  However, as much as I like chip damage, the thing that concerns me the most about the Spitter is that [so far] she has no ability to contribute during a quad cap attempt.  With Valve planning to release another 3-4 Special Infected in addition to the 3 we currently have, spawn rotations are only going to get more complex (as far as spawning the right infected go), and by adding another Infected that can’t perform a quad cap (in addition to the Boomer) it’s only going to make setting up quads harder.  I’m not convinced that the Spitter will be very useful, but with the L4D Competitive Community being so creative, I’m sure somebody will work something out.

It seems that Valve’s whole goal with Left 4 Dead 2 is to break the mindset of corner camping your way through the maps, and some of the gameplay tweaks they’ve revealed reflect that.  One of the biggest changes that has been announced so far is adjusting crescendo events so that the Survivors have to trigger a start button, run through an area while getting beat on by a zombie horde, and end it with a finish button.   As long as the zombie rush spawns are placed well within these crescendo events (unlike BH2…), I can see this being a very good change, especially for the competitive community.  It will allow the Infected to attack during crescendos instead of having to wait until it’s over, using the distraction of the crescendo to their advantage.  How well this change works out for the Infected will depend, in my opinion, on how dense the zombie rushes are.  If they trickle in one or two at a time, then this change won’t make much of a difference, but if they come in as actual hordes, I think we could see a measurable tipping of the scales in the infected’s favor.

Another thing some people on our forums have noticed, is in this (relink) gameplay video, when a Hunter pounces the person playing Nick, he pushes him about 10 feet.  There is a Hunter push mechanic currently implemented in L4D, but it is pretty difficult to pull off, some people are speculating that Valve has fully implemented the Hunter push mechanic, which would be a welcome change, as it would help the infected create more separation during attacks.  Valve has also revealed that the director will have control over dynamic pathing in L4D2. I honestly don’t see this being a big deal because if this feature become a big game changer, then someone (probably Downtown1) in the L4D Community will make a config that disables it, similarly to health kits and (most likely) Adrenaline.

Overall, Left 4 Dead 2 is looking like a game created for pubs instead of organized play.  There’s still a chance that Valve will come out of left-field with a competitive mode or something similar, but the odds for that aren’t high.  If you take a look at the original Left 4 Dead, it was developed much in the same mindset -- great for pubs and mediocre for competitive play.  The members of the competitive community were the ones that made Left 4 Dead a more suitable competitive game through configs, and I’m presuming we’ll have to do the same for Left 4 Dead 2.

I will start out this article by assuming that you know what IRC and mIRC is, so we will skip that. The first step is deciding the mIRC client to use, many people just use the default mIRC client from www.mirc.com; but I prefer to use a variant called Invision which can be found at http://i-n-v-i-s-i-o-n.com/cms/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1.  The IRC server which the L4D community uses is called Gamesurge. To connect to the Gamesurge server, once you have your mIRC client running, type /server irc.gamesurge.net and it will connect you to one of Gamesurge’s many servers.