Left 4 Dead Server Update

By Shamus Posted Thursday Mar 26, 2009

Filed under: Notices 42 comments

The feedback I’m getting is that the Twenty Sided Left 4 Dead server is in some way providing people with entertainment. Lacking the ability to play myself, I am at least happy that others are enjoying the game. We have MrTact to thank for that. If you see him in game, do try to keep from shooting him, since he’s paying the rent.

It’s traditional to have a forum to go with a server or a group like this, but my first instinct is that providing one would be poisonous to the community that has arisen here. A forum would take some of the conversation and move it into a walled-off area, and suddenly there would be two “classes” of readers. It could have the side effect of causing the comment threads to wither, and I am keenly aware of the value they add to the site. If anything, I’d like this new thing to add to the site in some way, even for people who never play the game. Barring that, I want to make sure we don’t upset this rare mix of thoughtfulness and civility.

But sometimes you need a way to communicate asynchronously with the group. So perhaps I’ll do a weekly gaming thread. People can say whatever needs to be said about in-game events, or report problems, post their Zoey / Francis romantic fanficion, or whatever. I guess we can consider this post one such thread.

And just to satisfy my curiosity:

What’s your preferred game mode? Normal, Expert, and Versus seem to be three distinct experiences, and I’m curious what the break down is among players. Normal seems to be the most popular, but it may be that’s it’s simply a neutral middle ground between Expert and Versus players.

 


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42 thoughts on “Left 4 Dead Server Update

  1. Randy Johnson says:

    I prefer BOTH Versus and Expert. I also heard that they patched versus to increase the cooldown on Melee, which is a much needed patch. Btw, FIRST!

  2. Galenor says:

    I prefer to work alongside people, rather than try to relieve them of all their vital organs via a rabid Hunter attack. As such, I like the Co-op mode more than the Versus one. However, I’ve never played Versus where both the Survivors and the Infected are made up of people I’ve gamed with, chatted with, and befriended. I’m sure that in such a situation, it’d be less about the l33t pwnage and more about just having fun.

    Despite that, I’d still prefer Co-op mode any day of the week, so the question lies on its difficulty. I’ve tried them all, and while Advanced mode does make for a nice ‘I feel like just running around blasting zombies’ moment, Expert is where I get most of my entertainment from.

    I kid you not, Expert mode is the mode that can get four random public players, and turn them into loyal Steam friends in a mere hour or two (or four, if the finale’s being fickle). The requirements for co-ordination that would turn SWAT teams green with envy means that nobody can afford to be a jerk. Nobody can afford to start throwing insults and euphemisms at the players, because usually, they’ll be the one thinking they’re too good for the team and going Rambo. And when the normal Infected can down a player at maximum health in 5-10 hits, that usually means it’s all over for everyone.

    The players all need to stick together, look out for each other, and be able to keep faith with his team when a Tank steamrolls the team as they run for the rescue vehicle. It makes for a great game, and can makes some great friends in the process!

  3. hevis says:

    I prefer versus with friends. Last night we tried Death Toll campaign on Expert (first time) with my friends, but 2 of us died in about halfway on the first map, so we restarted on Hard. I guess we just need some practice, and it also helps that I get my mic today.

  4. Danath says:

    Expert is my favorite, theres nothing like getting together with people you know, and diving headfirst into hordes of zombies, only to fail horrifically in an explosive manner as one of you accidently shoots the gas can inside your house while trying to set the tank thats chasing you on fire. Simply, challenge, teamwork, and fun all rolled in one, and it doesnt get stale because your always running the risk of death (don’t know how many times weve made it to the end of a level with 0-1 medkits and everyone in the red).

    I was in that expert game with you Shamus, FZ9000, some good laughs, great teamwork, and even though we failed many, many times, it was a great deal of fun.

    normal is fun simply cause you can be reckless and leeroy your way through it.

    Versus is my second favorite, simply because griefing can be fun in that little leprechaun way, and versus is all about the griefing.

  5. gtb says:

    I play any level of co-op, (depending on what the other three want) but I have yet to play versus. It just isn’t my thing.

  6. Rob says:

    Advanced or Vs. is how i roll, I only hit up Expert if I know the people.

  7. Strangeite says:

    I haven’t played the game and have no real intentions of doing so; however, I really really really really would like to see a TwentySided forum. I have been wishing for such a place for years.

    Looking back in my Gmail account, I realize that I have been coming to your site since October 6, 2006. About one month after my daughter was born. In that time, I have watched her and this site grow by leaps and bounds.

    Sophie has now graduated to a “bed girl bed” and it seems to me that this site has matured to the point where it needs a “big boy forum”.

    Just my two cents.

  8. lebkin says:

    I like to jump up and down the difficulty scale. I even enjoy playing on Easy now and then. Doing crazy things like running through the game with four shotguns or all pistols is fun. It translates from a razor edge survival game to a ridiculous B-movie feel as you go downward on the difficulty. Definitely fun at all levels.

  9. Rattus says:

    @Danath: If that game with Shamus and FZ9000 included incinerating ourselves in nicely confined room with two gas tanks, i was the fourth barbecue meat.

    For me now the versus is the best part of game, simply because we played expert campaigns for more than month, every day, at least one. Our best fun was expert farmhouse that took us almost 4 hours ( and 4000 zombies ) before one of us was lucky enough to get away in vehicle ( with a tank and few a zombies locked inside the apc with him so i guess he didn’t have pleasant ride )

    The versus is all about creating the most horrible horror situation come through for the opposite team. And I enjoy playing zombies really a lot. Whatever the role as a zombie, the excitement and malevolent joy of turning perfectly organized group of soldiers into helpless, screaming and chaotically running bunch is just priceless. I tend to not try that hard as a survivor and more enjoy creating the madness as infected.

  10. Man, I feel totally left out.

  11. BlackBloc says:

    Normal is starting to be a tad annoying because I can complete it with no sweat unless I’m playing with new players or people who have zero cooperative bones in their body. Conversely, Advanced has frustrated me to no end because unless I get 4 players the bots are too dumb to carry to the end. They just suck. I suspect I’d die rather quickly at Expert.

    Versus is nice, I’ve started to be an excellent smoker, though my hunter game is off and I tend to boomer only 1 or 2 characters per iteration because I’m still getting the hang of how to aim vomit in a physics engine.

  12. K says:

    I really need a new machine. I want to join this game.

  13. Neil Polenske says:

    This is how I mentally list ’em.

    Normal:
    – Pick up games and killing time.
    – Mic uneccessary, but a nice way to get to know other folks. Typing to communicate acceptable.
    – The ‘Leisure’ mode.

    Advanced:
    – Gaming with friends or players who’ve been around the block awhile.
    – Mic uneccessary, but it certainly helps. Type only short messages (one word preferably)
    – The ‘gaining achievements’ mode.

    Expert:
    – Serious game is SERIOUS. Play ONLY with people you know, trust, and played with before. NOT for pick ups.
    – Mic neccessary. Typing WILL kill you.
    – Mode is for getting expert achieves and to test your co-op skillz with your friends. This is where you go to find out if you’re really as good as you think you are.
    – I’m not that good…

    VS.
    – Pick ups are not recommended. Tend to be one-sided and filled with rage quits. Me included.
    – Mic neccessary, but comes with risk. It gets hectic and this mode attracts a lot of X-Box Live (XBL) behavior. May need to mute others and just use for short cries of help or warnings.
    – Haven’t played this mode very often due to constant XBL behavior. I’ll see if playing with you guys changes things. :)

  14. Shamus says:

    Re: The expert game with Rattus, Danath, and FZ9000:

    You didn’t even mention that the fire was my fault. Or that it happened more than once.

    Not only did the horde get us, be we were sporting enough to cook ourselves for them. If we wanted to top that we’d have to smear ourselves with barbecue sauce first.

    Francis: I HATE being burned alive.

  15. Rattus says:

    @Shamus : didn’t mention it cause in expert game it happens all the time due to constant fear and feeling of near disaster. Panic fire is there all the time.

    And of course we won’t mention the number of MY shotgun pellets that found their way into YOUR hide from less then meter away.

    Bill : Francis, is there anything you don’t hate?

    1. Shamus says:

      While we’re talking about multiplayer:

      How the smeg do you mute a particular person in Team Fortress 2? I was in a game last week (Rutskarn was there, and maybe a couple of other TS members) where a Random Annoying Internet Person was trying to agitate everyone via voice chat. (His shtick: Calling people gay.) As far as I could tell he was still playing the game, so if I could have muted him everything would have been fine.

  16. Mephane says:

    Normal is by far my preferred game mode. Expert is simply to hard for myself*, and Versus, while fun at times, usually makes me want to stop it after some matches. I think it’s the fact that as a zombie you spend more time waiting for respawn than actually playing.

    *and by “too hard” I mean “ridiculously difficult bordering impossible to even try to enjoy it”. I am probably below average in terms of shooter skills, and normal difficulty gives me just the right mix between pure zombie-killing madness and the challenge and risk of failure definitely needed for a game like this.

  17. Rutskarn says:

    With my friendly fire incidences hovering at a solid 14 per campaign, I don’t think I’m Expert material.

    Okay, some of that is my teammates fault, but still.

    Versus is a different experience than normal–for one thing, it’s scarier, something that surprised me somewhat.

    Somehow, it’s far more tense when there’s an actual, physical, intelligent entity out there trying its damndest to sneak up on you and subsequently kill you to death. Plus, there’s the anxiety that you’ll lose, and someone else will win, which is biologically a bit of a letdown.

  18. Fenix says:

    To tell you the truth, I’ve only played on expert since the beginning. With the exception of one time I played on advanced and felt it was too easy. Not to say expert is easy, regular deaths witch normally frustrate me and make me want to quit playing, weirdly, l4d is the only game I’ve found that really makes me want to bump up the difficulty. Anyway, that’s it.

    edit: whoa my wavatar changed! long time since I last posted.

  19. Yossarian says:

    While in game press esc its in the menu, Mute Players or something close to that.

    edit: Challenge: Finding a screen shot of the in game menu

    http://i41.tinypic.com/2v16z51.png

    Done

    1. Shamus says:

      Wow. Mute is right there. How the heck did I miss it? That’s kind of scary.

      Thanks.

  20. Matt P says:

    I suppose us Advanced fanatics aren’t cool enough for you Normal/Expert/Versus kids. Well alright then. See if I care.
    Advanced for me because I like being able to gun down a horde almost by myself (if no one else is looking that way) but still needing buddies when things turn to hell. It has a nice mix of “Imma kill something now. Don’t wait up.” and “Holy SHEEEEE, help me quick!”
    I’m lying just a bit, though, because if my friends and I were tactically more advanced than ‘stick together or the smokers’ll get you’* I’d be playing Expert like a shot. Still massive fun, though.
    Versus is fun for the exquisite griefing that a system link can bring. I best remember mauling to death a friend with a Hunter, and two stages afterwards, he jumped me when I was the last one to be going down a one-way drop. Since none of us knew the counter is for another player to throw a grenade back up the hole, I could only stand there and congratulate the guy for a brilliant revenge. Sadly, Versus is hard to organise for LAN games, and they can become boring one-sided games, so it’s mostly Advanced for me.

    *And one in particular drops this team mentality once he’s gotten what he needs from us (most received heals and pick-ups of any in the gang) and just wants to reach the rescue vehicle himself. Even when helping me would have only involved turning around for a second to spray a couple extra zombies off me so I could get away before they dragged me down. I try not to bear grudges with friends, but I was so close.

  21. CrushU says:

    @Shamus: Hey I was there for that. I was on the other team, RAIP was on our team to begin with, then suddenly it stopped and everyone went ‘Yay!’ in teamchat. If I remember right, if you hit escape to bring up the menu, it will have ‘Mute Players’ somewhere near ‘Disconnect’.

    Re L4D… The key to enjoying it is to make no assumptions about the people you play with, and to just play your cooperative best. Versus or Campaign. I’ve had some damn good fun losing in Versus, had good fun winning in Versus… Expert is just bloody hard and I don’t play that way very often because it’s just a smidge past the difficulty curve… Advanced leaves average pickup groups rushing into the safe house with a horde behind them, and frantically slamming the door behind them. Expert leaves those same groups wondering if there even IS a safe house. It does feel like a real accomplishment when you beat Expert though, especially with all 4 getting away. Feels like a real accomplishment beating Versus, too.

    People ragequit out of Versus way too early. ZOMG, I LOST THE FIRST GAME, *Ragequit* … Dude, there’s FOUR MORE CHAPTERS, and the points you can get from them is a whole lot more than just the first one. I play through to the end, win or lose, because winning due to forfeit is just lame.

  22. The Werebear says:

    I usually play Advanced for recreation or quick games, as that’s the point where it is challenging without being as brutal as expert.

    Expert is for playing with friends, or even pick ups if I feel like a REAL challenge. That’s where it gets brutal enough to get that desperate survival experience.

    I don’t play much versus unless I am playing with friends in a Preset team. Otherwise, it’s just not possible to do very well.

    What I really want is a mode that has zombie damage as per normal or advanced with Friendly Fire and Special/Horde spawn rates like Expert.

  23. Rattus says:

    @Werebear : It can be easily configured using server commands, and i hope some special servers will start to pop up after the official SDK is released.

    I tried to have real zombie apocalypse, spawned horde of 300 zombies and see my fps drop to 5 and then screen filled with running undead. nice sight but not much playable.

    When playing single, go on advanced and put hordes to number 50-100, plays like last scene of Braindead minus the lawnmower

  24. Mob says:

    I only ever play pickup Versus games, sans mic. All the quits and bad teams don’t bother me too much. I don’t care about the score. Once the chapter starts, it’s all about making it to the safe room or killing survivors. If we aren’t successful, there’s always the next chapter, or the next game. And I never quit. I’ve played a finale as the only one on my team. Actually got one of the survivors by launching them off the roof as the tank. Of course being the only human survivor against a full team of human infected didn’t turn out as well. It was still fun as hell though.

  25. Caliban says:

    My preferred mode is Expert, with people who take it serioiusly enough to want to succeed, but still realize it’s just a game so that accidents that lead to team wipes are just something to laugh about rather than getting all angry about a temporary set-back. (Yet I still do pick-up games on Expert all the time – a combination of masochism, and wanting to show my skillz off to strangers.)

    I’m not much for Versus unless it’s with friends – to many jerks or peopple who are constant complaining and then telling you how to play in pick-up Versus games for me. (You get them in Expert pickup games too, but not nearly as many in my experience.)

  26. Mad Flavius says:

    I thoroughly enjoy both co-op and versus. I have to say, however, the sheer primal joy of finally getting that perfect Hunter/Boomer combo is unbelievably fulfilling. There’s something about combining the same level of teamwork necessary for a successful Survivor run, but with the purpose of destruction, rather than survival.

    Oh, and the adrenaline of a successful pull as a Smoker, particularly when you paralyze the team by forcing them to backtrack…honestly, each of the special Infected have that perfect successful attack that makes the scores of failures worth it. That’s what I find so attractive about both L4D and TF2. While the ratio of successful pounces or headshots as a Sniper in TF2 is fairly low, the successes are so darn exhilarating.

  27. Danath says:

    @Shamus

    I didnt mention your name because I have been guilty of it, it happens at least once in almost every expert game I am in because someone panics, or doesnt see something, and considering your teammates go down as fast as the zombies you shoot, its only expected, and its also hilarious.

    I dont know who, but during the game, I threw a propane tank, was watching when the horde came, and someone else shot it, burning me alive (they then saved me), I thought that was absolutly hilarious, it happens :P I myself accidently shot Rattus and others in the face with my shotgun with absolutly no zombies around, I just didnt have a mic to say “crap!” into.

    At least it wasnt a propane tank, ragdoll physics are ouch.

  28. TechnoTroll says:

    Versus is by far the most fun mode.

  29. Derek K. says:

    I play Versus 85% of the time, Advanced 12% and Expert when my friends invite me.

    One really fun bit is playing Versus with the server configs forcing advanced….

  30. Matt` says:

    I pretty much exclusively play Versus… not sure I’ve ever even touched Expert mode. Playing as the infected is just too damned fun to pass up.

    Best story I’ve got was taking down all 4 survivors as Tank, that was in the top part of the Hospital (before the roof but after coming out of the lift). Came running round a corner, mostly out of sight because of a conveniently placed pillar and smacked one of them down the hall. Two went back to help him while the 4th guy tried to distract me.

    Chased after the group of 3, and noticed a forklift sat to one side… dodged in behind it and punched it at them, incapped all 3 in one hit… getting hit by a flying forklift is ouch. Then I just had to go and chase down the last guy to complete the set.

    In a similar vein of “punching large objects at people” stories, at the end of Blood Harvest the last survivor left standing was making a dash for the rescue vehicle… he so nearly made it, but unfortunately the log I punched his way rolled just a little too fast. Crushed him just as he was getting close to safety. (Some other time I was actually inside the armoured car punching folks when it drove off… left me stood there, floating in midair)

    So yeah… I have the most fun when I’m playing Tank

  31. Johannes says:

    Well, no Expert for me yet… Although after reading all the comments I must say I’m definately going to try one game this weekend. I thought Advanced was advanced enough for me, but maybe I’m finally good enough to up the level.

    And furthermore: Versus! I like that mode a lot. Nothing like smart human enemies chasing you down. Never know from where or how the special infected are going to attack (although things start to get repetitive after a few months of only 2 episodes of Versus). After playing quite a few Versus matches, no Boomer could surprise me any more in ‘normal’ mode (oh, apart from that one surprise attack). Hunters and smokers just aren’t a match anymore, and even a Tank gets easy (although it focusing on only one team member when hit to the ground is kind of frustrating, as that person usually won’t survive).

    Oh yes, and Versus matches make for ‘memorable’ stories, too; I quite recognize that.

  32. Danath says:

    Oh yeah, I should mention, I meant I AM FZ9000, dont remember the fourth person.

  33. RedClyde says:

    I prefer co-op, always. I’ve always found co-op modes in games more fun.

    As for difficulty, I usually go with Normal because I tend to play with strangers, and Normal’s easy enough that one guy running off usually won’t screw up everyone’s day. It’s the safe route to beating Campaign with three people you don’t know.

    I think playing with a full group of friends, I’d be all about Advanced, and a bit of Expert. Expert for the achievements, and Advanced for the balance between difficulty and fun (though this is just speculation on my part, since I haven’t played Advanced much, and Expert only one stage).

    I hope I can try these difficulties with some 20Siders soon.

  34. Jattenalle says:

    Expert & Versus

    Also, in Versus, the difficulty is locked to Normal.
    That is the health etc of the infected is the same as Normal co-op.
    Obviously having human adversaries turns the difficulty up quite a bit :)

  35. Rutskarn says:

    Yeah, Shamus. If it’s any consolation, I didn’t notice the mute until it was pointed out to me either.

    My explanation is that at that point, the amount of stupid in the air becomes flat-out contagious.

    Also, I didn’t see that one paragraph for some reason, but I’ve taken it as a personal challenge. Zoey and Francis? Try Boomer/Smoker…

  36. CaIiban says:

    The fourth person would have been me, Danath. (I’m also the one who shot the gas tank you threw, and then revived you before it killed you.)

  37. edcalaban says:

    Advanced is for a recreational game. Expert is for friends only, or for another stab at achievements. Versus is where I usually hang though. I enjoy playing as infected more than I enjoy the co-op.

  38. Constantinople says:

    This looks great. I’ve joined the Steam Group to see if I can play Team Fortress with you guys, but I’ll probably buy Left4Dead if I know there’s a group that won’t scream “fsking n00b!” if I play the game online.

  39. Riksa says:

    No fair. I got the game after I heard you created a Twenty sided Steam group. I was really happy to hear that a server had been created as well, until I realised that it’s obviously somewhere in the States and therefore useless to me here in Finland… What we need next is another server on this side of the pond. =)

  40. Bai Shen says:

    Is the L4D server still around? Is there one for L4D 2? I just picked up L4D 2 and would like to play with some of the twenty sided crowd.

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