Surprise update for L4D yesterday, balancing out multiple things. The tank was changed so his humongous arms actually hit multiple survivors the right way. He also won’t crap out if he’s in a vent getting shot, will spawn in slightly different places for different teams, and tank parking is gone.
The firehunter tactic where you use a hunter that unsurprisingly is on fire to deal a lot more damage has been nerfed. The smoker tongue is a lot more reliable and the boomer will now properly slime people under him when he explodes. There’s a ton more minor improvements so hit the jump for full patch notes.
Versus Mode Changes
- Tank melee attack can now hit multiple Survivors in one swing
- Fixed Tank punch being able to hit targets behind walls
- Fixes to ‘Tank parking’. The Tank will now run back and attack the Survivors if he becomes AI due to two players expiring the frustration meter
- Fixed a case where a Tank frustration meter could run out right as he was in his death animation and he would come back to life
- Fixed a case where the Tank was moving too slowly while crouching and being shot
- Tanks now have the possibility of spawning in a slightly different position for the first and second teams
- The order that the teams play as Survivors is now determined by which team has the higher overall score. The winning team will play as Survivors first
- The Smoker tongue can now target and grab victims through common infected
- Increased the cone in which a Smoker can grab a target
- The Witch no longer cuts Smoker tongues in a radius around her
- Boomers that explode in mid-air will now hit Survivors directly below them with Bile
- Reduced the damage that burning Hunters do to pounced victims
- Adjusted the time at which players take over from bots to avoid 5 seconds of the bot standing idle while the player finishes connecting.
- Fixed some cases where versus score was not being recalculated properly. It is no longer beneficial to pass pills between players at the end of the round or heal other players and then shoot them
- Fixed a case where it was possible to spectate an AI infected and hit +use to take them over
Server Changes
- Added convar sv_gametype that allows server operators to limit the types of games that will start on their server. Default value is ‘coop,versus’. Can be changed to just ‘coop’ or just ‘versus’ to limit to those game types
General changes
- Fixed a case where players would join as a dead Survivor when a living Survivor was still available
- Fixed a case where restarting a level due to the team dying would give more than the max primary ammo on restart
- Fixed the speaking icon showing up on the local player during level transition if voice_vox was set to 1
- The scoreboard now shows the numeric value of a player’s ping
GameUI
- Quick match will now try to match to any campaign. Removed the preference to match to games according to the player progressing through all campaigns
- Games in a finale are now joinable via the Friends and Steam Group games list
March 12th, 2009 at 7:10 pm
The update is a real blessing for the balance of the game. They found a solution for the stupid “We have to be Infected first”-gamers. It doesn’t prevent the ragequitting – though it reduces it and makes the game much more enjoyable. Had a fantastic game right after the patch came out. Head-on-head my team lost with around 3500:3600 – and even though the score was 3500 – 1400 before the final chapter. It’s a great addition to the gamebalance.
I hope they tweak and fix the european servers a bit – getting disconnected all the time is no fun at all.
Also I can’t wait for the upcoming content!
March 12th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Addenum:
I just went for a quick game and it appeared that with the recent update there also (like always) sneaked a few bugs into the game:
-the tank AoE is not working
-burning hunters do damage like not burning ones
-smoker pulls make the survivor invurnable to fall damage