L4D Comics, Blog Posts, Versus Mode - 11/19/08

The official L4D blog has been updated with two posts. The first one says that L4D is live and shows a picture of Gabe pressing the big red button, with Mike dressed up in the background.

The second post announces the winner of their picture contest, which was Aren Roberson pictured below.

They also show that the L4D four pack is available once again. Four copies for $150. Awesome. Now if only we could set servers to be co-op only!

Two L4D-inspired comics have shown up, the first one is from Ctrl+Alt+Del entitled "Chest Area". The second one from Monday Night Crew is good too.

Steam stats is showing L4D peaking at 32,128 concurrent players today.

Finally, some thoughts on Versus mode. I got home today and played two full Versus matches, one on each map.

Versus mode is amazing, especially when you crush the other team:

The screenshot shows that we did not finish the finale, and I'll tell you why. When my team reached the finale roof, I had nearly full health and jumped off the tower and it automatically made me grab the ledge. My team was already all down on the bottom so they could not rescue me. We all had to watch me tick down for about a minute and finally die, since there is currently NO WAY TO JUST DROP YOURSELF DOWN. This is a bug/system that makes me rage. At least have it so that there's a CONSOLE COMMAND to drop yourself, because in the cases when you grab on when you shouldn't, it kind of ruins the entire Versus match. Please Valve.. :(

Also, running Versus mode on a private server is a bitch. Running anything on a private server is a bitch, and I really hope that getting the server system worked out is the #1 priority for Valve right now. There's no easy way to just vote switch over to a Versus match. When you have a private server and are already in game (using connect ip in console), the only way to switch over to Versus mode that we could find was to just rcon changelevel versusmapname, which is a huge pain. Why isn't there a "vote to switch to Versus map"? If there is, we couldn't find it. Maybe we're just a bunch of idiots.

We also ran into a problem with Versus mode in regards to "vote to restart campaign". We started playing, and then a person dropped so we had to fill the spot and then restarted the campaign. After one team got to play through as the Survivors, it automatically went to the next map. This sounds like a bug, because it didn't let the other team play as Survivors even though they had no chance to which meant we had to changelevel to the first map yet again.

It'd be really great to be able to just restart a map in Versus mode. Versus matches last 2 hours+ and people usually leave after a map changes. With the automatic "door unlock" that takes place in Versus, it's impossible to get a fair start for the team that needs a player to be replaced. Please give us a vote option to "restart map and current map scores without messing up the rest of the scores", because Versus is not fun with bots.

On top of all that, as soon as Versus campaign is over with on a private server, everybody gets booted from the server since there's no lobby to return to. This is pretty lame and we wish there'd just be an indefinite final score screen until somebody votes for a new map.

Did you know that you don't get to choose where to spawn in finales as Infected?

The fun part of Versus mode is when everybody on the losing team starts hating each other.

Even with all the private server crap (when not using the matchmaking system), Versus mode is so much win. So, so, so much win.

One last thing: Sebben, you're a freak. He was playing Versus with us. I'm wondering when he has eaten/showered, because he has only about 2 hours less playtime than L4D has been available. And he wasn't one of the bitches that hacked their Steam accounts to get all the achievements, so congrats on that.