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Having been out for two full months already, Left 4 Dead is slowly seeing an influx of third party dedicated servers to compliment those hosted by Valve/Steam. While it’s great to see gamers step up and support the community with both their time and money, one of the more popular complaints amongst regulars is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to locate un-modded (”pure”) servers. This difficulty is largely due to the lack of a functional server browser built into the game’s interface. PC users of the game can access a bare-bones browser through manual console commands (specifically, “openserverbrowser”), however there are no applicable filters for server-side mods or altered cvars. Note to Valve: the #1 way to piss off PC gamers is to strip useful features from a multi-platform release because they don’t work well on consoles.
Indeed, some mods and settings are useful and even downright necessary when they provide fixes for game-breaking exploits. The AI boss infected bug, in which unscrupulous players could swap between spectator mode and the infected team in order to spawn entire armies of hunters (fixed 1/14/09), was prevented by the modding community weeks before the problem was officially remedied with a game update. Other server mods exist to automatically boot players who grief via friendly fire, or to prevent them from suiciding as a survivor (using the /kill command, thus gimping their entire team) while a votekick is taking place.
Douchebag safeguards. Griefer punishers. Exploit prevention. These are the kinds of mods we need (and for which we are grateful).
What we do not need are profanity filters.
| Posted in Commentary, Online gaming | 2 Comments » |  |
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