Survivors get the smack-down with Valve’s most recent patch to its zompocalyptic first-person shooter, Left 4 Dead. Formerly spammable melee attacks by the survivor team now come with a short cooldown, which goes a long way towards addressing incessant whining concerns from the community:

Game and client changes

• Introduced fatigue to the melee attack in versus mode. You will see a HUD display when your melee swing is cooling down
• Boomer vomit will now pass through common infected
• Addressed some surround sound detection issues
• Fixed a rare crash when exiting Left4Dead on Windows Vista
• Fixed a case where the complete all expert campaigns achievement was not being rewarded

Dedicated server changes

• Corrected an issue where Windows based dedicated were sending spurious shutdown notifications to the master causing them to delist temporarily
• Fixed dedicated servers not resetting the versus team swap correctly–you could join a dedicated server that had a previous game that was swapped and arrive on the other team than what was selected in the lobby
• Renamed the tags for sv_search_key to use “key:” in the server tags instead of “sv_search_key.” This should help with issues of the 63 character limit of server tags
• Fixed an occasional server crash related to voting

As usual, the patch comes as a complete surprise due to lack of developer communication with fans. At least they’re listening.

Come next month: The Left 4 Dead Survival Pack, the first installment of free DLC for Valve’s hit game. As announced by Microsoft on March 23rd, the Survival Pack will be released to PC and Xbox 360 users on April 21st, along with the Critic’s Choice edition of the game.

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• It’s ALIVE! Left 4 Dead Receives Major Patch
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• Left 4 Dead and The Dangers of DLC