The Invisible Tank

July 28, 2010 - L4D Team

The image above is from our friends at the IP Factory. This Friday they are releasing their Left 4 Dead 2 range of strictly limited high end collectibles. First up is the Tank. Pre-orders go live Friday July 30th.

Today’s update covers quite a few subjects so we thought we should touch on a few of them.

When we did our blog poll on rage quitting we mentioned we would be working on some of the underlying issues. Left 4 Dead 2 doesn’t have a more rage or less rage button – well not directly…

We checked some stats, did some testing, checked more stats, and did more testing. We have many more changes we are working on, some ideas failed, some were exploitable, and some were just bad ideas. What we are releasing today is not the sum of our answer to the problem but simply some of the updates that are ready to ship. More are coming.

While we were testing other changes with the Charger, we were bothered that doing the right thing did not give you the best score. New players were often confused by this lack of feedback, so we fixed that.

• Charger now receives 300 points for any Survivor that is insta-killed.
• Charger now receives 100 points for any Survivor that is insta-incapped by a charge.
• Any infected that causes a Survivor to stumble into a "ledge hang" situation will receive 50 points.

Friendly fire is never fun, especially when it really isn’t friendly fire. So in both Versus and Co-op we wanted to remove those times when you receive a friendly fire warning for shooting through an infected.

• Bullets that first pass through an infected character before striking a Survivor are now ignored as friendly fire.

Failing at the Tank is miserable experience. We all know the feeling when you are trying to explain to your team - but he was already on fire! So we did some work there.

• Tanks go into a stasis when they spawn and leave stasis when the human player takes over.
• Tanks do not attack when they are in stasis.
• Tanks in stasis are invisible but still show a glow to the infected team.
• Tanks in stasis cannot be set on fire.

The updates aren't over and you should expect to see some more shortly. As for the blog, besides the regular Friday update, next week we will be going into details on the Mutations, why Realism Versus was made permanent and other Mutations have not been. Plus what gets played more - Versus, Co-op, Survival, Single Player, or Scavenge?