Blog link:
http://left4dead.gameriot.com/blogs/I-thought-it-was-the-brakes/A-serious-issue-for-competitive-Left-4-Dead

After doing more and more scrimmaging I\'m beginning to see a very very large issue to surface that could severely hamper Left 4 Dead\'s growth as a competitive game.

Even though there are many advantages to playing a fast paced survivor side, many times I\'ve found myself playing against teams that will camp in certain situations as survivor. This has lead to some 2-3 hour scrims.

Lets look at things from a viewer/competition stand point. Any situation where a long stalemate can occur is bad for competitive game play. You can talk all day about chipping away hp of the survivors but the fact of the matter is if the team is set on camping an area you aren\'t going to be able to do dick for damage to them unless they get impatient.

The most common of situation is early tank spawns for the 2nd survivor team, where they trigger the tank and run back to the safe room. This isn\'t an issue for left 4 dead because it is cheap or effective though, but because it creates a stalemate. It reminds me of WoW arena when teams could sit in their spawn on ruins of Lord and create a stalemate because it was unfavorable for the other team to attack. It was miserable to watch, and miserable to play.

The sdk release will go a long way to helping fix the problem, since the community will actually be able to implement solutions instead of waiting for valve to fix them.

Lets start with the most obvious solution, shortening maps. 5 Maps for a match is a bit too long, on the short range you usually end up with matches lasting an hour to an hour and a half. This is acceptable, but also very rare since in scrims and matches I imagine you will find teams completed 3-5 maps each pretty consistently.

Here is the map / match format I would propose:

* 3 segments (1 a finale)
* In the first 2 segments, teams start with T1 weps, and T2 will spawn 50% into the level.
* ABBA format where teams switch who gets surv/infected first in the first / second segment (finale is irrelevant)
* normalized item/medpack spawning (same for both teams to eliminate randomness)

Another possible solution is to add in extra things to make camping/taking undesirable.

* A time bonus for survivors
* After a certain time limit the ai director spawns a never ending horde
* After a certain time limit the ai director spawns a tank, and continues to spawn tanks in a certain time increment after this point

I think all of these potential solutions are fairly reasonable, and I would honestly bet that the 3 map segment is something that catches on and becomes the norm for competitive play. To me this is really the last pressing issue that could be preventing Left 4 Dead to really have a chance at being a viable competitive game.

Agreed.

My team left halfway through the match because the other team employed this tactic, and no one really wanted to sit there for an hour or two waiting for the other team to move.

Something should be done to ensure that shit like that doesn\'t happen.

You could also enforce a strict time limit to each section as well - going over the map will end.

But yeah, something needs to be done.

if the map were to end. say after 10-15 minutes. how many points would they get?

Implement a time bonus into the scoring system.

I like the time bonus idea!

The only problem with a time bonus, is that people still can camp. Say your team goes survivor first, looses, switches teams and then the other team gets to a point where they camp to help their chances of just reaching then end. :o

We\'ve played a few teams that do this, and yes it is annoying, but it seems to hurt them more then to help them, it gives you 2-3x the special infected spawns and they end up losing because of it.