Infection Rate: Drop it, for FUCKING GODS SAKE, drop the infection rate. I don't care what anyone's explanation for having it at 30% is, but it's retardulous. Why?
Whitey's attack does 35 dmg, 3 hits without armor kills you. Usually whitey only gets one or two hits in before dying on any given human. It's almost a 1/3 chance to get infected (33%), so you're almost guaranteed to get infected, if you have armor, you're most definitely going to get infected, if you don't die. Usually whitey can kill you in three hits EASILY, to begin with. To be rewarded with infection for surviving is just, annoying to say the least.
NOT TO MENTION- The last update buffed infecteds, when humans turn they get temporary invulnrablity, and they do more damage I believe, so having more of that on a map like armory, or biotec, can end games entirely, with one infected alone. If there's a one in three chance for infection, on a 20 person game of biotec.. four(and I've seen five and six) infecteds makes it really hard.
People get infected WAY too much. The dev's set it at 15% because it makes sense, that's basically a 1/6 chance to get infected. That way infection is a rare thing, that can turn around gameplay, and perhaps we could get a plugin for infection to whitey chat, in the period of no talking before a person turns.
Anyway, 30% infection chance is just retardulous and I'm very sick of it. It makes it harder to get through some maps and there don't need to be 3-5 infected every round. It's dumb and I'm tired of hearing people complain. It makes it much more rewarding and acceptable..
Lower it to at least 25%, or if you're feeling cooler, 20%. 15% if you wanna be best friends.
MAPS
RedQueen- Why the hell was CG_RQ replaced with version B6? The only benefit to B6 is the majority of RQ fans have played it, and know it. There are so many bugs in it though, and it really is just a terrible map altogether... the gameplay is almost alright, but idunno. I would like to return the RQ_complex versions of red queen if we could. Klusarks versions cleaned up the bugs, put an actual ceiling on the level and made it more of a ZPS game, putting armor in the armory instead of a shit load of guns, and placing guns around the level like a ZPS map, so everyone isn't wielding two rifles and a magnum.
If you don't want to do that at least return the CG version.. or explain why B6 is there.
Cabin- I seriously dislike the current version of Cabin we have. First, it's ZPS. Second, nothings barricaded and as whitey I could clear white house of 6 humans in under 20 seconds, since I could get in there before anyone had a gun. The map lacks guns, but leaves the humans almost completely vulnerable. It's TERRIBLY optimized and has WAYY to many hiding spots, me and this other guy played hide and seek with 8 zombies for the whole 15 minutes before winning. They found him after 14 minutes but I was never found.
Anyway, either we should have snowy cabin, a classic everyone knows and "loves", or no cabin at all. The current one doesn't even have a distinctive name, so people think it's your basic cabin, but it isn't. It's got all sorts of extra stuff that make it almost a whole different kind of game~
No Exit- Seriously? This map? What the fuck? Where did this even come from? This map is very poorly made, and I've never seen it populate, only kill the server. It won a vote yesterday and we all got there, everyone who voted for it left, one of them claimed they thought it was something else. Everyone else left after that, I'm not saying that map causes that every time, but it's always been deemed a "shitty" map by people who I've played with there.
Anyway, I was thinking maybe we could start throwing up maps every week or so, and get rid of them one by one as we go, so I can figure out which ones are populating and entertaining the server properly. Perhaps have votes on which maps to add, if we get people in CG who play ZPS again to do so.
LAG
There has been SERIIIIIIIIIIIIOUS lag on the ZPS server for the past few months. I mean crazy shit lag, like everyone freezing in place except me and one other person, everyone times out and comes back asking what the fuck happened. Usually if the server got more than twenty people it would start stuttering, everyone's pings would rocket and we'd all get disconnected, and the server would restart itself somehow. Just last night everyone froze except me and some little kid, killed the entire server, only 7 people came back out of the 18 or so.
Perhaps the server just needs some maintenance, don't logs pile up over time, and doesn't other things happen that need to get deleted? Maybe that's why ZPS is the only server with such terrible lag.
Honestly, someone should just reinstall the server, let's start from scratch and see if it fixes anything. Then we just need to add maps and redo advertisements and the plugins.
PLUGINS
Damage Plugin- This plugin makes the game so much easier, I wouldn't have it on my server, since it tells you whether you need to go chase that zombie down for the kill or not. There's no longer any mystery, you KNOW exactly how much health the zombies/humans have, and you can set out to finish them off, it's just ridiculous. Though I really appreciate it because it makes owning noobs SOOO much easier.
RANK- Fuck rank. If you get a kill, it's +3 points. If you die, it's -15 points. This deters better players like Doc and I from wanting to play zombie, because you're deaths are bound to be higher than your kills as a zombie, unless you manage to die less than 4 times as a zombie, and most of my technique as zombie revolves around throwing lives at the humans.
TL:DR
There's basically a whole lot wrong with the server, or at least it feels that way. Infection needs to go down, Lag needs to be cleared up, we need different maps, and rank and the damage plugin aren't doing anything positive except making the better players feel better about themselves.
This is just a brief overview of my thoughts on the server. There's a lot more but I don't think EVERYONE needs to see all of it. Feel free to skim this post and post any opinions that are any kind of relevant.
I noticed that the server was able to populate on its own without my help. The map on the nomination list was good, but at least they were sufficient enough for a vast majority of the players to agree and play on.
Then coming back noticing that the server lacked player initiative to join.
(Self populating server without admin assistance, yea i can't word it any better)
NOT TO MENTION- The last update buffed infecteds, when humans turn they get temporary invulnrablity, and they do more damage I believe, so having more of that on a map like armory, or biotec, can end games entirely, with one infected alone. If there's a one in three chance for infection, on a 20 person game of biotec.. four(and I've seen five and six) infecteds makes it really hard.
Thing is, 10second prior to an infected player turning they are invincible to team attacks when originally they should be hurt/damaged/killed. Only way to kill the infected is to use to explosive ordinance or physics. Projectiles excluding physics related and/or blunt attacks are useless.
Once an infected turns, they are have 5seconds of invulnerability and are able to clip into human players.
I have seen other server fix these problems on their own, you can't rely on the devs. to fix your problems.
You fix or try to improve one thing, and more problems occur *cough* Valve *cough*.
Wheres that Health bonus plugins that we were promised? It's been like 6+ months of waiting.
Damage plugins, it does make it easy for humans. Take a situation where you see a zombie and you shoot at it. It cowers and you have a choice of hunting it or be smart. The damage plugins allows the human to smarter choices rather than rely on luck, the way its meant to be played, with good luck and strategy. Not some helpful, exploiting, HUD indicator.
Not to mention playing for 1000+ hours on Zombie Panic: Source, counting how much damage you've done to a zombie is easy with or without the damage plugin.
Yea ranks, not as fun as they use to be anymore. Every death i have to get 25+/- Kills lets see you do it Hmmm?
From Tatsuro-
I did want to mention that there are plans to put more effort into 2.3 here in the near future with support from the Contagion devs but because I can't guarantee that atm I left it out.
So yeah, one day, maybe.. I'd say they do updates like once a year, so probably springtime next year we MIGHT see one, if it takes longer than that, I can imagine they'd give up.. idk
Anyway, yeah, the map hangup problem existed before Tower did the update, and it was just his idea to get a fix, ideally if you're not familar with a game and you see an outdated mod you're like OLESDOIT.
We should just do a clean reinstall of everything, and I'll add maps and plugins again.. I suppose. I still have more trouble finding plugins than I did back in the day.. I can't find mods like the Health upon melee kill mod, and the such.
Browsing other servers I saw a few cool plugins I liked, like the ability to type !menu, and an onscreen menu pops up with options on votekicking, votemuting, nominate, votemaps, vote for hardcore, blah blah. It also had a page for the Motd and the !motd pillz plugin worked beautifully.
In order to get the MOTD plugin working effectively we'd need a HTML page with the rules on it, I tried the ZPS rules page from the forums but forums don't display correctly ingame~
ANYYWAY, get shit fixed dawgs.
Tired of that lag and inability to revote/kick.