Whenever a zombie round occurs i see a lot of people complaining about it and that they will just leave due to their dislike of it. That is why i’d like to ask those who hate infection mode and zombies why they hate it, and what they believe could be done to improve the game mode and the zombies.
3 Likes
well getting hit once then breaking all bones, infecting you and slowing isn’t fun
I like this mode still, even with all that
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I can just play L4D2
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My big thing is that there is a cure but it is only admin spawned. The best way to improve it is make it so the cure can be made but it is really expensive
4 Likes
Implement actual cure (but only if you haven’t turned zombie yet, after turning it should be too late)
Make gas masks actually work
have zombie blood/puke infect people who walk around it without gas masks/protection
add MOPP suits for thematics and aesthetics
Maybe balance around MOPP suits (slows you down but immune to zombie blood/puke)
implement narrative into the gametype (this fundamentally drives player goals; its important)
CL should want to secure samples of the zombie virus for weyland yutani
Fix cades so zombies can’t slash directly over them I dont’ know why this is a thing or why it’s weirdly intended for everyone to stand 1 tile back from cades instead of on them; its dumb and has always been dumb even against xenos
Current meta for infection rounds is to skip armor entirely because armor doesn’t help you at all. 1 hit can infect you regardless of heavy or light or no armor, and if you wear armor then you can’t outrun zombies which means they’ll definitely get that hit.
2 Likes
Current meta for infection rounds is to skip armor entirely because armor doesn’t help you at all. 1 hit can infect you regardless of heavy or light or no armor, and if you wear armor then you can’t outrun zombies which means they’ll definitely get that hit.
This, it’s very silly, marines would never ditch armor but because people know it’s a zombie round, they ditch armor so they don’t get screwed over.
for me its the lack of its own maps and scenarios, it plays out like distress signal so it doesn’t add much other than the ZOMBIES ASPECT. that being said the rounds can be fun for many, I have fun with infection at times.
It is in general, severely underbaked and can’t function without admins handholding and using MOOC untill the crows sing.
- Marines have multiple roles dedicated to keep each other in check
- Xenomorphs have the ability to one click any player for even being bald, whatever or not this is good is dependent on the judgement of just the Queen.
- How these two factions depend on each other to get more players has been Interated on since CM was a bay fork.
- There are mechanics in place to prevent Xenomorphs from camping LZs or advancing too early.
- You don’t need to rehearse a script of ignorance at every mechanic you see. If you are “hugged” you don’t need to wait several minutes to be the sacrificial lamb so doctors can get a license to do their job without getting notes.
Compare this to Zombies:
- There is no infrastructure in place for organizing round roles. Instead of coding a role to opt in to, you are told to ghost. The precedent has already been set that you can potentially miss out on both event roles and playing marine if you don’t apply in advance on the discord, or admins just forget to manually construct their event they can hold multiple times a week.
- If no one wants to go through this, then admins threaten infinite zombie spawners, which I have witnessed before to have no cooldown, it is therefore faster to respawn than it is to wait a minute or so to reanimate, despite that being the zombies defining trait.
- With this in mind, and depending on the admin running the event, it is still metagaming and liable for punishment, which marines are constantly reminded of, to decapacitate zombie characters. This is the only way for marines to do anything other than retreat to their LZ. The only reason they were able to push out from their LZ at all is MOOC reminders to not camp it.
- Playing in a HRP event
where I had to be bwoinked to blow open a door due to incorrectly mapped permissions, which was then covered up as a "thruster overload" by ARES with many typos in its messages after other players heard it; the Specialist waiting an hour to get the required skills to use their weapon; and many other problems occurring due to lack of testing, we were allowed to decapitate and acknowledge the virus on scanners. Playing in the next zombie event it is within rules to decapitate, not that this matters because of instant respawns and the next- - It is LRP to be aware of the zombie virus. You may see it IC with an item available to even PFCs, but have to act blind to IC information telling you to administer anti zombie medication for your ailment. To enforce the illusion everyone is mandated to have a cycling “flu” disease to defeat the purpose of medical HUDs.
1 Like
Zombies is built to be play to lose
When you join a zombies match you are playing to lose since it is determined by if the admins want you to win or not. This wouldn’t be as big of a issue if there was good RP and gameplay
The gameplay sucks
If you are a zombie and really want to win, hit a marine once and go onto the other. Marines get infected in one hit and there is zero way to tell until its too late to do anything meaningful. Zombies are meant to snowball, you get one person and then that person gets another and another and another, zombies multiply but the way they do is unfair to players because they aren’t earned. I usually end up killing myself or SSDing once i get infected because of the fact its never earned. Its the incompetence of my fellow marines or I just get hit once in thick, metal armor that is meant to stop explosives and then my game is effectively over. Zombies while being extremely strong can be easily gamed and rely on soing the same thing over and over again.
Simply its not fun
The RP sucks
The moment you get infected you are immediately ostracized. There is now way to slow down the effect or some slow decay where you are being cared for in quarantine then you have to go further and further in as you become more of a biohazard. Its kill yourself and have the SEA cremate you or get left planetaide or go outside of cades and die. Most rounds will go like this if you survive the entire time: you land, you walk around trying to figure out something you OOCly knows, you meet zombies, the round gets worse instantly, you fight a battle that is pointless, you evac shipside if you survive, shipside is lockeddown tight, quarantine breaks out since any marine that goes there to be “reaserched on” isn’t and is attempted to be purged which leads into a SG getting bit or a MP or whatever and then its chaos, the admins decide your fate where its SD, a cure that dosen’t come, or if you are really, really, really lucky an actual win. This entire process you could be infected by a random zombie hitting you once and again, the incompetence of marines who cant even keep cades close, and then go to zombie RP which dosen’t exist because when the gameplay is rushing cades and dying over and over again, how can you RP that. Even though i hate xeno players for disarm spamming and then going gang gang they have way more options because of the gameplay while zombies are FORCED into rushing cades over and over again which ruins the RP.
TLDR; Zombies is a gamemode where gameplay snaps RPs neck and then kicks you in the balls for having to want fun because its so poorly made.
1 Like
The metagaming, lack of planning, marine gamers in general.
The reinforced walls, the unescapeable docks, the traps on areas you AREN’T even sure they will come from, ladder traps with shotgun sentry and cades in a reinforced walled off room. The only way I’d enjoy it is if you took the gun vendors and limited the guns to shipside staff until the breakout went totally awry.
2 Likes
My issues with the infection mode is always the lack of buildup, lack of tension and then just how fast RP goes away once things kick off. If you think about it right off the bat because we know it will be a Zombie round automatically kills the buildup or tension, there is no mystery anymore we already know what will happen and it already sets a negative mindset for people right off the bat. The next issue is then once you land the timer to the end of tension is between 3 to 7 minutes since by then someone will get bit and kick off the mess and once it kicks off then there is no more RP except shipside till it goes up there. And then being a survivor dealing with zombies just sucks and so does being a zombie in general, you get hit once and your round as a marine is over and then conversely playing as a zombie is also boring when your only method of doing something to a marine is just run at them and hope you hit them.
If I could make changes to the way Zombie rounds are handled I would do something along these lines.
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Don’t announce its a Zombie round right away. Why kill any tension you could build up before the game even starts? You prime people with negative feelings towards zombies from wanting to engage right off the bat and also tell people from the start that they probably won’t have fun.
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Build up tension and suspicion before the Zombies are even placed on the map. Let the marines find traumatized survivors if they exist or let them find nothing but signs of struggle, let them wonder whats going on without any threats at first and then slowly introduce a threat.
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Rework how Zombies actually infect players and how players play as Zombies. Another big issue is that playing as a zombie sucks and so does becoming one, one scratch and your round is now basically over. I think the best way to solve this is to make Marines have a percentage chance of being infected rather than just being infected outright. Depending on Armor worn Marines have better chances of not being infected by simple slashes and conversely give Zombies an execution move to use on a downed Marine, a bite move that kills the marine and assuredly infects them with the idea being the marine was overpowered and toppled before joining the horde. And then lastly slow down zombies a little but make them more menacing in other ways, the fast zombies just don’t feel right and combined with the current infection system makes them unfun to fight. Slowing them down a little but making them a little more durable is a potential way to change it but other ideas will probably be good.
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Marines need to have a distrust of others. I feel that the most important thing people don’t take into consideration is that the best zombie stories are not about the zombies, rather they are about the human survivors and how they go about surviving. We very rarely get to see this since RP goes out the window generally and the current mechanics don’t support this currently and I feel it needs to be addressed. Give marines a chance to actually develop distrust and closer bonds with other Marines so they can form their own stories mid event, a good Zombie movie says more about the human survivors than about the Zombies themselves and it should not be forgotten.
I’m sure there are plenty of other good ideas and changes that could work well and fix the issues that are present with Zombies but this is what I feel is probably the biggest issues and some ways to fix them.
1 Like
Regarding Maegami,
This goes for events in general.
Frankly - people do not need to be told what the event is going to be. The only exception perhaps would be XvX and Tribes simply for clarity.
It could be so many things: Fighting CLF, UPP, W-Y, TWE, zombies, or predators groundside; Ship v Ship, boarding actions, SCP (if they are even still in the game), zombies shipside, Almayer being destroyed a few roundstart - which requires a full evac of the crew to the ground, hive shipside…etc.
The TLDR is you don’t tell people what it is initially, build suspense and escalatory basis for the event when the round starts, and go with further escalation from there. Speed of escalation depends on the event but you don’t want to drag it out past 20-30 minutes into the round since that’s usually when drop + combat has occurred in normal rounds.
The quickest I’ve ever seen for example was like…5 minutes in with announcements about the ship being damaged after exiting FTL and going to crash in 10 minutes. We literally had dudes shipside start to get trapped behind fire doors as alarms tripped due to depressurization in certain ship areas. The longest lead up to fighting I’ve generally seen probably have been during Ship v Ship ops where admins (and CIC) opted for some diplomatic “Get out of our territory” Announcement messages back and forth that might have gone on longer than it should have tbh
If you absolutely must you ask for volunteers for a “event role” and then tell those individuals what they will be doing when they Observe.
How to build suspense and add thematic aspects to the event?
ARES Messages, messages from a vessel/entity in the solar system, admins turning on emergency lights and/or using midis, the “Ship shake” occurring (where people go flying), lights flickering, power system failures, explosions, missile and CAS strikes against the Almayer, boarding pod attacks (probably doable?), traumatized survivors, infiltrators such as Special Ops or (heavily armed) Frogmen… in conjunction with normal operations (for example in a UPP or CLF round), special weapons authorization, roleplay announcements (eg: UPP-UA War declared and nuclear missile exchanges being reported in the solar system; reports of fleet movements; HC orders to effect a Class Delta quarantine on the system and ship and actual orders to blow up the engines to prevent FTL etc).
At the very least build some lore and roleplay opportunities into the event. Some things may be scripted but it’s absolutely ok to given the players some agency and create a event which has player driven results. Especially when it’s as simple as a ARES message or message from a foreign vessel about xyz because the marines did xyz.
2 Likes
Personally i think they should add an objective of finding a crashed Space jockey/Predator ship as one of the major complaints is that there’s no real objective. Once the ship would be found marines would then find the source of the outbreak (Black Goo) after securing a vial of it they would send it to research and admins would spawn a cure once research puts it in a scanner or something. This way the round isn’t just “wait for admins to spawn the cure with no build up other then shooting ten billion undead”
Reminds me of the one time they did do that. The marines were sent in and we found a dog in Lambda labs and two PMCs warning us not to touch it. Some marine fragged the room with them in and then after i got treated zombies started attacking us.
The problem is, zombies are designed to lose. They have no method of dealing with barricade lines, they’re easy to decapitate once they’re down, and they have no ranged attacks. Whether or not zombies win is kind of up to the admin running the event. As an example, the last zombie round I played, the captain grounded the alamo and refused to allow it to cycle, making it impossible for marines to change into zombies while on the almayer and cause chaos up there. From there, the marines just sat behind the cades while gunning down any zombie that came near, and then locking up infected marines who did not resist.
To me, zombie rounds should be all about chaos. There either needs to be a mechanic that spawns them on the almayer, or the admins running the event need to spawn a few in maintenance every once and a while. To further break things up, give marines an objective that forces them to go outside their cadeline and destroy something or find research for a cure or the almayer gets destroyed by white out/ares self destructing to contain the virus/etc.
I would also go ahead and maybe add a few different types of zombies so they’re actually somewhat effective in the field. Off the top of my head.
A fast one with a very low infection chance. Maybe give it multi-target melee like a crusher or something, but it doesn’t really need to hit hard, mostly just run into clusters of marines and break up their formation.
A “ranged” zombie that maybe spits a smoke similar to boiler. The smoke cloud would do no damage, but it would make marines vomit after a short random timer, have a chance to give them symptoms that make them appear infected with the actual zombie virus, and cover up the tiles so marines can’t know if there’s a horde of zombies rushing in or not.
Then maybe add a tougher zombie that just has more HP and armor. It could exist for the sole purpose of soaking up damage so other zombies can get closer. Sort of how defenders will suicide rush on whisky outpost.
From there, I would also make it so zombies no longer have a 100% chance to infect marines on every hit. The 100% infection chance has ironically been bad for zombies, in my opinion. It makes marines paranoid and less likely to take chances or leave their barricades. It also makes it very easy to know whether a marine is going to turn or not. I’d reduce it to something more survivable, but still scary in the long run like 15%. That would be perfectly fine with the way zombie attacks slow.
Then I would add some sort of mechanic where a basic flu or something is going around. This way you could have marines sneezing, coughing, and puking and not be infected, causing further chaos and confusion without be deadly, but allowing the zombie virus to be harder to stop. Finally, I would clarify the rules around hiding one’s own infection status. As is, I don’t know if I’m griefing or rule breaking if I hide in maint some where and wait to turn so I can kill the doctors.
5 Likes
My main problem with zombie rounds is that there is no incentive to keeping infected players around if the admins choose to withhold the cure. If you get infected, the best strategy for the humans is to put that player on the frontline to take the hits until he’s about to turn, then put him outside and execute while waiting for them to zombify and decap.
Instantly killing infected just hastens the process, so is wasteful of the time the player could be using to help their fellow humans for that time.
1 Like
Zombie event sucks cause it always ends with the dropship crashing into the almayer. How about it stays groundside and marines actually stand a chance against the horde along with some info about a infection going on groundside.
2 Likes
What happens is, assuming there is a high level of coordination going on/someone being proactive, that anyone who becomes infected is immediately singled out and placed into a quarantine cell in research.
Generally, a small team who know what they are doing can process and contain a large amount of infected, and dead, personnel in research. Often, I’ve seen this go so well that admins have had to blow up some of the rear cell doors to give all the trapped zombies a escape chance, but this is not even guaranteed to work since, if the Marines are doing well, they can just cade off the area.
I think zombies is at its best when the staff make use of the zombie spawners to allow dead people to respawn instantly as a zombie, it can help achieve a true hoard system.
My one feedback, I feel that if a zombie goes SSD due to the user having taken over a new zombie, the old body should die permanently so as to avoid those annoying situations where half the map is covered in “alive” but SSD zombies that don’t do anything.
A lot of stuff have already been covered by other people but
Game mode is on life support
Every zombies round needs to be micromanaged by admins which cuts out a lot of the fun. Most zombie rounds are predictable from start to finish because of this. If you somehow win and evac shipside expect admemes to call down and send the alamo with 200 zombies on it to ruin any semblance of shipside RP and fun from hidden infections. Marines are either losing horribly or clearing the map and that is decided by the admins, there is little in-between.
Most zombie rounds turn into ERT spam clusterfucks for a reason, the gamemode is extremely old, barebones and needs a LOT of work before even considering it as an event mode.
Playing as zombies is not fun
Zombies imply a horde yet we’re reliant on dead bodies coming alive.
The basic gameplay loop is this: getting shot up to swiss cheese and flamed after walking two tiles, waiting 15 minutes for respawn while scrolling on your phone, respawn again, rinse and repeat ad nausium. Some admins fix this with respawns which should be a feature tbh. L4D-esque special zombies would be cool.
Playing as marine has it’s highlights but it’s still flawed.
Admins are often too busy keeping the gamemode on life support to even get secondary objectives for marines so there is zero objective to achieve here hoping admins magically grant you a cure. RNG infection isn’t fun and camping dead bodies in a box is not fun for anyone. Constant required railroading by admins to cover the flaws really kills marine gameplay.
The good
The most fun you get is from the RP is people making the most of it wondering if they are infected or not and attempting to clear zombies from maint. Holdouts are fun as marine and sneak attacking the CO as a zombie is always funny. Trying to get a dead body destroyed in time is also fun. Processing infected marines leads to fun situations.
1 Like
i love infection just cause I love zombies in general but there are some obvious issues that keep it from becoming a normal gamemode or (IDEALLY…embedded into distress signal at a rare %) which is
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no one wants to play zombie because they dont have any cool abilities and the actual fun in the round is trying to not die from zombies
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everyone knows its zombies every fucking time so rp is super forced and everyone is quietly metagaming with light armor / no armor (making zombie gameplay even worse) and pretending they dont know how to deal with zombies
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reanimation is way too slow imo
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in a perfect world we would have zombies that have a random body part that needs to be taken off, generated at roundstart. maybe its the head. maybe its the left arm. maybe its an organ. maybe you just have to burn it. and then let marines & research figure this out
I love to roleplay as a guy whos absolutely completely afraid of zombies who wants to just hide away and barricade and lose his shit at the sight of a zombie
If I’m command/SO I like lie to the marines about the gravity of the situation (saying we’re winning if we’re not) to make everything more tense and confusing as it should be. i also give them fake cures " RESEARCH IS SHOWING TRICORD SLOWS THE INFECTION" and tell them to cut off your own limbs if you get hit to stop the infection lmao. i want people to lose their minds as if its an actual outbreak and this is such an entertaining way to contribute to that. if you play infection rounds just to win ur lame
1 Like