L4D's lobby system fails in so many ways, even today after multiple updates.
1. You get assigned to a lobby where someone (lobby host) is from Australia and you from Finland. ERR, thats a 370ms latency right there
2. You join into a game that is already going. ERR, that's a 150ms latency there between you and the server which hardly is playable as you cannot predict the zombies hits properly.
3. Lobby assigns you to a modded server where there are some shitty mods going on, the option "back to lobby vote" is disabled. Shit outta luck there. Too bad that the modded servers and 3rd party servers are in same pile (which SUCKS).
4. You cannot select a server where to go, unless you revert to console commands and are a lobby host or use direct connect to particular server through console.
5. Custom maps are a joke. You have to pre-download them and it takes too long time due to maps (campaigns) being over 100 megs, even 300. Once you download them, imagine 30 KB's a second. Thats 1 hour right there. At the point where you get it downloaded, no one is even playint it anymore. Next time you play, same thing but you get to download whole new campaign. At the moment i have 5 Gigs of custom campaigns downloaded from which i have played 3 out of over 20 campaigns.
On the good old CSS/TF2 system, you could just connect to a server and download the campaign from there directly and fast, if the server used a fastdownload host. I guess there was a reason for this, so the slow downloaders would not reserve a spot but Valve should have had the custom maps available over Steam.
6. You end up on a gameserver that is running within a server that is overcrowded aka overloaded aka running too many goddamn gameservers. Even Valve does this with L4D. The official L4D servers were running only 10-20 ticks per second while the optimal is 30. This is caused by the overhead CPU usage in panic events, such as finales and small fight scenes. At that point the CPU usage peaks up 100-300% compared to regular usage. Imagine 30 servers running fine and then all having panic event at the same time. Sheesh!
7. There is no community in L4D. I have one server in top 150 played L4D servers in the world (valve rank, which you see when entering the gameserver). It has served over 26531 players at that time from which 99,99% are people who see:
- Good server running
- Wonder how they could go there through lobby again
Valve builds a system where players keep in touch through Steam so they get together through random system and them meet up on some server ,add eachothers to friendslist and so on. This is perfectly fine but what Valve now forgets is the communities that actually run the servers. There should be a way to pick a server from the list and if its free, lobby assign to it. How hard can it be?
8. No one is actually looking after the players at the servers. There are stats about ragequits, teamkills, and such but not for the server owners. All they can do is look at the logs if someone killed the whole group in some random game and left the server. That sucks, really. And who reads those logs, there are tons of text for crying out loud!
9. The lobby search fails with filtering. If i put difficulty level to Any, i get multiple servers. If i go back, select filter to Expert, i see none or only 1, 2 campaigns with expert on, even though previously with setting any, i saw over 10. If i go back and set it to any again, i see them again, all of them.
10. A lot more stuff that i just can't now remember.
Lobby works to a certain point, perhaps for games like this but needs work - a lot.
