Think nobody plays Left 4 Dead 2 anymore? You’d be surprised.
According to Steam’s stats page, Left 4 Dead 2 is still one of the 40 most-played games on the service every day. As of writing, the game had nearly 8,000 concurrent players... on a random Wednesday afternoon. So yeah, thanks in part to things like a vibrant modding scene, the game’s still doing alright.
However, many of the undying co-op zombie/My Little Pony shooter’s players aren’t pleased with the game’s current state, as Valve’s official servers have been prone to long waits and disconnections ever since a recent update. It’s been about a week since people started reporting issues, and while some say they’ve yet to encounter particularly terrible problems, many are fed up. Players just want to hop into the game they’ve had easy access to for the past six years, which is not an unreasonable request. Valve, meanwhile, has yet to address the problem.
One player has taken a unique approach in their attempt to clear the twin fogs of time and zombies away from Left 4 Dead 2—to force Valve to notice this urgent issue in one of their less talked about, still popular games. Ellie made a mod that replaces in-game propane tanks with—as they put it—“Shitty Steam Servers.” Here’s their explanation:
“After suffering from a 9th server crash this week, I had enough. Steam and Valve clearly don’t freakin’ care about L4D2 because they made all official server crash with their new stupid update for Steam Controller (who uses controller in a PC FPS like really).”
“This mod adds Steam Servers in game to replace the Propane Tanks, so you can blow dem’ ♥♥♥♥ers and give them at leas[t] one purpose.”
“VALVE, FIX YOUR SERVERS NOW.”
Pissed at floundering servers? Now you can blow them the fuck up. A bit over-the-top, but it certainly gets the message across: Left 4 Dead 2 has a problem, and players feel like Valve doesn’t give a crap. Knowing Valve, they probably do, but nobody’s handled it yet because of their horizontal company structure, or a lack of people working on L4D2 these days, or a handful of other Reasons. I’ve reached out to Valve to find out exactly what’s going on.
In the meantime, do you still play Left 4 Dead 2? If so, have you been experiencing issues on official servers lately?
Update: Valve got in touch to let me know that an SDK update caused the server issues, but they recently rolled it back. They’ll launch the update again after “further testing.” For now, though, Left 4 Dead 2’s servers should be as functional as ever.
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