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I am not so proud to admit that I have wasted a lot of hours playing Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, but I just can't help myself — I love FPS games.

As an experienced player, I have noticed some weird things lately.

One of those things is NPC AI. Over the last few weeks bots have become increasingly useless on expert difficulty level. Here is a list of their annoying behavior:

  • They just stand and do nothing at times — this can happen even if zombies are running toward them or already smacking them hard. They sometimes won't shoot or melee to protect the player even though targets are well in their shooting or melee range. I can't stress enough how annoying is to look at them stand and take a beating, and that is without taking specials into account, just plain old common infected.
  • They use inferior weapons — Ellis is the most guilty of this retarded behavior. He will use his cowboy dual pistol wielding shit "skill" even when there is a horde around you. Result is that he always goes down, and constantly drags around with low health. Not to mention that the pistols in L4D2 are crappy compared to those in L4D1.
  • They refuse to notice weapons and items close by — this goes so far that they sometimes stand just a few meters away from adrenaline shots or pills. The only thing a player can do in such a situation is to go back and forth handing those items to each one of them.
  • They always notice weapons and items farther away that will get them in danger — How many times there was a hunter, boomer, jockey or smoker outside the room waiting and they go to get another weapon or pills and get pounced? This is totally fucked up, especially when you consider that they do not give a shit about those items when you call them or stand right next to those.
  • They go to "rescue" a team member in the middle of danger — result is often that they all die trying to go through the horde, fire, spit or worse yet through the tank. Even if they don't die, they all get beaten up.
  • They don't help fast enough when there is a special on you — They seem to be obsessed with getting their stupid queued task done, whether that means getting pills or their preferred weapon or helping another bot up (gasp!) instead of helping a human. Result is that the player very often dies from specials, which means chapter restart when playing a single-player game.
  • Path-finding — it is damn awfull. Together with previously described "non-cancellable queued task" behavior I sometimes wonder whether I am playing zombie shooter or The Sims.

Now as if all that wasn't bad enough, apart from common infected and "uncommon" infected (such as construction workers or cops) there seems to be a new sort of infected — you can blast them with a shotgun from up close thinking they are dead, turn around and get smacked in the head by them, and they don't go down until you hit them two or three times. Even worse is when you use a melee weapon, you hear the slashing sound as you hit them with an axe and their head rolls off, but they still manage to sneak a punch to your head. When they die they make a different sound (something like a loud air gasp which sounds a bit like a clown nose honk). Their appearance is random, there is no way to know which common infected are those hardened ones.

When it comes to specials, there are some very lame things Valve did — one of them is scratching. For example, even if you shove the hunter away it can often scratch you while stumbling, and that will cost you approximately 75% of your health. It turns out that it is safer to let him pounce you because that often does less damage. Same goes for jockey — even if you have terrific ping and reflexes sometimes you just cannot shove him away. Not to mention that for some reason often you cannot even hear the specials before it is too late. Charger's hand scratching you through the closed door or without even making a physical contact with you is even more pathetic just like hunters and smokers which now sometimes recover their special attack much faster than before.

Valve has obviously introduced gambling elements into a multiplayer FPS game — whether you stay alive does not depend solely on your skill anymore, but also on some blind luck. For me, that is a great turn-off — not only it has become impossible to finish some campaigns on expert difficulty when playing single-player, but even multi-player balance seems to be upset because people get frustrated and tired especially when they play good and when the failure is not due to their own fault.

A message to Valve: If I wanted to gamble, I would have played a card game or a board game with dice. Please make player's skills count again.