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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:

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.