Because big retailers are imposing dates.

Yeah L4D2 rocks! Love it! The versus is great as always, have yet to try scavenger. 

It was a global release date as well. 

I wonder if I want to play the game more or map for it more. I can't choose! I want to do both at the same time! 

just a question from someone who doesn't play this game, if you're mapping for l4d/2, do you ever actually place monsters in the map? or are you just specifying spawn points? as i understand it, the game dynamically spawns in monsters depending on player stats are previous performance? 

You don't place monsters but you can specify areas where they can exist, where they do certain things, etc 

that sounds pretty cool, i wonder if it would be possible to adapt it for quake in some way. have an 'ai' spawn monsters in and such. 

Spawn randomisation courtesy of Lardarse. We set up spawn groups and a series of positions - if you play the previous RMQ demo more than once you'll notice that the monsters change position, albiet subtley. 

"that sounds pretty cool, i wonder if it would be possible to adapt it for quake in some way. have an 'ai' spawn monsters in and such."

I've been tossing it around in my head too. It might be an extension of Qonquer, really. Place spawn points in the level, denote which monsters can spawn there (due to size restrictions or whatever) and let some sort of control program spawn the monsters keeping an eye on difficulty increases and time passing and such. 

So Steam cloud disconnects whilst I'm playing and resets all my achievements to 0. 

And that's the second time it's happened. Just this time I'd actually completed around ten of them. 

Yeah other people seem to get the same problem. I've checked on the steam forums for my own problems and ran across that achievement error thing.

Also, I thought my graphical corruption problem was solved with the nvidia beta drivers but they just solve the multicore rendering problem, the graphical corruption just takes longer to happen (like 20-40 minutes and then WHAM everything goes to shit.)

So I am still unable to play L4D2. I am upset. 

Why don't you simply backup your Steam folder from now on? 

spirit, do you know how big the steam folder is? 

They came back - but I couldn't see them by looking at Steam from another machine.

This is like when I tried the Gnome achievement in HL2 - carried the little fucker through the whole game (the car chase with zero friction was alot of 'fun') stuck him in the rocket and then . . . nothing. No little rocket man.

Could have gone back to a previous save, but I'd been through enough by that time. 

A patch any day, most likely. Not alot of consolation, I know. 

Sorry, inappropiate attempt on a "your data does not belong to you" bash. 

whoops :P 

Is the best reuse of maps I've seen.

FYI a chainsaw makes mincemeat out of a tank. 

The weather in Hard Rain is amazing! Such great atmosphere.
I love in map 4, how you're running from house to house to stay out of the open and rain, when you get inside the houses they really nailed the feeling of being in out of the rain, with the storm still going strong outside.

I tried some team scavenge last night, and it's really fun, a nice change from versus, and quicker to play.

Love this game. 

The bridge (final rescue) map of the parish is a poor piece of mapping in comparison to the other levels. There's two points where you don't know where to go at all - and this is on a bridge map thats a simple GoTo A-B.

Very frustrating, so here's some spoilers:

When the road is on a raised level you need to repeatedly jump up the side of the truck, onto the bonnet then roof. When it splits, take the off ramp. 

Hmm, that didn't bother me at all? Seemed pretty logical where I was supposed to go, I thought the bridge was actually quite interesting for what is a basically a straight line. 

But I ended up running in circles various times - and getting thrown off twice by Chargers didn't help.

The achivements bug won't go away - I've gotten the stronger than moustachio one three times now.

Lost Violence in Silence, faster than Moustachio (twice) and some agregates like the defib one. 

The first one suffered alot from achievement resets too during the first weeks, seems to be related to server troubles etc. 

The closest the industry can come to mixing AAA and Creative, it seems.

Will be interesting to see what the future holds for it in terms of third party content.

And this type next year - L4D3!

Now going to combine two great hobbies - drinking and playing L4D2 in a Lan. 

spirit, do you know how big the steam folder is?

What does it matter? Mine is 60gb and I backup my entire games folder (onto a NAS) every now and then (which is 77gb). I could see how the archiving part could become an annoyance once you go above 300gb if you have a slow CPU though. If you don't cant afford or don't want to get a cheap NAS, just use an external HD? You do have SOME sort of a backup routine right?