Now that TU has been around for awhile, the players have gotten very, very good at the minigames. In particular is Virus; better aim and strategy means that if you’re in a lobby with several high-badge players, winning as zombie is not possible. Zombies can only run and do melee damage against people with cracked aim and instant-kill weapons. Here are a few suggestions I have to deal with this:
1. Anti-Grouping measures
I think something as simple as preferring to spawn zombies near grouped survivors would help massively. If there’s a group of survivors, the zombies cannot approach, even in a horde, because they can massively outdamage anything you funnel into them.
2. Nerf the instant kill weapons
This one’s a big one. If every survivor has 3 different weapons that can instantly kill at range, being able to swap between them to ignore reload times, and is even half decent at hitting their shots (because you don’t need to be perfect when the shotgun or hand cannon have spread shot instant kills), there is no possible way for a melee only character to even exist. This is a huuuuuge oversight that gets even worse in lobbies with competent players. The instant kill weapons need a nerf to their ammo counts, and beyond that, need to be ensured that you only ever spawn with one at the most.
3. Keep enrage on patient zero
As soon as you infect someone, or if you’re unlucky enough to have someone join while you’re patient zero, the only bonus zombies get is gone. Having enrage on all of the zombies would be unbalanced, but keeping it on the patient zero would actually encourage some form of strategy on the zombie side.
4. Buff zombie movement speed
Not just a little. It needs to be buffed a lot to compete with adrenaline and counter grouping survivors. There isn’t much else to say here.
5. Give zombies something to do
Zombies can only run and die, and because they are melee-only, they are extremely outmatched by semi-competent survivors. TF2 had a zombie gamemode recently that was fairly balanced because each of the 9 classes as a zombie had a different M2 special. I think doing that, or maybe giving a zombie a random special each respawn, would massively improve things & encourage the same coordination between zombies that survivors have. You could M2 to boost your damage resist for a few seconds, or give nearby zombies a burst of speed, or disarm nearby TNT; the possibilities are many.
Please please PLEASE take these into consideration. I would love to enjoy this gamemode again but it’s just a glorified unit farm these days.