The big issue, Special Items: for every class aside from Medic every SI is fundamentally the same. These Special Items provide an area of effect that damage zombies; in of itself they do not require any interactivity from the player aside from where to strategically place it. Even then, there isn’t much strategy to go along with it: players tend to place them where ever zombies spawn more frequently to get more kills and receive more Units.
There are even times players will place their own Special Item in front of another player’s so they’ll receive more kills, and this only creates an unneeded amount of competitiveness where one player won’t have much fun because their Item has been rendered moot.
My main suggestion would be to change these abilities to have a more interactive structure e.g. electrician throwing a projectile that chains lightening to a few zombies. One more point I wanted to bring up about these Special Items being fundamentally the same is that every player will be rushing to upgrade said Special Item to keep up with their teammates having longer range and taking more kills in a way they can’t play around. This, however, opens up a larger issue of the upgrade system not giving true variety in builds, and creates a power gap between the classes.
while what you say is true on paper, the actual use of these items are very different.
for a survivor, your blade trap is a small, tight area that can instantly kill anything you want, but again, it’s small, you have to lead zombies into it.
the engineer can have an obscenely large zone, but the turret only targets one person at a time, leaving open spots ect.
i think the real special part of each class is their combo ability rather than their place-able item, if they were any different, they have more potential to not be balanced with eachother. ZM in multiplayer at the moment is also technically a competitive game to see who can rack up the most points haha
But the Electrician is the exact problem with how unbalanced these special items are, everyone rushes to pick them first due to how big their SI range is. It kills normal zombies with ease, and only the occasional Vampire might slip through.
As it stands every other SI can’t compete with turret, and blade trap. You may say they could just rebalance the other special items, but there’s still a few reasons why it’s not exactly worth it.
I’ll agree that the game is competitive in the aspect you’re trying to get the most points, however there isn’t anything you can do to outplay another player when they’re simply putting their Special Items in front of yours to take kills away.
The gamemode would simply just benefit too much from having more interactive Special Items like the example I gave in the original post.