Don’t get me wrong, I like the virus concept, but there is a reason no one is playing it. Maybe you guys are already aware of this and I’m just wasting my time, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt.
Latency and Responsiveness
Responsiveness is the foremost issue. I’ve played virus 4 times and my ping was fortunately in the 40-60ms range for every game. Yet, it still felt like I was playing at 250-300ms the entire time; there was almost a full second delay between pressing the mouse button and actual bullets appearing, bullets seemed to travel through enemies, and other players would teleport and slide every 10 seconds or so. As infected, sometimes I’d be right on top of a survivor and they wouldn’t turn because their real position is further ahead. The host always had a clear advantage too with him getting more kills than others.
I assume all this is partly due to the local host nature of these games, with no dedicated servers performance will be spotty, but this is bad even for a local host setup. If my ping is reading 60ms, then the game should play fine. So what gives? Is clientside prediction just not properly implemented or the net code in general is just in the early stages? What concerns me the most is that you guys are saying the gamemode is in beta when it is far from it.
Game Balance
The other concern I have is one of balance and general fun factor for both sides. While it’s hard to accurately assess balance given the lag issues, I think it’s clear stuff needs tweaked. Generally, playing survivor is too easy and playing infected is too hard which isn’t fun for either side.
Run Speed
Run speeds for all players should be halved at least (this will help the lag considerably too; very fast players + FPS = begging for hitreg issues) and infected should run slightly faster than normal players. The players should have to survive by running, gunning, and staying together, not just running alone.
Player HP
To make it fair for the infected (slower speeds + fixed lag = easier to shoot), they should have higher HP.
Infected Radar
Infected should also have a distinction between friendlies and enemies on the radar (red and green). On the rare occasions when the infected get the upper hand and it’s down to 1-2 people, it’s often impossible to find them because you’re just chasing down other infected on the radar and the timer then runs out.
I think with the lag issues fixed and these changes implemented, virus could be a much more playable gamemode and we’ll see more servers. Thanks.