Virus needs serious revision and should still be considered alpha

Suggestions
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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.

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Weapon prediction is in the works as we speak which should fix the ping issues, and the radar issue you’re talking about has already been fixed for the next update.

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This is being addressed with our own custom weapon prediction. We have been working on it for a couple months now and is nearing release (after the 0.2.0.0 release)

As @Zapty stated the radar issue was a bug and it’s fixed in 0.2.0.0.

The run speed issues are related to lag and the weapon prediction will handle this. The infected do run faster than the survivors.

Virus is in beta stage, because other than weapon prediction and some general lovin’, it’s feature complete.

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Your suggestions is quite thorough, and it’s quite clear that you have put thought into it. It’s certainly not perfect, but I think it’s well into the Beta phase. All the major features are implemented, so it just needs a bit of balancing here and there. Now then, I hope you’re okay with walls of text, because Virus is one of my favorite gameworlds and I’ve got some responses to the suggestions you’ve made.

Really? When I’ve gotten on, there have generally been people every now and again looking to play.

Weapon prediction isn’t quite done yet, and that is why this is currently an issue. Once that gets implemented, the problems of ping should be alleviated to some degree.

On game balance, I do agree that there could be some tweaking. It can be hard to do, however, as a good survivor is nearly impossible to kill while less experienced ones can be easy pickings. It all depends on how things go; I’ve played plenty of games where staying alive was nearly impossible each round. I would agree that, in general, it is hard to get things going as the first infected.

Definitely no. Virus is meant to be very fast paced, and lowering the base running speed would make everything feel sluggish and less intense.

I can agree with this, though I personally think that infected stats should scale depending on how many infected there are versus how many survivors are left. Lots of survivors? Infected are olympic sprinters. Down to the last four survivors? Infected are only just barely faster, as they can easily cut off routes. That’s just my personal opinion, though.

I personally think that grouping up is an option that has risks and rewards, just like staying alone. If you group up, you have more firepower and it’s harder for infected to penetrate your defenses. If one gets in, though, that can lead to a cascade of infections. Stay alone, and you have less firepower but don’t need to worry about allies turning into enemies all around you.

I’m not sure if I agree with that or not. Again, I’d prefer a scaled system of health/speed, but if that isn’t getting implemented then I don’t know which option to choose. On one hand, it is really hard to kill survivors with the infected’s current health. On the other hand, we still want to give last standing survivors a chance at winning. Make the infected too bullet spongey, and the hectic fun of trying to shotgun through hoardes of infected coming every which way is made too difficult to feasibly pull off.

Zapty already mentioned that the radar problem has been fixed, so you don’t need to worry about that.

Sorry for the wall of text, I just wanted to get my full thoughts out.

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Good to hear, thanks. A few hours later I actually found your feature tracker system (Trello) and saw most of this stuff on the list.

Fair enough, no point in debating it; every company has differing definitions I suppose. Certainly after reconsidering, from my criteria, it’s at least close to beta.

The server list is usually empty, every now and then I see a server. I would expect there to be 3-5 servers up at all times, similar to the golf and ball minigames. I typically play later in the day however.

You’ve played horror games before right? Dead by Daylight, for example, is incredibly intense and the walk speed is probably a third of this. White Noise 2 as well. TimeSplitters 2 had an “infection” gamemode which was fast-paced and pretty similar to this. Run speeds were lower.

Main point here is everything is relative, it’s the cat and mouse chase aspect that creates intensity and the feeling that something might be lurking around every corner that creates the atmosphere. The infected still run faster than you and have higher awareness than you do which maintains the threat level.

From my perspective, I had only suggested the HP buff as a means to balance out the speed reduction. Lowering the speed means the infected will ultimately need slightly more time to catch someone at medium distances because the level geometry (hallways lengths, room size, etc) will still be the same. If you keep the speed the same then I’m not sure I’d change HP.

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TimeSplitters 2’s Infection mode is actually what inspired GMod Tower’s original Virus gamemode in the first place IIRC

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