1) The Zombies

The fact is, having players "become" a zombie right now, with the way they function, is pointless. First of all, you respawn over and over again with no weapons and your only option is to charge the other players/NPCs in an effort to get the 5 kills needed to return as a "survivor." I think the Zombie players need some objectives of their own. There's no point in being a survivor if, when you "die," you can just come back to "life" by killing something. What if, when a survivor becomes a zombie, their new objective is to STOP THE SURVIVORS rather than BECOMING A SURVIVOR again? Then provide a cure or something, or some task that the remaining SURVIVORS have to perform before a player can rejoin humanity (and thereby stop hindering humanty's cause)? The way things are right now, round after round is just about who pops the most heads. I've noticed that the average player only spends about 2 minutes as zombie each round because of the tiny amount of kills needed to become human again. I read somewhere that forcing players to play zombie was meant to be a punishment for getting yourself killed, and on the web site it says "the only thing worse than having to fight them is becoming one of them." Right now, I see nothing bad about becoming one of them, because it's pretty easy to stop being one. The requirements for returning to the human team need to be tougher, at the very least. This would also elminate the annoying "pact" thing I see in every server, too, since Zombies wouldn't be able to get themselves back on the human team by themselves very easily...One of the survivors would have to get them out of their predicament. And since the player can't get himself/herself off the zombie team, and it would be an inconvenience for the survivors to have to stop and try to cure their zombie friends, THAT would make becoming a zombie worse than having to fight them. It would also encourage the survivors to survive, rather than try to see who can out shoot the other players.


2) Victory Conditions

Why can't the zombies win? I understand this is a co-op game, but what's the point of having objectives for everyone to work towards if there's no real penalty for not achieving them? This kinda goes along with number one, but not quite. The zombies should be able to win, and there should be some penalty to the survivors for not escaping. I saw someone mention that they enjoyed watching human spawn points get overrun...But since there's no penalty for dying, and zombie players don't stay zombies, eventually the zombies get beaten back every time. It makes each game the same as the last game and encourages players to merely try for the highest kill count instead of doing anything. Basically what that amounts to is a bunch of people camping on roof tops for rounds at a time. I think victory conditions for each side would add a lot of flavor to the gameplay. Right now, there's sort of victory conditions but not really. Only one side can win, and that's the good guys. If this is a zombie game, shouldn't we, the players, be afraid of losing the war? Shouldn't the bad guys over running our position mean the worst for our cause?

3) The Objectives

At this point, I have yet to discover a reason (or a reward for that matter, see #2) for accomplishing mission objectives. First of all, WHY do I have to run and grab a plain looking silver case? You tell me the Army wants to analyze it...Why, what's in it, and if you can't tell me that, why is it so important to the military? WHY do I have to kill a certain amount of zombies before the military will support me, even though they're already supporting me? Isn't the military there to rescue me, anyway? Who the bleep is/was FRED, and WHY is he so important to the mission besides the fact that he's mutated? WHY do the survivors have to do all this before they can escape, when the Army is perfectly capable of doing it themselves? I thought the survivors were supposed to escape...Shouldn't the objectives have something to do with the escape? Also, I think different objectives for different maps would add a lot of flavor. Each map is really a new scenario, and I was disappointed to find that they were the same in bb_heavensgate and bb_slaywatch. If they're going to be the same for every map, you really need to tell me why I should bother accomplishing them. What do I get for my troubles? See idea #2.

there is the possibility for different objectives... slaywatch usually starts with "hold the baricade for 3 minutes"

remember this is the first incarnation of this wonderful mod... the candy is comming

yeah, we're just going to have to wait till the developers and community come out with better stuff. I was hoping for more variety to objectives. A couple months, we'll have stuff worthy of Svencoop fame. I hope.