I’ve been discussing certain issues I have with Left 4 Dead with some mates, especially issues of closet or corner camping and, mostly pertaining to griefers, the dreaded safe-room camping. The former has established itself as a pretty popular tactic to deal with large hordes, especially during waiting sequences such after calling the elevator in No Mercy part 4. Of course it can be argued that bunching up is a perfectly viable defense strategy, but I would like to contend that the impenetrable “melee-spam shield” created by four survivors clipping into each other and meleeing like mad is a flaw in the game. It’s defies logic, it requires no skill whatsoever and it’s just too damn easy.

This flaw also contributes to a griefer problem that seems to be occurring more and more frequently: two griefers on the survivors side sit in a corner in the safe room, meleeing away. They cannot be vote kicked, hordes can’t reach them, the special infected have a hard time getting to them. I’ve seen servers held up for a quarter of an hour by this behaviour, because the infected team just wasn’t skilled or coordinated enough to bring them both down.

All in all, I came to the conclusion that one of two things must happen in order to fix this: either melee must be nerfed or the infected must be given a way to effectively force the survivors to disperse. Now, nerfing melee may solve that particular problem, but would probably also open up a whole new can of worms when it comes to balancing the game. Essentially it would make the whole game a lot more difficult for the survivors. No, if we want to force the survivors to stop bunching up in corners or cramped places, we need to make corners and cramped places less attractive.

The solution is already in-game and just needs a bit of tweaking: the Smoker. Or, to be more precise, the smoke he produces after dying. Right now this smoke is kind of lame. It obscures vision a bit, but survivors can generally walk through it without suffering much more than a cough so most people don’t even care about it. I think that could be changed.

If the smoke were only a bit more dangerous and caused a lot more discomfort for the survivors, it could become the ultimate area-denial weapon. A survivor standing within the smoke should no longer be able to spam melee. Instead, it should reduce melee speed to once every one or two seconds. Additionally, weapons fire should be much less accurate, as the survivor has no way of aiming properly. To round things off, slightly randomize the survivor’s turn speed while blinded by the smoke - this should add a perfect sense of disorientation.

Now let’s envision a scenario, where all four survivors are camping inside a closet, waiting for the lift to open on No Mercy part 4. Usually they can bottle up in there indefinitely, happily spamming melee and killing anything that comes at them. But now a Smoker moves in front of them and explodes into cloud of smoke. The survivors are suddenly blinded, can’t see what’s coming, can no longer effectively spam melee, can’t shoot straight. The infected are pouring in, hunters are jumping into the fray, the survivors can’t defend themselves or each other properly. Only by moving out of the smoke can they regain their senses and start to fight back effectively. The smoke is not deadly by itself, but it creates a small area that the survivors will definitely try to avoid until it dissipates.

I think this would give the Smoker death smoke a little bit more of a purpose, instead of just being a mild annoyance.