After a week of trying to play on shaky servers, one brave Left 4 Dead 2 modder has taken matters into their own hands. Assuming you can jump into a round of the game, you can now unleash your fury at those servers by blowing up, well, those servers.
The Steam Workshop grants access to all sorts of different mods for all of your favorite games. You can cruise around Grand Theft Auto V as The Hulk or wage war against giant Ponies in Skyrim. Like with those two examples, many of these mods take something that doesn’t belong in the game and inserts it in a clever and entertaining fashion.
I’m not sure any modder has gotten quite as meta as Ellie, though, whose “Shitty Steam Servers” mod puts the servers you’re actually playing on into Left 4 Dead 2. About a week ago, a patch went live that basically borked the servers for many L4D2 players. Steam actually got in contact with the folks at Steamed to explain that this was due to an SDK update that has since been rolled back and will be reinstated once further testing has been done.
Apparently less than seven days of iffy connections were enough to call Ellie to action, though, as their most recent mod allows players to take out their frustration against the very objects of their mental anguish.
You know how every first-person shooter boasts some sort of in-game object that, when shot, explodes? In Left 4 Dead 2, as well as about a million other games, those items take the form of propane tanks. Shoot the tanks, things go boom.
The “Shitty Steam Servers” mod simply replaces those tanks with objects that are based on the servers folks have been having trouble connecting through in the game. Ellie also put their frustration into their own words on the mod’s page.
After suffering from the 9th server crash this week, I had enough. Steam and Valve clearly don’t freakin’ care about L4D2 because they made all official server crash with their new stupid update for Steam Controller (who uses controller in a PC FPS like really). Since 10 days, it’s almost impossible to pass map 3 on every L4D2 server, thanks again to Valve and their (as always) bad update; why do you need to mess up with an old cool game that way. This mod adds Steam Servers in game to replace the Propane Tanks, so you can blow dem’ XXXers and give them at least one purpose. Valve, fix your servers now.
Ellie clearly has a beef with Valve and Steam, but their description reaches a level that makes me wonder if they aren’t having a laugh. For starters, losing connection with a game nine times in (a whopping) 10 days isn’t what I would call “suffering.” Secondly, if a patch goes live and errors arise, I’d be surprised if any developer was able to fix things that quickly. Finally, if someone is really this upset with a developer or gaming platform, why are they still using it?
That’s just my takeaway, anyway. If you’ve been having similar problems in Left 4 Dead 2, please let us know about the tremendous stress its put on your life these past 10 days in the comments section below.
Also, to be clear, I actually think the mod itself is pretty clever. Good on you, Ellie.
