You can see who will be the tank on each map by typing !tanks during l4d2center games

Queue waiting time vs game quality is a fundamental trade-off: changing one immediately affects the other. For a PUG site, our goal is to keep waiting times as short as possible without sacrificing too much game quality.

Since 2023, l4d2center has used the following system:
the maximum queue wait time is capped at 20 minutes, or is determined by the expected number of players based on the number of users currently online (number of players online divided by 6). This method worked well for a while, but I believe there’s now room for improvement—especially since mid-2024, when the ratio of players actually in-game to players online started to drop. More users are keeping the site open without actively playing.

Over the next few days or weeks, I’ll be adjusting the following variables:

• Maximum queue waiting time
  
• Expected number of players in queue, relative to number of players online

Current values:

• 25 minutes
  
• Players online divided by 8

Expected results:

• Faster queues, with maximum waits of 10–15 minutes, with rare exceptions up to 25 minutes, and no noticeable drop in game quality

Your feedback will be important to get this right, so please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts and experiences with the new wait times and MMR ranges in your games.

As long as this announcement is the latest in the group, it will be updated with the current values.

Our Anticheat is stepping up its game with deeper and more thorough cheat detection. As part of this update, VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) will now be disabled both on our servers and for players, as it has proven to be completely ineffective. Moving forward, our Anticheat will take over VAC’s role by actively scanning the game’s memory for cheats. This means you won’t be able to play on VAC-secured servers while using our Anticheat, it won't let you connect to them. Similarly, if you join L4D2Center with VAC enabled in your game, the Anticheat will not function.

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Before this update, our Anticheat was limited to basic checks. Without deep analysis of the game’s process, it could only verify the integrity of game files and detect a handful of popular cheats that didn’t bother hiding themselves too well. But even with this limited functionality, the statistics we’ve gathered are disheartening. From March 14 to March 29, a total of 573 unique players used the Anticheat on L4D2Center. Out of those 573, 49 (9%) had cheats installed on their computers. And of those 49, 24 (49%) were actively using cheats while playing on L4D2Center.
Looking at these numbers, two questions come to our mind:

• What would the stats look like if we could detect all cheats?
  
• If so many of players required to use the Anticheat are using cheats while it is active, what percentage of the players not required to use the Anticheat are using cheats?

This data was the wake-up call we needed to finally make a decisive move. We’ve come to the conclusion that a cheat-free gaming environment isn’t possible without requiring all players to use the Anticheat. Over the next four months, we’ll be rolling out a gradual transition where all players will gain the “required to use Anticheat” status in order to participate in L4D2Center lobbies.
Of course, even with our active development of the Anticheat, over time there will be cheats that update to remain undetected, but we plan to work proactively to always stay ahead of this potential race.

Graphs

• Distribution of players by MMR range https://dl.l4d2center.com/fp/d6/gi/am/el/zc/t0/mmr.png
  
• Player distribution by region https://dl.l4d2center.com/fp/d6/gi/am/em/ds/wk/region.png
  
• L4D2Center games frequency over time https://dl.l4d2center.com/fp/d6/gi/4x/tv/p1/73/games.png

Additional Statistics

• Approximately 1 in 1000 games ends in a draw.
  
• Around 12% of all games fail to start due to players not joining. This statistic excludes games that end due to mid-game quitting.
  Map-specific statistics https://dl.l4d2center.com/fp/d6/gi/zz/nr/qy/20.txt
  The high failure rate for some maps is not due to technical issues but rather related to map update frequency and map size in megabytes. This occurs because many players click the custom map download/update confirmation without actually downloading/updating their maps.

Some of the L4D2Center servers have been switched to 128 tickrate. These servers will be active for 10 days, as they are paid until December 18-19th. You can try them out and share your opinion. If you like them, we might create more 128 tick servers in the future (though it's not very likely).