Two things is all I ask, Valve

Left 4 Dead on Xbox360 is my recent vice. It’s just too much fun. It’s also causing me frustration to no end.
All the game is about is having fun. There are no rankings that can haunt you and there’s no score being kept once a match is over with. So that means there’s really no motivation to win other than its fun to win; even though it’s also fun to lose.
Sounds perfect, right? Wrong. It’s the goddamn Garden of Eden and every ass-chomper is also biting into the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. I’m not saying these dill-holes are smart with this metaphor, just that they ruined complete paradise.
There’s an exploit where the Infected can push a items in the way, blocking the Survivors completely, causing a stand-off. This makes it so the Infected will eventually win. Eventually in this situation can take hours. It becomes a slow battle of attrition. It has no place is a fast paced zombie action survival game.
So the first thing I ask from you Valve is that you remove the ability from the Infected to move objects that can block the Survivors. You’ve already done it for the PC version. Please find the time to fix it for the Xbox360 version. We’re your customers too.
Second thing I ask from you Valve is to add a disconnect ratio. So many games have been ended because someone is losing and they just want to quit. This ends it for everyone. I’ve worked my ass off to win a match so many times only to have our server shut-down because our opponent was going to lose. Sure it counts as a win for me but that means nothing because the matches aren’t ranked and scores aren’t kept. I’ve had my ass handed to me a lot. It took time to get to the mediocre skill level of which I’m a master. But I never quit. I always tried to learn how I was being beat. Both for how to copy it and improve it and also how to avoid it.
So if you add a disconnect ratio and I see a player who disconnects 50%(!!) of the time, I’m going to kick him from the game. He can repair his ratio by playing quick matches so he’s not forever fucked…but he is for a long while.
I think with these rules in place, paradise can return to the land of the dead, as it should.

Web Woes

There’ve been some troubles lately in my blog-o-sphere. Against the suggestions of our webmaster Microbomb, I wasn’t running a tandem blog on a blogger account to make my articles redundant. Then when we put in meta-tags to make our website searchable and viewable, www.catch-33.com was hacked and we lost all our content. There were of course backups for all the articles but they were spread across three different computers in no logical order. Also all the fine tuning of the work is done post publishing so while no content was lost, flavor was.
The hacking also scattered those contributing to the site. SirFignuts went and created a Tumbr account in our name and writes there now. The Villain went back to writing at either our TestBed or his Reality Blog. egotistus had his delicate sensibilities damaged and has retreated back into his shell. And MicroBomb still resides at his blogger account.
So I’ve got some options: Rein everyone back into the compromised Catch-33 and hope it never gets hacked again. Move the URL to hostmonster and run the site there after again reining everyone back in. I’d say having a network of all of us writing on our own site would work but we don’t individually produce enough content to necessitate that, at least by my thoughts and standards of what a functional weblog should be.
I think the only solution that will work is a de-centralized hierarchal network that automatically feeds our individual blogs upward to the final site via the RSS. But such a site isn’t already made nor is the network for it to work. So until then, I’ll be working out of my Tumblr account, my Blogger account and the TestBed (the only places I have access still).