javano

Maybe try reading my original post.

I agree with pretty much what Tom said. There has got to be a formula like OP posted. I am sure it involves all the stats shown on the leader board including High rounds. It is confusing at the moment because people with better stats are still stuck at lower ranks.. like Tom and myself. Unless Tom ranked up recently. I think the downs/deaths leaderboards are really heavily weighted. The good players play more, hence go down more, hence are stuck at the bottom of those two inverse leaderboards.

Interesting. So Jimmy Z says it's based on skill, and we have Rez saying that by design you will lose rank if you don't play often enough. So the conclusion we can come to here is that Treyarch assesses skill based on having no life and constantly playing Zombies? What a horribly stupid system. I see this so much with the Zombies team... brilliant ideas with horrible execution. I mean... a Zombies ranking system!! Awesome!! There are so many ways you could properly do that and make it a fun way to compete with your friends! Oh, but no... it's just "Play constantly or be punished." SMH I assume by "rank" he means hashmarks. Which makes sense since they appear to be tied to play frequency.

I feel bad that you put so much time into misreading my sentence XD I said that's the formula I would suggest that it use, not what it actually is, since it doesn't use that system.

"No, instead, I blame Activision. I think they rushed this game. I think Treyarch tried to overachieve with Black Ops 2, and Zombies in particular, but they just didn't quite live up to the potential." Amen, man. All these people hating on Treyarch don't realize that it's the money-hungry pigs at ATVI forcing them to shit out gold every two years. Do you know how hard it is to make an entire AAA title in two years? Some of the Halos have been in development for twice that long. Unfortunately, Activision has a track record of running fantastic game franchises into the ground to make a quick buck (Tony Hawk, Guitar Hero, etc..). A track record that I'd love to see come bite them in the ass as soon as they are done fucking up the CoD series.

That's what the turbine does. It doesn't just instantly stop working (usually), it starts flipping on>off>on until it breaks.

Okay, I'm just going to kill this thread now. What you guys are seeing is a light node. It's a little orb developers place when building a map to signify a light source, in this case, it's for the fire. Normally they become invisible when the map is compiled, but apparently there is a graphics glitch that allows one to see them via window reflections. That is all. I am 99.99999% sure that the easter egg is done for now, until DLC time. Feel free to keep looking, but I highly doubt anyone will find anything.

I know that feel bro, the rank system as-is is completely useless. It is the farthest thing from a skill assessment. Every lobby I join is a bunch of people with glowing skulls. After starting the game, I find out that they have no idea what they are doing; usually ending up with someone turning off the power in the middle of the game and getting everyone killed... :x Also, /)

Really? Because I've tested it with about half a dozen of my friends and every day that they don't play, they lose one mark and after their first game of the day, they gain one. Not sure what's up with your friend

The Zombies Ranking System -- Explanation and Review The Intro: Okay, so I'm firstly going to explain how I believe the ranking system works and secondly going to state my opinions on it. Now, without further ado, let's begin. The Rank: Your zombies rank seems to be comprised of two sections: The picture itself which represents your "skill", and the hash marks which represent your play frequency. Let's go down another level: The Emblem: The emblem it self appears to be a visual representation of your average global leaderboard standings and goes up and down as your standings do. It goes through a series of pictures, starting at one bone, progressing to two, then to a skull, then to a skull with a knife and finally to a skull with two shotguns. (I these are the only ones I've seen, I hear that there is a skull + two knives and a skull + one shotgun, but I wont take them as fact until I see them for myself.) The Hash Marks: The hash marks are quite easy to understand. They range from zero to five. Every day that you play, you gain one hash mark, every day that you don't, you lose one. One other point of importance is that if you have 5/5 hash marks and a rank of at least 3 (skull), your skull will have glowing blue eyes. That's about it for the rank, it's not actually that complicated. Now, on to my review. The Conclusion: To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of the system. I feel that assessing your skill based on leaderboards is extremely unreliable, because leaderboards don't demonstrate skill, they demonstrate condensed amount of play. Take this example: You have two players: Player A who is great, Player B who is not so much. Say player A plays one hour per day. B plays about five. Doing the math, player A would have to be five times more efficient than B to even equate to the same "skill" level as B. Yes, there are Downs and Deaths leaderboards (Which I will get into after), but that's only two leaderboards that are heavily out-weighed by the ~10 other kills/headshots/etc stat-grinding ones and would be almost irrelevant after the average is calculated. Secondly, the downs/deaths leaderboards. I'm not sure who designed these, but they make less than no sense. The concept of a leaderboard is to see where you rank among all the other players and see how much you need to improve to get a higher rank. With these two leaderboards, since they are inverted (sorted from lowest to highest instead of vice-versa like normal), you literally can only work your way down to a lower rank. There is nothing you can do aside from not playing the game to increase your rank. Also, it doesn't take into account how much time you've played, so the people at the top of the board are people who have only played one match. My solution would be to replace the offending leaderboards with "Downs per minute" and "Deaths per minute" and sort them in ascending order as per standard. However, this doesn't solve the big problem... I think that the way the skill portion of ones rank shouldn't be based or leaderboards or stats at all for that matter, rather, your skill relative to other players. I'd suggest the model of having players balance themselves out. When you finish a game, the game assesses your performance and increases/decreases your rank accordingly; of course, it would also take into consideration the ranks of you and each of the other players when it calculates that. Something like this: Skill rating = [kills + (headshots/2)] * (revives/downs) Rank adjustment = (Other player's rank - Your rank) * Your skill rating Now, you'd probably want to throw/tweak some multipliers in there, but you get the point. Anyways, that's about it. Feel free to leave feedback/suggestions! Also, if anyone has any pictures of the emblems they'd let me use, give me a shout. I don't want to steal any for the purpose of this post. If I think of anything else to add, I will do so. -Javano

Here is another one of my long-ish write ups. I combined all the different note-worthy things I have found around Shangri-La. Hopefully I can help connect the dots explaining the mountain range easter egg. Enjoy! Loading Screen/Mountain relation. My theory is that everyone is looking at it backwards. Everyone is saying “Hey, look at that mountain, it’s out of place!”, and automatically making the assumption that since the hill is out of place, the entirety Shangri-La shouldn’t be there. Let us take a step back; Think for a sec. We have two things that don’t mix. Why are we assuming that the mountain is automatically the one that –should- be there? I think that it’s the opposite. Please refer to my two professional-quality diagrams. (Second pic courtesy of Telixion) I believe that these two pictures are the before and after pictures of the same valley. Match up the colours if you don’t see what I mean. I don’t think Shangri-La was moved here, I think whatever was over by the mountain was taken away, leaving the dry exposed dirt and rock. Another thing: the storm is shown as a tornado. When was the last tornado you've heard of that spit something out? Never. The whole concept of a tornado is based on suction, they suck things in. I believe that this particular tornado sucked in whatever temple was on the other end of that rope bridge. The same bridge that you can see remnants of on the right side of the second picture (Note the rope hanging across the valley)… I rest my case. Water power/ Element 115 The whole temple is “powered” by water. This could be because the water flows through the underground 115 mine and becomes contaminated with traces of 115. This would explain the temples time-travel abilities and how the residents got infected. Structure vista outside of map There is a vista on the map showing some structure/building. I have yet to find the significance of said structure, but it is obvious Treyarch wanted us to see this particular building. Go to work boys. Shangri-La prefab on Moon There is a single prefab sitting in the Biodome on Moon. It is a round stone disc that is placed on either ends of the many pillars on Shangri-La. Possibly a subtle hint from Treyarch that we missed something in Shangri-La (presumably the Mountain easter egg). It might also be saying something along the lines of “Hey, this place looks like Earth. However, that doesn’t mean it’s –ON- earth.” And then pointing the finger back to Shangri-La? Eclipse The eclipse is really, REALLY, big compared to regular eclipses. This implies that the Moon is much closer to us than normal. 31-79 JGb215 I have yet to discover the complete meaning of its name. However, when 31 and 79 are used for lat/lon coordinates, it places you inside the Kunlun Mountains in China. Incidentally, the fictional location of Shangri-La is also somewhere within the Kunlun Mountains. Still almost no clue on the JGb215 part though. The only thing that comes to mind is J being the measurement of Energy (Joules) and Gb being a measurement of data (Gigabits). If that is the case, what could a combination of Energy and Data be? Monkeys in rockets? When one of the zombie monkeys successfully steals one of your drops, he brings it back to the PaP temple (which also happens to be Richtofen’s Shrine) and blasts off into the sky in a rocket? Da fuq? The element 115 mines The fact that they were mining 115 is important. Keep in mind that 115 does not occur naturally on earth (to our knowledge). This implies one of three things: A. There was a huge 115 meteor shower in the past (the land was given time to resettle over the meteorites, this would take TONS of time). IMO this is the most likely because, if you remember, when you activate the easter egg and go back in time there is currently a meteor shower in progress. Wouldn’t that imply that the temple was either rebuilt or repaired from the damage AFTER Brock and Gary went through though? B. Shangri-La is a source of naturally-occurring 115. C. We aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto. “Beware the wrath of the dragon’s fire” This warning is inscribed in Illuminati around the edge of all the golden gongs used in the easter egg. To my knowledge, no one has deciphered its meaning yet. Illuminati influence There is a strong illuminati influence not only around the map, but in the creation of the temple itself. The gongs, the stone doors and the easter egg tiles all have Illuminati inscriptions on them. This is probably related to the fact that when Richtofen was testing his MDT prototype, he was teleported to Shangri-La. The result of this was that the Shangri-La residents (possibly the Vril-ya) worshipped him and most likely thought he was some kind of god. "People" in barrels In the mine, there are people in barrels. The same as those found on Kino. I think this might be the same as why there was a Shangri-La prefab on Moon (Possibly tying the two maps together). I believe that these “people” are actually Vril-ya. If this is true, that means Kino could have a larger part in the story than we previously thought. Remember, they were conducting experiments on people at Kino. [Relatively] advanced technology In the mine, there is technology that is much more advanced than it should be. (Lights, metal pipes/valves, gas lines). Why does an –ancient- temple use electricity, have the capacity to smelt metal and have running gas lines? We know that pretty much all of the locations we have been to were Group 935 stations. Shangri-La might either have been converted to a station, or maybe even built to disguise the station itself? Why I don’t think it’s on Mars This has been a HUGE theory for a while. I just wanted to pop some holes in it. Firstly, the air composition, gravity, atmosphere, temperature, etc.. are all wrong for Mars. Even on Moon with futuristic tech, they still couldn’t even come remotely close to how exact Shangri-La is to Earth. Secondly, the only real argument behind Mars is that the mountain looks like Martian terrain. It also looks like the terrain of any non-flat desert or dry climate. Thirdly, the theory is that Shangri-La was “taken” and placed on Mars. Oh yeah? Look around, it is lush forest for MILES in every direction outside of the map except that one mountain. Finally, how exactly would two explorers trekking through the jungle magically step from Earth to Mars without even noticing? Remember, Brock and Gary travelled through the mountains ON FOOT. They walked to Shangri-La. Last time I checked, it’s pretty hard to accidentally walk to Mars, or even to walk to Mars period. New discoveries have pretty much proved Mars is involved, so I guess my theory is invalid. Thanks for reading my long winded post. I just want to end this by saying that I may be ignorant to recent developments and discoveries on these forums. So if anyone has any information that I missed, please feel free to comment and I'll be sure to add it in. :)

My Various Suggestions And Feedback In-Regards To Zombies Warning: It's Very Long! 1. Treat zombies as a separate game included within Call of Duty, not a “minigame”. Examples: [*:ly4jpe1z]Introduce a leveling system similar to that of multiplayer. Ideally with multiple prestiges. [*:ly4jpe1z]Unlockables that carry over to regular multiplayer mode. [*:ly4jpe1z]Pack-A-Punch gun skin in multiplayer for X zombie kills with that gun. [*:ly4jpe1z]Zombies backgrounds/emblems. [*:ly4jpe1z]Other Zombies-related unlocks. 2. Support extremely high rounds (50+). Examples: [*:ly4jpe1z]Double/triple pack-a-punch. [*:ly4jpe1z]A way to purchase/obtain ammo other than max ammos. [*:ly4jpe1z]More extremely high-priced items (High priced meaning 5K-100K, I have had up to 400K at one time). 3.Fix glitches. Examples: [*:ly4jpe1z]Getting “Treyarched” on extremely high rounds. [*:ly4jpe1z]“No free instances” error. [*:ly4jpe1z]Failed health regeneration after taking damage. [*:ly4jpe1z]No flopper explosion if collision with zombie mid-flight. 4. Different wonder weapons, not just “one shot” shotgun spin-offs. Possibly a wonder knife/equipment? (Continued in the “Notes” section at the bottom) Note: When I first heard about the “Wave Gun” I was thinking it was going to be something along the lines of a flamethrower that fired microwaved instead of fire and used a magazine instead of a cool-down meter. Which IMO would be awesome! 5. Pro perks (Purchasable after the standard perk has been purchased) Ideas: [*:ly4jpe1z]Double Tap Pro: Even faster fire rate, Increased bullet damage, increased penetration and increased clip size. [*:ly4jpe1z]Speed Cola Pro: Even faster reload, faster everything (ex. grenade throwing, knifing, other animations), remove extra reload time on empty reload (if applicable). [*:ly4jpe1z]Quick Revive Pro: Even faster reviving, Larger revive radius, Use gun while reviving and can revive without looking at player, Get M/S when downed in coop, increased bleedout time, keep perk in slot 1 after being downed. [*:ly4jpe1z]Juggernog Pro: More health, Faster health recovery, No flinch when hit by zombies. [*:ly4jpe1z]Staminup Pro: Even faster sprinting, Infinite sprint distance, Faster weapon draw after sprinting, sprint is not broken when damage is taken. [*:ly4jpe1z]Deadshot Daquiri Pro: Even more accurate hip fire, Headshots do more damage, Instant ADS (including sniper rifles). [*:ly4jpe1z]PhD Flopper Pro: After DtP explosion auto-pop back into standing position, no flinch from falls, larger DtP explosion, DtP explosion always triggers (does not need to be off a ledge) [*:ly4jpe1z]Mule Kick Pro: Faster gun switching, Hold one extra tactical grenade and two extra lethal grenades and one extra equipment (if stackable), increased reserve ammo carrying capacity. Note: Whether these would replace the standard perk’s perk slot or take up a new one along-side it would be up to you. Not all the effects were necessarily intended to be implemented, I just compiled all the different ideas I had into one list. 6. Tomahawks! Why? Because what would be more fun that hitting a zombie in the face with a hatchet? 7. Increased security. No more haxx0rz! (We don’t need a repeat of Moon) Note: For those who are unaware, the ENTIRE Moon easter egg was hacked and released within an hour of the map’s release. Which effectively ruined it for the whole easter egg hunting community. I don’t know exactly how the code is compiled/encrypted, but I am more thinking pre-encryption things such as making the variable/resource names extremely confusing to those who don’t know what they are looking at. 8. Continue introducing new concepts Examples: [*:ly4jpe1z]The Hacker [*:ly4jpe1z]Gun-less starting room [*:ly4jpe1z]No Man’s Land 9. “Zombies Remaining” Counter. (Really useful for higher rounds where you have no idea if there are 20 or 2000 zombies left) 10. Solo Leaderboards! Bring ‘em back! (Solo, in my opinion, is pretty pointless without a leaderboard). 11. Matchmaking search prioritization criteria. Examples: [*:ly4jpe1z]People who have mics and aren’t in parties [*:ly4jpe1z]People of similar skill/level [*:ly4jpe1z]Best possible connection 12. Faster difficulty scaling (A long game of zombies can go for 6+ hours!!!) 13. Two Easter eggs [*:ly4jpe1z]One serious, easier, one to advance the storyline and appeal to the more-casual gamers. [*:ly4jpe1z]One harder one with seemingly-random steps for the more hardcore egg-hunters) Note: I don't necessarily mean two full-length easter eggs. In theory, the effort of the one could be split across both proposed easter eggs. 14. A “Report Player” option for hacking, glitching, cheating, etc... 15. Private match customization options Customization Examples: [*:ly4jpe1z]Player health [*:ly4jpe1z]Starting money [*:ly4jpe1z]Zombie health [*:ly4jpe1z]Perk multipliers [*:ly4jpe1z]Amount of zombies [*:ly4jpe1z]Types of zombies [*:ly4jpe1z]Weapons [*:ly4jpe1z]Infinite ammo/endless clip options. Note: Naturally achievements/leaderboards would be disabled when the rules are customizable. 16. Join game-in-progress option (Compensate players who join late but don’t count the game towards their leaderboard. (Possibly put an icon beside their name to show what round they joined on for YouTube purposes?) 17. Maintain credible leaderboards: detect and remove glitched, hacked and cheated scores 18. Difficulty levels (Recruit, Regular, Hardened, Veteran) Note: Difficulties would most-likely only be available in Solo matches due to the possible complications with multiple players. 19. ELITE compatibility 20. Vote kick player from pre-game lobby in public matches. (For that one no-mic who will not leave) 21. Host switching when host leaves instead of game crash 22. Playlists such as: [*:ly4jpe1z]Mic & Game-chat required [*:ly4jpe1z]Over X level only [*:ly4jpe1z]Random map, etc… [*:ly4jpe1z]Introduce special event playlists (ex: melee only, wall guns only, ½ cash, etc...) 23. Make a penalty for leaving games early Note: This may not be as necessary if a “Join Game In Progress” option is introduced. 24. Game does not end when the host leaves Miscellaneous Notes [*:ly4jpe1z]Just some feedback on the easter eggs. In my opinion Shangri-La was the best gameplay-wise, but Moon was the best storyline-wise. I liked the steps in Shangri-La because they were logical, there was always a reason for doing what you were doing. I found that in Moon the steps didn’t really make as much sense, and didn’t really have any clues pointing you to in the right direction. I at many times found myself saying: “Okay, we just did this. Now there is no indication of what to do next! Are we just supposed to randomly run around shooting stuff?”. In Shangri-La after you finished one step, the next was immediately visible (with a little looking of course). Within a minute of entering the Eclipse you would hear Brock and Gary yelling, which immediately clued you in to what you needed to do. [*:ly4jpe1z]Make song easter egg harder, it doesn’t need to be obnoxiously easy to appeal to casual gamers. It was a good difficulty in World at War, you had to do a little bit of looking but it was findable. Maybe make it a tiny bit easier, such as having something pointing you to flushing that toilet or ringing that phone. In Black Ops it is crazy easy. It is the exact same every map: Find the three objects that are making a really loud whining noise that can be heard from across the map. When it is that easy, there is really no satisfaction that comes with solving it. It’s more like: “Oh cool, a new song.” Whereas in World at War it was more like: “Wow! I just flushed a random toilet and found an easter egg. Awesome!” [*:ly4jpe1z]Nova 6 crawlers/Phaser zombies should never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever come back. The idea behind introducing a new zombie-type was good; it’s just that Nova zombies were obnoxiously annoying. To be honest, anything that impairs the player, unless very well implemented, can be extremely frustrating. Such as the mud-pit in Shangri-La. [*:ly4jpe1z]Touching on the wonder weapon subject a bit further. I think there needs to be more of a variation with them. Not even necessarily from one wonder weapon to another, but even make them act differently from regular guns in general. They have been doing this in a sense, but all the wonder weapons follow the same one-shot kill template. Who says it needs to behave like a normal gun? Maybe a gun that leaves a trail of toxic bubbles? Or one that doesn’t even deal damage at all and just leaves them some kind of gameplay-altering effect, such as all the damage they do to players being reflected back at them? They are “Wonder Weapons” after all. [*:ly4jpe1z]This isn’t really as much of a problem as it is a preference. Back in World at War there were a lot of really detailed and rather inconspicuous easter eggs that took hours of research to fully understand. Such as GPS coordinates, historical references, etc… In Black Ops there aren’t nearly as many of those. It’s mostly the more instant-satisfaction easter eggs such as the songs or the side-quests. I know a lot of us hardcore players really enjoyed having huge research threads on forums where we spent days researching those things that most people missed. Assuming this actually makes it to anyone at Treyarch: Thank you for spending the time reading my long-winded list of suggestions and comments. It is awesome the way that we the community can provide our input and, to an extent, craft your game into the game we want it to be. It really does make all the difference. I hope that some of these ideas caught your eye, and I can’t wait to see what you guys make next! I hope to be in your shoes in the somewhat near future making games equally as awesome, but until then, keep up the extraordinary work! Adam “Javano” Carruthers :D

I think what you guys are talking about is the MTD.. Not the MPD. The MTD stands for Matter Transference Device and is the technical name for what we know as the teleporters. The MDT is NOT the pyramid. That is all.

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