MegaAfroMan

I thought it was kind of cool, but not really what I wanted to see. MMX's Cyclical theory has my heart. People always claim that the map must not be cannon because Maxis doesn't recognixe samantha, and Maxis wasn't in a quadrotor to our knowledge, but MMX's theory explains that with the simple idea of alternate timelines, and time cycles. Even though the theory has an obnoxious name, it is so simple, it can literally be represented with a few scribbles on paper. I at first figured it was some form of metaphor for Samantha's perception of godhood as if real people were just Dolls. Richtofen and Maxis also were present in the Aether in some way, so it made sense for them all to be in this "higher plane". To Sam, the plane reminds her of her childhood before all the mess with zombies and 115. A much simpler time and easy to retreat to. To her, controling normal people as a god, would seem like playing with dolls. Richtofen and Maxis are present because they both had aether presences. Richtofen competed with Sam, hence she sees him as a playmate, another little boy. Maxis on the otherhand, has always seemed more sinister, and more distant. Hence his STILL comes through electronics, even to Samantha in the higher plane. See, godhood is a hard thing to take away. Considering gods can travel freely through time and space. So although in our normal universe and timeline, Richtofen is in control, Samantha is in some way, shape or form, in some timeline/universe still a god, but now without center stage, she's been bored. So she made up this scenario using the O4, who either died under Richtofen's rule, or got snatched by Samantha mid teleport and redirected to her play zone. All in all, it's a complicated mess that I think is quite intruiging. I don't see why everyone bellyaches about Origins being a punch in the face to our story. I think they just don't fully grasp the true complexity that is our universe enough to understand that Gods, and time travel isn't exactly a straightforward thing. I can't be mad about that, it's a tough thing to grasp. I know I don't fully grasp it myself. That's what 14 years of college is for. A Doctorate in Cosmological Physics.

THIS. See, my friend and I LOVE Origins and it's objective style gameplay. It adds a sense of progress during the game, and is just overall enjoyable complex. That being said, I do miss the faster feel of BO style maps. I would absolutely love if Treyarch either alternated between the two types, or better yet, did what Chopper here suggested, and actually commit to making a survival mode for each map they produce for that classic BO1 feel, then the story mode for those that like objectives (But not end the game objectives please...) However they NEED to include in every map: Many many doors. There should be enough doors that I need to spend well over 10000 points. They also shouldn't be bypassable like in Buried. A source of high round death. I'd prefer a BO1 style Wonder Weapon, but even just more traps would be nice. Something to make higher rounds less of grind. No bank. Sorry. It kind of ruined things for me. Buried had many easy ways to gain points otherwise. TranZit was okay only because it was such a chore, but the "bank" strategy of setting up on round one is the most logical on paper, but completely ruined any chance of having fun during a serious game on TranZit for me. It effectively made Die Rise completely accessible on round 1, and that is NOT okay. Before the bank Die Rise was ALMOST a BO1 style map. Lots of doors, only 1 buildable, an awesome Wonder Weapon.

23 huh? Good to have a solid Number. Yeah this sounds just like the: "Marlton makes stronger buildables" myth.

Yeah, the BO1 stuff got messed up. Superhands Solo Zombie guide is just under the generic Black Ops forum. It used to be general gameplay. I'm not sure when this weird mess occured, but it happened.

Wonderful intro my friend. Glad to have you around.

I feel like rather than a remake, they may have been playing around the idea of DLC adding areas to TranZit, so after doing all the NavCards, there would be the Returned game mode which had a seperate route, or something. It just feels like they wanted to do so much more with TranZit, but then they ran out of time or hit some snag. The community then completely hated on TranZit and they probably scrapped any hopes of adding to the map and moved on.

I've zoned out multiple times to end up crushed by the robot's foot on Origins. I also had attempted to hide from the Panzer by running to the crazy place. He was waiting when I came back out. I panicked and died.

Nice! If you can make it visible that'd be great. But this is still fanstatic. Thanks Hells Warrior!

After thinking about, I came up with the following: Health increase would remain linear, rather than exponential. It currently IS linear until round 10 I believe. Or at least it was in Black Ops. The health would cap off around 30 in such a way that a hordesworth (25 zombies or so) could barely be killed by one clip of a PaPed weapon. After that health would rise in an exponentially decaying manner. It'd get higher, but by less and less each round. Average zombie speed would increase in a linear fashion BUT zombies would have set speeds. For example zombies could walk (1) jog (5) or run (10). So if we have an average speed of 3, we'd see a rougly even mix of Jogging zombies and walking zombies. At 8 We'd see mostly runners, with a few joggers, and a random walker here or there. After zombies hit their current max speed in BO2, they will increase in an exponential decay, never passing the player's speed. Starting around round 20 specialized zombies would start appearing. These zombies are not completely unique boss types. They are more like sprinters from Verruckt, and Armored Soldiers from Die Rise. The rate at which these zombies appear alongside normal zombies increases untill approximately 30% of all zombies are specialized. Starting around round 40 chaotic pathfinding scripts will begin to interrupt normal play. These would start of just causing something simple, like making all or some of the current zombies pause in place for a second or two once in a round. Then they'd start to become more frequent. Closer to 50 or 60, zombies would have rare occurances of reverse pathfinding. In which they head away from the player, rather than towards. These would only occur IF the player has been moving consistantly, and covering some x amount of distance while doing so, to avoid benefiting campers with these pauses, and to avoid campers from fooling the system by shifting left and right in place constantly. Of course these are purely theory. I'd need to play test them myself, but I do believe this will make records past 70 very difficult to acheive, as specialized extra health zombies and boss zombies will dislodge campers, and sprinting zombies and chaotic pathfinding keeps runners on their toes. Full map loops, stopping for cover at key choke points might be mildly sucessful in this, but I am uncertain. I would hope each map would have either a boss round, or better yet, a boss zombie which spawns during rounds, like Brutus or the Panzer. I also would desperately hope they'd add more round based unlockables in the maps. Like a room or two (not all rooms certainly) that only unlock after a certain round has been acheived. And late game rewards. Super perks (like the fates from DoA) available after round x for a very high price, or something. I also hope they keep elements from Origins, like 4 upgradeable WWs. The Challenges were also nice as none of them required you to go out of your way to get the reward. I'd like to see choices like in Moon. Take the PES to survive in space, or the Hacker to do cool stuff. Upgrade your Blundergat with Acid to make it attract zombies, or without to make it an absolute killing beast. That's all I got. My main hopes, whatever happens, is that: Training survives and camping gets a much needed boost. World Records float more around 90 to 100 rather than 200 or higher, but NOT because of damage caps and infinite enemy health. More late game variety. As of right now, in most zombies maps (all games) there is an ideal weapon loadout, and usually an ideal perk set up. I'd like there to be at least 4 distinct and complete loadouts and set ups worth to mix and match at will.

If they add something like this in the next installment, I sure hope they balance it perfectly. I'm just pretty sure they won't. They'll try, but they won't. Just as well, I'm sure there will be a few players that will rage quit if they aren't "their" character, or if they spawn as their least favorite character. Because of those, I'd rather there not be any character specific skills.

Likewise. As long is there is always a way to get to that next round, I'm happy. If it can be out-gunning, or out-thinking, instead of out-running, I'll give it a fair shot and try to adapt.

Also, on Slades point, I beleive the reason for awarding rep, should be publically visible. If you aren't willing to tell everyone why you think this post is topic quality, you probably shouldn't be awarding rep. There are exceptions I suppose, but they are far to sparse to influence this. That way as well the community can report misused brains so the staff team doesn't have to screen all the brains themselves. because quite frankly, I know they won't. At least not all the time. Not anything against the staff. I've been in their shoes. It's so tedious to screen everything like that. I remember how it was when I saw Asylum posts awaiting approval, or reports waiting to be dealt with. You just kinda skim through and make sure it doesn't look like garbage on the surface. Anything better than that and it was approved. Because sometimes that was the best you could do. You might not fully understand the topic being theorized about, so you can't fact check. And we didn't want to be highly controlling as staff, so we couldn't turn down threads based on opinion or content unless it was highly offensive.

Is my topic an excellent examination of zombies or a high quality read pertaining to the community? I'm no longer staff so this isn't my job. But at the same time I still act like it is, so it's really the users decision. Unless measures are enacted based upon what I have said, they are merely suggestions. With that being said, I do hope one day that the trivia game can be opened to have no restrictions, and that UOTM can again award brains. But right now, it is just too unbalanced. So I highly, highly, highly support PINNAZ and his efforts to bump all the old quality threads back to the surface to be properly rewarded. If enough users follow his path and brains the posts they think of top quality, then maybe the average number of brains per active user can be high enough to allow for small awards for frivilous things like trivia games.

I like running circles more than the alternative of sitting in one spot if you want to oversimplify things to a ridiculous level. I don't agree, not because I don't want to. Simply because this is how I prefer the game to be played. It's not as static and boring as you are trying to make it sound. It really doesn't get repetitive if you do it right. That's the whole definition of chaotic. I respect our differences, and if Treyarch could make the game with two settings, that'd be fine with me. However, I don't like your statements of train running being boring and simple circle running. I also don't like you claiming it is a higher difficulty by changing the AI so training is impossible. It's not a higher difficulty, it's a completely different core game. If trains were really such a simple and easy thing, then there would be many more players of knife or shotgun rank in BO2, and many many more players above round 30 in the global leaderboards. And I'm not a pro at this myself. 30 is my average. My highest round is just past 50. Yet I still support training fully. It's not that I don't think a survival game in which training cannot be done is bad. And it's not that radical changes can't result in positive outcomes. It's just not what I want for zombies. If AI were to be changed, I could see more special zombies. Having more frequent hazards to deal with while training would ramp up the difficulty and chaotic nature of training even more so. Speed should never pass or match the player though. Or else training becomes mostly impossible. If the health system were to be redone to reach a peak, rather than increase to infinity, I could see matching the players speed being managable. Otherwise, it'd essentially put a cap on the game for max level. There would be a point at which the zombies are too fast to out run, and too strong to kill making the survival aspect pointless. This could be remedied by adding an ending, but so many survival games follow that philosophy already, and it just isn't what zombies should be. Also, I support the buildables and speed changes and crawler deaths added in BO2. Some of the maps weren't quite up to par, but 90% of the core game changes I enjoyed. I'd like to see more, but to me, survival is the root of zombies, and it is just a fact that there will be a point usually pre 50, at which it is impossible to survive without training. Either way, I respect our disagreements, and do hope others chime in on their thoughts. Happy slaying, in whichever way you most prefer.

Brains should be not allowed in the forums you've already suggested, along with Forum Games. If, and only if, the staff sees fit to allow for a game to supply brains as a reward it should be run by staff, who I'm pretty sure can be given special permissions to bypass the restrictions on the games section. Off-topic is a tricky situation. It was disabled before, I do understand why it would make sense to leave it open, but Deep Thought and Member Lounge are also semi-off topic areas in which a user can be rewarded. Just allowing Off-Topic by itself to be unrestricted is far too broad. If Off-topic was split into many different subjects, some could be argued for over others. In the end I think Off Topic as it is now should be restricted. No brains. This is a Zombies Site after all. Allowing brains for personal reflections in Member Lounge, or Philisophical stories in Deep Thought is enough opportunity for those who aren't quite as prolific about zombies to still earn their brains. I'm not sure what this board has for options, but on a different board I worked with a user had to write why they were awarding rep to another in order to do so. I think it'd be beneficial here, or else brains will just end up being like the Facebook Like button. Brains should be special. Seeing as we don't have user groups, and most of our medals don't reflect post quality (other than hot topic and stickied) brains is what should signify a high quality CoDz poster. Not someone who writes a post saying, "I love Half-Life!" then receives brains from all the people that also enjoy the series. A high brains count should really signify one of two things: The post and/or user is an excellent examination of the Zombies Game either for story or strategy purposes. The post and/or user is an excellent community member or great read and of the highest quality. It should not signify: The post and/or user is very popular or expresses a popular opinion (ie zombies are awesome) The user posts many times in a game or other arrangement in which the same group of members repeatedly award each other brains for reasons zombie related or not. Personal peave, I even held this while I was staff myself, staff members shouldn't get brains for posting announcements, or other official things. Often times these are the result of collaboration between several members, and it is ridiculously unfair to the other collaborators that the one who posts it gets brains. Also, posting these things are their job. They shouldn't be rewarded with rep for doing so. In some circumstances exceptions can exist to all of what I've said, but for most situations I am fairly adamant that the above restrictions and ideology will provide the best use of the reputation system that the site can have, short of a committee of staff ruling on the validity of every awarded brains from this point onward.

See that's where I, and many others would disagree with you. I don't want trains to die. I love training. No Mans Land has me hooked on trying to pull the most chaotic trains together. It's such a rush. To me, training isn't boring. However I could agree that in some circumstances (PhD platform on ascension perhaps) it can be. Often times these boring trains are also among the slowest, and therefore you shouldn't feel like you're making a decision to make the game harder by training elsewhere just to make it harder, you're also making it much faster. I don't see why zombies need anything to survive. From what I see it is doing just fine, and I'm sure it'll will be able to hang on until the next installment. How am I so sure people wouldn't like radical AI changes? Look how many people complained endlessly about all of BO2 for including such simple changes as buildables and fewer insta-kill Wonder Weapons, and making crawlers die if you got more than 550 or so feet away from them. The community, at least around here and on my friends list, was pretty upset. I don't forsee zombies being received well with a radical AI change. I could be wrong, but most likely it would be seen as the death of CoD Zombies. It may then transition into a new gamemode called zombies but with a different feel, or it may be shunned to oblivion. I personally like it the way it is, and the way things have been progressing.

I say yes. Although it varied for me personally from game to game. World at War: No. Only for basic skills practice, or if you have the documatation abilities to attempt a World Record. The lack of a leader board, coupled with the way the mechanics punish the lone player (drag from zombies, frequent double slaps, no revives, Wonder Weapon weakens health permanently) make solo World at War zombies too much of a hassle for my taste. I'd only play it for a brief nostalgia session with the weapons. If I want to experience the map, I'd play the remake on Black ops instead. Black Ops: Kinda. Still no leaderboards kinda makes your work seem for nothing, but with minor documentation you can still brag to your friends as long as it wasn't a World Record number. Then you'd need serious equipment. Black Ops Solo is however great for practicing anything from basic mechanics, to survival strategies, to how to use specific weapons properly, or learning the maps. I find it to be decently enjoyable. I just wish there was a solo leaderboard. I like seeing my rounds, seeing other's rounds, and comparing. Black Ops 2: Yes, mostly. Leaderboards make me so happy. But 3 of the 6 maps aren't very great solo (for me). Nuketown is really tough, and frustrating. TranZit is too large and boring. Buried is just boring. These are all great on Co-op, but on solo they're not very worth while for me. The remaining 3 however are great, and now you can strive to be the top of your personal leaderboard, or be within a certain percentile on the global leaderboard. You can also try to focus on your stat leaderboards as well, using solo play to increase grenade kills or doors opened. So, solo for me has become more appealing over the games. Although the best maps were availble in BO, your have more incentive in BO2, so it about evens out between the two. When I solo, I can play completely alone, but only if I have the right mindset. Otherwise I try to find someone to talk to. Most of the time if someone else wants to play zombies and I'm in a solo match, I will quit to go join them. 2 Players is my favorite for serious games, however 4 is fun for quick matches.

As far as the AI upgrades go, I can tell you while it'd be interesting, it would effectively change zombies entirely. It'd be a completely different game. If they added a few more unique zombies, it could either be received well, or hated. In BO2, the speed of the zombies can vary significantly, even in high rounds, and in some areas, those slow walking zombies do exactly what you're hoping Treyarch would add. They get in the way in small loops in close quaters. I think part of what many (not all) players like about zombies is the sort of rush associated with breaking new ground in high rounds, but also a rush associated with pulling off a difficult train. Knowing that one minor screw up could spiral to your death just makes it all the more enjoyable. With special enemies, I disagree. Treyarch did a fine job. Look at your own comments again. The problem is the weapons. If extinction had wonder weapons, like 3 shot burst laser rifles, or mythic staves that shoot raw elemental power, then the Scorpions would be just as easy to deal with as Brutus, Panzer, or the Napalm/Shriekers. If Wonder Weapons didn't exist, then 3 Panzers spawning at once in the late game would most certianly increase pressure, if not guarantee a down. Yes the scorpions do respawn continuously, but it wouldn't necessarily be a huge obstacle to pick them off as they appear if you had Wonder Weapons. Not that I'm saying zombies should ditch Wonder Weapons. Zombies just doesn't quite work without wonder weapons with the current health system The ranking system was awful and does need to be changed. I agree with you on that point.

I don't mean to come off as cranky or mean or anything. It's just as what Grill said, when I had (along with others) proposed and put in place the brains for UotM award, the average user already had several hundred brains. 100 (10 in the current system) would be a healthy boost at that time. Right now it'd be unfair to those who wrote many quality threads and had a high brian count before, but never won Uotm. And unfair to those who had only won UotM once, but were gods like Ehjookayted, Superhands, Shooter, and Tac. If we're doing a complete restart, then it is complete. As such all old reward systems must be reevaluated. Perhaps at some future point Uotm can be revamped once more, like I did when I took control of it, and it can be given shiny brains along with a facelift to the rules.

I was the UOTM boss at the time, so I don't feel like I'm overstepping Flammen or Strwrs too much by saying, it would be 10 brains. Only 10. No more. Also, it was USUALLY 10 brains awarded per 1+, but new users would actually award an awkward fraction. But anyways, I don't support the idea of awarding those past UOTMs Or current or future UOTMs. I also don't support the brains for trivia thread. It was fine on the old site, where there was already a large amount of brains in existance, but as most users are currently very low, one could appear to have more brains, by hanging around the trivia thread all day, and everyone on the UOTM list will have a huge and unbalanced jump ahead.

I think they planned there to be much more, but then ran out of time and had to drop some of their plans. As such we have all these weird leftovers. Coupled with Jimmy Z's need to troll us, we have our current situation. I wouldn't be majorly surprised if there is something we are missing with TranZit, but, I higly doubt it is anything major, or important.

It is definitely a challenge, but at the same time it gets to be frustrating to those of us of average skill. I've had good runs (for me) on this map, but only if Jug appears before round 11 or so. Any later and I rarely survive. I don't necessarily want to step on the toes of the "pros" that need the challenge, but it makes the game too difficult for the rest of us.

You can buy and drink a perk-a-cola while someone else is in the drinking animation. In BO1 only one bottle could exist at a time. :P