All of these servers are modded in order to significantly ramp up the difficulty. The servers are absolutely elitist and cater to veterans of the game and provide more of an old school gameplay, the way the game was roughly before summer 2017, but harder. The servers ABSOLUTELY DO NOT cater to retards, noobs, casuals and other simpletons. There’s ZERO intention to meet their needs, such as running servers with >6 max players, running retarded (Killbox, crazy playboy, etc) maps, running lower difficulties servers, running weeklies, boosting XP gains, etc. If you are from these categories — stop reading and go play on official servers. If you are a vet and a tryhard, welcome.
The servers rely on the server side only mods approach. Which means that the client KF2 game stays 100% vanilla, doesn’t depend on the Steam workshop whatsoever, downloads nothing and not a single change is made to it. EGS players can play perfectly fine on these servers on official TWI maps and even on the workshop maps, if they care to download them manually. No changes to the game are required to play on these servers reliably. Just install the KF2 and you are ready to join and play.
Overall, the adjustments are very mild, barely change the game in terms of the general gameplay flow and follow a certain vision of the game someone at TWI clearly had when developing it, but make it harder.
* no spawnrage on FPs/QPs/KFP (QPs spawn on Hans boss round);
* maxmonsters multiplied roughly x2 (MaxMonsters=(25,35,40,50,60,70));
* dropped weapon despawn time 60m;
* scrakes wave 1 (1-3 depending on #players), fleshpounds wave 2 (1-3 depending on #players), each next wave has roughly 10-40% more big zeds. Overall the cycle was designed to be rather close ts_mig_v1 initially (which further was beefed up with big zeds), but some things were further normalized to produce less rngy game experience, e.g. no squads with ridiculously high amount of stalkers or crawlers, instead they are spread out across the wave more, overall more alpha clots (and thus more rioters because alpha clots have a chance to spawn as rioters). As for rioters, which are a controversial new addition to the game post-release, I’ve ran a poll and you voted to keep them. The hardest squad for this cycle, as per ts_mig tradition, is 4 FPs, this squad can spawn only on wave 10 up to 3 times depending on the # of players;
* support starts with 1.67 times more ammo;
* bosses are almost vanilla, but they spawn more zeds: KFP spawns FPs instead of QPs; Hans just spawns more zeds; Abom spawns ridiculous amounts of clots and bloats; Matriarch spawns EDARs, Husks and trash, but never EDAR trappers;
* no EDARs or QPs throughout non-boss waves (chance for stalkers or husks to spawn as EDARs is zero and QPs are removed from the cycle);
* trader time 100s (to allow for weapon pickup and reaching the trader, vote to skip if not needed), there’s no remote trader or trader dash, which probably will never be introduced as they are immersion breaking, however, I’m open for discussing each and every balance change;
* no white crawler explosion;
* amount of zeds for 1 player per wave (for more players vanilla multiplication formula is used) 54,54,54,54,59,62,66,71,76,82. Compare to vanilla numbers for HoE 10 wave game: 42,47,54,54,59,59,59,68,71,71; for 6 players per wave the numbers are: 244,244,244,244,267,283,298,321,344,374. This is just 8.6% more total zeds than in vanilla and balanced such that, taking into the account the number of big zeds as well, to have just enough ammo on key perks (GS, SS, Commando) to win the game with 65% or higher HS accuracy and not needing the spares. The spares are also viable, although intentionally are hard to manage (so, for example, running SPX +2 and deagles +2 isn’t as advantageous over SPX+AFs+deagles because of running out of ammo). Also compare to a typical WSF 12 which is used for most CD games which results in having roughly 28% more total zeds per wave as compared to vanilla;
* knife parry/block 50%/40%;
* kicks are pretty much unlimited (in vanilla one is limited to 2 kicks per match);
* precision perks only servers do not allow to choose chaotic perks;
* no big zed HP downscaling with players dying: say, in a 4 players game if 3 die and don’t leave, the remaining 1 will keep getting 4p HP fleshpounds and scrakes spawned to disincentivize medics/zerks/survivalists from betraying the team, downscaling the game experience to LMS scenario and clutching easily;
* features “True Solo” experience by Macrallex, more on this:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Huwhyte/announcements/detail/3601222453346447539 ;
* “Homogeneous Fleshpounds” mod, which makes homogeneous fleshpounds different from vanilla in these ways:
– adjusted so they don’t miss the attacks the vanilla ones miss;
– the hits that almost never register with the vanilla FPs do indeed always register;
– homogenized attacks so they inflict exactly 68 HP damage, the combo attacks reach that number summarily, i.e. 3-punch combo each punch deals roughly 1/3 of 68 HP;
– are very unlikely to follow up immediately with calm state punches, unless the player was cornered, bumped into something or otherwise wasn’t allowed to be knocked back from the raging attack;
– if they lose LoS with their targeted enemy their timerage counter gets reset, similarly to KF1 fleshpounds (the author and the initial researcher into this was Keyes, go write a +rep on his profile), although I have implemented it differently in the end;
– however, you can’t kite them indefinitely, as there’s another unconditional 90 seconds timer, upon expiration of which AND establishing LoS with any player causes FPs to rage;
– never skip the rage animation;
– their bump damage to scrakes rages scrakes on 1 bump;
* consistent 100% reliable stuns, including crossbow stuns on scrakes;
* rioter head armor break threshold HP 125 -> 85, head armor 450 -> 250 HP, body health from 300 -> 420 HP;
* each swing of the crawler’s Atk_Lunge_V3 combo attack does damage with 0.6 factor which translates to 7 HP per swing as opposed to vanilla 12 HP per swing;
* the final blow to the head of any zed inflicts 37% to body HP, as opposed to 25% in vanilla;
* the sprint chance for most trash is reduced from various vanilla values from 85-100% down to 70%, the non-sprinting trash still starts sprinting if rallied by rioters;
* gorefast -> gorefiend conversion chance is 45% -> 25%;
* alpha clot -> rioter conversion chance is 35% -> 25%;
* no other differences with HoE.