AAR for yesterday - me, Derf, Ocram and Peltz tackled Dead Center on expert and beat it relatively easily. We took 5-6 tries on the finale to get it right, but in the end we managed to find the ideal formula and got out all 4.

It was actually a rather uninspired attempt - I wasn't in the best of moods so my insipired leadership wasn't at its usual level, for one. The first level (which is laughably easy and short) almost wiped us completely before we even made it to the elevator leading you into the building fire. Derf wanted a restart, but we denied him. DENIED!! Erh...so we limped on to the saferoom, in any case.

After that we picked up our pace a bit. The outdoor map level to the mall was a breeze, including the coca cola panic event (even if some things went wrong with the chain of command of piping/biling, but hey).

Inside the mall we just tried to move move move and get on and down stairs as quickly as possible. Once you're in a hallway or corner the mall is pretty easy, it's just near the stairs that you can get gutted. There was one incident with a tank spawning right after the only dead end part of the map, inevitably wiping us, but other than that no probs here either. The hard panic event (with the alarm system) was progamed with well-placed pipes, bile bombs and me on point with the ultimate weapon for this shit: chainsaw.

Then, finale time...after a few tries, Ocram suggested we do the upper floor first, then move from that to the intermediate floor and then fuel it all on the ground floor. That was what we need and it worked like a charm. Basically, we can get all the cans except for 4 of them down on the ground before the tank spawns...when it does, you just gotta circle the intermediate floor and shoot it/put it on fire. After it does, collect the final 4 cans, kill a horde, go down, pipe, collect the farthest cans on the ground, then work on the nearest ones. The final 4-5 cans were a bit chaotic, we would probably have done better to assign 2 "runners" and 2 "overwatch" or "buddies" to go with them instead of just randomly having people run and fuel and shoot, but it worked out in the end. Thanks to Peltz for picking me up before fueling the last cans btw.

We're really getting the hang of it - even on an "off" day we can work expert without too much bad luck. Derf is slowly suggesting realism expert...we'll see.

P.S. since we couldn't find a half decent server anywhere I just handpicked one with the console server browser and had the rest join my game once I had connected. Upside: superb pings all over (50 +-), stable server. Downside: can't change campaigns, can't choose characters (confusion). Just figured I'd let you know it's an option.

See, not a word on how you ditched my ass after the cola run and how you shot the car alerting the horde. haha.

Anyway the first pipe at the panick event was a failure, it dropped inside the store and hit all of us when we jumped out of the window. Pity i got sandwiched by two zombies. I tend to get incapped and killed alot because somehow we cant stick together till the end of the map. We really need to practice that the first one to reach certain point, ie the stairs, the door, the escalator turns around and provides cover. Its going to be essential with the realism mode anyway as the loss of even one gun can be the difference between success and failure.

The true problem is that subcounsiously we try to beat eachother at how many zombies we kill thus the gunfire probably drowns out the voices of cockeys.