hvzsurvivalblog-blog

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

If not for the players

"Humans Versus Zombies would be the single greatest game ever, if it weren't for the players."

There is a lot of truth in this statement. People who have played HvZ have hopefully had fun with it. No matter what you do though, there is always that one player who contests an obvious tag, or a zombie that doesn't quite wait to respawn, or that guy who yells "I got you" before the dart has left the barrel. I went to an invitational and overheard a few players, who had been zombified. They were talking about how they make the human stun one of them twice by yelling they missed, which can give them enough time to have the other zombies make a tag.

Did I mention I got up at 3 in the morning with some friends to drive for 6 hours to get to this place? That was not what I wanted to hear from people!

In a Utopian world, where nobody cheated, and people treated other players with respect: Humans Versus Zombies would be the best game in the world. 

All it would take is for people to follow the rules, and for the players to remember "DBAD"

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

RIT Documentary

This video really shows the amount of time moderators dedicate to running Humans Versus Zombies. It is a lot of work! For all those who play, please remember how much work went into the game from behind the scenes. 

RIT is famous for having a huge amount of players, a crazy amount of work is required to keep those numbers in check and following the rules.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOI8q23FxdQ

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

Roommates... when they're not eating your food in the fridge or using your shampoo they are either your greatest assets or worst nightmare during HvZ.

All it takes is one roomie to bite the brain and suddenly everything starts to get tricky, the hallways are no longer safe, the person who was your escort out of a building is now lurking along your routes of travel.

The upside is when you have a whole room of zombie fighting comrades going and getting food is a whole heck of a lot easier. 

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

So, sorry about slacking on the posts. Went to London for the Olympics, had very limited internet.

Without further ado, my most recent project was another nightfinder. I've been attempting to perfect the homedepot spring build, this one may be the example of the best I can get out of it. Its ranges are excessive, 80 feet every time (way farther with streamlines) and if I angle it I don't even know how far it would fire.

Single shots are underestimated in HvZ, they don't sacrifice range or accuracy for a mechanism that will give them multiple shots. They, straight up, just fire a dart, and generally do it very well.

Sure you have to reload after you fire, but if you can hit your target the first time that reload isn't nearly as worrisome 

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

So big thanks to http://urbantaggers.blogspot.com/ for bringing this to my attention. Old (un)reliable is getting a nice revamp along with the rest of the elite series. Looking pretty cool if I do say so myself

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

I know you've done zombie attack strategies, however; lets say you have sucky mods and they give the zombies a defense mission. You have a box, that you have to get from one side of campus to another. You know the size of the box ahead of time. The humans do not. What do you do?

Alright so... everyone loves zombie defense missions (Sarcasm!)

Missions for zombies are always focused on one thing, regardless of what people think, it is all about getting tags. Missions generally speaking are the window of opportunity for a zombie to make multiple tag attempts without a long wait. Only humans are truly burdened by survival and mission completion.

If you have a game of 100 players and first mission the group of ten zombies gets 4 tags, doesn't matter if the humans "Won" the mission. Zombies got the tags they needed. That long winded bit is to support my next statement. Though missions are intended to be followed through for victory by moderator standards, zombies have a default victory simply by getting tags.

So depending on the size of this box you should assign however many you need to carry it, and then just bring it through the most annoying/zombie friendly terrain you can find, as long as the spawn timer is less than the usual (when there is no mission so probably 15 minutes) you have an advantage and you should attempt to use it.

If your mods are mean and assign a punishment if the mission is not completed, you should probably attempt to sneak the box across with a large decoy force keeping the humans busy/attempting to get tags.

Those are my thoughts, depends on your campus, depends on your zombies numbers when compared to the humans. I personally believe tags are a priority come mission day. Let the zombies have their objectives, but if the mission reward seems less appealing then the potential tags...

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

Conclusion: Springs at Homedepot are a Good Idea... but you need to adjust accordingly. See previous post describing my trial and error attempts.

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

So, Home Depot... I would imagine you've all heard of this wonderful store. For me it is my "Go to" for weird projects. Recently a project has lead me to discover they do in fact sell springs. Lots of springs. I will be looking into what springs will work for what and update this. At first glance I'm not thinking this will be very handy for reverse plunger blasters as they use a strange size... 

Seeing possibilities for a cheap alternative to salvaging a tech 6 or HvZ 8 shot for their parts though. Anyways, this is more of a "soon to be edited" post, feel free to send in a message about any information on this

RIGHT: SO UPDATE TIME:

There are a set of compression springs that are give or take the same size as a night finder spring. DO NOT BE FOOLED. Those things are way more powerful. After essentially breaking the plastic "screw in" pieces for the plunger tube I had to resort to hot gluing it down to the base side. It was still too powerful so I moved the plunger tube down half a centimeter to reduce compression of the spring. This required cutting off the front shell of the nightfinder to allow for the tube to stick out. I then pvc/markerbarrelled the thing. News just in, fires 90 feet flat. Flat. Not angled. 

One more little Update: Replaced the screws to the plunger head with more sturdy counterparts. Too much force was causing the head to pop off due to the spring pushing on it.

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

War Paint:

People love to play the role, whether it be Rambo or simply two slashes under the eyes for game day. Heck, I've seen someone with full face paint and paper streamers taped to them.

Contrary to popular belief, you can add warpaint to your blaster as well. 

For once, I will be adding a photo of my own as an example... no citations necessary.

If you want to paint your blaster first make sure you are allowed to use it in your game. I intentionally tried to keep mine looking nerf-blaster-ish. Nobody wants to get shot by the cops, nor have the cops shut a game down as unsafe.

To paint your blaster:

Step 1) Disassemble, take the outer shell (what you're going to paint) and rough it up with some sand paper. This lets the paint stick in better.

Step 2) Primer coat it. No joking don't skip this step. I like to go with black, but a white primer would work just as well.

Step 3) Wait for this to dry. Wait at least an hour or more. I just throw my stuff on the bench and come back to it in a day. 

Step 4) Add cover over primer layer for design of choice. There are a ton of ways to do this. I used masking tape to make tiger stripes.

Step 5) After tape/coverage you've added is completely on, add your actual paint cover. On the longstrike this was red. Wait to dry, then remove the tape/coverage

Step 6) Reassemble the blaster, show off how cool it looks (And pretend it was really difficult so nobody copies you!) Have fun!

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

Suggestions:

So I've gotten a great base of stuff you can look through and try out, but by no means am I naive enough to think I've found even a quarter of the total tricks/tips/strategies out there. If you ever have questions, suggestions, or ideas you want me to test out/put up, please send them in!

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

So the Humans vs Zombies movie, though arguably not the very best movie of its genre (It was pretty bad) brings up an interesting topic. If a person who is a zombie in HvZ, happens to become a real zombie... do tags they make on other players (full hand of course) count? Or should they be considered non-players? This grey area of the rule set should be addressed at some point.

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

How to know when to reload

So right off the bat image was found on sgnerf.blogspot.com but I'm sure you could all figure that out yourselves...

Anyhow this is one of those topics which is overlooked. Hell yeah you got a raider drum blasting off 35 darts like nobody's business, but do you ever bother to keep track?

I have always assumed that there is an infinite number of darts in those huge drums and when it runs out... well I knew it would happen eventually but heck if I knew exactly when. The simple way to remedy this is to "Color Code" as you load the clips. You could simply add all white or all orange as the last 4 or 5 and then use a different color for the rest of the drum. Gives you a great heads up warning before you're noticing that the blaster may in fact not be firing darts any longer, just puffs of air.

Here is a video of some guy posing all cool and then telling people how he does things (for the record: that aint me): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y2m7gzNLYY&feature=player_embedded#!

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

Velcro Tape

  Keeping up with my theme of promoting some random products I figure I should mention the one that is unbelievably entertaining to play with.

Yes indeed, the joy of velcro... you can stick things onto other things, take them off, put them back on (All while being much more reliable then magnets)

Velcro is useful... yes, but it is not just for people who don't know how to tie their shoes. With velcro tape on your blaster you can attach a variety of objects. Currently I have only employed this to attach a Jolt to a Alpha Trooper, BUT I could see this working with socks, clips, dart storage devices, etc etc...

Anyways its not all that expensive and I found some in wallmart so I would imagine other similar stores carry it as well if you're thinking about adding this to your arsenal 

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

Orange mod works:

You may have heard of them, these guys are honestly brilliant. It is such a simple thought "Man I wish my nerf gun could have metal parts instead of plastic, then I could really mod it."

They then made metal parts.

Then they sold them to others who have also thought "Man I wish my blaster had metal parts."

Genius really.

Though these things are kinda expensive to order (if you want a full kit its looking like 40 bucks plus shipping) every single review I have read/every person I have ever run into with the mods installed have had good things to say. 

There was a guy who came in from another school to attend a mission during a game I was on the moderating team for. His longstrike with the orange mod works kit fired 80-90 feet. This is a Reverse plunger blaster. Those things are considered good if they fire 40. 

If you are on the fence about getting one, I can't blame you. That is a lot of money you could just buy Chinese food or beef jerky with. BUT if you're thinking about buying a nerf "Elite" blaster when those release, keep in mind this is probably similar in price and will make your blaster fire farther then those suckers

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

Alright, so you're kinda cheap (Like me) and you have no intention of going out and buying some more clips/a gun that comes with more clips. You do have though, two stampede dart magazines. Well to make them a bit more useful all you need is some tape. This is similar to the "Flip clip" concept with two six rounders

Obviously you could get more creative about this, but this is a real easy way to double your dart capacity and reduce reload time

Image was found at http://www.instructables.com  (I have been somewhat lazy about citations)

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

Was having a hard time finding good Zombie sided tips and tricks, so I decided to break out the whiteboard. I tried to work with what I thought was the most even number of Humans and the least amount of zombies required to get the tags. I'm sure depending on the situation/weapons associated you may need more/less 

Getting a tag is not an exact science, but these are some game plans that seem to work

[hvzsurvivalblog-blog]

Pushing the dart: Technique

So, pretty much anyone can pick up a nerf blaster and shoot it. These things are really user friendly/idiot proof. The thing is, not any old person can pick up a nerf blaster and make it fire an additional 20 feet. I'm not talking modifications here, I'm talking about "Pushing the Dart"

Its simple logic, if the dart leaves the blaster at speed X, and the blaster is not moving relative to its surroundings the dart is going to be going at X mph

But what if the blaster was moving? If the blaster was being pushed forward at speed Y and the dart leaves the blaster at speed X, the dart will have the initial speed of Y + X

"Dude I don't like math, get to the point"

ALRIGHT! I hear ya. Basically, if you take a blaster and push it forward as you fire a dart, you can add a huge amount of range. The technique is keeping the blaster straight as an arrow at your intended target. 

I've only met two or three people who were any good at what I'm explaining, it takes practice if you want to hit anything (especially at a distance). That said this is a really useful trick to know.