[L4D] Health Bonus Update Fix
 

This plugin will fix the health bonus not updating after healing someone. Basically if A heals B, then the health bonus for A will update, but the health bonus for B will not update till someone shoots him.

Boost the Health Bonus Legitimately
There is one legitimate way to "bump" up the health bonus, basically if you have 80hp and a medkit and another person has 10hp and no health pack, then you would heal the person with 10hp. In this case it is no longer necessary to shoot the other person to get the health pack bonus to update.

Note: Originally this fixed a health bonus exploit due to pill passing or healing, but the purely exploitative part was patched by Valve in a March 11, 2009 patch.


In other words health bonuses will always update when someone is healed or pills are passed around.


This plugin will block the exploits related to the health bonus in Versus mode.

Exploit Description:
1) Passing pills around before closing the safe room door
2) Healing others with low health and then shooting them

In situation #1 the game thinks everyone has pills.
In situation #2 the game thinks the healer still has a medkit so it's the same thing as getting 2+ extra medkits at the end of a level.

Why Use The Exploit?
In both situations it is possible for the health bonus to go from 120 something to 180 and thus you get easily 60x4=240 more points (and that's just for map1), easily up to 1500 extra points overall on the campaign just from health bonus glitching.

I look forward to people picking this up until VALVe fixes it in their own patch, since currently teams glitching the health bonus virtually eliminates any point difference one might've had otherwise.

How Is The Exploit Blocked?
Whenever pills are passed to another player or someone is healed, the health bonus update algorithm gets run. We force L4D to update the health bonus for the affected players by giving them +1 temporary health (if they hadn't any temporary hp already), which almost immediately drains down to 0 temporary health.



Thanks to:
Fission for helping me test this throughout the entire lifespan and helping me figure out how to reproduce the two health bonus exploits.

Trinity Gaming for doing a "live" 4 survivors test without using cheats or any SM commands.

ShadoMagi for inspiring me on using the side-effects of m_healthBuffer to update the health bonus.

CHANGELOG

• 0.1.2 - Changed version cvar to l4d_eb_health_bonus (it was too long), and removed all compilation warnings
• 0.1.1 - The health bonus will update 0.1 seconds faster than in v0.1
• 0.1 - Initial release

Re: [L4D] Health Bonus Exploit Blocker
 

I'v never heard this exploit until now.

But there is idiots everywhere, I'll probably install it.

Re: [L4D] Health Bonus Exploit Blocker
 

Before I whack this on my server, what exactly does this do to circumvent the exploit?

I understand how the exploit works (you explained that well), but I'm still not sure what this plugin does to stop it.

Re: [L4D] Health Bonus Exploit Blocker
 

Good question! I updated my post with this :

How Is It Blocked?
Whenever pills are passed to another player or someone is healed, the health bonus update algorithm gets run. We force L4D to update the health bonus for the affected players by giving them +1 temporary health (if they hadn't any temporary hp already), which almost immediately drains down to 0 temporary health.

Re: [L4D] Health Bonus Exploit Blocker
 

Nice been looking for something like this for my server. Will be installing it and let you know if anything weird crops up.

Re: [L4D] Health Bonus Exploit Blocker
 

Sourcemod Compiler 1.2.0


/home/groups/sourcemod/upload_tmp/phpJ2CTad.sp(374) : warning 203: symbol is never used: "format"
Header size: 2372 bytes
Code size: 2044 bytes
Data size: 756 bytes
Stack/heap size: 16384 bytes; Total requirements: 21556 bytes

1 Warning.

Re: [L4D] Health Bonus Exploit Blocker
 

My my, picky aren't we? Uploaded the same version with the warning removed.

Re: [L4D] Health Bonus Exploit Blocker
 

Warnings arent as important as Errors, if you used the online compiler to compile some of the plugins on the board, they may give you a few warnings. Not uncommon but good not to have.

Re: [L4D] Health Bonus Exploit Blocker
 

Minor update to 0.1.2 - Changed version cvar to l4d_eb_health_bonus (it was too long), and removed all compilation warnings

If anyone is wondering I was testing this throughout 3 scrims and 2 pub games today and it went just fine working as it should, didn't crash the server either.

Re: [L4D] Health Bonus Exploit Blocker
 

If you are using this plugin and are also using my Ready-Up Mod 0.15.0 or later, then you may delete this plugin. The same functionality is featured in the RUP mod.

Re: [L4D] Health Bonus Exploit Blocker
 

Valve claims to have released a fix for this in their latest update, but since they don't have the Tank multi-survivor hit working, who knows?

If anyone has tested this let me know, if not I'll get around to it in a few days.

Re: [L4D] Health Bonus Exploit Blocker
 

This issue seems to be fixed by Steam.

Re: [L4D] Health Bonus Exploit Blocker
 

Well, I'm not looking for "seems" but an actual test to confirm it.

Re: [L4D] Health Bonus Exploit Blocker
 

VALVe just made a update that should fix this. Servers must update probably to fix this issue.

Re: [L4D] Health Bonus Exploit Blocker
 

Passing pills it is indeed fully fixed by the patch.

As for medkits..

I tested this and it seems like when A heals B, health bonus for A updates right away, but you still need to shoot B for the health bonus to update.

-------------

I have thus renamed my plugin to a "Health Bonus Update Fix." I still recommend people download this so that when they heal end-of-round they don't need to manually shoot the healee for the health bonus to update.

Re: [L4D] Health Bonus Update Fix
 

Finaly its fixed or not ?

Re: [L4D] Health Bonus Update Fix
 

K so heres what i've gathered, if you are at the end of any map, and you heal someone with less health then you the health bonus goes up no matter if they have a medpac or not, no shooting required on either side