Mr. Newell,
Though I have been aware of your accessibility and email address for many years, this is my first time actually sitting down to write you. The reason here is simple: Left 4 Dead. I wish to express that the current status of Left 4 Dead is lamentable in its failings. Given where it's at in comparison to where it should be, I cannot in the least justify a purchase of its sequel at this time.
This is also causing me to be far more critical of any future Valve titles. The damage that Left 4 Dead has done to your formerly stellar reputation is, in my opinion, permanent and substantial.
First, the promises of future official content, often expressed by Valve as part of the product. On several occasions, employees of Valve (inclusive of yourself) stated that we would receive more content. Achievements, campaigns, Infected, unlockables, and weapons were specified in particular, exactly like Team Fortress 2 has been enjoying since it came out. In your own words, it was to be an ongoing audience-development content stream. These were widely stated, leaving no doubt as to the purchase value they added to your product. If there was some way to construe all of these promises as advertisement (which they essentially are), there's little doubt that all of those statements would've been involved in a lawsuit by now.
...and with good reason, because we haven't received any of it.
In itself, that wouldn't be so bad if the SDK had hit soon after release (as it was stated that it would, I recall), in working order. The community would have taken up the slack, and the lack of any further commitment on your part would not have been required -- or probably even noticed -- after that. Again, however, this was another colossal failure. The Left 4 Dead SDK is still in beta presently, and it took something like half a year or more to even see release. This resulted in many months of playing the same two official campaigns over and over monotonously, up until the Survival Pack came out and actually gave us the versus campaigns that we had paid for. It was not at all an enjoyable situation, more motivated by my psychological justification of purchasing so little competitive content than anything else.
Out of everything that's happened though, the most inexcusable is the sheer lack of repairs to the game. Left 4 Dead is already in use as a professionally competitive title, where money and prizes are on the line. Yet it still suffers from exploits and bugs (including those of the game-breaking variety), even concerning things as simple as collusion detection.
It's taken forever for matchmaking to reach any kind of reasonable point, and the lobby system was intolerably glitchy for many months.
Despite its lack of further update, you are no doubt aware of the following topic:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=751344
Including some of the above, I still experience issues. Witches, for instance, have always been quite unreliable -- capable of screwing one team up and then bypassing the next. Left 4 Dead still crashes every now and then, and lately it has been prone to drop connection from servers without warning.
I do not believe it is unreasonable for customers to expect fixes to their broken software, especially given where those bugs can affect the enjoyment and fair competitive environment of the game. Yet despite being more broken, Left 4 Dead sees less than half the amount of updating that Team Fortress 2 does. I can think of no good reason that this should be the case.
Then there's the matter of the beta. Most games progress from their beta, but by all accounts Left 4 Dead regressed substantially. A large amount of content that was in the game in the beta was removed, and Left 4 Dead was gutted down into being a lot more generic and far less interesting. All of the Infected were more versatile and useful (which would've led to complex teamwork and strategies other than clicking the left mouse button and moving around a bit when we're playing the non-Hunter ones), and the reputation system looked promising for griefer detection. Two tanks at once before the end of a finale would still be a better way of doing it, because it would prevent the single tanks from being circled around and reduced to zero health in short order. Miniguns never should've been removed from the rescue vehicles.
I imagine that someone would state balance as the reason for these changes, but balancing what was there would be easier than ripping it out of the game. Not to mention being of more value to your customers.
Finally, before I forget to mention it, hard coding the Versus difficulty to Normal was perhaps one of the worst things your company has ever done to one of your own games. There's really no excuse for forcing the rest of us who don't want to play the sissified Normal difficulty to do so in our Versus games, nor forcing people who administrate servers for your game to use only the difficulty you want them to have.
Thanks for hearing me out and everything you've done for gaming,
HEXYDEZiMAL
http://steamcommunity.com/id/HEXYDEZiMAL
I am a member of the L4D2 boycott, so if you choose to respond please specify if I can quote you or not (nothing will be taken out of context, I respect you far too much for that).