The Office Is Open Late

Tonight — Friday 4 September, from 19:00 GMT — we are going to be on the servers running live multiplayer matches with whoever turns up. Four survivors to a compound, and when one lot dies the next lot goes in.

There is no sign-up sheet, no bracket and no seeding. Come at any point in the evening, leave at any point, play one round or all of them. It runs until the survivors run out, which — going by every previous evening — is later than anybody planned.

The Discord is the door

Everything is organised in the Damn, Zombies Discord: a voice channel for the round in progress, and a text one for arguing about the crate afterwards. That is where the matches are called and where you find out which compound has a seat going. If you are already in there you do not need to do anything at all — just be about at seven.

It is also open to everybody, key or no key. Beta places get talked about in there long before anything about them reaches an inbox, and the matches get streamed into it, so an evening in the Discord is a better use of the time than refreshing a page.

If you already hold a key

You have everything you need. Your access key and the download for all three platforms are on your account page, and the key stays there for as long as you hold it — there is nothing to have kept safe and nothing to lose.

Bring the build that is on that page rather than one you downloaded a while ago. The lobby asks anything older to update before it will let you into a match, so a stale copy is an argument with a connection screen at five past seven rather than a round. It is the same page, beside the key, with its checksum under it.

If you are still waiting on a place

Then you will not be shooting anything this evening, and it is worth saying that plainly rather than letting you find out at seven. The beta is closed, every request is read and approved by hand, and approvals go out in batches rather than one at a time.

What you can do is make an account and ask for a place — it is one button once you are signed in, and a sentence about yourself if you feel like writing one. Then come into the Discord anyway. Watching four people who have never met try to hold one building is most of the entertainment.

What we are actually after

Playing with the people who made it is the pitch, but the reason we do these is that a full compound breaks things a solo run never gets near. Four survivors spend points four times as fast, open doors in an order nobody predicted, and stand in places the horde has to solve. If something desyncs, drops a frame or prices wrong, this is the evening it happens in front of us rather than in a report a week later.

There is no win condition. The run ends when the survivors do. Come and find out how far that is with three strangers and a shared bank balance.