We had a lengthy discussion in Discord today about if the changelevel command should be allowed in a run to rotate campaigns. When utilizing this command for changing maps to the beginning of a campaign, the normal intro cinematic will break and you will have partial control immediately sans moving your view until the "cutscene" in the background finishes.

Using changelevel in the console is the only circumstance under which the intro cinematics break, all other ways they will play normally. Keeping it would have been because a couple of accepted runs previously used it, and it isn't cheat-protected (although other non-cheat commands aren't allowed).

The reasons against using it were,

• There is no option through the intended game menus that cause the same effect, it can only happen using the console command.

• It will bypass the vote creation timer (3 minute wait between votes) that exists in version 2.0.9.1 and up, which means All Campaigns would be affected by this.

• It adds bots back to the server that were previously kicked by a Dark Carnival bug, when otherwise there is no other way to get them back besides restarting the server entirely.

• Most importantly, and what made the decision easy, is that unlike all other commands which are allowed, changelevel cannot be used on a Valve official server, only by the host themself.

With all of this considered a decision was reached to flatly disallow the usage of changelevel to rotate campaigns and break the intros and the rules have been updated to reflect that. Legacy runs using this are kept as making the rule retroactive is unfair, and they are easily beaten regardless since many new tricks have been found.

Thus concludes a L4D2 leaderboard history lesson!