Maxplayers limit can be overloaded in The Passing 3 in some mutations

[alexiscoutinho]

Description

The maxplayers hard limit of 18, by default, can be overloaded in the Port chapter of The Passing in the mutations Hard Eight, Special Delivery and Flu Season. There are multiple 'paths' to reach the limit, some of them with more serious consequences. The 'catch' here is to also count the extra slots occupied by afk players. In the most loaded scenario, the game would need to give 8 slots for the specials, 2 slots for the Tanks, 4 slots for the l4d2 characters, 3 slots for the l4d1 characters and 3 slots for the afk players. Summing this up, we end with a request of 20 slots!

Since the game won't allow 20 slots, some player entities won't be spawned:

• If specials were the last to fill up the cap, then they will be capped at 6 until other slots are freed (presumably by killing the Tanks or returning from idle).
• If Tanks requested their slots last, then they wouldn't spawn at all. This could theoretically be exploited to skip the Tank stages.
• Usually, the survivor slots are only requested and occupied in the beginning of a round. However, when one goes idle, a new player slot is requested to give to the survivor bot. If one goes afk when maxplayers is overloaded, the game will fail to spawn his bot, he will literally be forced into the spectators team and his l4d2 character will be gone! This is probably the worst consequence of this issue.
• Since Tanks can't spawn before the l4d1 survivors, there is no risk of losing Zoey ❤️.

Reproduction steps

I only elaborate the 'worst path' to reach the limit:

1. Load c6m3 in Hard Eight, Special Delivery or Flu Season with at least 3 human players;
2. Start the finale normally and have everyone go to a very safe area where the specials can be accumulated (or just noclip somewhere);
3. Progress to the stage that spawns 2 Tanks;
4. Having let the 10 infected player entities accumulate, tell 2 human players to 'take a break'. When the second player does this, he should lose his survivor.

[alexiscoutinho]

Given that Special Infected could attempt to spawn while another is in the death animation (still occupying a player slot), this issue might occur a bit sooner and maybe on other maps if your idle timing is very unlucky.