GigaCorp

This is straight up not true. When I starting playing this game a few builds ago, if zombies was chasing you then you could run behind a house and the zombies would just keep running into the walls and get stuck, now they turn the corner and keep following. Also, up until a few builds ago zombies would never use stairs and you could easily escape just running up a few flights of stairs and they would all get stuck at the bottom. Not saying it changed very recently but pathing was changed from what it use to be and it's made zombies way too smart. I would guess this change is probably the main source of all the complaints about difficultly in recent builds, since it use to be a helluva lot easier to lose zombies because their pathing was so bad.

One of my biggest problems with the current build is the insane zombie pathing. It use to be zombies were completely stupid and would lose you if you simply turned a corner and they would keep running at the wall. I understand why they wanted to improve it, but the current pathing basically has every zombie with an exact floorplan of all the buildings in his head and it's totally immersion breaking. I like to play on the Drayton map which has tall buildings, some of the larger buildings are basically two buildings merged together, each with a ground-level staircase and linked by roof access. I've destroyed one of the two staircases and had zombies who couldn't reach me directly anymore path all the way to other staircase, up 4 stories to the roof (bashing doors all the way) and back down 3 stories to reach me, it's utterly ridiculous. Zombies have no reasoning ability, as such they can only go directly to what they can see/hear. They have zero capacity to say to themselves "hey I can't get to this guy up in that second story, lets take the long way around and see if we can flank him by going up the other staircase to the roof". They should go after you if they see you, but if they lose sight of you they should path to where you last were but then have no idea where to go from there, you know like reality.

Is it just me or has the difficulty increased exponentially in the last few builds? I'm not talking about the number of zombies but about the how it seems like zombies have greatly increased sight and hearing ranges. Zombies see me from across the map now, and can hear me well enough on the third story that they are going crazy underneath me at ground level, none of this was an issue before. They also seem less stupid when it comes to pathing, they actually seem to climb stairs better without getting stuck. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but the change in difficulty is rather dramatic imo.