I’ve been there.

Waterloo occasionally hosts invitationals which take place over a weekend, with a series of five or six missions back-to-back on the first day with more relaxed player-organized minigames on the day after. If you imagine a full week of HvZ compressed into one day, cutting out the between-classes play and leaving the most intense parts i.e. the missions, then this is pretty much that. Waterloo campus is a tightly integrated network buildings connected through tunnels and skyways. There’s always more than one way to get where you’re going, and there’s a lot more tight corners and shorter sightlines than on a typical campus. All of this adds up to make running away far more viable as a survival strategy for humans than on other campuses; the locals know this well and know the best escape routes. Personally, I prefer to fight but I’m OK with a running fight; I like to keep other humans alive by keeping zombie headbands down. I made this triple flywheeler integration primarily for that purpose and was lugging it around for most of the day. As an invitational attracts more serious and better-armed players, the moderators decided to compensate by implementing a short stun timer: five minutes, later reduced to four. For a full day of missions, this is pretty brutal.

The ultimate upshot of this is that both the humans and the zombies did a lot of running for the whole day. It was great, but by the end of it, I had a hard time going down stairs. (Surprisingly, it was going down stairs that was the most difficult. Climbing up stairs was easier.) I now have a better idea of what it is like for creaky old people, and I have Waterloo HvZ to thank for that.

This might be a bit of a non-answer, but my favorite thing about nerf is how different blasters can be different from each other while all being viable for use in most games. In a friendly nerf game in the park, you might see revolvers alongside lever-action rifles alongside dual-wielded derringers.

There’s a soft spot in my heart for Swarmfires and Rayvens, largely becasue those were among the best (for HvZ, for a “shoot lots and protect other humans” playstyle) blasters in production at the time when I started playing.