After having read a thread on these forums about how game stage is formulated it seemed kind of odd to me that the game stage which governs the difficulty of the Zombies would be higher than the level at which my character was capable of handling, or at the very least handling with a lot of difficulty. Yeah, I wasn't sure how it worked, but noticed the other night that my game stage for the level my character was seemed high. They have have fixed it in 17.2 but I'm not sure. The game is bugged at the moment and the game developers have acknowledged that the game stage is bringing the irradiated zombies way too quickly.