Note: I'm not being specific in my timeline for when changes were made since I don't remember exactly when. Been playing since A8, and after a while stuff kinda blends together.
Eh, Lowf and I play on 2-hour days, so our hordes before this were pretty damn epic, given nighttime lasts quite a bit longer then. Then it got changed to where you had a big push up front and tricklers after. Which was arguably more fun, because me and Lowf would sit on the wall, swap to bows/crossbows, and provide Ninja Warrior style commentary as we plinked the tricklers. This worked pretty well our first two games on A17 as the XP from the tricklers was great...
But the first horde under the new changes was outright disappointing and overwhelming at the same time. We were testing a new approach, which can basically be summarized as "Minimize base building the first 4 days, build only what you *need* to survive the night... and power level to 20 ASAP" and this worked out pretty well. Hit L20 on day 5, spent the next three days putting up the wall, digging in spikes, and stockpiling arrows and ammo.
Small hitch: We didn't find a single mining helmet, nor did our vendor ever have one... and we were cutting it to the wire in terms of time so we didn't have the standard torch poles out. It was quite dark so we couldn't see much of anything until it was nearly in the spikes. Thankfully our spike field was 4 rows, so we lost about 2/3rds the spikes without a wall breach... but we had 5 cops and a bunch of wights show up for our Day 7 horde and for a few minutes we were pretty concerned... and then they just stopped coming. It wasn't even midnight yet.
Side note: For folks playing 2-hour days, the timer on loot bags is way, way too short for horde night zombies, even with the truncated spawn now. As it stands, the only thing horde night z's are good for is XP. All the loot expires long before dawn, and with the new changes the majority of it will poof before the last wave rolls through.