Confessions of an Urban Dead "Zerger"

This post has been coming for a long, long time, and I'm kind of relieved it's finally time to write it.

Urban Dead. The for-free, low tech MMO zombie apocalypse game. I've played it, on and off, for a couple years now. But as of today, I'm done.

See, I am what in UD is called a "Zerger," or a "Multi Abuser." I have multiple characters, and I use them in concert to achieve my goal. I'm not the first, and I certainly won't be the last.

Some people, unfamiliar with the game, may ask, "Multiple characters? So what? I have 10 alts in my MMO of choice." Well, it's because the guy who created and runs the game says so, and with good reason. The game is free, and nothing stops you from creating all the characters you want, but the design of the game is built around each character only having a certain number of turns per day. Everything you do in the game uses up turns, or "action points," which grow back at a rate of 1 per half hour. So, if one person say, created 50 zombie characters, he could use them to assist his one "main" zombie character to tear open a barricade without spending any of his "main" character's action points. Obviously unbalancing. So there is a real, genuine need to keep this sort of thing from happening. But the implementation falls on its face in certain situations, which I will detail later.

I didn't start out a multi-abuser. I came to UD honestly and normally, by somebody talking about it in a forum. I decided to check it out, and rolled myself up a character. Within 10 minutes, my little newbie was out of action points and hadn't accomplished much of anything at all. Still curious to see more of the game, I made another character, and when he ran out of AP in 10 minutes, I made another. I wanted to see all the different angles of the game, so I made one a policeman, one a fireman, one a soldier, one a scientist and one a zombie. These five characters were spread out across the city (the game's location is the fictional city of Malton), in totally different suburbs.

And so there I was, with my four little guys, each struggling and not getting much accomplished, but still growing. I quickly ran into Kevan's (the UD gamemaster) first barrier to multi-abuse, and perhaps bandwidth hogging, in the form of a 150-click limit from a given IP address. By this point, I was intrigued with the game, and decided to go ahead and pony up the 5 bucks per character Kevan required to lift this restriction. I've spent 25 bucks on far worse things.

I went on playing this way for a month or two, finding my soldier grew the fastest, my fireman survived the longest, and my scientist just had an all-around rough time of it in every way.

After a couple months, someone in the forum I mentioned earlier had the idea to get together and form a cooperative group, which was called Skulls Skulls. I joined up with them with my four human alts, and as we converged on Yagoton (our chosen area of operation), I first became aware of the policy on "multi abuse," and expressed concerns to the leader of the group about my situation. He wasn't too worried, but I decided it would still be best to take corrective action. I didn't, however, want to rob the group of manpower, so I "gave" three of them to friends and coworkers I knew in real life. We all worked together, passed information to each other, etc, but I was really the only one who kept any communication with the Skulls group, or anyone else in the game. The others mostly just wanted to play and win and were happy to let me coordinate everything.

So there we were, a minor group doing what we could to help each other grow stronger and fight zombies, until a fateful day when the guy who I gave my scientist to scanned a zombie asking for a revive and found him to be the leader of a local PK gang called the "Amish Liberation Front", and refused to revive him. He got to safety and told me about him, and I coordinated with the others to put him down. That was the beginning of the end for Skulls Skulls.

The PK we killed started digging around, went to our forum and started accusing us of multi abuse (Ironic, ain't it?). In reprisal, he ordered his entire group, which outnumbered and vastly outleveled ours, to start concentrate on killing Skulls Skulls. They were pretty successful, mostly on the other forumites who weren't as experienced as my little crew and I were. My pack fought back as best we could, but the Amish were higher level, more closely coordinated, and didn't have the handicap of having to try to stick together that Skulls did. The forumites in skulls suffered rather badly, and one by one they started either dropping the group tag or just not logging in any more.

We weathered the storm from the Amish, but it hurt the skulls bad. They didn't have quite the headcount they used to, and I think many of them, the leader included, felt resentment toward me for starting the whole mess by killing that PK instead of reviving him. On top of all that, the guys I gave characters to were starting to feel like they didn't want to play anymore. So they gave me my characters back, I removed them from Skulls Skulls, let them know we were retiring, and tucked the characters away in 4 different directions from Yagoton, to sleep until a zombie ate them for the last time.

Fast forward in time 6 months.

It was a slow period at work, and in the process of looking for something to kill a little time and yet still look like I was working, I checked back into my main character on Urban Dead. There had been some changes in the game that piqued my interest.

And after seeing how things were, I made the decision to become a zerger.

I make no apology, and I sure don't regret this decision. I had spent months playing it on the up and up, and frankly I was tired of being alone and impotent, especially after I'd seen what could be accomplished by 4 people working in close coordination. I'd watched good people, honest players screwed over by intellectual preadolescents and a system designed to cater to chaos and antisocialism, and decided I was going to do something, and do it my way, rules be damned. I wasn't afraid of any repercussions because I was already "done" with the game the way Kevan wanted it played. I had nothing to lose, and fully acknowledged that from this point on, I was playing on borrowed time until the inevitable ban hammer fell.

I converged my four human characters, my zombie character (who I revived and spent the thousands of exp he had accrued maxed out as a non-rot zombie), and even a character donated to me by another person who had lost interest in the game. Additionally, I rolled a new zombie, just to have an extra set of eyes roaming about that didn't cost my "main" characters any AP.

I decided that my efforts would be focused on fighting against the type of guys who made my last foray into UD less than enjoyable: the "PKs." The survivors who, like me, had gotten tired of the game but instead of quitting decided to make a game out of making life miserable for other survivors still trying to play the game as intended.

I picked out a group called the YRC, short for "Yagoton Revivification Clinic." These were an altruistic bunch of survivors trying to do their damnedest to get life back into those who didn't want to be dead. They were known across malton for their fast service and helpful demeanor. They also tried to maintain neutrality in matters political (read: drama), but all this didn't stop the asshole contingent from trying to make their life miserable as well. They were routinely plagued by PKs, generator saboteurs, organized zombie attacks numbering in the dozens, etc. I decided what was needed was a vigilante group dedicated to trying to make the YRC's life easier to do their work by doing what their neutrality wouldn't let them do: hunt down and kill those who would make hell for them.

So, I started the group, Guardians of the YRC. Our members were Me (Gasbandit), Me (Captain Jack Testes), Me (El Camino), Me (Blaze Steelbuns), Me (GeeBee1), Me (The Angry Scientist), and Me (a disposable zombie noob). For 6 months, we patrolled Yagoton from The Whatmore Building (headquarters of the YRC) to Bale Mall, looking for known PKs and helping against zombies. Except for the occasional (usually about once or twice a week) execution of a PK, the work was mostly barricading, healing, and helping to revive people.... and lots of walking. Walking around, looking at who was inside each of the many buildings. It got pretty complicated to remember where I had and hadn't been, and even with six alts on patrol, you coudn't cover everything if you were hitting the same buildings multiple times. There wasn't much experience, but the characters were already level 41 (max level) before I started this little project, so there really wasn't a point to worrying about experience... just results. And I like to think I made a difference.

I'm astounded it took at least six months for UD's vaunted "anti-abuse" algorithms to catch on and finally ban the above characters. Over the last six months, through trial and error testing limits and seeing what worked and what didn't, I learned how to work around the system. It was only this last week, where I completely stopped protecting myself and blatantly abused UD in the heaviest and
most obvious manner possible that the characters finally got banned.

I kept each character in a different building adjoining Whatmore. I alternated computers (I have two IPs at home, and an office computer, and the ability to remotely log in to all of the above) between alts, so that my IP was never consecutively used for two consecutive alt moves. I found that the magic 3 triggers for the anti-multiabuse system were attacking, healing and barricading, with the most sensitive trigger being barricading. If Alt1 even attempts to barricade in BuildingA even once, Alt1 is the only character at your IP address who can successfully barricade, attack or heal for the next few hours. Anyone else from that IP would miss constantly, or get the "you can do nothing for this person" message when trying to heal. Attacking and healing were a bit less sensitive, but multiple alts from one IP attacking a single target in a short space of time is a big alarm flag (which I am sure is how they finally caught me). Healing wasn't so much a flag as just something that seemed to be turned off when one of the other two activities triggered the alt flag. So after a few days and a few dozen wasted AP, I learned how to work around the system. Only barricade on the alt that had the most AP, so he could get the job done, and do your killing and healing first on other alts if you need to do that in that square. Sleep in separate buildings, though side-by-side buildings seemed to be enough. And never attack the same person on the same day with more than one alt from the same IP address.

See, that was what finally got me, I'm sure... in trying to retake the whatmore building this week from a very large and highly organized group of zombies (possibly even zergers themselves), I made the cardinal errors of keeping all my alts in the same building at the same time, and attacked the same zombie (because how can you differentiate zombies you haven't scanned and put in your contacts?) with more than one alt from the same IP address (laziness on my part). But I'm not all that sure about that, because the ban didn't actually kick in until the zombies had won, and I had saved up ~25 AP, so that I could move them across 3 suburbs to the nearest survivor-held revive point. So that might have been another trigger... having the same IP move multiple characters across suburb boundaries to the exact same coordinates (the revive point, in this case) in a short period of time. 8 hours later, when I checked I got the message that my characters were disabled.

I guess my hubris had caught up with me... I'd worked the system so long that I got sloppy and didn't even try to cover my tracks any more, or perhaps I just wanted to push the envelope to try to retake Whatmore, or maybe I was just subconsciously tired of it all and stopped caring. Even now, I feel liberated that I have been freed of my self-imposed responsibilities and management tasks. This must be, on a small scale, what a career soldier feels like dying on the battlefield. My work is done.

I don't care what anybody thinks of me, particularly those who would condemn me for "cheating" at this game. This game needs to be cheated. I'll detail why:

• One character, be it zombie or survivor, cannot accomplish anything on his own. Be it clawing down a heavy barricade or gunning down a zombie (if you count the time to scrounge ammo and load weapons, or if you are using melee weapons), each action of consequence takes roughly a full day's worth of AP, and that's all that you can store (50 ap max).


• The methods of communication in the game are woefully insufficient, and punish the player for communicating by making them spend AP to communicate. Talking and broadcasting should not cost AP, at least not a half hour's worth per sentence. UD's communications paradigm forces players to metagame (use outside-of-game communication and planning) if they want to work together, and as noted above, multiple characters MUST work together to accomplish anything.


• PKing is far too rampant and has no repercussions other than what survivors themselves decide (and are able to) impose. This exacerbates the already-rough time survivors have, which brings me to:


• The game is terribly unbalanced in favor of the zombies, even at max level. Zombies incur minimal penalty from dying (they just stand back up again, for as little as 1-6 AP, and be at full health and ready instantly), whereas survivors incur a tremendous penalty (stand up as a zombie, have to wander until you find somewhere/someone to revive you, wait for the revive, cure your infection, and get to safety, all to the tune of probably close to a full day's AP gone). Survivors must spend AP barricading to have safe places to sleep, Zombies don't even need safe places to sleep (see dying above). Survivors need to buy abilities just to be able to survive (shopping, free running, construction, etc). Zombies can buy an ability to keep from being revived, but no human ability can stop them from being zombified. Infection needs to be cured by revival. A level 1 survivor can't even defend himself or attack zombies, but infinite level 1 zombies can be rolled and herded into a building under attack so that once it is ransacked it cannot be reclaimed and repaired by survivors (and you can't barricade a ransacked building). Some survivor abilities are still useful as a zombie, but only the stinky corpse ability works as a survivor, and its utility is questionable. Zombies PKing each other does no harm, unlike survivor PKing. And the list goes on and on.

I shudder to think of the chaos and destruction I could have wrought had I been a PK or if I decided to go full zombie with my alts. But now it's all over, and I'm glad. I'll just list what needs fixing, in my not so humble opinion, and head off to greener pastures-

1. Communication in-game needs to be revamped and not cost AP. If you are worried about channel spamming, make a rolling limit on the number of "says" a character gets in an hour, of about 5 or so, after which "your voice is too hoarse to speak."


2. Cell phones need to work 100% of the time. The powered mast dynamic needs to go away.


3. Survivors need to be able to shoot out of second story windows at zombies outside.


4. Infection needs to be cured by revival.


5. Survivor-on-survivor killing needs to be worth no experience, and if not be made impossible or punished by the system, then at least put some kind of marking on characters to indicate their murderous nature.


6. Free running needs to be standard issue to everyone who starts a character as a survivor.


7. The maximum number of AP needs to be raised to 100 or possibly even 200, though the regeneration rate should stay the same. Zombies should have a lower max AP than survivors.


8. Zombie max HP needs to scale from 10 up to 50 (or 60 with body building) with level.


9. Only zombies should have the option to destroy generators/radios, and then, only as an automatic function of ransacking.

Ok, that's enough of that. As my parting words, I'll just say, Yellow Dart, you were incorrect when you accused me of zerging, but I fixed it for you 6 months later.

Farewell, UD.