Zerging
From The Urban Dead Wiki
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The term zerging is commonly used by Urban Dead players to describe all forms of multiple character abuse. This is a way of creating de facto super-characters, and is a structural problem for all MMORPG designs where new characters can be created cheaply.
To zerg is therefore to create alternate characters (also known as Alts) and coordinate them as if they were a single one. This practice is cheating in Urban Dead. UD includes automatic anti-zerging countermeasures. Zerg characters can be automatically penalised or deleted.
Some of the more pedantic UD players note that "zerging," according to its Wikipedia explanation usually refers to the use of multiple new throw-away characters to achieve a goal. By that definition, true zerg characters would receive little or no maintenance and would often be discarded after one use. While this type of cheating does occur in UD, it is only a sub-type of mutiple character abuse, or simply multi abuse. Multi abuse has its own detailed entry on this wiki.
[edit] Zerging Problems in Urban Dead
Combat Mobs - A pack of characters that coordinate attacks approach the effect of a 100% one-shot kill. Before the countermeasures, zerging players would create armies of Firefighters or Zombies in a particular suburb and use them to attack a Safehouse. The characters used in the zerging were often abandoned afterwards.
Sentinels - A player places a character in a given building, and leaves them there. They log in every so often, thereby preventing the character from going inactive, and allowing them to check the status of the building. (Whether it's been broken into, whether it's been rebarricaded, and so on.) Upon seeing a change in the building's status, the player then knows the optimal place to move their combat mob so as to maintain whatever status they desire for that building/suburb. Ransack allows a lone zombie sentinel to prevent survivors barricading a ransacked building until it is killed. Although hard to prevent, this is still against the clearly worded game rules which state that characters must lead completely separate existences within the game - your characters should not collaborate. Sharing information between characters (especially where that is the main purpose of the alt) is collaboration.
[edit] Implemented Anti-Zerging Countermeasures
Random Start Location - It was initially possible to pick your starting suburb, to be near your friends - this option was removed quite early on.
No Intra-Player Cooperation - The FAQ states that characters found to be cooperating "in a suspicious fashion" will be automatically penalised or banned by the system. Characters from the same IP in close proximity (details deliberately not released) suffer penalties in combat, in using First aid kits, and in search percentages.
IP Limit - The IP limit prevents a single machine from initiating zerg activity. The technical implementation is to allow no more than 160 hits from a single IP address per day.
[edit] Unofficial Anti-Zerging Countermeasures
Resensitized runs its own Zerg Liste which relies on screenshots of similarly named characters suspiciously close to one another or admissions of zerging (it happens more than you think) to keep track of and systematically eliminate the cheaters of Malton. The larger PK lists (Resensitized and Rogue's Gallery) don't count bounty claims against players on the Zerg Liste as PKs for their purposes, so Zerg Hunters (such as ZHU) are relatively safe except for the zergers who constantly try to hunt them down in retaliation.
[edit] Seems like Zerging
A number of groups, mainly PKers, deliberately choose very similar names in order to give the impression of one person doing all the actions, even though it is a group of players, each controlling a different character. A couple of examples are the Pathetic Bill and SillyLillyPilly groups.
[edit] Usage Notes
The name Zerg comes from StarCraft, where the Zerg are one of three playable races. The weakest Zerg, the zergling, is fast and cheap to produce and therefore very well suited for mass rush attacks in the early game. Its analog in Urban Dead is a newly created level-one character. StarCraft players also use zerglings as decoys and cannon fodder in the mid-late game.
