User:Grant
Why Zombies Are Better
At first blush, most players tend to prefer playing a human character. The reasons are fairly straightforward: Survivors can start with more useful, powerful abilities; Zombies have only a single starting class, with a relatively weak skill. They have many actions and items available. And the players themselves are, of course, also living, and so tend to sympathize with the survivor cause. But several of these advantages decrease with time, and there are some very good parts to playing a zombie that might be easily overlooked.
Certainly zombies are very weak when they are new to Urban Dead. This experience is made even more painful for most players since their first experience as a member of the undead will be without even a single skill. Without even 'vigor mortis,' a zombie is truly pathetic, and losing 10 AP just to stand up will be very frustrating. However, most of these concerns are diminished with time. A skilled zombie is just as fast as a human, and possesses more powerful attacks than any melee attacks available to humans.
Furthermore, the items that humans must spend so much time searching for are unnecessary to zombies, and zombies get to use all of their abilities for 'free,' once the appropriate skill has been purchased. Healing is completely unnecessary for zombies, who can simply stand up to regain full health (which requires drastically less AP than killing them did). You can forget about waiting in line at a revive point, too, since revives are unnecessary for zombies; any zombie who finds himself temporarily un-un-dead can simply jump out of a building to rejoin his or her cause. If one is really committed, taking the 'brain rot' skill makes one immune to combat revives, as well, and can hinder human revival efforts - something humans have no equivalent skill for.
It's true that humans have more actions they can perform, more buttons they can press at any given time. This gap decreases slightly, as zombies gain skills. But how many of them are truly useful? Barricading and free running are the two really great human skills that zombies can't rival. Zombies have improved attacks, free healing, free reviving, scent death, feeding groan, and ultimately invulnerability to revives.
Let's think about the dynamics of the game as a whole. The humans are survivors: They're trying to avoid being killed. Zombies are trying to kill the humans. At a very basic level, all human actions in the game are reactions to what the zombies are doing. It may not seem like it to the survivors hiding behind the barricades, but zombies are the ones who dictate the overall course of the game. They decide when and where to strike, while the humans simply wait. Zombies have the ability to make a real impact in the game, by devoting themselves to the cause - when a human goes down, that's one more zombie, like it or not. You can choose not to help the zombies while you are one, but until you get a revive, you're no help to the humans. But when a zombie gets revived, that's a completely different matter! A fellow human can be just as fearsome an enemy to human forces as a zombie can - more so, really.
Although it might seem strange, I've come to see the 'limited' abilities of zombies as some of their most appealing traits. What are the most annoying things about playing UD? It's probably those assholes that TKed you, right? Maybe the losers who keep GKing your NT facility? If it's not that, it's probably jerks who won't shut up, filling your screen with spam. Just think - zombies really don't have to deal with that kind of crap: No generators, and on top of that no need to search. Zombies mostly shut up, although their speech and gesturing is sufficient for any important in-game communication that needs to take place. And even if somebody TKs you, who cares? You can just stand right back up again; the result is that zombies don't bother TKing, and any zombie-zombie attacks are just the result of newbie zombies who don't have any skills, yet. Zombies have even better tools for assembling and cooperating than humans do, in-game, and no reason not to help each other out.
Finally, I'd be remiss not to mention what good sports and generally fun people many zombies can be. Although there are many fine human players, zombie players in particular exhibit open-mindedness and a sense of humor, and perhaps those were their reasons for playing as zombies to begin with.
