User:SK100

The End of Malton?

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It looks to me like, in April, 2011, some person or group set out to destroy Urban Dead. They have registered thousands of new players, mostly as zombies. Since then, the balance that kept Malton swinging back and forth for years has dramatically shifted against survivors. As of this writing, the ratio of zombies to humans is 84% Zombies, 16% survivors.

I started looking at the statistics and making notes about what I saw, and here are a few observations and speculations.

Observations

• During the week from 3/31/2011 to 4/6/2011, there was a sudden upswing in the number of zombies without a corresponding downswing in the number of survivors. About 2,000 new zombies. See chart below.

• The number of active players had remained right around 17,000 give or take 1,000 for about a year. At midnight, March 30, there were 16,091 active players, 7997 survivors, 4593 zombies. By midnight of April 4, there were 19409 active players, 7986 survivors, and 6992 zombies. That's about 2,400 new zombies in five days. Since then, the survivor population has been in catastrophic decline. See the game statistics log: Game Statistics Log

• As best as I can determine, there are normally between three and four thousand players who register each week; however, most of them lose interest quickly. It is highly unusual for there to be two thousand new active players in a week.

• On 5/11, I witnessed a break-in at an NT facility, in which eleven zeds participated. Eight were members of the group, The Dead. Five of those had registered during this period. All the feral participants were much older. So I got curious.

• I investigated The Dead. It is listed as defunct, but it seems to also have over 1,600 members, which is ten times more than any other group. Its historic page records an attempt in 2008 "to slaughter every last survivor in Malton." Its new page is uninformative.

• A random sample of suburb wiki pages reveals that it seems to be present in every suburb.

Speculations

Is something going on? Clearly. Is there cheating? Possibly. It could be purely coincidental that 2400 people independently decided to actively play as zombies during a single week. Or it could be that a dedicated handful are managing one hundred characters apiece. Without waterboarding, we may never know.

Various explanations come to mind about the motivation behind this wave of activity. It could be a lust for notoriety. It could be vengeance. My favorite idea is that it could be corporate sabotage: some online gaming company wants to take down the free competition, so they have hired a staff of minimum-wage flunkies to break the game. Alas, we can't blame it on bin Laden any more.

Graphic evidence of something crazy going on: