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Post by randomdead on Feb 2, 2007 18:25:26 GMT -5
I recently found myself swaying gently in front of the Quarty library, entranced and drawn to the fever pitched groans echoing from within. I found a chance to acquire knowledge, through the consumption of Charles Darwin's brains. While I do regret that the removal of his brains proved fatal, I had to know more, since I had recently read "The Voyage of the Beagle" by none other than Charles Darwin himself. I was pondering the richly detailed anthropology of the flora and fauna of South America when I was asked to give a lecture by SweetIrony on the early days of Urban Dead, specifically the rise of The Many. Since she was the first and only person in over a year that had said anything about The Many, I decided to share my knowledge of the early days with your group. I guess a secondary reason is that I am a librarian in real life (I work on the restoration of rare books and documents).
In an ideal world, I would give this lecture in game, but there is way too much to be said about the early days. After some research, I realized that I was perhaps one of a handful of people that was still active from the first true outbreak. I also realized that I am the last active member of the first true horde, The Many. Since it will take some time to give an accurate description of the organization, politics, and actual gameplay in the early days, I will post updates relating to specific topics in the next few days. I also encourage anyone that has questions to please post them. I will try to answer them the best I can, since it is close to a year and a half since this game was created.
I will try to give my best explanation of the following topics, in no particular order:
- Gameplay in the early days - The rise of The Many - Politics and mass hysteria involving The Many - The fall of The Many - The rise/fall of DARIS - Why this game is so much fun
Well it is Friday night and there is much to be done, so I will try to get started on this lecture by tomorrow.
PS - I apologize to Charles Darwin for the forceful removal of his brains. I had no idea what the Quartly Library was all about until recently.
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Post by Sir Fred of Etruria on Feb 2, 2007 19:50:58 GMT -5
Randomdead, only a couple of the Quartly librarians read this forum. I would be delighted to have you deliver your presentations in game. People are very much supporters of the QSG who have never registered here.
If you want to plan a discussion, I'll let the folks inside know you mean no ill-will.
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Post by Die Hard Girlyman on Feb 2, 2007 20:55:35 GMT -5
yeah, but I think this story would go best here anyway, I know I'm interested
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Post by Artaxerxes/SweetIrony on Feb 3, 2007 3:41:22 GMT -5
Yaaay!! I'm so glad you've responded to my invitation. It will be wonderful to hear from such a veteran player. As Sir Fred says, we would love to have you speak in the library. You could do a series of lectures over several days, if 50AP are not enough. On the forum or in-game, however, I look forward to hearing what you have to say!
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Post by vonluthius on Feb 4, 2007 4:05:48 GMT -5
randomdead,
When did you start playing out of curiousity?
For Myself, I began on August 9th, 2005, a montha nd 3 days after the game was released, and I JUST missed out on seeing the last padlock get cut and thus my wirecutters became useless. The game in the early days was quite awesome, coming in when I did I missed out on the joys of exploring and recording the buildings and streets around me on paper so as I could plonk them on my wall so as I knew where the hell things were in relation to each other, cause there was no map to start with, the joys and pains of no barricades, though I was there for the 1st generation revive syringes and getting revived whilst offline meant you stood up and were killed again as often as not. The Many were awesome and a sense of humopur as 100+ Zombies busted into a building and all said Mrh? in mockery at the same time before butchering everybody was cool. The CoL and the Original Forums then all the cxrap that happened there and damn but you have a mammoth task ahead of you.
I agree, most of it should be plonked down here because quite simply it will take weeks to get down ingame, though I'm uf or helping out in that regards (I'll have to wander off to Houldenbank for a Rotters Revive first though), and also if you want anymore contributions to the early history of the game at least from 1 month in, anything I can get for the Original CoL etc straight off the Forums (Yes we actually had private forums which are quite fascinating to read actually from so far after it was all new and awesome) I can happily contribute as well.
Anyways, good luck with it all,a nd nice to know we have an actual librarian here on the forums.
Question, I have a friend who is looking at becoming a librarian in RL too, has completed an arts/english degree and will do a course (so she can be a qualified librarian) in Melbourne in a years time (year off to work and save again) but asides from that, would like to know anything she can about how to become a librarian, or get work in a library if that is at all possible, so if you have any advice I can pass on to her that would be fantastic, especially in regards to the preservation of books as most of us have quite extensive collections, some things which, at least for us students are quite expensive exceeding 100-200 dollars each so yeah, would be nice.
Anyways, I must be off,
Von Luthius.
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Post by randomdead on Feb 4, 2007 15:21:05 GMT -5
I started playing on August 8th 2005 with my zombie and created my human a few days later. Ahh wow you are right, I do have a huge task ahead of me. I have been reading the threads made on the something awful forums and I am only up to a few days before the attack on giddings mall. I have read about 5 threads already and each one was on the verge or actually over a 1000 posts each. Just looking ahead I realize I still have anywhere from 5000 to 7000 more posts to read . If I did this in game it could easily take 2 months to say everything that needs to be said. Well I guess I will start with a little backstory. It is well known that the members of the Something Awful forums were behind DARIS and The Many. They tend to refer to themselves as 'goons" for reasons which will become clear when I get to the politics of the matter. The interest in Urban Dead on the awful forums started a few days after the game was first launched. Most of the goons started humans and formed the first "goonbase" out in Shuttlebank. A few goons also realized that PKing could be committed for easy XP and the lack of any consequences. Thus the first true PKing group was formed by players calling themselves "The Kindergarten Cult" or "The Wiley Clan". Members of the cult could only be distinguished by having the last name Wiley. They had huge success early in the game since Malton was completely lawless and unorganized at the time. The Wiley Clan became the foundation of DARIS and later the backbone since most wileys were high level humans before Shearbank was taken in the name of the populat. It did not take long for the goons to start attracting attention. All the PKing did not go unnoticed and a bunch of players not affiliated with something awful were attracted to the goonbases, safety in numbers I guess. Soon many zombie groups were posting the current location of the goonbase on the unofficial urban dead forums. While the threat from the zombie groups at the time was very low, it was the unaffiliated public players with their grief over the wileys and their general boneheaded banter that started to piss the goons off. Soon a new goonbase location was found in a particularly lawless and open suburb, Shearbank. Around August 13th, goonbase alpha was moved to the Ranahan Library, about two blocks away from Stickling. At that time, Stickling mall had never been in the hands of the humans. Around 10-12 zombies drifted inside the mall but it was easily taken and barricaded in 2 days. Within a week there were around a hundred inside the mall and 60 in the Ranahan Library. Displeasure with the quality of players that were attracted to Shearbank ran at a fever pitch on the forums. It was suggested that Shearbank be claimed in the name of the something awful goons and be off limits to the general population. However this was easier said than done. Shearbank would have to be evacuated by the goons and then a zombie group would have to completely wipe out Shearbank. But first any other groups looking to make a power grab in nearby suburbs would have to be eliminated. The only group that was remotely organized was the Octopus Overlords based in Millen Hills. They numbered at about 50 members and had been targeted several times by the wileys already. Since OO members were crying over all the pking centered around them on the unofficial urban dead forums, they made an excellent target due to the fact that they would raise a huge stink on the forums over a coordinated zombie attack against them. If we were to have any success, we needed people to sow fear among the general population. In order to keep people out, we needed Shearbank to look as dangerous as possible. Thus The Many were formed and named in tribute to the zombie like members of the hive mind in System Shock 2. They were given unlife in order to cleanse the homeland and pave the way for the rise of DARIS. Next up: The rise of The Many
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Post by Artaxerxes/SweetIrony on Feb 4, 2007 22:40:34 GMT -5
*applauds* Well done, very interesting. I look forward to reading more.
Von Luthius, I had forgotten that you are a veteran player as well! Please, by all means, contribute your perspective on the history of Malton!
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Post by Ron Burgundy on Feb 5, 2007 21:53:53 GMT -5
July 26th, baby! You guys should keep an eye out for Tony Blair, he started on like the second day or something absurd like that. I remember...
I remember DARIS! A friend of mine was in it and he offered me their protection. He went on to leave UD and become an evil bastard. If you know anyone named "Brendan Hickey" you should totally shake his hand.
I remember Ron Burgundy was killed for the first time in October- specifically, in Yagoton. I had gotten tired of the Caiger area (there weren't any zombies there before the first siege) and wandered off.
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Tony Blair
Full Member
He gets our vote
Posts: 193
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Post by Tony Blair on Feb 8, 2007 11:58:28 GMT -5
July 26th, baby! You guys should keep an eye out for Tony Blair, he started on like the second day or something absurd like that. I remember... I remember DARIS! A friend of mine was in it and he offered me their protection. He went on to leave UD and become an evil bastard. If you know anyone named "Brendan Hickey" you should totally shake his hand. I remember Ron Burgundy was killed for the first time in October- specifically, in Yagoton. I had gotten tired of the Caiger area (there weren't any zombies there before the first siege) and wandered off. TB was not my first character. My very first character was created on July 5th and back then you couldn't even attack zombies but both other survivors and zombies could attack you, and barricades didn't even exist. Tony Blair was created about 3 days latter when combat was more of an option and he had nothing to do with the British PM (back then it was still mostly Americans playing). I think that it was about a week latter that we finally got the ability to close doors. If we were smarter back then we would have just used free running to hide in padlocked buildings, but all of those were pretty much destroyed about two days after wire cutters were activated (I am ashamed to say that I cut one or two myself). Oh and until people learned about heavy barricades free running was considered a junk skill. About the only team that had anything to do with it was the Cannonball Crew. It took a while to earn x.p. Back then so there was a period of about a month where the CC was really one of the very top teams and everyone else had to catch up to us. Also do you remember back in the old days when people would try to trap zombies inside of heavy barricades? We were the ones that got that started. We were on a long distance rescue mission the Club Veal and got trapped in the first documented in-game blizzard. We couldn't move very far and next or EHB safe house (most people didn't know you could go past heavy back then either) was two zombies inside railroad station or something. So for something to do I snuck inside and built an EH barricade around them. Officer Daxx found out about the idea on the CoL forums and he liked the idea so he tried it at Oram Walk and then it became famous. A lot of times it actually worked too because not all zombies realized that you could leave just by clicking on another square. It didn't last long after Oram though. The tactic got to be too famous and then everyone learned about its weakness.
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Post by Ron Burgundy on Feb 8, 2007 12:08:10 GMT -5
Yeah, I remember locking zombies inside buildings and not having barricaded at all! Man, those were the days! Remember the 50 guys who tried to hold a fort they couldn't barricade and got whiped out in a day or two- man, that just doesn't happen anymore. People barricade now. Lame.
Those ingame blizzards were horrible, though! For people who don't know, the page was linked on Boing Boing or something and got flooded by people doing god knows what. You could click on the search button and wait until your connection timed out because the server was that slow. I started playing at 4AM; it was a little better early in the morning.
Man, that was way back when! Those things were before even the wiki, back when we were all using that horrible forum with Inscrywhat'shisface and SomeoneelseIcantremember running it. And then ther was Thatoneguy who always banned people. It was that or the yahoo group, whatever those things are.
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Tony Blair
Full Member
He gets our vote
Posts: 193
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Post by Tony Blair on Feb 8, 2007 13:37:51 GMT -5
They tried it twice once at Perryn and then they lasted longer at Creedy but only because it took the zeds longer to get there. There was actually lot of fighting of going on in those battles but it didn't matter because you would kill a zed and it would get right back up. Then we got the ability to close doors and dump bodies so they treid again with the same results.
Finally we got barricades and Oram Walk became the big safehouse only because officer Daxx had enough men to keep them going. But they got overwhelmed and somtime latter the Many came into the picture. The big threat from them was they were so powerfull that they could tear down the heaviest of barricades in only a matter of minutes and people didn't know how to defend agasint them. Once again the CoL turned to it's Cannonball Crew for help. We helped to slow the many down mostly by running to suburbs ahead of them and barricading before they got there. In fact we were the first ones to encounter DARIS because we went the Shearbank to try and protect it from the many and some of men including myself ended up getting PKed (it was the first time that TB was killed). Because of that incident we gained early intel that DARIS and the Many were linked before it publically known. Of coruese there wasn't much the CoL could do for it.
After that we shadowed the Many pretty much he whole time. Despite the raw power in numbers that the Many had the CC's causaties remained pretty low because a lot of my guys remembered how to survive in the days before we even had barricades where other teams were too new for that.
Granted we couldn't do a lot but the CC was the only team that held up agasint the Many's onslaught and was about the only one that did anything agasint them at all until clan l2K and what ever group Von Luthus was running at the time came along. For my efforts the CoL made me Commander in-chief of it's military. I quickly gave the rest CoL's military a crash coruse in surviving the Many's attacks (most didn't do quite as well), but our cordination between teams got better and we started to hold up a little better. There wasn't really an epic battle other than Giddings whcih we weren't at the Many just kind of died out.
The tacticts that we used to defend agasint the Many were
1. Barricade a lot of buildings to EHB so that they have a lot of Hard targets to deal with. 2. Don't clutter into one safehouse but instead spread out so that the whole team doesn't get wiped out. 3. If you can try to stay in buildings with a lot of other surviours so that hopefully they get picked off before you do. 4. Save some AP, check your account offten, and be ready to run.
It was just common sense but it kept us alive. Some of it even helped inspire Von's idea for the Candyland invasion.
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Post by thekooks on Feb 16, 2008 7:08:18 GMT -5
Do you think the game has ever been balanced? Do you think it can be balanced?
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Post by Sir Fred of Etruria on Feb 16, 2008 16:38:08 GMT -5
Hmmm.... thanks for the question. In my opinion, it is more balanced than ever. The main issue is survivor scrounging tends to be a form of AP banking. Now that zombies can block repairs and barricades, the human AP-pool/equipment is being taxed at a much higher rate than I'd ever seen before. Now a human must be equipped for combat... you can no longer just play a support character. Gone are the healers and scientists, everybody needs to kill the undead before stacking the plastic trees. I think the only major imbalance is that humans are a little more fun to play... until we get a munch brains button. That would make zombies more fun fr the novice players. That's the real issue... the level 41 players can operate on both sides and have a hell of a lot of fun, if we could make it more seductive for the level 10 and under to play zombie, then it would level the playing field.
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Post by Rockby Quickfoot on Feb 17, 2008 9:10:38 GMT -5
That's probably the biggest thing I'm not liking about the changes. You really can't play just a support character anymore. I used to be a full-time medic, but now I carry two fully loaded pistols with me, just so that I can expunge a zombie or so to put those barricades back up.
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Post by randomdead on Feb 17, 2008 12:28:01 GMT -5
I think the only major imbalance is that humans are a little more fun to play... until we get a munch brains button. That would make zombies more fun fr the novice players. That's the real issue... the level 41 players can operate on both sides and have a hell of a lot of fun, if we could make it more seductive for the level 10 and under to play zombie, then it would level the playing field. You are completely right. It is also one of the main reasons why I never really finished the story of The Many out of the game. I did the research and realized why The Many came and went so quickly. Back then we were a completely unknown and mysterious force. For the first time, survivors were scared and panicking over getting eaten by a zombie horde. It was glorious, exactly what the game was trying to emulate. When we finally came to our first real resistance, Giddings Mall, we realized how broken and unbalanced the zombies were to humans. This was also compounded with the fact that the headshot skill was implemented right as we first started the siege of the mall. Back then a headshot would erase all your excess experience, making leveling impossible. It really, really sucked. After the failed siege on Giddings, most of the horde said "fuck it" and started concentrating on their DARIS characters. Playing as a human member of DARIS was just as much fun as being in the many back in our prime. It also gave birth to the first urban dead plug-in for firefox, which highlighted the names of DARIS members, so we would not kill each other and keep Shearbank pure. After that failed siege, I went on strike and did not really start playing my zombie again until July of 2006, when I guess I "first died". The game can be just as fun for zombies, you just have to find alternative means to do so. This is why randomdead is a librarian at the Quartly, a dancing, singing, zombie killing clown of sorts. It’s just more entertaining that munching brains all the time. Will the game ever be balanced? No, and it shouldn't be. What zombie movie have you ever watched where the survivors did not prevail in the end? This game really boils down the aspects of human nature in times of fear and total chaos and how strange this existence truly is.
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