
The In-game Economics of Ultima Online (1999) - simonsarris
http://www.mine-control.com/zack/uoecon/uoecon.html
======
simonsarris
A bit more back story on UO, ported from my comment in the Nomic thread.

UO was divided into Trammel (safe from PvP) and Felucca (not), and some
servers only had Fel. Originally, there was only Fel, and Trammel was made to
entice more players who might not want such a cutthroat environment.

In Fel as soon as you left a city you were more or less fair game to die from
an _extremely_ hostile environment. PC Gamer (If I recall) described the
learning curve of UO as "A frozen wall of acid." Brutal, but _very exciting._
A wild west MMO.

(In Fel) UO was a rare RPG where anyone could kill anyone, for any reason, but
with the repercussion that they would be branded a "Bad person" (visible with
a gray or red name instead of blue). Stealing from good people corpses also
did this. Anyone can attack and kill bad persons, and if you killed even more
people you were a murderer and it took a very long time to return to normal.

This Blue/Gray/Red name system created a sort of cautiousness among travelers.
Being near a pack of "blue" people might be safe, since any person that tried
to steal or kill would turn gray and they'd immediately kill him.

Unless of course, all those blue-named people were conspiring, and you are the
target.

You want to use super awesome powerful gear? None of this sissy MMO stuff. Die
and you lose it, and your enemy (or his enemy!) gets the spoils. An insurance
system was added later (2005ish?) where you could pay a certain amount per
item to not lose it, probably also as an attempt to make the game less harsh.

The problem I have with a lot of MMOs is that the power of your character is
simply how much time you sink into the game. Essentially, MMOs are games that
reward wasting time.

UO had so much more than that. UO was a game where treachery and sneakiness
really paid off, if you wanted them to. Lots of ways to nearly instantly kill
or entrap people lead to a lot of very exciting plots where guilds might be
laden with spies. Absolutely nothing like the ridiculously limited PvP found
in games like WoW.

In a lot of ways it was the Diplomacy (diplomatic back-stabbing board game) of
MMOs. And it was great.

\--------

For more also see outworlder's excellent comment in the Nomic thread:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890513>

The criticisms of UO wiki page is also a very good read, especially the
housing and economy sections:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Ultima_Online>

~~~
tibbon
Many of these mechanics weren't in there during alpha/beta/launch, but came
shortly after. But the essential part that was always in there is 'you will
die, and get looted' which never happens in modern games.

~~~
DanBC
> 'you will die, and get looted' which never happens in modern games.

DayZ? Minecraft?

~~~
reitzensteinm
As a game developer, I'd explain this as follows: the whole gaming industry
has been following the same path towards casualness. Arrows in FPS games
telling you where to go, auto adjusting difficulty, forgiving aiming, tons of
quick save checkpoints, the list goes on.

The majority of players prefer these be in place - otherwise, why keep doing
it? But there's still a significant segment of the market that pines for the
day when games really kicked you in the ass.

So enter DayZ, and some psycho player with an Axe chases you while playing a
creepy loop of a seven year old girl singing, and exploits bugs to kill you
completely unfairly, there's a small but significant number of players that
will fall in love with a game like that.

But you're not going to convert even a large share of Black Ops 2 players with
that experience. It would be like making every car an Ariel Atom.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yldW2FXy7IY>

~~~
Evbn
On the other hand, a lot of games now are large and diverse with hours worth
of content/art, instead of 5 minutes of content constant replayed for hours
until the button patterns are memorized.

~~~
DanBC
Gran Turismo (first version, on Playstation one) was hard. It was good, but it
was hard.

Later versions (GT4 especially) were much easier, with many more races and
tracks and cars. But is it more fun? Is it fun for advanced players to grind
through easy races? (even with weird features to increase difficulty and
earnings from races?)

------
w-ll
The UO economy was crazy, for a while I had a 11x14 inside of Luna Walls and
was making like 30m a week. Selling to a gold dealer using my friends paypal
(I didn't even have a bank account at the time, I was in middle school and
said friend was in HS). I was making just shy of a grand a month in 8th grade
running a mall in a video game.

I later sold my account and the in-game land for 5k, I regret it to this day
:(

What am I doing now you might ask...

Bitcoin :)

~~~
cwilson
I remember when one of the house placement land rushes occurred on the server
I played on at the time. I had saved up for a Tower deed, and stay up ALL
night in preparation. Had friends waiting to camp my spot with me and so
forth. I got my spot, got my tower, then a friend of mine told me they were
selling on Ebay for $600 to $1,000 depending on the placement and size of
house. The Tower being the second largest structure in the game, I ended up
selling it two days later for a cool $800.

I was 14 at the time I believe. I used my dad's Paypal account that I had
convinced him to get months before, so he had never used it, and then had to
explain how I made $800 on the Internet selling virtual goods. My parents
insisted I was actually selling drugs for a good month.

Good times.

------
acd
I'm pretty sure different economic systems could be simulated in MMO games for
the benefit of mankind.

Let one game shard run with central banks, and the current economic system
where banks create new credit through thin air. See how that affects the
economic system in the game. How it affects house and asset prices, commodity
prices and purchase power.

Let another shard run free banking with competing currencies. See how that
affect asset prices, commodity and purchase power.

In yet another game world within the same system evaluate Bitcoin and see how
that affects house prices, commodity prices etc.

And in another world use hard currencies such as gold and silver as purchase
coin, simulate that there are limits on how much gold and silver can me mined.

Let the game worlds run for quite some time! Then evaluate which of all those
system lead to the most prosperous game population, choose that for the real
economy.

~~~
javert
Too many variables will be missing. For example, you won't see how different
economic systems affect scientific research and (thus) overall technological
progress, which is the means by which a relatively poor person today is better
off than a king 400 years ago.

------
hayksaakian
Pure Gold:

"Human NPCs serve an extremely important role within the economy of UO because
they are permanent. That is, real players disconnect to go to bed or (heaven
forbid) to go to work and are therefore not online the majority of the time"

Other insights:

"An interesting economic phenomenon occurred concerning the fee charged by
vendors. When they were first implemented, vendors charged a fee based on the
resource price of their inventory regardless of their sales. With this in
mind, clever players realized that they could set the price for the goods to
be extraordinarily high and thus prevent anyone from buying them. This, it
turned out, was a very effective way of creating a safety-deposit box since
the vendors can not be robbed. Players started buying vendors for the sole
purpose of increasing their hoarding space. This exacerbated hoarding problems
and also resulted in a form of suburban sprawl where people built tents and
attached vendors consuming valuable land. The designers ultimately fixed these
problems with an elegant economic solution: the vendors now charge a fee based
on the value of the goods assigned by the player. Thus, players can still set
the values too high, but they will be charged rent proportionately thus
deterring this practice dramatically."

And another

"...almost all characters are forced to be entrepreneurs of some type, a fact
which doesn’t correspond well to these player’s real life. In other words,
most people in real life generate their incomes from employment contracts and
thus they understand these arrangements. Unfortunately, such employment
contracts are not implemented in UO. Therefore, there is naturally
disappointment when players are forced into being entrepreneurs and find that
this job is not effortless."

~~~
corysama
Never played UO, but I saw this material given as a talk at GDC.

When they set their designs on a closed-loop material economy, they didn't
account for extravagant hoarding behavior such as building houses from stacks
of leather boots. Occasionally, they couldn't spawn new monsters because the
world had ran out of the raw materials the monsters were supposed to drop as
loot! They had to inflate the economy several times while trying to find yet
another policy fix.

------
cwilson
When I think back to the days when I played Ultima Online (14 to 17 I
believe), for whatever reason my fondest memory is a "profession" I picked up,
which was that of a blacksmith. We're not talking a cookie cutter category I
selected on character creation here, we're talking I happened to have a
certain level in a skill that allowed me to repair my own armor and weapons,
so I turned it into a public service. I'd stand around in the forge area of
the most popular town, about 3 - 4 blocks from the bank in town (the most
popular area in the town), and advertise that I could do repairs (generally
resulting in a tip).

This required that another player literally GIVE me his or her items. As in, I
could run off with them if I wanted. There was no trade window that allowed me
to repair their items without actually taking them. They had to trust that I
would give their items back after repairing them.

I found this absolutely fascinating (and still do) for multiple reasons:

1\. Over time you built up a reputation of being trustworthy. At first people
would only give a smith they didn't know crappy items, but as you became more
trustworthy and well known they would start to hand over their rare items for
repair. I was literally building a reputation in an online game, in a real
community, for providing a quality service (think about the impact this likely
had on a 14 year old, who at that time had no idea what having a job, or
building a reputation, was like).

2\. Items HAD to be repaired in UO, so this wasn't something players could get
around (unless they wanted to train up that skill themselves, and you were
limited on how many skills you could train to their max level at any given
time). You simply had to trust a blacksmith in order to repair your items.
After players came back to town after long sessions of dungeon crawling and
killing monsters (in many cases because their armor was in need of repair),
they would funnel back into town and the first stop was generally to get
repairs.

3\. For whatever reason everyone stuck to a tips based system. I don't
remember a market rate at any time for repairs that players set as a
community. It was just assumed you tipped your smith.

4\. The better armor/weapons you personally wore while smithing, the more
likely you'd get customers who had better weapons/armor, resulting in higher
tips (because they likely had more money). It was my first experience with
advertising and building a personal brand.

This is just a taste of why UO was such an amazing game and social experiment.
It's a shame nothing has come close to recreating such an experience (EVE
Online being an exception, but it still falls short in many ways).

If I had to pick a second fondest aspect of the game, I'd probably say Rune
Books. You could "mark" runes in the game with a spell, which coded that rune
with the location you were standing in when you marked it, which you could
then place in a book. You could then travel back to that exact location at
will, at the cost of a spell and its required reagents (hell, the reagents
system was amazing as well!). Players made Rune Books of all the towns,
dungeons, and crazy hidden locations (or their own homes, favorite shops, etc)
for personal use, but also to sell so other players didn't have to make them
on their own (as it would require a significant amount of traveling on foot to
do so). I remember being very fond of my Rune Book collection.

What a game.

~~~
almost
I remember setting up a rune collection in my house/shop (you could set up NPC
vendors to sell stuff to other players). The collection was free to use but my
vendors sold copies of it you could take away or (for much less) runes that
would bring you back to my shop. This meant that people would use my shop as a
transport hub, and buy stuff while they were at it.

Such a harsh game, but that's what made it exciting. Interactions felt real,
and just like in real life while people could be dicks most people chose to be
decent.

------
egfx
I was an Elder in UO. We created short quests while Seers were responsible for
rendering larger storyline quests. Seers weren't really allowed to venture off
script and do things but Elders were encouraged to. We Elders had insane
powers. We could appear anywhere in the world at anytime, walk around
invisible indefinitely and into players locked dwellings. We were able to
color and rename items. And make serpents and spiders appear in mass and in
the middle of town by waving a beast making wand. This was actually encouraged
under the Britain is under the plaque storyline. Being an Elder was boss, but
stealing from mages in Occlo with my thieves guild in Baja. Also.

------
ChuckMcM
Wow, that is an awesome read. Comparing it to the economics in the World of
Warcraft is also interesting. I particularly like the discussion of 'drains'
vs 'closed circuits' there is a lot of interesting questions about building
virtual economies where those are implemented in various ways. In particular
comparing them to 'drains' in the physical world like fashion changes or
upgrade cycles.

~~~
nhaehnle
... and it's not just about virtual economies, either. The section "Hoarding
and The Failure of the Closed Economy" is basically a lesson on the so-called
Paradox of Thrift and the virtue of government deficits:

In the closed system, the "pumping up" of resources from the bottom of the top
was done by the game administrators, and is very much akin to a government
that spends exactly what it taxes.

In the open system, the "drain" at the bottom is still government taxation,
while the "faucet" at the top is still government spending.

What the developers of UO learned is that those need to be tuned independently
of each other to get a well working economy. If only people understood this
about the real economy!

------
guiambros
If you're interested in in-game economics, another very interesting read is
_Lessons From Habitat_ <http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html>, a game
created in the early 80's by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer that ran
on Commodore 64.

Despite being written more than two decades ago, most of the conclusions from
_Lessons.._ are still fresh and applicable to game mechanics today.

Randall (@frandallfarmer) is also the author of _Building Web Reputation
Systems_ , published by O'Reilly - <http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/3900>.
Another nice reading, if you're interested in the subject.

------
dysoco
I have always wanted to play Ultima Online, since years ago. But too bad it
still has monthly fees... $10 a month might not sounds too steep, but I'm in a
place I can't pay using credit card nor get dollars... and it sucks.

------
nilsimsa
I remember playing UO and getting PKed the first foot out of the city. It was
quite frustrating. At some point a group of players formed a mob and would
hunt down those PKers who played dirty with low level players.

------
shocks
Interesting.

I would like to see an article like this, about the economics behind Eve
Online. That would be interesting.

------
boxysean
More UO nostalgia:

I started playing UO when I was about 13. My parents paid the monthly fees for
a few months, but I couldn't convince them to keep paying for it. ("Do your
homework, Sean!") Frustrated, my friends and I found the free, independent,
emulator-run servers and started playing on them. Finding the nuances between
the free servers (called "shards"), we settled on one in particular and stayed
there for the next few years.

I got bored with playing pretty quickly -- I was never really good at games
that required skill or huge amounts of time investment. I started talking with
the shard staff, gained their trust, and "graduated" into being a moderator
for the server when I was 14 by doing some minor policing (resolving disputes,
busting people leveling up with macro programs like UOAssist, etc). I could
warp anywhere and got to choose special colours of clothing and had this
awesome counselor robe. Looking back, according to [1], I best fit a
"socialiser" player.

Then I got bored of simply moderating. There were a backlog of feature
requests to the lone shard developer, who was busy trying to, y'know, have a
family and work his day job. At the behest of the Italian couple who ran the
server, I began developing for the shard when I was 15 (having not programmed
before). I did lots of simple things like create weapons and funny items with
special abilities [2], my favourite being a bag of skipping stones. Then I
started doing more complicated things like recreate Triple Triad from FFVIII
[3], and useful things like remake the guild system.

These UO people were my friends, we hung out on IRC every day, and even did a
couple of international Secret Santa gift exchanges.

I got bored again around 16 or 17 and forgot about UO, but it had a lasting
impact on me:

At 18, I began studying computer science. I realized that the code I wrote to
sort a list back in the UO days (not knowing any better) was actually the
standard sorting algorithm, bubblesort.

(actually relevant to the link -->) At 19, I started to learn about economics
and related it back in a very real way to my days playing UO. I was tempted to
go back and try to design a method of distributing wealth that reduced
inflation.

And by 20 I realized I was a very good programmer. (I'm now 26.) I still
attribute UO at the Italians I've never met in person for that.

[1] <http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm>

[2] <http://neverlands-library.com/index.php?id=4lvl> \- can't believe I found
this / someone documented this

[3] <http://neverlands-library.com/index.php?id=cards>

~~~
eclipticplane
I wrote a good deal of code for a two of the popular emulators; starting with
SphereServer, and then RunUO, primarily just on the server side and less so on
the actual shard side.

Shards (emulators) let the server owner script and customize the game a lot,
such that it rarely resembled the real game. A lot of shards were really
shitty, in that the minute you created your character you instantly got full
skills, tons of gold, free armor, etc. Thus, there was no pride or value in
anything.

SphereServer scripting was very clumsy, written in its own quasi-object
language. It had a LOT of flaws, but was leaps and bounds above UOX, the first
major emulator.

The RunUO came around, written in C#, and was much faster than SphereServer.
It scaled to thousands++ of online users. Scripting was all done in C# as
well, meaning things were compiled rather than interpreted at runtime as in
SphereServer (some things in Sphere were cached, but not many). Most of the
active emulator shards today use RunUO.

------
rymith
I miss UO. I used to work from home, so I had a box set up that would run a
simple c program that would send keys to repeat a macro based on what I wanted
to train, but at random intervals. I did this because I wanted to keep up with
my buddy, who had the time to actually play. But I also had a small bit of
code that I injected that would scrape the text. I would set my character on a
boat, and then when a mod would show up, it would beep from the PC internal
speaker (so I wouldn't get caught if my wife turned down the volume on the
speakers). I can't count the number of times talking to some directoe or VP
while this high pitched noise came across on a conference call while I
panicked to explain the noise, have a conference call, and type enough to
convince that I was a person. I miss that.

~~~
Bockit
Nowadays they have macro programs to help with this that use LUA or custom
scripting languages to run the game.

I remember learning LUA by writing scripts. Probably my pinnacle here was one
to harvest wood / mine automatically, recalling to a bank to drop everything
off and then head to a new mine, rotating mines so they wouldn't run out and
playing a siren noise and sending me an email when the anti-macro popup would
come up.

At this point I was more playing to see how advanced and resilient I could
make my script, and less so to play the game, heh.

