
How Ultima Online rares were born - Volscio
http://www.raphkoster.com/2010/11/24/how-uo-rares-were-born/
======
alexophile
In my youth, I had what could only really be called an obsession with Ultima
Online, I played it on and off (including playing on and running independent
servers,) for the better part of a decade and the economics of the world were
always really intriguing to me. When I started playing, it was totally
possible to make a living as a humble miner. At some point, we started
stealing ore - I'm not proud of it, but early UO was a very Hobbesian place.

But things started to get really interesting once everyone was capable of
reliably accumulating more gold than practically necessary (I preferred
hunting liches on the fourth level of Deceit) the de facto currency became
overt displays of wealth. The built in prices became meaningless. There was a
market for housing that differed in interesting ways from shard to shard.
There were whole _malls_ that housed secondary markets for bulk purchases of
reagents and crafting supplies.

I literally went furniture shopping for my house at the carpenter shop in the
mall run by Dragon's Claw in a castle outside Britain... and while I was
there, I probably picked up some regs.

As a player, I remember the early days of the pure black dye tub. IIRC I
bought my first one for 25,000 gold [edit: for reference, a boat cost 15k, and
a house deed, 40k] and instantly dyed everything I owned this anti-color. It
was a very trying time, waking up not knowing if your valuables were still
there. But it's really interesting to read the events from the perspective of
a very reasonably upset artist. The way they ended up handling the black dye
tub, however, became the sort of precedent for this type of incident.

The most compelling aspect of UO was the diverse ways in which people made use
of the world and its resources - and OSI seemed to be, on the whole, fairly
receptive to these things. One other good example was the practice of "Server
Wars." Every Sunday morning, the server would save and go down for updates.
When this happened, everyone would get a grey message after which no activity
would be saved, but the server would stay up for a while. This became the
worldwide cue to go to your local graveyard for a colossal melee which would
be wiped away when the server came up.

I could go on at great length about other ways in which the world of UO was
great, but I'm moving tomorrow and really need to sleep.

~~~
JanezStupar
Indeed. The economy of UO was awesome - yes it had its usual inflation
problems, but still. Whats most impressive is that many markets developed in
spite of (probably more because of) crude mechanics involved trade.

There was the grind - but it was awesome, actually. Since it was risky -
beyond loosing a couple of minutes of gametime. You either played your
gathering and crafting safe - making many trips to your hoarding spot, which
made you profits painfully low or you could try to maximize your hourly rate -
at insane risk to falling prey to an enemy.

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sabj
Ah, one of so many reasons I loved UO!

@patio11, I think the scorn for virtual item sales was not always just one of
condescension. Rather, the idea was born from a certain economic
understanding. If the belief was that virtual item sales would be a fraction
of subscriptions, but that virtual sales could upset gameplay and unbalance
games, harming the play experience and undermining the community, they were to
be eschewed. At least, that was an argument that I would see a lot.

~~~
patio11
Yeah, I saw that, too. It seemed to me that a lot of developers connected very
strongly with their audience on the level of: "I am cash-poor and time-rich
and should win, because I am willing to work for this. Victory should not go
to people who are cash-rich and time-poor. I should beat their face in and
people should be in awe of me, because I worked for my pixels."

~~~
wlievens
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, I interpret you as saying "they wanted to
preserve gameplay over a potentially more interesting business model, and
that's a bad thing".

Maybe you're not a gamer, so that makes it harder to imagine. But games like
Farmville aren't on the same level as something like Ultima Online. It's like
comparing a fast food chain to an authentic French restaurant. Nobody will
blame the restaurant that they're using a different model.

~~~
patio11
There are a lot of dragons who would vigorously contest the notion that I am
not a gamer, or would if I hadn't spent years of my life getting together with
my closest 39 friends to genocide them. My interest is mostly academic, about
how for-profit companies convince themselves that suboptimal processes are in
their best interests.

------
patio11
It is interesting for me, in a lot of ways, that MMORPG developers scorned
virtual items sales and claimed they would never work (and later, that they
would never work in the US) for literally _decades_ while simultaneously
trying to stamp out thriving markets in their games... and then Zynga
blindsided them "out of nowhere" with how much money could be extracted
through sales of virtual goods. There was always a strong ideological
component to the "no real money transactions in our games" -- and for a while
it not only defeated the clear business benefits of swapping stuff for money,
it successfully convinced the industry that that was an unviable model despite
them being literally engaged in a losing holding action against that very
model.

~~~
daredevildave
I don't think Zynga invented this. The big Korean games like Maple Story, Kart
Rider, Sudden Attack had mixed game and real-life currency for quite a while
before.

I remember going to a GDC (2007?) where western developers were heavily
discussing the Korean model and whether it would work in the west.

Aside: IMO, Zynga is a bit of a cynical money making machine. The Korean model
seems to be more about the game, while still making plenty of money.

~~~
electromagnetic
The Korean games remain fun to play. 9/10ths of things on sale are one-offs
like a longer duration healing spell or a temporary strength booster. They
generally didn't alter the gameplay hugely. Sure it meant a same-level player
could pawn you, but it didn't guarantee it and in most cases the player using
these specials wasn't a match for an actual hardcore gamer.

Then there was the marginal 1/10th of products that were like a level 15 armor
but a level 12 could wear it. It didn't genuinely change much again, because
when I played these games I frequently attacked well out of my level range for
the huge XP you'd get because I was genuinely good at fighting in them.

I see Nexon cash cards in 7/11, Bestbuy, Zellers and even in pharmacies. I see
Zynga getting sued for millions of dollars for ripping off competitors ideas
(Mob Wars, etc).

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phaedrus
The idea of an item being rare due to emergent properties reminds me of
something cool from Diablo 1. There was at least one unique item that shared a
"kind" slot with another, lower level unique. Due to a bug, the game would
always choose the lesser item. This might have made the other item not just
rare but actually impossible to get, except for an interaction with another
feature: if a unique dropped once in a game, the same unique would not drop
again. This mechanism took the lower level unique out of the running, allowing
the other one to drop - but only if this same kind of unique were chosen twice
per game.

So the probability of finding the second unique was P(A|B). That is, the
probability of finding it in any random game was probability of A _given B_.
Out of the four billion 32-bit seed integers the random number generator for
Diablo 1 might be initialized with, only a handful satisfied this requirement.

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makeramen
this reminds me of the missingno glitch in pokemon blue/red from my elementary
school days (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MissingNo.>)

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spc476
It sounds like they might have learned the lessons of Habitat
(<http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html> \- long but worth it; if you want to
skip to the relevant portion, scroll down to the "A Warning" section, or to
the "Keeping 'Reality' Consistent" and keep in mind this was about 25 years
ago).

