
Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players - foggyToads
https://gametyrant.com/news/ultima-online-spent-3-years-developing-systems-that-were-destroyed-by-players
======
Animats
MMOs as virtual worlds are really hard. Red Dead Redemption online has all the
great graphics, but play is mostly people randomly killing other people. No
plot. This is a big problem with MMOs - big working worlds can be built, but
mostly people just kill each other. Look at the success of Fortnite - 8
million peak concurrent players.

Second Life has a functional economy, but no NPC ecosystem. The economy is
driven by land ownership and fashion. Second Life has landlords, who pay money
to Linden Labs for land and get a bulk discount, then rent it out. They have
most of the problems of real landlords - collecting rent, handling evictions,
dealing with tenant complaints and tenant disputes. Most of the administration
of Second Life is handled by landlords. The biggest operations make US$ 6-7
figures this way.

Fashion is a big deal in Second Life. There are designers with followings.
Fashion shows. Women are in the majority. This is entirely player based -
players are buying from other players. LL takes a cut when converting from
Linden dollars to US dollars, but it's under 10%.

Objects in SL have privileges, but not quite like files. The privileges are
Copy, Mod, and Transfer. This is key to making the economy work. Owning an
item with Copy privilege lets you make more copies, but you can't give them
other people. With Transfer privilege alone, you can give or sell the item to
others, but can't make more copies. Items like furniture and vehicles are
usually Copy, no Transfer, so you can buy one chair and set up a room, but not
set up a car dealership. Clothing is usually Transfer, no Copy, so only the
owning avatar can wear it, but you can sell it at a rummage sale. Anything
which is both Copy and Transfer can be duplicated and sold. All this is server
side, so it's hard to break the protection.

SL now has a NPC system, "animesh", but, as is typical for Linden Labs, they
just implemented it and gave out a few demo objects. Everything else is up to
the users.

SL runs about 40,000 concurrent users, which would place it at about #12 on
Steam if it were on there, around where GTA V is on Steam.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Essentially MMOs aren't just one hard problem, they are a collection of hard
problems.

There are some excellent game theoretic problems in there, the ecology is just
one of them. One of the more interesting experiments in the StarWars universe
game was the market economics of things like furs.

What I noticed during my years of WoW playing was that the market functioned
very much like the 'in app purchase' market of more casual games. For example
you could sell magic reagents which an enchanter could use to level up their
skill, this was a quick way for someone to exchange gold for skill points. It
created an economic stream for players who could "farm" the correct materials
to disenchant to get the most in demand reagents (as I recall Greater Eternal
Essence was a big seller).

Success in an MMO is in part a balance of these opportunities where a
character can trade time for value.

In the Ultima online case the skins were just worth essentially vendor cash,
but without that market force in the middle, the economy tanked. Now if
vendors paid less and less for hides as the rate of hides redeemed for cash
increased, it would provide a natural limiter on the value of that activity.

A truly successful MMO would provide a way for the MMO owner to tax the
activity of the players in a way that generated actual cash for them to pay
for servers and developers. Then the game becomes self sustaining.

~~~
Animats
_A truly successful MMO would provide a way for the MMO owner to tax the
activity of the players in a way that generated actual cash for them to pay
for servers and developers. Then the game becomes self sustaining._

Which is what Second Life does. Land payments support Linden Labs.

There is a new generation of virtual worlds - VRchat, Sansar, Sinespace, and
High Fidelity. The last three have numbers of concurrent users well below 100.
VRchat had around 10,000 at peak, and is now down to around 5,000. There's
also Facebook Spaces, which is a VR interface to Facebook that didn't catch
on, and Decentraland, which was an excuse for an initial coin offering and
whose blog is down. Those are all holdovers from the VR boom that didn't
happen.

The next new technology is Spatial OS, a back-end game engine for really big
MMOs and virtual worlds. A few games are just starting to use this. The
company behind it is valued at $500M, which means they have to charge so much
to use it that big game developers are staying away. You have to run it on
Google servers, and they don't publicly disclose the price schedule. It's
generally said to be high, though.

~~~
norswap
Based on this and my own investigation of the tech, I predict Spatial OS is
going to tank. Hard.

------
nrb
I owe my career to this game.

I was totally obsessed with UO from the moment I logged in for the first time
and created my character, a crafter who was primarily a miner/blacksmith.

That’s the thing about UO... nobody was the hero, everyone was just trying to
survive and thrive in their own way; whether that meant crawling the dungeons
as a warrior, bard, tamed, or caster; terrorizing those same dungeons as a
player-killer out to strip the dungeon crawlers of all their loot and gear;
or, spending your days baking bread or running your own player shopping mall,
your only limitation was your effort and imagination. The idea that you could
stake out your own small part of this vibrant world, right down to building a
house in the limited land space available; or making your name as an
accomplished crafter who people sought out for their superior crafted
equipment, it was so fascinating to me.

After a few years I found out about a project called the Ultima Offline
eXperiment, they were working on a server emulator that would let you run your
own worlds, with your own rules! (Their scripting engine was JavaScript,
running on the server... 19 years ago) As a teenager with no prior software
experience, this was incredible to me. I scoured the internet for anything I
could find to learn C++ and JavaScript and started screwing around with the
emulator. It was slow going at first, given the somewhat limited resources
available on the internet at the time, but I stuck with it and from that point
on I knew exactly what I wanted to spend my life doing. After that I moved to
would become the de-facto emulator for nearly 2 decades, RunUO. Through that
community I found contract work on projects that were unrelated to UO, and
from that experience transitioned to a full-time career in software about 10
years ago.

This game was hugely important to me and who I became because of it, and it
makes me so happy that stories about UO pop up every few years as a reminder
of that.

~~~
andrepd
>That’s the thing about UO... nobody was the hero, everyone was just trying to
survive and thrive in their own way; whether that meant crawling the dungeons
as a warrior, bard, tamed, or caster; terrorizing those same dungeons as a
player-killer out to strip the dungeon crawlers of all their loot and gear;
or, spending your days baking bread or running your own player shopping mall,
your only limitation was your effort and imagination. The idea that you could
stake out your own small part of this vibrant world, right down to building a
house in the limited land space available; or making your name as an
accomplished crafter who people sought out for their superior crafted
equipment, it was so fascinating to me.

This is absolute magic to me. Wow. It sounds like an absolute dream. It is my
opinion that the possibilities of a shared, persistent, virtual world were
never fully realised. The description you make: of a fantasy world,
persistent, vast, "real" (as in, internally consistent and fair), a world you
can _live_ in... modern MMOs offer absolutely none of that. It's a shame.

It speaks volumes that probably the best realisations of the MMO were...
Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, maybe Everquest? Maybe even some primitive
MUDs and, oddly enough, a couple Minecraft servers. Instead we're stuck with
WoW (and its clones), which was an _excellent_ game in its own right, but it
wasn't a _true MMO_ in the sense above described.

~~~
chii
> we're stuck with WoW (and its clones), which was an excellent game in its
> own right, but it wasn't a true MMO

because most companies didn't realize what they were copying when they copied
WoW.

True MMO - aka, a sandbox game. See this very indepth critique, if you want
more about this topic
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64)

~~~
firekvz
Let me tell you this, but.. WoW was the clone, it tried to copy already
existings MMOs, the only reason WoW was sucessfull was because all the
advertising it got

Asia (KR/JP) had already huge mmo games before WoW

~~~
nrb
That’s not completely fair... WoW was successful because it was outstandingly
polished (no other game was even close at the time) and fun to play.

~~~
kungtotte
It also got a massive amount of early hype by being a Blizzard/Warcraft IP and
not generic fantasy.

All of the buzz surrounding it prior to launch was about being able to play as
characters from the Warcraft universe, not that it was a polished MMO.

The IP got people to sign up, the polish made them stick around.

------
jghn
The promise of alpha/beta era UO really died quickly. Even more rapidly not
long after that once EQ showed up and redefined the genre.

There were other cool ideas beyond the ecology that got the axe pretty
quickly. For instance originally NPC shopkeepers kept hours so you had to show
up when they were around. Player didn't like this as it was inconvenient so
they made them permanently stationed.

Similarly there was a live economy, shopkeepers would only buy things that
they needed/wanted, and prices were tied to supply/demand. However players
demanded the ability to dump all of their junk to shopkeepers as a way to
generate money. A common pattern was that players would have mountains of
skullcaps due to building their tailoring skill, but were then upset when no
shop would buy 3000 skullcaps from them.

Ultimately it became clear that more would be players preferred "a CRPG where
other people happen to be playing" than "a virtual world", so be it.

~~~
da_chicken
> A common pattern was that players would have mountains of skullcaps due to
> building their tailoring skill, but were then upset when no shop would buy
> 3000 skullcaps from them.

That's not really a problem with the shopkeepers. It's a gross mismatch in how
difficult they made it to progress in skill versus the artificial aggregate
demand for those products. If your game design requires that your players
craft 3,000 of something, it's probably a good idea to think about what
they're going to _do_ with 3,000 of that especially if your players are going
to expect to make a profit or if they have limited inventory.

~~~
amyjess
Well, the big problem is that most craft skills weren't difficulty-based.

That is, you had a fixed chance to craft _anything_ based on your skill, each
attempt made the same exact progress towards improving your skill, and
skullcaps used up the least amount of cloth. I think some items may have been
gated based on your skill, in that you couldn't attempt them until you passed
a certain skill level, but that was it. With Tailoring, regardless of whether
you suceeded or failed, an attempt would use up however much cloth it took to
make the item you were trying to make, so if the item costs less cloth to
make, you could make more skill checks on the same bolt of cloth (IIRC, a
skullcap cost 2 yards to make, and a bolt was 50 yards).

Tinkering was even worse. I remember with Tinkering, you'd double click your
tinker tools, then select your pile of ingots. At that point, it would check
your skill, and if you failed your check, it would say "Tinkering failed" and
maybe use up an ingot or two (my memory is hazy on whether or not anything was
consumed). If you succeeded, it would bring up the menu where you could pick
any tinkerable item in the game, and if you got to the menu, you could make
anything you picked as long as you had the requisite raw materials.

IIRC, Blacksmithing was the only craft skill that was difficulty-based from
the start.

People really exploited this during character creation when making
blacksmiths. You could create your character with up to 100 total points in up
to three skills, with a maximum of 50 points in any one skill. The optimal
starting layout for a smith was 50 Blacksmithing, 49 Mining, 1 Tinkering.
You'd want the some Tinkering because your mining and blacksmithing equipment
would often wear out and the replacements were all tinkerable. If you put in
any Tinkering at all, you'd start with a free set of tinker tools, and since
the skill wasn't difficulty-based, if you needed to replace your shovel or
tongs, you'd just repeatedly attempt tinkering on your ingots until you
_finally_ succeeded your skill check, no matter how many tries it took, and
once you made it to the menu (this leads me to think that failing didn't use
up any ingots, but I could be wrong, and my memory on this is hazy), you could
make your new shovel or tongs.

They eventually made all the craft skills difficulty-based, but it took
several _years_ to implement.

~~~
sologoub
That sounds a bit off - mining was next to worthless to start with as you
gained it very fast. Probably 50 smith, 50 tinker would be better.

------
wmil
I've seen plenty of articles along this line, but the author always seems to
blame the players for the system failing.

To me it looks like their ecological model failed because it was deeply
flawed.

Real ecologies aren't really closed systems. There's generally constant energy
coming in from the sun, and that energy is the limiting factor. Humans, at a
simple level, build wealth by preserving the products of this energy.

But in original UO, a player having 10000 shirts would cause the amount of
wool produced in the world to decline. That doesn't make any sense so it's not
surprising that it didn't work.

~~~
schiffern
>Real ecologies aren't really closed systems.

Neither was theirs — things spawned! It was just overexploited, much like our
own ecosystem.

>Humans, at a simple level, build wealth by preserving the products of this
energy.

A rose-colored summary.

We also frequently engage in futile activities that _seem_ profitable, but in
fact destroy wealth by failing to appropriately manage the biogeophysical
life-support system of Spaceship Earth. See our current ecological collapse -
climate change, soil erosion, wilderness destruction, higher rates of species
extinction, aquifer pollution/depletion, overfishing, ocean acidification,
ocean plastics, etc.

What is ecologically optimal should also be what's _economically_ optimal,
because ultimately they're part of the same overall system. The imaginary
economy/ecology divide (like the imaginary human/environment divide) is itself
a source of inefficiency, because it incentivizes ignoring problems by
pretending to push them "outside the system."

If we can't make economy and ecology align our species is SOL & JWF — shit out
of luck and jolly well fucked.

In my opinion, this is the biggest and most intractable of the possible Fermi
Great Filters. Not destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons or nano-goo, but
restraining our own species from self-annihilating global ecocide via perverse
economic incentives (aka "Capitalism, the Bad Parts™").

The free market is an incredibly powerful decentralized decision-making tool,
but it should be used to enhance humanity's long-term survival rather than
undermine it.

~~~
esarbe
I think you're on to something wrt to the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter.

I sometimes wonder if it's possible at all for any species that evolved to
compete for resources to survive the stage where humans are now.

------
abootstrapper
UO was such a cool and open experience. I enjoyed it over the next generation
“turn in quest” rinse repeat MMOs. In UO I played a blacksmith and a beggar.
My friend played a miner and a fanatical priest. We never set foot in a
dungeon and saved up enough virtual money to buy our own house.

~~~
jghn
These are some of my favorite tales from the early UO days. I also had a
blacksmith friend. He never went adventuring, he spent his time in the town
square doing blacksmithing jobs for folks. I had another friend who was an
interior decorator who would decorate your home for a fee. So much more room
to explore than your typical CRPG style game.

------
Raph_Koster
I was the original lead designer on Ultima Online and the key designer of this
system. A few notes, because this article has MANY inaccuracies.

1\. Ultima Online wasn't even in development for three years total. An early
prototype was February to September 1995, done by Rick Delashmit. Starting
late August and early September 1995, the core team showed up. We showed the
game at E3 in spring of 1996 in alpha form. We showed it in beta form at E3 in
the spring of 1997. And we launched on Sept 26th, 1997. The ecology was in the
alpha test, and was removed during the beta after being rewritten by an
engineer who didn't really like or understand it.

2\. "Not many players know about" this is false. The strategy guide published
simultaneously with the game even lists all the resource values for how much
meat, hide, feathers, whatever, each creature represented. All of those
statistics remained in the game and still are there to this day twenty years
later. What was disabled was the AI. The values are still used by crafting,
harvesting, and lots of other systems in the game.

3\. Said AI is exhaustively documented on my website here:
[https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/03/uos-resource-
system/](https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/03/uos-resource-system/) (first
article, there is a sidebar with links to the follow-ons) and also collected
in my recent book POSTMORTEMS, which has a huge pile of historical info on
Ultima Online as well as Star Wars Galaxies and other games I've worked on.

4\. The reason the AI was disabled had nothing to do with why the ecology
collapsed. The AI was disabled because of the cost of doing radial searches
followed by pathfinding. "The way players fit into this equation was that the
they would embark on quests to kill the carnivorous animals and the pelts that
they gained from those quests would be worth more than those gained from the
herbivores" doesn't make any sense. :)

5\. The ecology collapsed for a different reason: we had a closed economy loop
at first, where everything was spawned from a fixed resource pool. It fell
victim to player hoarding: when players killed sheep, they then made zillions
of shirts from the wool to grind crafting advancement. Then they hoarded them
or sold them very slowly. The result was the central bank ran out of wool, and
then couldn't spawn more sheep. This is documented in one of the earliest
detailed analyses of MMO economies, Zach Simpson's "In-Game Economics of
Ultima Online," a very influential piece which led to the widespread use of
the term "faucet-drain economy" in online game design. See
[https://web.archive.org/web/20020730225856/https://www.mine-...](https://web.archive.org/web/20020730225856/https://www.mine-
control.com/zack/uoecon/uoecon.html)

6\. "This problem is also what spawned multiple instances of servers (or as
they called them, “shards”) that people know and recognize from most MMOs
today." This is not why we ended up with shards, either. UO was originally
designed for a concurrency around 250, much like Meridian 59 and other MUD
heirs of the day. Its original lifetime forecast was only 30000 or so units,
but we knew from early on we'd need multiple servers, even at that population
count. Meridian 59 launched with a whole bunch of them, for example. After we
got 50000 tester sign-ups, we were asked to hugely increase server size, which
led to Rick inventing a server boundary mirroring technology we called
"multiserver," which allowed the map load to be shared across clusters of
machines. The entire game was then rearchitected for that in between 1996 and
1997. The term shards came from the fiction of earlier Ultimas, see
[https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-
came...](https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came-from-
uo/)

7\. "At the time when 3D graphics cards were new" \-- they were nonexistent
when we started.

8\. The source for the article is a more accurate video at Ars Technica, which
has war stories from Richard Garriott. But Richard's memory is, alas, faulty
on some of these finer details.

9\. There are some great Quora answers on the tech stack for the game and
whatnot which have been on HN before, but if you're interested, you may want
to check them out.

I will say, it's awesome and flattering and super cool that so many people
still harbor so much affection and so many memories from this game. I was
around 25 when I was leading design on it, and the early days when we were
doing the impossible are still some of the fondest memories of my career. For
lots more war stories, do check out either the book, my site, or this
postmortem presented at GDC for the game's 20th anniversary:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnnsDi7Sxq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnnsDi7Sxq0)

~~~
debaserab2
Hi Raph, I don't normally do the fanboy thing, but you are an idol to me.
12-year old me grew up reading your UO patch updates regularly. When I found
your personal blog a few years ago I think I spent a week straight reading
through it.

UO remains the only MMORPG that I have ever played that felt like a truly
immersive virtual world. It ruined all MMO's that came after it for me. I
played the WoW beta for about two weeks before the grind became apparent and I
lost interest. Who the hell cares about only completing pre-made quests? In
ultima, you defined your own adventure, and if you succeeded in it your fame
could actually be known among players on your shard and not just a mechanic of
the game's code. To me, this sets the benchmark to what an MMO is supposed to
be.

There's also a slightly darker/mischievous part to my experience with UO:
Macroing (the act of automating your character via third party programs)
really introduced me to the world of programming. At first it was using point
and click step-by-step UI recording software, but after a few years I had a
fully fledged ore mining bot that could even do things like respond to a red
name appearing on the screen by recalling to a safe house programmed in an
actual turing complete language. Although I'm sure that had to be a pretty big
pain point for you, I'm not sure I'd have a career as a software engineer if
that hadn't happen.

~~~
Raph_Koster
You're welcome, I guess. Assuming you like your career.

------
jfries
This was very cool idea and is one of the things that made me start playing.
In the Official Guide book to UO you could find for each creature what it
desired. From what I understand that was lifted from the database guiding the
ecology system.

A great source for more information on the design of UO (including some bits
on the ecology system if you dig deep enough) is Raph Koster's blog:
[https://www.raphkoster.com/tag/ultima-
online/](https://www.raphkoster.com/tag/ultima-online/)

------
llao
Direct link to actual source (includes transcript if you prefer reading):
[https://video.arstechnica.com/watch/war-stories-ultima-
onlin...](https://video.arstechnica.com/watch/war-stories-ultima-online-the-
virtual-ecology)

------
code_duck
The headline seems a bit dramatic and even incorrect. The system wasn’t
destroyed, but fictional digital wildlife that they stocked their server with
was hunted to near extinction, along with their notion that their system had a
maintainable ‘ecological balance’.

My headline would be ‘Ultima Online developers created unsuccessful virtual
ecological system’. I’d think they could have fixed this by increasing any
penalty and reducing any gains had by killing “friendly” animals, but the
article doesn’t go into detail about what they changed before removing it. If
the only penalty for obtaining resources from the ‘wrong’ animal is that your
character is immoral in a fictional world, I could see why they’d have these
results.

The article also makes it sound like, or even states, that the problem was
overpopulation on the servers.

------
kvakvs
It had to be balanced around the main carnivore species ruling the online
world, the players. Which apparently wasn't done, and then simple respawn with
some simple dynamic rules based on population and rate of death, would have
done it much better.

~~~
jghn
My understanding was that part of the problem was that they expected more of
the RPing MUD crowd to show up, not the typical gamer crowd. Whether or not
their calculations would have been similarly incorrect even if their userbase
predictions were spot on is another question altogether

~~~
swozey
The Catskills server was the roleplay server and it had actual die-hard
roleplayers, the Origin storytellers (counselors? I forget) did a lot of work
to help them with events, etc. For instance an entire clan (Shadowclan Orcs)
took over the NPC owned Yew Orc Fort. There were big Pirate groups too in
Buc's Den. I remember the Paladins of Trinsic, Yew Militia and the Undead
(they may have been called something else? They had the Necropolis).

It was some of the most fun I've had in a game ever.

The servers really had different cultures. I really loved Siege Perilous while
it was doing the Color Wars. The map was 4 castles with 4 different teams,
you'd spawn inside your team castle surrounded by chests full of GM
weapons/armor that made you immediately become a GM of that item (say
Grandmaster Halbredier) then run out and fight the other teams. It was almost
like a Battlefield game. Then they changed it to some boring mode for beta
testing.

I was 11-12 when I got into UO in 1996. I could talk about it all day. I miss
it.

The 2nd Age I think is when I quit. Whenever they added riding cockroaches and
neon colors and all that other stuff.

[http://www.shadowclan.org/about.html](http://www.shadowclan.org/about.html)

~~~
jghn
I remember it well. I played on Lake Superior which had a smaller but also
prominent RP scene at the time, albeit more villain oriented. For instance one
of our more well known RPing PK guilds was featured in Wired:
[https://www.wired.com/1998/05/ultima/](https://www.wired.com/1998/05/ultima/).

The two groups had a bit of a rivalry on the then main message board,
Crossroads of Britannia. LS called the Catskills group "Care Bears" and they
called us "The Biker Gang". To my knowledge that was the first usage of care
bears in that manner, but I'm sure it predates us. I remember one time when
they all came over to our server with "care bear" characters and "invaded" the
main player run tavern, Silk's Tavern.

My roommate at the time was a prominent RPing PK on Catskills, I was a
prominent RPing anti-PK on LS. Folks from both groups made road trips for a
house party/gathering at Catskills own Elawyn of Yew's RL house.

On the LS side it often was the case that both sides of the RPing PvP world
would concoct RP reasons to band together to combat general asshattery
regardless of if they were red/blue.

Siege Perilous & T2A was right around the time I was getting out of the game.
I was still playing, but much less as college was over and real job had begun.
Combined with the game rapidly becoming less fun for me and I just found
myself playing less and less

~~~
swozey
Aurics Moongates.com is still around if you want a trip down memory lane.
During Alpha/Beta it was a place where a lot of us went to chat while we
waited for discs to arrive.

Unfortunately most of the music doesn't load any longer. I always loved the
Ultima soundtracks.

[http://moongates.com/](http://moongates.com/)

edit: [https://soundcloud.com/mmomusic/sets/ultima-
online](https://soundcloud.com/mmomusic/sets/ultima-online)

edit2: This sounds terrible not as a midi

------
adrianm
I recommend Raph Koster's latest book "Postmortems" for a digest of his
experience developing Ultima Online, including some background on the ecology
that never shipped.
[https://www.raphkoster.com/games/books/](https://www.raphkoster.com/games/books/)

------
sologoub
UO was an amazing experiment in self-organization and survival in the world
with little protection. At least for a while.

The initial pre-facet gameplay basically split between the protected town
space and free-for-all wilderness. As soon as one wondered outside town guard
area, anything could happen - you could attack anyone and anyone could attack
you, costing you all you carried. Or nothing could happen. That was the genius
of the game play - just like in the real world, once you went out into the
wild, it was you against all.

In this vacuum of law, guilds emerged that controlled and protected parts of
the wilderness. You joined one of them and helped build society from scratch.
Patrols were organized, crime was fought. Turf was defended. Crafters were
protected.

A pseudo medieval society emerged with their own casts and hierarchies. All
shards were different.

At the time, I played Pacific shard for the MOD guild. Then the rule change
came that ended all of this - they split pvp and non-pvp realms. This is when
the wipeout happened.

Without the pvp players, the non-pvp realm became overrun. You could sit and
wait in the most dangerous dungeon for hours to get a chance to slay a dragon.
Previously, this was prevented by pvp players attacking the dragon hunters,
now people could just kemp out in the most valuable armor and carrying most
valuable weapons. Things you wouldn’t think of using before for fear of losing
them to another player were now fair game.

Many of the veteran players retereated to the Seige Perilous shard with
extremely punitive rules and hard game play, but many left. Siege lasted for
3-4 years for me before I finally gave up.

In the end, the lawless, ruleless gameplay that required society to emerge was
such an amazing experience that I’ll be forever thankful to the devs for
allowing us to experience it. Such things help one understand and believe in
humanity, despite all our flaws and the few bad apples that emerge.

~~~
kalekold
Trammel completely ruined UO because of exactly what you describe. It was so
sad and totally avoidable. I left not long after too.

------
TheAceOfHearts
I'm surprised to see this here, I actually just stumbled on this video a
little earlier on YouTube. It's actually a series with multiple entries.
Here's the playlist [0] if anyone is interested in checking out the others
videos.

Getting an inside look at game development is always fascinating. I wish more
developers would talk about their experiences. You can usually take away
incredibly valuable lessons from videos like these. For example, from this
Ultima Online thing you'd learn about the importance of user-testing.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKBPwuu3eCYkScmqpD9xE...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKBPwuu3eCYkScmqpD9xE7UZsszweVO0n)

------
m0llusk
In this case players had the ability to move around and attack things. If
trapping live animals or training pets were options then players might have
tried that instead. Pets in particular trigger protective impulses in people.
The issue is not the players but a simulation focused on violence and
extraction.

~~~
DonHopkins
Oh, you could tame animals to make them your pets.

One Halloween I logged into UO, and my character had been transformed into a
deer, as some kind of a sick joke! All my inventory was gone, and all I could
do was deer stuff.

Then some bastard came along and TAMED ME. That totally sucked! I had to
follow him around obediently all day. I guess I'm lucky he didn't skin me and
make me into leather armor.

------
pkaye
I played it only for a few days because they had high level players going
around killing newbies for fun. My first step out of town some guy kills me in
one shot. I went back to continue and he does it a second time and third time.
Eventually gave up in frustration.

~~~
starpilot
lol owned

~~~
jeffrom
Think you mean oOooOO OooOoOOo

~~~
swozey
Oh man, what was it, Ghostspeak? Then you could ask a ghost who had killed
them and if they were near you..

~~~
jghn
spirit speak

------
sehugg
Economies are hard, as are game economies:
[https://www.raphkoster.com/games/snippets/the-evolution-
of-u...](https://www.raphkoster.com/games/snippets/the-evolution-of-uos-
economy/)

~~~
aiiane
This is one of the things that impresses me so much with EVE Online - that the
economy has stayed as stable as it has. (Sure, there has been some inflation,
and some interesting swings at times, but it still fundamentally _works_.)

~~~
hannasanarion
Part of that is there is no vendor trash in EVE. Everything is valuable to
someone. Items aren't leveled or quality ranked, they have upsides and
downsides that you can balance, there are practically no "strictly better"
item relationships, even the noobie ships and guns are useful in the late game
for low risk travel ships. This item structure, plus PLEX and insurance for
money sinks, lets them control inflation and keep the economy healthy.

------
shagie
Related: A collection of slides on in game economics by the former (in 2000)
director of technology at Origin (not a UO team member):
[https://web.archive.org/web/20020730225318/https://www.mine-...](https://web.archive.org/web/20020730225318/https://www.mine-
control.com/zack/uoecon/slides.html)

The model economy (related to Muds) in Imaginary Realties by Dan Hastings,
preserved by Richard Bartle :
[http://mud.co.uk/dvw/themodeleconomy.html](http://mud.co.uk/dvw/themodeleconomy.html)

The basics of these economies is that there is a faucet of some resource and a
drain drain on that resource (it goes somewhere and is ultimately destroyed...
some how). The economics aspect has a very hard problem with balancing those
faucets and drains.

------
gluelogic
I love any UO-related post!

Speaking of killing everything in UO, in what would be considered the "T2A"
era of this game (I'm estimating something like 1998-1999), I remember
manipulating the line-of-sight bug that let you attack NPCs inside town in
such a way that the town guards wouldn't come (There were many "criminal acts"
you could commit, like attacking or stealing from a player, and if you did
them in town the guards would instantly kill you).

I would town kill NPCs to get colors of cloth that were not achievable using
the dye tubs available to you. They would spawn with colors that were less
garish than the ones you would end up with if you dyed them. I would chop
their clothes up, sort them by colors, and use the raw cloth to create clothes
on my tailor. It was a great money maker, because killing NPCs was quick and
easy, and in the end it's just clothing items, but the product was not
available anywhere else. If someone killed you in the process, you were naked
except for a weapon anyway, and people generally did not understand what I
wanted with the cloth in the first place so it didn't get looted.

From the housing system to the criminal system, UO was just the best MMO. You
could do anything, but you had to suffer the consequences. I love the totally
free-market economy it gives rise to. I feel like MMORPGs got a lot softer and
less "libertarian" (if I can use that word without all the political baggage),
for better or worse. Probably for better, because WoW was popular in a way
that UO never would be.

I always heard Anarchy Online was great, but I never got around to playing it.

~~~
codezero
I played anarchy a bit. It was ok but mostly just pvp and bugs. Shadowbane was
where the hardcore pvpers went as well as call of asheron I think?

Edit: Asheron’s Call and Dark age of Camelot.

Oh gosh. Kids these days have no clue! Or maybe they do.

~~~
kalekold
Dark Age of Camelot was amazing. I remember many times standing in the
frontier as part of a friendly army facing the enemy both armies equaling 100
to 200 people. Someone would give the order to charge and all hell broke
loose. Defending keeps was also fun, throwing things off the battlements. Good
times.

------
swozey
I'm loving this UO talk, I just found this Postmortem by GDC published in Sep
2018 (so I think it's new? I've never seen it)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnnsDi7Sxq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnnsDi7Sxq0)

This is a much watch if MMOs fascinate you. They're very transparent.
Absolutely great video.

edit: Oh my god they bring up FlyGuys prostitution ring..

------
zaroth
The price of pelts should have dropped to zero from the oversupply.

~~~
jghn
That sort of thing did happen but also quickly was removed.

~~~
Raph_Koster
Players hated making things that had no value. They knew full well there was
no market, but they were conditioned to expect a reward for doing it anyway. I
suspect players would be much more tolerant of it today.

------
codezero
I need to read this but as a beta and long term player of UO, the bugs made
the game even better.

~~~
geniium
Yeah! Like when the servers were going down we knew the last 15 Minutes
weren’t saved and the whole world was going crazy and everyone was using his
best weapons and turning red.

~~~
codezero
My favorite was stacking flour on the shore and teleporting through locked
doors from the plank of a ship.

Also there was a massive subculture of collectors who grabbed the rare items
not locked down after a server reboot. The game shipped with a lot of bugs
that they fixed by adding tiles after the fact and some weren’t locked down so
people grabbed them up. My speciality was fruit bowls :P

Once we broke into a GMs house and stole an all red sword.

Also using circle of transparency to mark a rune inside a house.

Teleporting demons and dragons into peoples towers. Gosh the fun never ended.

~~~
kalekold
I remember asking a mage for a gate to another city, he opened one and I
stepped through. I found myself on a tiny little desert island whose only
inhabitant was an extremely large dragon lol. I wasn't even mad, I laughed out
loud as I died.

------
jccalhoun
I never played UO and I've never spent a great deal of time playing any MMO. I
know it would take a lot of effort but I think a neat solution would be that
if all the animals were killed then people would start starving to death.

I wonder if social pressures could somehow be codified into a game. If someone
goes around killing all the players then maybe none of the vendors will want
to do business with that person or something? Though I'm sure there are ways
players could still explain that and I'm sure people who have spent a lot more
time thinking about MMOs than me could explain why that wouldn't work

~~~
Raph_Koster
This and many other experiments were tried in the MUDs and early days of MMOs.
The idea of denying services to those who killed a lot worked pretty well on
many UO player-run shards.

------
noobiemcfoob
All video games are crippled by player's wish fulfilment trumping any attempt
to make genuine mechanics. Everything must be fun in the end.

------
AzzieElbab
Interesting complaint, but didn't ultima also have a system where you could
only raise skills by killing things over and over? It's successor - Everquest
was even more hostile to having fun. Wow softened up this horrible trend

------
lordnacho
Sounds like they just left it to pure ecology to somehow balance? Did they
think of making depopulated species harder to kill, or make them mate faster?

~~~
Raph_Koster
We actually wanted the scarcity, so it would affect prices and desirability.
We just didn't expect _everything_ to be scarce.

------
chiefalchemist
23 comments so far and few if any seemed to be troubled by the fact the game
players we're so willing to kill __everything__. Untethered?

~~~
manfredo
Not uncommon among real people when they enter a new world. Take for instance,
bison being nearly eradicated within a century of significant settlement west
of the Appalachians.

Not to mention, new players were probably practicing combat. It's not like
anyone would normally have concern for killing virtual goats and rabbits.

~~~
JamilD
Or the extinction of the California grizzly within 75 years of gold being
discovered. It’s a common pattern — maybe the issue isn’t with the game…

~~~
code_duck
I would be far more likely to hunt a species to extinction in a fictional
video game where it doesn’t remotely matter at all than in real life.

~~~
chiefalchemist
So being wired to find that entertaining is a good thing?

Regardless, given what we're seeing in real life I'm not so sure the appeal is
limited to video game activity.

~~~
swozey
I have friends with hunting ranches where I could go shoot anything I want,
like Axis deer, Ostriches, etc. I don't hunt. When I played UO I killed
thousands of rabbits to get pelts to raise my tailoring skill. I don't see how
these correlate whatsoever. I've also mowed down people in Grand Theft Auto
but am very cautious around pedestrians in real life.

------
jeffrallen
They should have given Bambi a BFG3000 to defend herself.

~~~
Raph_Koster
Early on, creatures learned skills just like players did. In the alpha, this
led to wolves who hunted bunnies, and some bunnies the bunnies escaped and
learned a little, and eventually there were both dire wolves (their name
actually changed to "wise elder wolf" or something) and vorpal bunnies. These
latter ones killed many unsuspecting players in the alpha, and we had to
remove the creature learning because it was bad UX> We left in a vorpal bunny
template in the launch game, however, as an Easter Egg.

~~~
gluelogic
I remember the vorpal bunnies. I seem to remember a bug where they would
sometimes appear as an energy vortex sprite...

Can you elaborate on why the creature learning was bad UX? Did people get
irritated when the wolves were killing their rabbits?

~~~
Raph_Koster
It was bad UX because people couldn't easily tell the difference between a
vorpal bunny and a weak one. The name wasn't enough. UO had a "consider" style
skill but no one used it (I forget the name, "evaluate" or something).
Eventually, "consider" was streamlined in MMOs into color coding mobiles, a la
WoW. But in UO, people relied on the creature's sprite to assess difficulty.

The energy vortex sprite was a different Easter Egg iirc. And sometimes, you
could get energy vortices that were llama-shaped...

~~~
gluelogic
Yeah! The purple llama.

The skill was probably Animal Lore.

Best MMO ever! Thanks for giving insight into it.

------
etxm
The two things I loved most about UO:

* no opt-in required PVP with full looting

* the bugs / exploits

I had a very high bounty. :D

The chance that you could actually lose months worth of work always made the
game heart pounding exciting when you were running for your life.

Favorite bugs:

* mage/carpenter could build tables, stack them, teleport to the top, and jump through people’s roofs to loot houses

* stealing weapons and armor off people and killing them with it

* mouse tip hover + overloaded treasure chest trap

* dying bags in a trading window

I LOVED this game.

Edit: what awesome bugs, exploits, and rares do you remember?

~~~
ThrowawayR2
Apropos of nothing, I've always found the behavior of the players of MMOs and
online games one of the clearest telltales that sociopathy is a lot more
prevalent that most people think it is.

~~~
Raph_Koster
The term I used at the time was "virtual sociopath" \-- you'd think sociopathy
is more common if you glance at forums today, too... but there's a huge
element of disinhibition brought about by non-personal contact. It doesn't
mean the person is like that in person at all.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> _It doesn 't mean the person is like that in person at all._

While I defer to your expertise, I have to say I find it a bit difficult to
believe. Being in an online game just changes the form of interaction between
people, not the fact that they're interacting. (We couldn't, for example, say
"Oh, X is a jerk over the telephone but s/he's not like that in person at
all".) These players know full well that there was another human being at the
other end of their misbehavior.

Whatever the online analogue of " _in vino, veritas_ " might be, I would be
willing to bet that it's true and that these players are actually revealing a
significant aspect of their true nature.

~~~
Raph_Koster
Actually, we _do_ in fact say that X is a jerk over the telephone but less so
in person. It's pretty well studied. The generic term is "psychological
disinhibition" and it used to come up all the time around the issue of email
and tone.

