26 ms·

Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

249 points by foggyToads 8y ago

zaroth 8y ago
The price of pelts should have dropped to zero from the oversupply.
- jghn 8y ago
  That sort of thing did happen but also quickly was removed.
  - Raph_Koster 8y ago
    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.
  - qwerty456127 8y ago
    Why? Isn't ecology indivisible from economy in almost any system that includes humans?
jfries 8y ago
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/
jeffrallen 8y ago
They should have given Bambi a BFG3000 to defend herself.
- HoochTHX 8y ago
  That would explain the killer rabbits in FF Online.
- trynewideas 8y ago
  Or at least magic-resistant, human-transmittable chronic wasting disease. Or deer ticks.
- Raph_Koster 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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 8y ago
sehugg 8y ago
Economies are hard, as are game economies: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/snippets/the-evolution-of-uos-economy/ https://www.raphkoster.com/games/snippets/the-evolution-of-u...
- aiiane 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
  - pmiller2 8y ago
    I think it helps that CCP has an economist on staff to manage it.
  - Raph_Koster 8y ago
    Trivia: Eve was originally conceived as "UO in space." :) And Runescape was "UO on the web." Even Neopets was originally inspired by UO.
kvakvs 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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
jghn 8y ago
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.
- tomjakubowski 8y ago
  The earlier economy you describe sounds a bit like Dartmud. I think they gave in eventually too and started supplying the shopkeepers with new money every so often, however some of them still retain in-game "opening hours".
  - supernintendo 8y ago
    Raph Koster cites MUDs (including Dartmud) as inspiration for Ultima Online [1]. UO as it existed around the T2A / Renaissance era was, in many ways, a lot closer in design to MUDs than it was to modern MMORPGs. [1] https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/10/31/emmerts-serious-games-keynote/ https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/10/31/emmerts-serious-games-...
- sehugg 8y ago
  Also there were things like the "Clean Up Britannia" event, where players were encouraged to cull their item collection in exchange for neon hair dye and other goodies: http://www.uoguide.com/Clean_Up_Britannia_(1999) http://www.uoguide.com/Clean_Up_Britannia_(1999)
- da_chicken 8y ago
  > 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.
pkaye 8y ago
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.
- cronix 8y ago
  Sounds like the spawn system in most games.
  - da_chicken 8y ago
    It's exactly why later MMOs had PvP rules. Even WoW's PvP servers didn't allow PvP in the starting areas.
- starpilot 8y ago
  lol owned
  - jeffrom 8y ago
    Think you mean oOooOO OooOoOOo
    - swozey 8y ago
      Oh man, what was it, Ghostspeak? Then you could ask a ghost who had killed them and if they were near you..
      - jghn 8y ago
        spirit speak
  - debaserab2 8y ago
    don't forget to stand over the corpse and spam your bow hotkey to keep the animation on that one particular frame where it looks hunched over the corpse...
abootstrapper 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
llao 8y ago
Direct link to actual source (includes transcript if you prefer reading): https://video.arstechnica.com/watch/war-stories-ultima-online-the-virtual-ecology https://video.arstechnica.com/watch/war-stories-ultima-onlin...
chiefalchemist 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        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.
        manfredo 8y ago
        Humans have hunted for nearly the entirety of their existence. Mammals' forms of play simulate predation and evasion. Whether or not it's a good thing is subjective, but that humans innately find some forms of violence entertaining is pretty clear.
TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
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=PLKBPwuu3eCYkScmqpD9xE7UZsszweVO0n https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKBPwuu3eCYkScmqpD9xE...
nrb 8y ago
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.
- tobz 8y ago
  Heh, this is funny... I worked on an emulator for Dark Age of Camelot _and_ an emulator for World of Warcraft (WCell) and attribute experience from both projects to getting my first software gig. I also remember (fondly) going through RunUO with .NET Reflector to pick up tips and tricks. :)
  - na85 8y ago
    I worked with runuo quite a lot and while I too have lots of fond memories, it's actually a huge mess of a codebase. It's object-oriented except when it's not. It's modular except where it isn't. It "optimizes" for $number_of_cores_on_your_box but doesn't actually use them for anything but world saves. Almost none of it is commented or documented (doxygen doesn't count as documentation). I think runuo excelled not because it was significantly better but because it was less shitty than POL and Sphere that came before it.
Animats 8y ago
MMOs as virtual worlds are really hard. Red Dead Redemption online has all the great graphics, but play is mostly people randomly killing other people. No plot. This is a big problem with MMOs - big working worlds can be built, but mostly people just kill each other. Look at the success of Fortnite - 8 million peak concurrent players. Second Life has a functional economy, but no NPC ecosystem. The economy is driven by land ownership and fashion. Second Life has landlords, who pay money to Linden Labs for land and get a bulk discount, then rent it out. They have most of the problems of real landlords - collecting rent, handling evictions, dealing with tenant complaints and tenant disputes. Most of the administration of Second Life is handled by landlords. The biggest operations make US$ 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.
- cosarara 8y ago
  How are objects created in the first place? If I like your object, can I just make another one that looks exactly the same?
  - WJW 8y ago
    Yes, but then you just trade time for gold again. The whole point was to get something without paying the "time" cost.
code_duck 8y ago
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.
etxm 8y ago
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?
- jghn 8y ago
  Keep in mind that players like yourself are precisely the reason games like this don't really exist anymore.
  - etxm 8y ago
    Games like what? Buggy games? Yes the do. Games with real risk? It requires an aggressive player to make that risk real otherwise there is no point to making a game with risk if everyone is just smithing horse shoes for each other. I’d argue that games like UO don’t exist anymore because most people don’t want to play a game where you can lose everything.
  - foobiekr 8y ago
    Except for the bugs, a lot of this sounds great to me. I haven’t played an MMO style pvp game since Interplay (yes, dial-up modem banks) and this is the first tine an MMO game description has sounded fun to me.
    - jghn 8y ago
      It was a lot of fun. The problem was more of a culture clash. You had a mix of RPers, CRPGers, and more standard gamers excited for PVP possibilities. There were plenty of people in the first two camps who were into PVP, that wasn't a problem for most folks. It was the constant griefing, dealing with bug exploiting goons, being teabagged by people named things like AzZBlaSTA which really wore people down. I ran with a very PVP oriented crowd. My experience was that 100% of them who describe the game in the specific ways the GP did were what caused the average player to throw up their hands and look for a much more controlled world. It's not that these were bad people per se, they were just playing a very different game than the rest of us and the two sides were never really going to get along.
wmil 8y ago
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.
- DennisP 8y ago
  It doesn't seem that unrealistic to me, given how much of the real ecosystem humans have destroyed so far, and continue to destroy. In fact, I'd say the developers could have predicted this outcome with a quick glance at the real world. You have a good point that the natural world renews itself from incoming energy, but that doesn't save it when it's destroyed at a faster rate than it can renew.
- schiffern 8y ago
  >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.
noobiemcfoob 8y ago
All video games are crippled by player's wish fulfilment trumping any attempt to make genuine mechanics. Everything must be fun in the end.
swozey 8y ago
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..
lordnacho 8y ago
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 8y ago
  We actually wanted the scarcity, so it would affect prices and desirability. We just didn't expect everything to be scarce.
adrianm 8y ago
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/
codezero 8y ago
I need to read this but as a beta and long term player of UO, the bugs made the game even better.
- geniium 8y ago
  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.
  - gluelogic 8y ago
    Memories. What did we call this? "Server wars" if I remember correctly.
  - codezero 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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.
shagie 8y ago
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-control.com/zack/uoecon/slides.html https://web.archive.org/web/20020730225318/https://www.mine-... 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.
balibebas 8y ago
If you liked Unferworld and have Android phone get: SHATTERED PIXEL DUNGEON
motbus2 8y ago
Let's face it amd be realistic about this. Welcome to the programmer life. You build they break.
motbus2 8y ago
Welcome to programmer life. You build they break.
Raph_Koster 8y ago
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-control.com/zack/uoecon/uoecon.html https://web.archive.org/web/20020730225856/https://www.mine-... 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-from-uo/ https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came... 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
m0llusk 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
gluelogic 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
jccalhoun 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
sologoub 8y ago
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.
- sologoub 8y ago
  PVP is player vs player, where you can kill or be killed by other players. UO has a complex reputation and title system to help with this. Murders actually counted and had a price in game play.
- kalekold 8y ago
  Trammel completely ruined UO because of exactly what you describe. It was so sad and totally avoidable. I left not long after too.
AzzieElbab 8y ago
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

249 points by foggyToads 8y ago

zaroth 8y ago

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

jghn 8y ago
That sort of thing did happen but also quickly was removed.
- Raph_Koster 8y ago
  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.
- qwerty456127 8y ago
  Why? Isn't ecology indivisible from economy in almost any system that includes humans?

jfries 8y ago

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/

jeffrallen 8y ago

They should have given Bambi a BFG3000 to defend herself.

HoochTHX 8y ago
That would explain the killer rabbits in FF Online.
trynewideas 8y ago
Or at least magic-resistant, human-transmittable chronic wasting disease. Or deer ticks.
Raph_Koster 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago

sehugg 8y ago

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

aiiane 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
- pmiller2 8y ago
  I think it helps that CCP has an economist on staff to manage it.
- Raph_Koster 8y ago
  Trivia: Eve was originally conceived as "UO in space." :) And Runescape was "UO on the web." Even Neopets was originally inspired by UO.

kvakvs 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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

jghn 8y ago

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.

tomjakubowski 8y ago
The earlier economy you describe sounds a bit like Dartmud. I think they gave in eventually too and started supplying the shopkeepers with new money every so often, however some of them still retain in-game "opening hours".
- supernintendo 8y ago
  Raph Koster cites MUDs (including Dartmud) as inspiration for Ultima Online [1]. UO as it existed around the T2A / Renaissance era was, in many ways, a lot closer in design to MUDs than it was to modern MMORPGs. [1] https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/10/31/emmerts-serious-games-keynote/ https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/10/31/emmerts-serious-games-...
sehugg 8y ago
Also there were things like the "Clean Up Britannia" event, where players were encouraged to cull their item collection in exchange for neon hair dye and other goodies: http://www.uoguide.com/Clean_Up_Britannia_(1999) http://www.uoguide.com/Clean_Up_Britannia_(1999)
da_chicken 8y ago
> 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.

pkaye 8y ago

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.

cronix 8y ago
Sounds like the spawn system in most games.
- da_chicken 8y ago
  It's exactly why later MMOs had PvP rules. Even WoW's PvP servers didn't allow PvP in the starting areas.
starpilot 8y ago
lol owned
- jeffrom 8y ago
  Think you mean oOooOO OooOoOOo
  - swozey 8y ago
    Oh man, what was it, Ghostspeak? Then you could ask a ghost who had killed them and if they were near you..
    - jghn 8y ago
      spirit speak
- debaserab2 8y ago
  don't forget to stand over the corpse and spam your bow hotkey to keep the animation on that one particular frame where it looks hunched over the corpse...

abootstrapper 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

llao 8y ago

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

chiefalchemist 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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.
      - manfredo 8y ago
        Humans have hunted for nearly the entirety of their existence. Mammals' forms of play simulate predation and evasion. Whether or not it's a good thing is subjective, but that humans innately find some forms of violence entertaining is pretty clear.

TheAceOfHearts 8y ago

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=PLKBPwuu3eCYkScmqpD9xE7UZsszweVO0n https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKBPwuu3eCYkScmqpD9xE...

nrb 8y ago

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.

tobz 8y ago
Heh, this is funny... I worked on an emulator for Dark Age of Camelot _and_ an emulator for World of Warcraft (WCell) and attribute experience from both projects to getting my first software gig. I also remember (fondly) going through RunUO with .NET Reflector to pick up tips and tricks. :)
- na85 8y ago
  I worked with runuo quite a lot and while I too have lots of fond memories, it's actually a huge mess of a codebase. It's object-oriented except when it's not. It's modular except where it isn't. It "optimizes" for $number_of_cores_on_your_box but doesn't actually use them for anything but world saves. Almost none of it is commented or documented (doxygen doesn't count as documentation). I think runuo excelled not because it was significantly better but because it was less shitty than POL and Sphere that came before it.

Animats 8y ago

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.

cosarara 8y ago
How are objects created in the first place? If I like your object, can I just make another one that looks exactly the same?
- WJW 8y ago
  Yes, but then you just trade time for gold again. The whole point was to get something without paying the "time" cost.

code_duck 8y ago

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.

etxm 8y ago

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?

jghn 8y ago
Keep in mind that players like yourself are precisely the reason games like this don't really exist anymore.
- etxm 8y ago
  Games like what? Buggy games? Yes the do. Games with real risk? It requires an aggressive player to make that risk real otherwise there is no point to making a game with risk if everyone is just smithing horse shoes for each other. I’d argue that games like UO don’t exist anymore because most people don’t want to play a game where you can lose everything.
- foobiekr 8y ago
  Except for the bugs, a lot of this sounds great to me. I haven’t played an MMO style pvp game since Interplay (yes, dial-up modem banks) and this is the first tine an MMO game description has sounded fun to me.
  - jghn 8y ago
    It was a lot of fun. The problem was more of a culture clash. You had a mix of RPers, CRPGers, and more standard gamers excited for PVP possibilities. There were plenty of people in the first two camps who were into PVP, that wasn't a problem for most folks. It was the constant griefing, dealing with bug exploiting goons, being teabagged by people named things like AzZBlaSTA which really wore people down. I ran with a very PVP oriented crowd. My experience was that 100% of them who describe the game in the specific ways the GP did were what caused the average player to throw up their hands and look for a much more controlled world. It's not that these were bad people per se, they were just playing a very different game than the rest of us and the two sides were never really going to get along.

wmil 8y ago

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.

DennisP 8y ago
It doesn't seem that unrealistic to me, given how much of the real ecosystem humans have destroyed so far, and continue to destroy. In fact, I'd say the developers could have predicted this outcome with a quick glance at the real world. You have a good point that the natural world renews itself from incoming energy, but that doesn't save it when it's destroyed at a faster rate than it can renew.
schiffern 8y ago
>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.

noobiemcfoob 8y ago

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

swozey 8y ago

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..

lordnacho 8y ago

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 8y ago
We actually wanted the scarcity, so it would affect prices and desirability. We just didn't expect everything to be scarce.

adrianm 8y ago

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/

codezero 8y ago

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

geniium 8y ago
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.
- gluelogic 8y ago
  Memories. What did we call this? "Server wars" if I remember correctly.
- codezero 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.

shagie 8y ago

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-control.com/zack/uoecon/slides.html https://web.archive.org/web/20020730225318/https://www.mine-... 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.

balibebas 8y ago

If you liked Unferworld and have Android phone get: SHATTERED PIXEL DUNGEON

motbus2 8y ago

Let's face it amd be realistic about this. Welcome to the programmer life. You build they break.

motbus2 8y ago

Welcome to programmer life. You build they break.

Raph_Koster 8y ago

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-control.com/zack/uoecon/uoecon.html https://web.archive.org/web/20020730225856/https://www.mine-... 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-from-uo/ https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came... 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

m0llusk 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

gluelogic 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.

jccalhoun 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

sologoub 8y ago

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.

sologoub 8y ago
PVP is player vs player, where you can kill or be killed by other players. UO has a complex reputation and title system to help with this. Murders actually counted and had a price in game play.
kalekold 8y ago
Trammel completely ruined UO because of exactly what you describe. It was so sad and totally avoidable. I left not long after too.

AzzieElbab 8y ago

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