Ugh. Lots of nostalgic views here made fonder through absence I think. UO sucked was amazing but it sucked. I can't recall how many empty dungeons we walked th

Ugh. Lots of nostalgic views here made fonder through absence I think. UO sucked was amazing but it sucked. I can't recall how many empty dungeons we walked through, only to get to the treasure room filled with gold? No. Filled with other players. All just camping out, waiting for loot to drop. In fact it would be true to say I can only recall such dungeons. And then the Lich would respawn and all the n00bs would shit themselves while someone else killed it, and then everyone frantically trashed the place looking for loot like an FBI raid at the drug dealer's girlfriend's place. Honestly it was so utterly pointless to try to "play the game" that my friend and I actually indulged (I am ashamed to say) in some naked griefing. Which is to say, the only fun we had was in trying to figure out the games state machines, i.e. to goad people into killing us such that we could get the guards to kill them. How it works: stand outside a town. Be offensive. Wait till someone attacks you. Run into town. Yell "Guards! Guards!". Guard appears and kills aggressor. Take all his stuff. There were various iterations of this that Raph Koster actually wrote up [1], and it was fun. For us. Neither my friend nor I are actually assholes, and only resorted to this because it was literally the only "game" present in the entire system. We'd paid for a game, we rationalized, and by golly we were going to find one. Ok, we probably were just entitled assholes. Perhaps it got better later, but we'd gone by then. [Naked griefing, because every now and again we'd grief a wizard and they'd freeze us in place and then kill us. But we were naked. Didn't even lose a shoe.] There was also "The Great Unused!" which we had "fun" with for a while. This was an item that was called "Unused", and its icon was a photoshop lens flare. It also weighed 255, the max amount. So you couldn't move if you were carrying it. So my friend and I spent hours standing next to it, picking it up, and then dropping it on the other side, moving it two squares at a time, leapfrogging each other. We could put it on a boat (much to our relief, as we'd been lugging it for an hour by that point) and managed to bring it from a far island back to "town". Where upon, we tried to start a cult to worship "The Great Unused!" People tried to steal it, by picking it up, and we would laugh as they ran in place for an unreasonably long time (some people are just so determined), but eventually they would drop it. It didn't catch on. Now Raph's first go at Star Wars Galaxies I really enjoyed. I couldn't play very often, and yet I could still be useful, even as my friends leveled far ahead of me. I played a medic, and sometimes my heal would be the thing that saved someone from death and a long walk back. Most MMOs (that I played), once your friends are four levels ahead of you, you don't get any experience points at all if you join their party. So UO was a great starting point, and very smart, very passionate people have made significantly better games, learning every time. [1] https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaphKoster/20180627/320893/A_brief_history_of_murder_in_Ultima_Online.php https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaphKoster/20180627/320893/A...