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We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

564 points by yreg 4y ago

andrewmcwatters 4y ago
I get the feeling that any good, truly "massive" MMO eventually has to deal with stuff like this beyond a technical level, beyond a gameplay balance level, and straight into social ramifications. As a younger guy than these players, this story reminded me of the Disk of returning and Thordur's black hole from RuneScape.
- nominusllc 4y ago
  The solution is to make the pipeline for reporting bugs easy and lucrative enough to encourage bug reports.
victorclf 4y ago
Still hopeful that someone will make a new exciting sandbox MMO that fills the gap left by UO.
- v8xi 4y ago
  there with you - UO was the greatest game I ever played
  - axus 4y ago
    A game development pair working on a kind of similar MMO for the last 10 years. "Haven and Hearth" has all the house building, player killing, crafting, and trading. No pre-made safe zones, though, and it resets every year or two. I think all of these small, independent efforts fall under the radar without the advertising of more expensive games. I don't know if UO was well-advertised at the time, but it was certainly the only option at launch!
    - nerdix 4y ago
      UO was well advertised before launch. One of my most prized possessions as a kid was a summer of 1996 (want to say June) issue of PC Games magazine that had an in depth preview of UO. It came out about a year before the game actually launched. I probably read that article about 100 times. I was never going to get my parents to pay the monthly subscription fee so that magazine and my imagination was the closest I got to UO until I was in college and could afford it myself (that was during Age of Shadows and EverQuest had already supplanted it as the most popular MMORPG) In the late 90s, Ultima was still one of the biggest (if not the biggest) PC/Western RPG franchises. UO launched before Ultima 9 kind of killed the franchise. I'd be surprised to find anyone who was really into PC gaming during that era that hadn't heard of Ultima Online.
- no_wizard 4y ago
  It appears to be still around? https://uo.com/ https://uo.com/ EDIT: looks like it changed hands a number of times, very unlikely its as good as it once was, I imagine
  - cottenio 4y ago
    Not really “changed hands.” Stages: 1. EA with original Origin devs 2. EA post-Origin 3. EA, integrated into Online group (with Westwood) 4. EA Mythic (UO & DAOC) 5. Broadsword (owned by the former GM of EA Mythic under a licensing deal) I think that’s fairly accurate. Older devs correct me if I’m wrong.
- hoten 4y ago
  I've been working on this sort of game for awhile now. Never too seriously, though that will change in 2023. Hardly worth sharing at this point, but I will anyway. https://hoten.cc/gridia/play/ https://hoten.cc/gridia/play/ I need to seriously think about what I want out of this game (more of a mmo game engine), but "UO-like" is definitely top of mind.
  - alexose 4y ago
    I was excited to play but I couldn't make it past the character creation screen. There's a bug preventing me from spending all of my attribute points.
    - hoten 4y ago
      Huh, that's odd. I can't figure out how to get that problem to happen. Not even selected a preset works? By the way, if you manage to get it to work, make an account starting with '@' to get admin privileges. You could also explore the local play–it's the same server code, but running in a web worker instead of on my server.
      - victorclf 4y ago
        I got the same bug when I clicked create button without filling the "character name" field. Great demo btw!
        hoten 4y ago
        ooooh yup that'll do it, thanks!
- chongli 4y ago
  Sadly I don’t think it can be done. I mean sure, the game could be written, that’s not a problem. The trick is to get people to show up and in particular get players to play who aren’t “UO fans.” UO was amazing because a ton of people played it who weren’t UO fans or even MMO fans because such things didn’t exist. The players were simply RPG fans wanting to try something new and what happened was magical and serendipitous. Now any game that tries to do the same will only attract UO fans or classic MMO fans. That original audience of people who were essentially naïve but open to a new experience are gone.
  - jghn 4y ago
    It doesn't help that the majority of people who bemoan the loss of games like UO quickly reveal themselves to be the sort of psychotic players who are the exact reason games like that no longer exist. You'll hear things like "I miss being able to slaughter dozens of people and take all their stuff". Ok great, but your average player hates that sort of game. And you need a high prey/predator ratio to satiate such desires. I say this as someone who thinks of early UO as the best game they've ever played. I didn't mind that type of player, even spent most of my time fighting with/against them. But I also recognize that this segment is why we can't have nice things.
    - chongli 4y ago
      I am one of those rare people who actually really enjoyed the thrill of playing a miner (or some other crafter) and having murderers show up and try to kill me for my valorite ingots. It felt like high stakes (in game terms, low stakes in real life terms) hide-and-seek! Over the years I ended up wearing many different hats, of course. I had red characters and thieves and mage-thief hybrids (by far the most annoying character for people to play against). I participated in guild vs guild combat, I had a tamer, a bard, a smith, a fisherman. I loved everything there was to do in UO. On a free shard I even dabbled in programming, writing a bot to automate shearing sheep and storing the wool in the bank. That shard had a really high spawning rate for sheep so I was able to earn enough gold to purchase a keep to share with my friends in about a week of real time!
anvic 4y ago
yay, you invented UUIDs (?)
- shiftpgdn 4y ago
  Ultima Online invented a significant amount of technology we use today. The technical term "sharding" literally comes from the intro video in the game where they explain why there are multiple copies of the same world.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > Ultima Online invented a significant amount of technology we use today. Yeah, but not UUIDs. Those go back to the 80s.
    - cottenio 4y ago
      But shards! lol
    - __d 4y ago
      I think they were invented by Apollo Computer as part of their NCS (Network Computing System). From there, they were adopted by the OSF (later Open Group) DCE RPC system, and from there, by Microsoft (who renamed them GUIDs).
      - capableweb 4y ago
        In that vein, earliest mention of UUID I could find (thanks Apollo Archives): > 2.4 Unique Identifiers > An important aspect of NCA is its use of universal unique identifiers (UUIDs) as the most primi- > tive means of identifying NCA entities (e.g. objects, interfaces, operations). UUIDs are an exten- > sion of the unique identifiers (UIDs) already used throughout Apollo’s system [Leach 82]. Both > UIDs and UUIDs are fixed length identifiers that are guaranteed to refer to just one thing for all > time. The principal advantages of using any kind of unique identifiers over using string names at > the lowest level of the system include: small size, ease of embedding in data structures, location > transparency, and the ability to layer various naming strategies on top of the primitive naming > mechanism. Also, identifiers can be generated anywhere, without first having to contact some > other agent (e.g. a special server on the network, or a human representative of a company that > hands out identifiers). https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/papers/ncs.pdf https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/papers/ncs.pdf The paper is not dated but probably was around 1986 or later?
nyanpasu64 4y ago
> Not that I’m saying MMOs need blockchains; but it turns out Proof-of-Work ledger technology had a use case here! Do you need a proof-of-work ledger, or just a central sequentially-consistent transactional ledger shared between all servers (without burning energy for rare SHA checksums)?
- nrb 4y ago
  Since only the server is authoring the entries, just a ledger.
  - tiagobraw 4y ago
    also known as database
    - TrapLord_Rhodo 4y ago
      The article strictly points out the need for a shared concurrency models required in the functioning of a online game thats massively parrelled across both clients and various individual 'servers'. Unique, hash based, 'stacked' items that are non-fungible with a decentralized shared state across clients.... yes, technically that's 'Just a database' but a highly complex one. I get people hate the hype and 'uselessness' of crypto and even the term 'Blockchain' is loaded, but dismissing the technology out of hand is uncalled for. Especially when the author gave a very clear use case for a very real problem in shared state computing.
      - veleek 4y ago
        All of the server nodes are run by the same entity (the game developer). Blockchain is a good solution when the nodes are not necessarily trusted (thus the need to prove that you did the work). If all the nodes are trusted you can accomplish the whole decentralized thing much more easily. As a super simplified example, if you want your distributed database to generate unique identifiers, partition the id space so each node is guaranteed not to overlap. You trust to nodes so you don’t need blockchain.
no_wizard 4y ago
Aside from being an amazing story, my other takes are the following: C / C++ are truly powerful and efficient languages for execution. Can you imagine doing this with Java or C# and still keeping the memory usage and speed reasonable, even in 2022? This is the late 90s (maybe early 2000s). C++ is a workhorse, warts and all. Game development is just so different from all other types of development, but I feel like if you can game dev at this level you can develop just about any type of interactive application, but maybe I'm wrong? The golden age of MMOs has long passed, hasn't it?
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  > Can you imagine doing this with Java or C# and still keeping the memory usage and speed reasonable, even in 2022? Yes.
  - chii 4y ago
    for example, EVE Online is mostly done via python (server side at least - not the frontend iirc). In fact, i reckon the reason a lot of games would have crashes is because it's written in an unsafe language like C++. And the reason there's so many successful plugins for minecraft is _because_ it's in an "easy" language like java.
    - Operyl 4y ago
      Client uses a ton of Python too, mind you they have a very special interpreter. https://github.com/stackless-dev/stackless/wiki/ https://github.com/stackless-dev/stackless/wiki/
      - dbrueck 4y ago
        Great point! Side note: you can get a lot of the power of Stackless Python without a special interpreter if you use greenlets (https://greenlet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://greenlet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).
      - chii 4y ago
xwdv 4y ago
Ultima Online is the only MMO that felt like a true virtual world and not just a grindy RPG game played with a lot of people. It occurred at a unique time in history that is unlikely to be replicated again. You could build the same game but players have largely moved on from this style of MMO. A shame.
- Alex3917 4y ago
  > It occurred at a unique time in history that is unlikely to be replicated again. You could build the same game but players have largely moved on from this style of MMO. I don't necessarily personally disagree with this, but this counter argument is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H4j-5YFKK4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H4j-5YFKK4
  - zinckiwi 4y ago
    I largely agree with the perspective of that video. Specifically thinking of the difference between EQ and WoW, I do think there's one objective difference though: downtime. It wasn't uncommon to spend minutes recovering from a fight, or wait 20+ minutes between spawns if you were camping a particular spot. At the time we moaned about it, so WoW came along, and "solved" the complaint. In hindsight, the downtime was the best part of the game. Chatting with strangers in a pickup group. Gambling. Friendly duels. Dumb feats of strength. Mutual grumbling about waiting for the boat. My fondest memories were all the things around the gameplay, but that doesn't make the game irrelevant. It was an excuse and a reason, but also a setting. The combination was intoxicating.
    - toast0 4y ago
      > In hindsight, the downtime was the best part of the game. There's a lot of this in baseball spectation as well, maybe american football too. The game is there to bring you together and hang out.
- nhinck2 4y ago
  Yeah UO only worked because it was basically the only game in town. The sheep were playing alongside the wolves. Once there was more choice in the market the more casually and cooperatively minded players self-selected into games catered to them. Everyone who wants 'the next UO' has got to realise it's never going to happen.
bevacqua 4y ago
As someone who got involved in an open-source version of the Ultima Online server, this is a fun read Instead of `areaserv` like the article talks about, RunUO had the concept of sectors within a region[1]. Sidenote: To this day RunUO is one of the easiest codebases to understand i've ever come across We too had a pretty bad item duping bug, around how banks allowed you to create checks with money, and an overflow bug leading to people being trivially able to print money — this led to runway inflation in some servers. UO economies themselves being matter of study, for a Really interesting article, see [2] [1]: https://github.com/runuo/runuo/blob/master/Server/Region.cs https://github.com/runuo/runuo/blob/master/Server/Region.cs [2]: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bf1bc95506fbe3baadb7063/t/5c00ac140e2e7265722166af/1543547925580/The+In-game+Economics+of+Ultima+Online.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bf1bc95506fbe3baadb7...
- benlwalker 4y ago
  There's also now an open source recreation of the original client, all written in C# that actually uses a GPU so it renders 4k at 250fps instead of 800x600 at 12.5fps. It's a very mature and stable reproduction at this point. https://github.com/classicuo/ClassicUO https://github.com/classicuo/ClassicUO
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    Now if they could just eliminate the grind, and get a thriving player base again!
    - benlwalker 4y ago
      As an alternative, may I offer you a wasm port? https://play.classicuo.org/ https://play.classicuo.org/ (I've never used this but I heard it runs well)
      - w-ll 4y ago
        f. on a monday.. come one i gotta get work done. now i gotta go afk for the week a nd blame it on pg&e
furyofantares 4y ago
> Not that I’m saying MMOs need blockchains; I would hope not! Lots of MMOs exist, for example. > but it turns out Proof-of-Work ledger technology had a use case here! Right, blockchain and more narrowly Proof-of-Work have loads of use cases. They're just the worst solution available for almost all of them.
- palata 4y ago
  They are actually pretty damn good for some criminal use-cases...
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    Not even. Everything except Monero makes money-laundering analysis trivially easy.
    - fatneckbeardz 4y ago
      ok so to restate. proof of work blockchain use case: you want to invent a money transfer system that will attract criminals to use it, and they will think it is anonymous, but its not really anonymous.
    - cottenio 4y ago
      Ironically I gave an interview to VICE News about exactly this during the Mueller investigation and they had to cut my Monero comments out for time.
    - JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
      If the funds are sent to mixers?
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        I would bet the FBI operates and controls a non-zero amount of mixing services.
    - 4y ago
psyclobe 4y ago
Gosh I remember beta testing this game, was a coming of age time, the first MMORPG. Glorious times of guilds and true PvP (e.g. you leave the town you basically were on your own) these were the true days of high online adventure!
- samstave 4y ago
  Same era - but I had a "cheat mode" ;; We ran the Intel DRG and ran this on a bank of Intels highest end machines on a T3 to our gaming lab, just when 56K got released... and were able to effecitvely MASS PK players with 6 accounts with 100 sneak, two rogues, 2 dread lords and two great lords.... we would taunt with our dreads, run, hide, and appear with our great lords of same name and get attacked ruining the reputation of others, allowing them to kill us but specifically die next to our hidden sneaks who would loot us... and run our bullshit back to our castle. We had a 7th castle butler account who all he would do was manage keys... our third member of our guild got wasted one night and managed to lose our rune stones... but we had a teleport mech where we had the courtyard covered in bags of wheat? and in order to tele to the courtyard, you had to have the butler acct go pick up the bag to the tele spot such that you could zap in... Then, our guy, Draygor,,, he accidentally got whacked with the rune stone before he could make it to the bank, and the Japanese Guild spent MONTHS waiting for us to fuckup with an account that allowed them to portal into our castle... then they fn hid until we showed up... We used to teleport dragons onto the roof such that we could trap them behind chests and practice our spells until we had 100 in every skill ... but we went to vacation, DRAYGOR (largest pot grower in BC Canada) who had a T1 to his house We also had a bugged weapon that was an axe/or/hammer cant recall -- but it was one-hit-one kill no matter what. We were actually followed for a while with that bugged weapon as we would trade it back and forth... and chased by invisible mods... (they basically have a super account that their sprite was invisible and they would follow us around.... That aside from the hitman series - is my golden games.
DixieDev 4y ago
I missed UO's hayday, but when I've played the big modern MMOs I find myself instead attracted to the idea that individual characters shouldn't be able to do everything. I feel like forcing players to interact if they want to gather specific resources or craft vital items would really help a game feel "massively multiplayer". Are there any modern MMOs with mechanics like this, e.g. life-skill limits or some other source of dependence on other players?
- nordsieck 4y ago
  > Are there any modern MMOs with mechanics like this, e.g. life-skill limits or some other source of dependence on other players? I think Eve Online is the classic example. It's not technically true that players are limited in the sense that you mean. Rather, the limits are emergent. The areas with the most valuable resources also have the least game provided security, so players are forced to band together into large organizations to protect themselves - essentially true virtual countries.
  - ericbarrett 4y ago
    In addition, in Eve nearly all items (ships, modules, ammo, even starbases) are player-manufactured, player-hauled, and player-sold.
  - cottenio 4y ago
    EVE is my favorite example. There were four games I played at EA Redwood Shores: UO, Battlefield 2, EVE Online, and Microsoft Excel (because EVE).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - the_only_law 4y ago
      > Battlefield 2 Really is a shame what happened to that franchise.
arduinomancer 4y ago
This is pretty specific but does anyone remember in one of the Runescape open betas back in the day there was a duping bug? I think involving a chest? If I recall it was really easy to do and by the end of the beta like everyone had totally jacked up gear Of course it all got reset eventually since it was just a beta but I recall it being pretty hilarious to play during that period
- namrog84 4y ago
  Not only that but diablo 2 had such a prolific duping problems of this 1 ring. The ring itself became a currency. They eventually added a mechanic in game that consumed the rings for something else as a way to remove the rings from game without deleting at will.
  - ithinkso 4y ago
    I think SOJs became currency and the duping problem made them worthless and moved the currency to high runes? But what they did with the anni quest to get rid of the rest of the SOJs was clever Oh man, thanks for the nostalgia trip!
- barsonme 4y ago
  The part hat dupe trick!
- asdff 4y ago
  GTA Online had a number of methods to quickly rack up unlimited money when it came out. Not really external hacks, just regular old in game glitches were around. I used it to get a bunch of money in game, and rather than breaking anything, it just made it a lot more fun being able to drive whatever car or get whatever I wanted. Calling up a tank is a blast in a game like gta online! I pretty much stopped playing the game when they patched everything and reset the in game economy and made my character broke and boring.
cottenio 4y ago
I hope anyone who enjoyed the article will find time to listen to the original team discuss UO’s early development and the crazy design and social problems they were trying to solve. They succeeded at some, spectacularly failed at others, but brought forward things that still impact MMO and (now) Metaverse design today. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024930/Classic-Game-Postmortem-Ultima-Online https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024930/Classic-Game-Postmorte...
eigenschwarz 4y ago
Darknet Diaries does a two part episode that covers, among others exploits, this infamous (and famously entertaining) UO zero-day exploit: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/7/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/7/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/8/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/8/
- palata 4y ago
  I wonder if Darknet Diaries will someday become the XKCD of security stories: "there is a Darknet Diaries for that" :)
pmoriarty 4y ago
This reminds me of the assassination of Lord British: [1] "Lord British was a player character created by Richard Garriott, the producer of Ultima Online. Using this character, Richard acted as Ultima’s King and would sometimes interact with other players. Lord British had considerable protection from an entourage of bodyguards and was even explicitly coded to be invulnerable to virtually any attack. During the game’s online beta test, Lord British gave an address to fellow players at his Castle Britannia. But while British was giving his address, a player character known as Rainz cast a spell scroll that set the Lord on fire, killing him instantly. "It turns out that shortly before this event, the server had crashed and needed to be restarted. Garriott forgot to reimplement his invulnerability flag, leaving him open to being killed. If that wasn’t shocking enough for the attendees, a fellow developer of the game known as Starr Long, with his in-game character Lord Blackthorn, summoned a horde of demons to kill the assassin. Not only did the assassin manage to escape, but the demons had killed nearly every player attending the address..." [1] - https://www.cbr.com/ultima-online-lord-british-assassination/ https://www.cbr.com/ultima-online-lord-british-assassination...
- JoeOfTexas 4y ago
  Wow, talk about a train wreck lol.
  - egypturnash 4y ago
    Thus continuing the time-honored tradition of the entire Ultima series: trying to find a way to kill Lord British. Garriot's self-insert is the king of the land of Britannia in pretty much every one of the games, and there's some way to kill him in just about all of them. https://ultima.fandom.com/wiki/Killing_Lord_British https://ultima.fandom.com/wiki/Killing_Lord_British
  - rvba 4y ago
    It was incredible marketing for the game. I remember all the gaming press wrote about it. It would just inspire you to try to play the game. If someone made an MMO today, it would make sense to stage similar events to get some nice viral marketing. The 'corrupted blood' incident in World of Warcraft gave the game a lot of free marketing even in normal press - who loved to write about it. From what I understand (many?) players enjoyed the few days of chaos too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident
djitz 4y ago
This is giving me Leeeeroyyyy Jenkinssssss vibes https://youtu.be/mLyOj_QD4a4 https://youtu.be/mLyOj_QD4a4
aasasd 4y ago
I continue to be burdened and mystified by a memory from an article circa early-mid 2000s, about UO or a similar game, if there was one: that in the game, when one was being robbed or beaten, they could summon some wunderpolice, whose representative immediately teleported to the scene and instantly killed the culprit. However, if the alarm was false, then the supernatural officer killed the player instead. The implication, as I understood it, was that the divine entity was operated automatically by the game. It's possible that the story went through a bad case of ‘broken telephone’—and my few feeble attempts of finding the truth in more recent years were unsuccessful. Still I wonder: was there such a thing as described above? Did it work? Was the ‘police’ really an NPC?
- Misdicorl 4y ago
  Yeah it worked like that. Saying "guards" would instantly summon the guards if any criminal was present and subsequently murder the criminal(s). Nothing about incorrect summoning though. Most people had a macro invoking "guards" "bank" abd "vendor buy" all at the same time. The interface was mud like and the first (?) command in a statement that was valid would execute.
  - aasasd 4y ago
    Thanks, I now found a wiki describing these mechanics, and it turns out that UO had an entire system of markings for players who committed illegal activities. This clears things up a bit. Idk where the ‘killing the player’ part came from—though local game journalism at that time was quite, uh, idiosyncratic. But, as the workings of these guards were somewhat hazy in my mind, they gained an ominous air.
    - baobabKoodaa 4y ago
      I think I know why you have this hazy memory! Oftentimes these robber groups patrolled around the edges of the "safe zones" where it's possible to call guards. When there were battles, it was often chaotic with multiple characters moving and mauling each other. Sometimes an innocent player would be attacked near the border, they would defend themselves and accidentally do some action which marks them as a criminal (for example, moving inside the border of the safe zone and defend against an attacker who is outside the safe zone and not marked as criminal). The innocent player defending themselves might call "guards", but because they've accidentally made some particular action, the guards would treat them as the criminal and kill them.
washywashy 4y ago
I remember my days playing on a likely not-so-legal role playing shard that also had a connected blog where players posted stories about their characters.
RektBoy 4y ago
Great that you can still play very good UO servers like UO Outlands. Because OSI UO turned into care-bear themepark, which is unplayable.
RektBoy 4y ago
> CEO “Mmm, I don’t think deleting them all [the duped items] is a good idea, you’ll hurt too many players.” > I wanted to chafe and say something, maybe assert that he just didn’t understand, but reined myself in and after the meeting I went back to the team and told them that we were forbidden from auto-deleting all the dupes. No wonder many players rather switched to private shards. C-levels were out of touch pretty soon. Also this shows how different your work cultures in US is in comparison to ours in some EU country (no problem here to call CEO out on his BS)
- barrucadu 4y ago
  How is it out of touch? Dealing with the cheaters who are duplicating items is one thing, but what about the victims who have bought items they thought to be perfectly legitimate? And before you say "delete the items and refund them", how are you going to get the purchase prices? Pore through game chat logs? What if the items have been sold on again? Manually find and reverse all the transactions?
zeroclip 4y ago
I am very pro-NFT and pro-blockchain but disagree with the author. Blockchain is not going to replace a MMO item database. Blockchains have bottlenecks and are not needed if you and your users are OK with a centralized database to meet high performance requirements. Now, imagine your goal was to create a distributed and decentralized MMO not owned by any single company, and permissionless so that anybody could built on top of it. For this it does make sense to use blockchain-like technology like a rollup that aggregates state deltas of many transactions, batching them into a proof that is posted to a distributed ledger.
Geenirvana 4y ago
I miss UO. I only played on unofficial servers but I had many hours of entertainment. My greatest achivement is that I wrote a Macro program called UO-Mcro in VB6. It was a stepped based Macro program that didn't require coding to use. It had popular actions such has LeftClick x Wait x seconds Set Variable If / Loop Each action was designed using VBScript, so it was possible to extend to more advanced actions. It has long since gone but the website is available on the wayback machine https://web.archive.org/web/20040802021732/http://uo-mcro.tk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040802021732/http://uo-mcro.tk...
cosgrove 4y ago
>And it wasn’t just players: autonomous mobile objects (mobs) like monsters, animals, and NPCs could cross them as well. Started playing MMOs in 2001 and it wasn't until this day that I learned why they were called mobs. Wow.
bastawhiz 4y ago
> Not that I’m saying MMOs need blockchains; but it turns out Proof-of-Work ledger technology had a use case here! (No wonder Amazon now offers a similar service: QLDB). For one, QLDB isn't proof of work. It's centralized: if you think you need a blockchain within your own data center to establish consensus, you don't. Blockchains are only useful when there is no central authority, which isn't the case with (all?) MMOs. Badly written blockchains have double spend issues. Video games with race conditions and no locking controls have duping problems. Blockchains only manage to eliminate the centralization (in theory), not the bugs.
unicornmama 4y ago
UO was an awesome experience. No one has ever made a similar game, and UO doesn’t exist in its prior form. But let’s not forget that we all stopped playing UO for a reason.
- quelltext 4y ago
  What's the reason?
Eumenes 4y ago
I attribute alot of my success in the professional/tech industry to MMOs. I started playing games like Asheron's Call, Everquest, and UO as young as 3rd grade. I helped organize pvp events, traded constantly, communicated on forums, participated in guild/clan events, recruited new members. Sounds silly and I can't really explain it but made me more resourceful, social, and generally comfortable in ambiguous situations.
kdazzle 4y ago
Man, I ran across PK Ghost the other week. So many memories. Actually, looking back, it was a pretty innovative webcomic. https://www.imanewbie.com/ https://www.imanewbie.com/
glonq 4y ago
I participated in the public alpha and beta testing for UO. I recall it being a very laggy experience back in the days of 28.8k modems.

564 points by yreg 4y ago

I get the feeling that any good, truly "massive" MMO eventually has to deal with stuff like this beyond a technical level, beyond a gameplay balance level, and straight into social ramifications. As a younger guy than these players, this story reminded me of the Disk of returning and Thordur's black hole from RuneScape.

nominusllc 4y ago
The solution is to make the pipeline for reporting bugs easy and lucrative enough to encourage bug reports.

victorclf 4y ago

Still hopeful that someone will make a new exciting sandbox MMO that fills the gap left by UO.

v8xi 4y ago
there with you - UO was the greatest game I ever played
- axus 4y ago
  A game development pair working on a kind of similar MMO for the last 10 years. "Haven and Hearth" has all the house building, player killing, crafting, and trading. No pre-made safe zones, though, and it resets every year or two. I think all of these small, independent efforts fall under the radar without the advertising of more expensive games. I don't know if UO was well-advertised at the time, but it was certainly the only option at launch!
  - nerdix 4y ago
    UO was well advertised before launch. One of my most prized possessions as a kid was a summer of 1996 (want to say June) issue of PC Games magazine that had an in depth preview of UO. It came out about a year before the game actually launched. I probably read that article about 100 times. I was never going to get my parents to pay the monthly subscription fee so that magazine and my imagination was the closest I got to UO until I was in college and could afford it myself (that was during Age of Shadows and EverQuest had already supplanted it as the most popular MMORPG) In the late 90s, Ultima was still one of the biggest (if not the biggest) PC/Western RPG franchises. UO launched before Ultima 9 kind of killed the franchise. I'd be surprised to find anyone who was really into PC gaming during that era that hadn't heard of Ultima Online.
no_wizard 4y ago
It appears to be still around? https://uo.com/ https://uo.com/ EDIT: looks like it changed hands a number of times, very unlikely its as good as it once was, I imagine
- cottenio 4y ago
  Not really “changed hands.” Stages: 1. EA with original Origin devs 2. EA post-Origin 3. EA, integrated into Online group (with Westwood) 4. EA Mythic (UO & DAOC) 5. Broadsword (owned by the former GM of EA Mythic under a licensing deal) I think that’s fairly accurate. Older devs correct me if I’m wrong.
hoten 4y ago
I've been working on this sort of game for awhile now. Never too seriously, though that will change in 2023. Hardly worth sharing at this point, but I will anyway. https://hoten.cc/gridia/play/ https://hoten.cc/gridia/play/ I need to seriously think about what I want out of this game (more of a mmo game engine), but "UO-like" is definitely top of mind.
- alexose 4y ago
  I was excited to play but I couldn't make it past the character creation screen. There's a bug preventing me from spending all of my attribute points.
  - hoten 4y ago
    Huh, that's odd. I can't figure out how to get that problem to happen. Not even selected a preset works? By the way, if you manage to get it to work, make an account starting with '@' to get admin privileges. You could also explore the local play–it's the same server code, but running in a web worker instead of on my server.
    - victorclf 4y ago
      I got the same bug when I clicked create button without filling the "character name" field. Great demo btw!
      - hoten 4y ago
        ooooh yup that'll do it, thanks!
chongli 4y ago
Sadly I don’t think it can be done. I mean sure, the game could be written, that’s not a problem. The trick is to get people to show up and in particular get players to play who aren’t “UO fans.” UO was amazing because a ton of people played it who weren’t UO fans or even MMO fans because such things didn’t exist. The players were simply RPG fans wanting to try something new and what happened was magical and serendipitous. Now any game that tries to do the same will only attract UO fans or classic MMO fans. That original audience of people who were essentially naïve but open to a new experience are gone.
- jghn 4y ago
  It doesn't help that the majority of people who bemoan the loss of games like UO quickly reveal themselves to be the sort of psychotic players who are the exact reason games like that no longer exist. You'll hear things like "I miss being able to slaughter dozens of people and take all their stuff". Ok great, but your average player hates that sort of game. And you need a high prey/predator ratio to satiate such desires. I say this as someone who thinks of early UO as the best game they've ever played. I didn't mind that type of player, even spent most of my time fighting with/against them. But I also recognize that this segment is why we can't have nice things.
  - chongli 4y ago
    I am one of those rare people who actually really enjoyed the thrill of playing a miner (or some other crafter) and having murderers show up and try to kill me for my valorite ingots. It felt like high stakes (in game terms, low stakes in real life terms) hide-and-seek! Over the years I ended up wearing many different hats, of course. I had red characters and thieves and mage-thief hybrids (by far the most annoying character for people to play against). I participated in guild vs guild combat, I had a tamer, a bard, a smith, a fisherman. I loved everything there was to do in UO. On a free shard I even dabbled in programming, writing a bot to automate shearing sheep and storing the wool in the bank. That shard had a really high spawning rate for sheep so I was able to earn enough gold to purchase a keep to share with my friends in about a week of real time!

anvic 4y ago

yay, you invented UUIDs (?)

shiftpgdn 4y ago
Ultima Online invented a significant amount of technology we use today. The technical term "sharding" literally comes from the intro video in the game where they explain why there are multiple copies of the same world.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  > Ultima Online invented a significant amount of technology we use today. Yeah, but not UUIDs. Those go back to the 80s.
  - cottenio 4y ago
    But shards! lol
  - __d 4y ago
    I think they were invented by Apollo Computer as part of their NCS (Network Computing System). From there, they were adopted by the OSF (later Open Group) DCE RPC system, and from there, by Microsoft (who renamed them GUIDs).
    - capableweb 4y ago
      In that vein, earliest mention of UUID I could find (thanks Apollo Archives): > 2.4 Unique Identifiers > An important aspect of NCA is its use of universal unique identifiers (UUIDs) as the most primi- > tive means of identifying NCA entities (e.g. objects, interfaces, operations). UUIDs are an exten- > sion of the unique identifiers (UIDs) already used throughout Apollo’s system [Leach 82]. Both > UIDs and UUIDs are fixed length identifiers that are guaranteed to refer to just one thing for all > time. The principal advantages of using any kind of unique identifiers over using string names at > the lowest level of the system include: small size, ease of embedding in data structures, location > transparency, and the ability to layer various naming strategies on top of the primitive naming > mechanism. Also, identifiers can be generated anywhere, without first having to contact some > other agent (e.g. a special server on the network, or a human representative of a company that > hands out identifiers). https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/papers/ncs.pdf https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/papers/ncs.pdf The paper is not dated but probably was around 1986 or later?

nyanpasu64 4y ago

> Not that I’m saying MMOs need blockchains; but it turns out Proof-of-Work ledger technology had a use case here! Do you need a proof-of-work ledger, or just a central sequentially-consistent transactional ledger shared between all servers (without burning energy for rare SHA checksums)?

nrb 4y ago
Since only the server is authoring the entries, just a ledger.
- tiagobraw 4y ago
  also known as database
  - TrapLord_Rhodo 4y ago
    The article strictly points out the need for a shared concurrency models required in the functioning of a online game thats massively parrelled across both clients and various individual 'servers'. Unique, hash based, 'stacked' items that are non-fungible with a decentralized shared state across clients.... yes, technically that's 'Just a database' but a highly complex one. I get people hate the hype and 'uselessness' of crypto and even the term 'Blockchain' is loaded, but dismissing the technology out of hand is uncalled for. Especially when the author gave a very clear use case for a very real problem in shared state computing.
    - veleek 4y ago
      All of the server nodes are run by the same entity (the game developer). Blockchain is a good solution when the nodes are not necessarily trusted (thus the need to prove that you did the work). If all the nodes are trusted you can accomplish the whole decentralized thing much more easily. As a super simplified example, if you want your distributed database to generate unique identifiers, partition the id space so each node is guaranteed not to overlap. You trust to nodes so you don’t need blockchain.

no_wizard 4y ago

Aside from being an amazing story, my other takes are the following: C / C++ are truly powerful and efficient languages for execution. Can you imagine doing this with Java or C# and still keeping the memory usage and speed reasonable, even in 2022? This is the late 90s (maybe early 2000s). C++ is a workhorse, warts and all. Game development is just so different from all other types of development, but I feel like if you can game dev at this level you can develop just about any type of interactive application, but maybe I'm wrong? The golden age of MMOs has long passed, hasn't it?

Dylan16807 4y ago
> Can you imagine doing this with Java or C# and still keeping the memory usage and speed reasonable, even in 2022? Yes.
- chii 4y ago
  for example, EVE Online is mostly done via python (server side at least - not the frontend iirc). In fact, i reckon the reason a lot of games would have crashes is because it's written in an unsafe language like C++. And the reason there's so many successful plugins for minecraft is _because_ it's in an "easy" language like java.
  - Operyl 4y ago
    Client uses a ton of Python too, mind you they have a very special interpreter. https://github.com/stackless-dev/stackless/wiki/ https://github.com/stackless-dev/stackless/wiki/
    - dbrueck 4y ago
      Great point! Side note: you can get a lot of the power of Stackless Python without a special interpreter if you use greenlets (https://greenlet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://greenlet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).
    - chii 4y ago

xwdv 4y ago

Ultima Online is the only MMO that felt like a true virtual world and not just a grindy RPG game played with a lot of people. It occurred at a unique time in history that is unlikely to be replicated again. You could build the same game but players have largely moved on from this style of MMO. A shame.

Alex3917 4y ago
> It occurred at a unique time in history that is unlikely to be replicated again. You could build the same game but players have largely moved on from this style of MMO. I don't necessarily personally disagree with this, but this counter argument is worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H4j-5YFKK4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H4j-5YFKK4
- zinckiwi 4y ago
  I largely agree with the perspective of that video. Specifically thinking of the difference between EQ and WoW, I do think there's one objective difference though: downtime. It wasn't uncommon to spend minutes recovering from a fight, or wait 20+ minutes between spawns if you were camping a particular spot. At the time we moaned about it, so WoW came along, and "solved" the complaint. In hindsight, the downtime was the best part of the game. Chatting with strangers in a pickup group. Gambling. Friendly duels. Dumb feats of strength. Mutual grumbling about waiting for the boat. My fondest memories were all the things around the gameplay, but that doesn't make the game irrelevant. It was an excuse and a reason, but also a setting. The combination was intoxicating.
  - toast0 4y ago
    > In hindsight, the downtime was the best part of the game. There's a lot of this in baseball spectation as well, maybe american football too. The game is there to bring you together and hang out.
nhinck2 4y ago
Yeah UO only worked because it was basically the only game in town. The sheep were playing alongside the wolves. Once there was more choice in the market the more casually and cooperatively minded players self-selected into games catered to them. Everyone who wants 'the next UO' has got to realise it's never going to happen.

bevacqua 4y ago

As someone who got involved in an open-source version of the Ultima Online server, this is a fun read Instead of `areaserv` like the article talks about, RunUO had the concept of sectors within a region[1]. Sidenote: To this day RunUO is one of the easiest codebases to understand i've ever come across We too had a pretty bad item duping bug, around how banks allowed you to create checks with money, and an overflow bug leading to people being trivially able to print money — this led to runway inflation in some servers. UO economies themselves being matter of study, for a Really interesting article, see [2] [1]: https://github.com/runuo/runuo/blob/master/Server/Region.cs https://github.com/runuo/runuo/blob/master/Server/Region.cs [2]: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bf1bc95506fbe3baadb7063/t/5c00ac140e2e7265722166af/1543547925580/The+In-game+Economics+of+Ultima+Online.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bf1bc95506fbe3baadb7...

benlwalker 4y ago
There's also now an open source recreation of the original client, all written in C# that actually uses a GPU so it renders 4k at 250fps instead of 800x600 at 12.5fps. It's a very mature and stable reproduction at this point. https://github.com/classicuo/ClassicUO https://github.com/classicuo/ClassicUO
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Now if they could just eliminate the grind, and get a thriving player base again!
  - benlwalker 4y ago
    As an alternative, may I offer you a wasm port? https://play.classicuo.org/ https://play.classicuo.org/ (I've never used this but I heard it runs well)
    - w-ll 4y ago
      f. on a monday.. come one i gotta get work done. now i gotta go afk for the week a nd blame it on pg&e

furyofantares 4y ago

> Not that I’m saying MMOs need blockchains; I would hope not! Lots of MMOs exist, for example. > but it turns out Proof-of-Work ledger technology had a use case here! Right, blockchain and more narrowly Proof-of-Work have loads of use cases. They're just the worst solution available for almost all of them.

palata 4y ago
They are actually pretty damn good for some criminal use-cases...
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  Not even. Everything except Monero makes money-laundering analysis trivially easy.
  - fatneckbeardz 4y ago
    ok so to restate. proof of work blockchain use case: you want to invent a money transfer system that will attract criminals to use it, and they will think it is anonymous, but its not really anonymous.
  - cottenio 4y ago
    Ironically I gave an interview to VICE News about exactly this during the Mueller investigation and they had to cut my Monero comments out for time.
  - JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
    If the funds are sent to mixers?
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      I would bet the FBI operates and controls a non-zero amount of mixing services.
  - 4y ago

psyclobe 4y ago

Gosh I remember beta testing this game, was a coming of age time, the first MMORPG. Glorious times of guilds and true PvP (e.g. you leave the town you basically were on your own) these were the true days of high online adventure!

samstave 4y ago
Same era - but I had a "cheat mode" ;; We ran the Intel DRG and ran this on a bank of Intels highest end machines on a T3 to our gaming lab, just when 56K got released... and were able to effecitvely MASS PK players with 6 accounts with 100 sneak, two rogues, 2 dread lords and two great lords.... we would taunt with our dreads, run, hide, and appear with our great lords of same name and get attacked ruining the reputation of others, allowing them to kill us but specifically die next to our hidden sneaks who would loot us... and run our bullshit back to our castle. We had a 7th castle butler account who all he would do was manage keys... our third member of our guild got wasted one night and managed to lose our rune stones... but we had a teleport mech where we had the courtyard covered in bags of wheat? and in order to tele to the courtyard, you had to have the butler acct go pick up the bag to the tele spot such that you could zap in... Then, our guy, Draygor,,, he accidentally got whacked with the rune stone before he could make it to the bank, and the Japanese Guild spent MONTHS waiting for us to fuckup with an account that allowed them to portal into our castle... then they fn hid until we showed up... We used to teleport dragons onto the roof such that we could trap them behind chests and practice our spells until we had 100 in every skill ... but we went to vacation, DRAYGOR (largest pot grower in BC Canada) who had a T1 to his house We also had a bugged weapon that was an axe/or/hammer cant recall -- but it was one-hit-one kill no matter what. We were actually followed for a while with that bugged weapon as we would trade it back and forth... and chased by invisible mods... (they basically have a super account that their sprite was invisible and they would follow us around.... That aside from the hitman series - is my golden games.

DixieDev 4y ago

I missed UO's hayday, but when I've played the big modern MMOs I find myself instead attracted to the idea that individual characters shouldn't be able to do everything. I feel like forcing players to interact if they want to gather specific resources or craft vital items would really help a game feel "massively multiplayer". Are there any modern MMOs with mechanics like this, e.g. life-skill limits or some other source of dependence on other players?

nordsieck 4y ago
> Are there any modern MMOs with mechanics like this, e.g. life-skill limits or some other source of dependence on other players? I think Eve Online is the classic example. It's not technically true that players are limited in the sense that you mean. Rather, the limits are emergent. The areas with the most valuable resources also have the least game provided security, so players are forced to band together into large organizations to protect themselves - essentially true virtual countries.
- ericbarrett 4y ago
  In addition, in Eve nearly all items (ships, modules, ammo, even starbases) are player-manufactured, player-hauled, and player-sold.
- cottenio 4y ago
  EVE is my favorite example. There were four games I played at EA Redwood Shores: UO, Battlefield 2, EVE Online, and Microsoft Excel (because EVE).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    > Battlefield 2 Really is a shame what happened to that franchise.

arduinomancer 4y ago

This is pretty specific but does anyone remember in one of the Runescape open betas back in the day there was a duping bug? I think involving a chest? If I recall it was really easy to do and by the end of the beta like everyone had totally jacked up gear Of course it all got reset eventually since it was just a beta but I recall it being pretty hilarious to play during that period

namrog84 4y ago
Not only that but diablo 2 had such a prolific duping problems of this 1 ring. The ring itself became a currency. They eventually added a mechanic in game that consumed the rings for something else as a way to remove the rings from game without deleting at will.
- ithinkso 4y ago
  I think SOJs became currency and the duping problem made them worthless and moved the currency to high runes? But what they did with the anni quest to get rid of the rest of the SOJs was clever Oh man, thanks for the nostalgia trip!
barsonme 4y ago
The part hat dupe trick!
asdff 4y ago
GTA Online had a number of methods to quickly rack up unlimited money when it came out. Not really external hacks, just regular old in game glitches were around. I used it to get a bunch of money in game, and rather than breaking anything, it just made it a lot more fun being able to drive whatever car or get whatever I wanted. Calling up a tank is a blast in a game like gta online! I pretty much stopped playing the game when they patched everything and reset the in game economy and made my character broke and boring.

cottenio 4y ago

I hope anyone who enjoyed the article will find time to listen to the original team discuss UO’s early development and the crazy design and social problems they were trying to solve. They succeeded at some, spectacularly failed at others, but brought forward things that still impact MMO and (now) Metaverse design today. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024930/Classic-Game-Postmortem-Ultima-Online https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024930/Classic-Game-Postmorte...

eigenschwarz 4y ago

Darknet Diaries does a two part episode that covers, among others exploits, this infamous (and famously entertaining) UO zero-day exploit: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/7/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/7/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/8/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/8/

palata 4y ago
I wonder if Darknet Diaries will someday become the XKCD of security stories: "there is a Darknet Diaries for that" :)

pmoriarty 4y ago

This reminds me of the assassination of Lord British: [1] "Lord British was a player character created by Richard Garriott, the producer of Ultima Online. Using this character, Richard acted as Ultima’s King and would sometimes interact with other players. Lord British had considerable protection from an entourage of bodyguards and was even explicitly coded to be invulnerable to virtually any attack. During the game’s online beta test, Lord British gave an address to fellow players at his Castle Britannia. But while British was giving his address, a player character known as Rainz cast a spell scroll that set the Lord on fire, killing him instantly. "It turns out that shortly before this event, the server had crashed and needed to be restarted. Garriott forgot to reimplement his invulnerability flag, leaving him open to being killed. If that wasn’t shocking enough for the attendees, a fellow developer of the game known as Starr Long, with his in-game character Lord Blackthorn, summoned a horde of demons to kill the assassin. Not only did the assassin manage to escape, but the demons had killed nearly every player attending the address..." [1] - https://www.cbr.com/ultima-online-lord-british-assassination/ https://www.cbr.com/ultima-online-lord-british-assassination...

JoeOfTexas 4y ago
Wow, talk about a train wreck lol.
- egypturnash 4y ago
  Thus continuing the time-honored tradition of the entire Ultima series: trying to find a way to kill Lord British. Garriot's self-insert is the king of the land of Britannia in pretty much every one of the games, and there's some way to kill him in just about all of them. https://ultima.fandom.com/wiki/Killing_Lord_British https://ultima.fandom.com/wiki/Killing_Lord_British
- rvba 4y ago
  It was incredible marketing for the game. I remember all the gaming press wrote about it. It would just inspire you to try to play the game. If someone made an MMO today, it would make sense to stage similar events to get some nice viral marketing. The 'corrupted blood' incident in World of Warcraft gave the game a lot of free marketing even in normal press - who loved to write about it. From what I understand (many?) players enjoyed the few days of chaos too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident

djitz 4y ago

This is giving me Leeeeroyyyy Jenkinssssss vibes https://youtu.be/mLyOj_QD4a4 https://youtu.be/mLyOj_QD4a4

aasasd 4y ago

I continue to be burdened and mystified by a memory from an article circa early-mid 2000s, about UO or a similar game, if there was one: that in the game, when one was being robbed or beaten, they could summon some wunderpolice, whose representative immediately teleported to the scene and instantly killed the culprit. However, if the alarm was false, then the supernatural officer killed the player instead. The implication, as I understood it, was that the divine entity was operated automatically by the game. It's possible that the story went through a bad case of ‘broken telephone’—and my few feeble attempts of finding the truth in more recent years were unsuccessful. Still I wonder: was there such a thing as described above? Did it work? Was the ‘police’ really an NPC?

Misdicorl 4y ago
Yeah it worked like that. Saying "guards" would instantly summon the guards if any criminal was present and subsequently murder the criminal(s). Nothing about incorrect summoning though. Most people had a macro invoking "guards" "bank" abd "vendor buy" all at the same time. The interface was mud like and the first (?) command in a statement that was valid would execute.
- aasasd 4y ago
  Thanks, I now found a wiki describing these mechanics, and it turns out that UO had an entire system of markings for players who committed illegal activities. This clears things up a bit. Idk where the ‘killing the player’ part came from—though local game journalism at that time was quite, uh, idiosyncratic. But, as the workings of these guards were somewhat hazy in my mind, they gained an ominous air.
  - baobabKoodaa 4y ago
    I think I know why you have this hazy memory! Oftentimes these robber groups patrolled around the edges of the "safe zones" where it's possible to call guards. When there were battles, it was often chaotic with multiple characters moving and mauling each other. Sometimes an innocent player would be attacked near the border, they would defend themselves and accidentally do some action which marks them as a criminal (for example, moving inside the border of the safe zone and defend against an attacker who is outside the safe zone and not marked as criminal). The innocent player defending themselves might call "guards", but because they've accidentally made some particular action, the guards would treat them as the criminal and kill them.

washywashy 4y ago

I remember my days playing on a likely not-so-legal role playing shard that also had a connected blog where players posted stories about their characters.

RektBoy 4y ago

Great that you can still play very good UO servers like UO Outlands. Because OSI UO turned into care-bear themepark, which is unplayable.

RektBoy 4y ago

> CEO “Mmm, I don’t think deleting them all [the duped items] is a good idea, you’ll hurt too many players.” > I wanted to chafe and say something, maybe assert that he just didn’t understand, but reined myself in and after the meeting I went back to the team and told them that we were forbidden from auto-deleting all the dupes. No wonder many players rather switched to private shards. C-levels were out of touch pretty soon. Also this shows how different your work cultures in US is in comparison to ours in some EU country (no problem here to call CEO out on his BS)

barrucadu 4y ago
How is it out of touch? Dealing with the cheaters who are duplicating items is one thing, but what about the victims who have bought items they thought to be perfectly legitimate? And before you say "delete the items and refund them", how are you going to get the purchase prices? Pore through game chat logs? What if the items have been sold on again? Manually find and reverse all the transactions?

zeroclip 4y ago

I am very pro-NFT and pro-blockchain but disagree with the author. Blockchain is not going to replace a MMO item database. Blockchains have bottlenecks and are not needed if you and your users are OK with a centralized database to meet high performance requirements. Now, imagine your goal was to create a distributed and decentralized MMO not owned by any single company, and permissionless so that anybody could built on top of it. For this it does make sense to use blockchain-like technology like a rollup that aggregates state deltas of many transactions, batching them into a proof that is posted to a distributed ledger.

Geenirvana 4y ago

I miss UO. I only played on unofficial servers but I had many hours of entertainment. My greatest achivement is that I wrote a Macro program called UO-Mcro in VB6. It was a stepped based Macro program that didn't require coding to use. It had popular actions such has LeftClick x Wait x seconds Set Variable If / Loop Each action was designed using VBScript, so it was possible to extend to more advanced actions. It has long since gone but the website is available on the wayback machine https://web.archive.org/web/20040802021732/http://uo-mcro.tk/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040802021732/http://uo-mcro.tk...

cosgrove 4y ago

>And it wasn’t just players: autonomous mobile objects (mobs) like monsters, animals, and NPCs could cross them as well. Started playing MMOs in 2001 and it wasn't until this day that I learned why they were called mobs. Wow.

bastawhiz 4y ago

> Not that I’m saying MMOs need blockchains; but it turns out Proof-of-Work ledger technology had a use case here! (No wonder Amazon now offers a similar service: QLDB). For one, QLDB isn't proof of work. It's centralized: if you think you need a blockchain within your own data center to establish consensus, you don't. Blockchains are only useful when there is no central authority, which isn't the case with (all?) MMOs. Badly written blockchains have double spend issues. Video games with race conditions and no locking controls have duping problems. Blockchains only manage to eliminate the centralization (in theory), not the bugs.

unicornmama 4y ago

UO was an awesome experience. No one has ever made a similar game, and UO doesn’t exist in its prior form. But let’s not forget that we all stopped playing UO for a reason.

quelltext 4y ago
What's the reason?

Eumenes 4y ago

I attribute alot of my success in the professional/tech industry to MMOs. I started playing games like Asheron's Call, Everquest, and UO as young as 3rd grade. I helped organize pvp events, traded constantly, communicated on forums, participated in guild/clan events, recruited new members. Sounds silly and I can't really explain it but made me more resourceful, social, and generally comfortable in ambiguous situations.

kdazzle 4y ago

Man, I ran across PK Ghost the other week. So many memories. Actually, looking back, it was a pretty innovative webcomic. https://www.imanewbie.com/ https://www.imanewbie.com/

glonq 4y ago

I participated in the public alpha and beta testing for UO. I recall it being a very laggy experience back in the days of 28.8k modems.