8 ms·

The In-game Economics of Ultima Online (1999)

125 points by simonsarris 14y ago

w-ll 14y ago
The UO economy was crazy, for a while I had a 11x14 inside of Luna Walls and was making like 30m a week. Selling to a gold dealer using my friends paypal (I didn't even have a bank account at the time, I was in middle school and said friend was in HS). I was making just shy of a grand a month in 8th grade running a mall in a video game. I later sold my account and the in-game land for 5k, I regret it to this day :( What am I doing now you might ask... Bitcoin :)
- Alex3917 14y ago
  I had a similar experience. I owned five houses in the desert and basically had a player city. For a while I was even a counselor before they found out I was 14.
- cwilson 14y ago
  I remember when one of the house placement land rushes occurred on the server I played on at the time. I had saved up for a Tower deed, and stay up ALL night in preparation. Had friends waiting to camp my spot with me and so forth. I got my spot, got my tower, then a friend of mine told me they were selling on Ebay for $600 to $1,000 depending on the placement and size of house. The Tower being the second largest structure in the game, I ended up selling it two days later for a cool $800. I was 14 at the time I believe. I used my dad's Paypal account that I had convinced him to get months before, so he had never used it, and then had to explain how I made $800 on the Internet selling virtual goods. My parents insisted I was actually selling drugs for a good month. Good times.
- DiabloD3 14y ago
  Now all we need is a Bitcoin powered MMO.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Wow, that is an awesome read. Comparing it to the economics in the World of Warcraft is also interesting. I particularly like the discussion of 'drains' vs 'closed circuits' there is a lot of interesting questions about building virtual economies where those are implemented in various ways. In particular comparing them to 'drains' in the physical world like fashion changes or upgrade cycles.
- nhaehnle 14y ago
  ... and it's not just about virtual economies, either. The section "Hoarding and The Failure of the Closed Economy" is basically a lesson on the so-called Paradox of Thrift and the virtue of government deficits: In the closed system, the "pumping up" of resources from the bottom of the top was done by the game administrators, and is very much akin to a government that spends exactly what it taxes. In the open system, the "drain" at the bottom is still government taxation, while the "faucet" at the top is still government spending. What the developers of UO learned is that those need to be tuned independently of each other to get a well working economy. If only people understood this about the real economy!
hayksaakian 14y ago
Pure Gold: "Human NPCs serve an extremely important role within the economy of UO because they are permanent. That is, real players disconnect to go to bed or (heaven forbid) to go to work and are therefore not online the majority of the time" Other insights: "An interesting economic phenomenon occurred concerning the fee charged by vendors. When they were first implemented, vendors charged a fee based on the resource price of their inventory regardless of their sales. With this in mind, clever players realized that they could set the price for the goods to be extraordinarily high and thus prevent anyone from buying them. This, it turned out, was a very effective way of creating a safety-deposit box since the vendors can not be robbed. Players started buying vendors for the sole purpose of increasing their hoarding space. This exacerbated hoarding problems and also resulted in a form of suburban sprawl where people built tents and attached vendors consuming valuable land. The designers ultimately fixed these problems with an elegant economic solution: the vendors now charge a fee based on the value of the goods assigned by the player. Thus, players can still set the values too high, but they will be charged rent proportionately thus deterring this practice dramatically." And another "...almost all characters are forced to be entrepreneurs of some type, a fact which doesn’t correspond well to these player’s real life. In other words, most people in real life generate their incomes from employment contracts and thus they understand these arrangements. Unfortunately, such employment contracts are not implemented in UO. Therefore, there is naturally disappointment when players are forced into being entrepreneurs and find that this job is not effortless."
- corysama 14y ago
  Never played UO, but I saw this material given as a talk at GDC. When they set their designs on a closed-loop material economy, they didn't account for extravagant hoarding behavior such as building houses from stacks of leather boots. Occasionally, they couldn't spawn new monsters because the world had ran out of the raw materials the monsters were supposed to drop as loot! They had to inflate the economy several times while trying to find yet another policy fix.
simonsarris 14y ago
A bit more back story on UO, ported from my comment in the Nomic thread. UO was divided into Trammel (safe from PvP) and Felucca (not), and some servers only had Fel. Originally, there was only Fel, and Trammel was made to entice more players who might not want such a cutthroat environment. In Fel as soon as you left a city you were more or less fair game to die from an extremely hostile environment. PC Gamer (If I recall) described the learning curve of UO as "A frozen wall of acid." Brutal, but very exciting. A wild west MMO. (In Fel) UO was a rare RPG where anyone could kill anyone, for any reason, but with the repercussion that they would be branded a "Bad person" (visible with a gray or red name instead of blue). Stealing from good people corpses also did this. Anyone can attack and kill bad persons, and if you killed even more people you were a murderer and it took a very long time to return to normal. This Blue/Gray/Red name system created a sort of cautiousness among travelers. Being near a pack of "blue" people might be safe, since any person that tried to steal or kill would turn gray and they'd immediately kill him. Unless of course, all those blue-named people were conspiring, and you are the target. You want to use super awesome powerful gear? None of this sissy MMO stuff. Die and you lose it, and your enemy (or his enemy!) gets the spoils. An insurance system was added later (2005ish?) where you could pay a certain amount per item to not lose it, probably also as an attempt to make the game less harsh. The problem I have with a lot of MMOs is that the power of your character is simply how much time you sink into the game. Essentially, MMOs are games that reward wasting time. UO had so much more than that. UO was a game where treachery and sneakiness really paid off, if you wanted them to. Lots of ways to nearly instantly kill or entrap people lead to a lot of very exciting plots where guilds might be laden with spies. Absolutely nothing like the ridiculously limited PvP found in games like WoW. In a lot of ways it was the Diplomacy (diplomatic back-stabbing board game) of MMOs. And it was great. -------- For more also see outworlder's excellent comment in the Nomic thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890513 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890513 The criticisms of UO wiki page is also a very good read, especially the housing and economy sections: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Ultima_Online http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Ultima_Online
- tibbon 14y ago
  Many of these mechanics weren't in there during alpha/beta/launch, but came shortly after. But the essential part that was always in there is 'you will die, and get looted' which never happens in modern games.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
acd 14y ago
I'm pretty sure different economic systems could be simulated in MMO games for the benefit of mankind. Let one game shard run with central banks, and the current economic system where banks create new credit through thin air. See how that affects the economic system in the game. How it affects house and asset prices, commodity prices and purchase power. Let another shard run free banking with competing currencies. See how that affect asset prices, commodity and purchase power. In yet another game world within the same system evaluate Bitcoin and see how that affects house prices, commodity prices etc. And in another world use hard currencies such as gold and silver as purchase coin, simulate that there are limits on how much gold and silver can me mined. Let the game worlds run for quite some time! Then evaluate which of all those system lead to the most prosperous game population, choose that for the real economy.
- javert 14y ago
  Too many variables will be missing. For example, you won't see how different economic systems affect scientific research and (thus) overall technological progress, which is the means by which a relatively poor person today is better off than a king 400 years ago.
- munger 14y ago
  Also people play games to have fun or to escape, resulting in their actions being much different than they would be in real life.
rymith 14y ago
I miss UO. I used to work from home, so I had a box set up that would run a simple c program that would send keys to repeat a macro based on what I wanted to train, but at random intervals. I did this because I wanted to keep up with my buddy, who had the time to actually play. But I also had a small bit of code that I injected that would scrape the text. I would set my character on a boat, and then when a mod would show up, it would beep from the PC internal speaker (so I wouldn't get caught if my wife turned down the volume on the speakers). I can't count the number of times talking to some directoe or VP while this high pitched noise came across on a conference call while I panicked to explain the noise, have a conference call, and type enough to convince that I was a person. I miss that.
- Bockit 14y ago
  Nowadays they have macro programs to help with this that use LUA or custom scripting languages to run the game. I remember learning LUA by writing scripts. Probably my pinnacle here was one to harvest wood / mine automatically, recalling to a bank to drop everything off and then head to a new mine, rotating mines so they wouldn't run out and playing a siren noise and sending me an email when the anti-macro popup would come up. At this point I was more playing to see how advanced and resilient I could make my script, and less so to play the game, heh.
- rsync 14y ago
  I actually co-located a server in a datacenter in 1998 just to macro UO. I would pcanywhere into it from home and keep the macros going, etc., and it never lost connection or ping-timed-out since it was right on the backbone (as we said in those days...)
cwilson 14y ago
When I think back to the days when I played Ultima Online (14 to 17 I believe), for whatever reason my fondest memory is a "profession" I picked up, which was that of a blacksmith. We're not talking a cookie cutter category I selected on character creation here, we're talking I happened to have a certain level in a skill that allowed me to repair my own armor and weapons, so I turned it into a public service. I'd stand around in the forge area of the most popular town, about 3 - 4 blocks from the bank in town (the most popular area in the town), and advertise that I could do repairs (generally resulting in a tip). This required that another player literally GIVE me his or her items. As in, I could run off with them if I wanted. There was no trade window that allowed me to repair their items without actually taking them. They had to trust that I would give their items back after repairing them. I found this absolutely fascinating (and still do) for multiple reasons: 1. Over time you built up a reputation of being trustworthy. At first people would only give a smith they didn't know crappy items, but as you became more trustworthy and well known they would start to hand over their rare items for repair. I was literally building a reputation in an online game, in a real community, for providing a quality service (think about the impact this likely had on a 14 year old, who at that time had no idea what having a job, or building a reputation, was like). 2. Items HAD to be repaired in UO, so this wasn't something players could get around (unless they wanted to train up that skill themselves, and you were limited on how many skills you could train to their max level at any given time). You simply had to trust a blacksmith in order to repair your items. After players came back to town after long sessions of dungeon crawling and killing monsters (in many cases because their armor was in need of repair), they would funnel back into town and the first stop was generally to get repairs. 3. For whatever reason everyone stuck to a tips based system. I don't remember a market rate at any time for repairs that players set as a community. It was just assumed you tipped your smith. 4. The better armor/weapons you personally wore while smithing, the more likely you'd get customers who had better weapons/armor, resulting in higher tips (because they likely had more money). It was my first experience with advertising and building a personal brand. This is just a taste of why UO was such an amazing game and social experiment. It's a shame nothing has come close to recreating such an experience (EVE Online being an exception, but it still falls short in many ways). If I had to pick a second fondest aspect of the game, I'd probably say Rune Books. You could "mark" runes in the game with a spell, which coded that rune with the location you were standing in when you marked it, which you could then place in a book. You could then travel back to that exact location at will, at the cost of a spell and its required reagents (hell, the reagents system was amazing as well!). Players made Rune Books of all the towns, dungeons, and crazy hidden locations (or their own homes, favorite shops, etc) for personal use, but also to sell so other players didn't have to make them on their own (as it would require a significant amount of traveling on foot to do so). I remember being very fond of my Rune Book collection. What a game.
nilsimsa 14y ago
I remember playing UO and getting PKed the first foot out of the city. It was quite frustrating. At some point a group of players formed a mob and would hunt down those PKers who played dirty with low level players.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
shocks 14y ago
Interesting. I would like to see an article like this, about the economics behind Eve Online. That would be interesting.
dysoco 14y ago
I have always wanted to play Ultima Online, since years ago. But too bad it still has monthly fees... $10 a month might not sounds too steep, but I'm in a place I can't pay using credit card nor get dollars... and it sucks.
guiambros 14y ago
If you're interested in in-game economics, another very interesting read is Lessons From Habitat http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html, a game created in the early 80's by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer that ran on Commodore 64. Despite being written more than two decades ago, most of the conclusions from Lessons.. are still fresh and applicable to game mechanics today. Randall (@frandallfarmer) is also the author of Building Web Reputation Systems, published by O'Reilly - http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/3900 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/3900. Another nice reading, if you're interested in the subject.
boxysean 14y ago
More UO nostalgia: I started playing UO when I was about 13. My parents paid the monthly fees for a few months, but I couldn't convince them to keep paying for it. ("Do your homework, Sean!") Frustrated, my friends and I found the free, independent, emulator-run servers and started playing on them. Finding the nuances between the free servers (called "shards"), we settled on one in particular and stayed there for the next few years. I got bored with playing pretty quickly -- I was never really good at games that required skill or huge amounts of time investment. I started talking with the shard staff, gained their trust, and "graduated" into being a moderator for the server when I was 14 by doing some minor policing (resolving disputes, busting people leveling up with macro programs like UOAssist, etc). I could warp anywhere and got to choose special colours of clothing and had this awesome counselor robe. Looking back, according to [1], I best fit a "socialiser" player. Then I got bored of simply moderating. There were a backlog of feature requests to the lone shard developer, who was busy trying to, y'know, have a family and work his day job. At the behest of the Italian couple who ran the server, I began developing for the shard when I was 15 (having not programmed before). I did lots of simple things like create weapons and funny items with special abilities [2], my favourite being a bag of skipping stones. Then I started doing more complicated things like recreate Triple Triad from FFVIII [3], and useful things like remake the guild system. These UO people were my friends, we hung out on IRC every day, and even did a couple of international Secret Santa gift exchanges. I got bored again around 16 or 17 and forgot about UO, but it had a lasting impact on me: At 18, I began studying computer science. I realized that the code I wrote to sort a list back in the UO days (not knowing any better) was actually the standard sorting algorithm, bubblesort. (actually relevant to the link -->) At 19, I started to learn about economics and related it back in a very real way to my days playing UO. I was tempted to go back and try to design a method of distributing wealth that reduced inflation. And by 20 I realized I was a very good programmer. (I'm now 26.) I still attribute UO at the Italians I've never met in person for that. [1] http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm [2] http://neverlands-library.com/index.php?id=4lvl http://neverlands-library.com/index.php?id=4lvl - can't believe I found this / someone documented this [3] http://neverlands-library.com/index.php?id=cards http://neverlands-library.com/index.php?id=cards
- eclipticplane 14y ago
egfx 14y ago
I was an Elder in UO. We created short quests while Seers were responsible for rendering larger storyline quests. Seers weren't really allowed to venture off script and do things but Elders were encouraged to. We Elders had insane powers. We could appear anywhere in the world at anytime, walk around invisible indefinitely and into players locked dwellings. We were able to color and rename items. And make serpents and spiders appear in mass and in the middle of town by waving a beast making wand. This was actually encouraged under the Britain is under the plaque storyline. Being an Elder was boss, but stealing from mages in Occlo with my thieves guild in Baja. Also.

125 points by simonsarris 14y ago

w-ll 14y ago

The UO economy was crazy, for a while I had a 11x14 inside of Luna Walls and was making like 30m a week. Selling to a gold dealer using my friends paypal (I didn't even have a bank account at the time, I was in middle school and said friend was in HS). I was making just shy of a grand a month in 8th grade running a mall in a video game. I later sold my account and the in-game land for 5k, I regret it to this day :( What am I doing now you might ask... Bitcoin :)

Alex3917 14y ago
I had a similar experience. I owned five houses in the desert and basically had a player city. For a while I was even a counselor before they found out I was 14.
cwilson 14y ago
I remember when one of the house placement land rushes occurred on the server I played on at the time. I had saved up for a Tower deed, and stay up ALL night in preparation. Had friends waiting to camp my spot with me and so forth. I got my spot, got my tower, then a friend of mine told me they were selling on Ebay for $600 to $1,000 depending on the placement and size of house. The Tower being the second largest structure in the game, I ended up selling it two days later for a cool $800. I was 14 at the time I believe. I used my dad's Paypal account that I had convinced him to get months before, so he had never used it, and then had to explain how I made $800 on the Internet selling virtual goods. My parents insisted I was actually selling drugs for a good month. Good times.
DiabloD3 14y ago
Now all we need is a Bitcoin powered MMO.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Wow, that is an awesome read. Comparing it to the economics in the World of Warcraft is also interesting. I particularly like the discussion of 'drains' vs 'closed circuits' there is a lot of interesting questions about building virtual economies where those are implemented in various ways. In particular comparing them to 'drains' in the physical world like fashion changes or upgrade cycles.

nhaehnle 14y ago
... and it's not just about virtual economies, either. The section "Hoarding and The Failure of the Closed Economy" is basically a lesson on the so-called Paradox of Thrift and the virtue of government deficits: In the closed system, the "pumping up" of resources from the bottom of the top was done by the game administrators, and is very much akin to a government that spends exactly what it taxes. In the open system, the "drain" at the bottom is still government taxation, while the "faucet" at the top is still government spending. What the developers of UO learned is that those need to be tuned independently of each other to get a well working economy. If only people understood this about the real economy!

hayksaakian 14y ago

Pure Gold: "Human NPCs serve an extremely important role within the economy of UO because they are permanent. That is, real players disconnect to go to bed or (heaven forbid) to go to work and are therefore not online the majority of the time" Other insights: "An interesting economic phenomenon occurred concerning the fee charged by vendors. When they were first implemented, vendors charged a fee based on the resource price of their inventory regardless of their sales. With this in mind, clever players realized that they could set the price for the goods to be extraordinarily high and thus prevent anyone from buying them. This, it turned out, was a very effective way of creating a safety-deposit box since the vendors can not be robbed. Players started buying vendors for the sole purpose of increasing their hoarding space. This exacerbated hoarding problems and also resulted in a form of suburban sprawl where people built tents and attached vendors consuming valuable land. The designers ultimately fixed these problems with an elegant economic solution: the vendors now charge a fee based on the value of the goods assigned by the player. Thus, players can still set the values too high, but they will be charged rent proportionately thus deterring this practice dramatically." And another "...almost all characters are forced to be entrepreneurs of some type, a fact which doesn’t correspond well to these player’s real life. In other words, most people in real life generate their incomes from employment contracts and thus they understand these arrangements. Unfortunately, such employment contracts are not implemented in UO. Therefore, there is naturally disappointment when players are forced into being entrepreneurs and find that this job is not effortless."

corysama 14y ago
Never played UO, but I saw this material given as a talk at GDC. When they set their designs on a closed-loop material economy, they didn't account for extravagant hoarding behavior such as building houses from stacks of leather boots. Occasionally, they couldn't spawn new monsters because the world had ran out of the raw materials the monsters were supposed to drop as loot! They had to inflate the economy several times while trying to find yet another policy fix.

simonsarris 14y ago

A bit more back story on UO, ported from my comment in the Nomic thread. UO was divided into Trammel (safe from PvP) and Felucca (not), and some servers only had Fel. Originally, there was only Fel, and Trammel was made to entice more players who might not want such a cutthroat environment. In Fel as soon as you left a city you were more or less fair game to die from an extremely hostile environment. PC Gamer (If I recall) described the learning curve of UO as "A frozen wall of acid." Brutal, but very exciting. A wild west MMO. (In Fel) UO was a rare RPG where anyone could kill anyone, for any reason, but with the repercussion that they would be branded a "Bad person" (visible with a gray or red name instead of blue). Stealing from good people corpses also did this. Anyone can attack and kill bad persons, and if you killed even more people you were a murderer and it took a very long time to return to normal. This Blue/Gray/Red name system created a sort of cautiousness among travelers. Being near a pack of "blue" people might be safe, since any person that tried to steal or kill would turn gray and they'd immediately kill him. Unless of course, all those blue-named people were conspiring, and you are the target. You want to use super awesome powerful gear? None of this sissy MMO stuff. Die and you lose it, and your enemy (or his enemy!) gets the spoils. An insurance system was added later (2005ish?) where you could pay a certain amount per item to not lose it, probably also as an attempt to make the game less harsh. The problem I have with a lot of MMOs is that the power of your character is simply how much time you sink into the game. Essentially, MMOs are games that reward wasting time. UO had so much more than that. UO was a game where treachery and sneakiness really paid off, if you wanted them to. Lots of ways to nearly instantly kill or entrap people lead to a lot of very exciting plots where guilds might be laden with spies. Absolutely nothing like the ridiculously limited PvP found in games like WoW. In a lot of ways it was the Diplomacy (diplomatic back-stabbing board game) of MMOs. And it was great. -------- For more also see outworlder's excellent comment in the Nomic thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890513 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890513 The criticisms of UO wiki page is also a very good read, especially the housing and economy sections: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Ultima_Online http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Ultima_Online

tibbon 14y ago
Many of these mechanics weren't in there during alpha/beta/launch, but came shortly after. But the essential part that was always in there is 'you will die, and get looted' which never happens in modern games.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

acd 14y ago

I'm pretty sure different economic systems could be simulated in MMO games for the benefit of mankind. Let one game shard run with central banks, and the current economic system where banks create new credit through thin air. See how that affects the economic system in the game. How it affects house and asset prices, commodity prices and purchase power. Let another shard run free banking with competing currencies. See how that affect asset prices, commodity and purchase power. In yet another game world within the same system evaluate Bitcoin and see how that affects house prices, commodity prices etc. And in another world use hard currencies such as gold and silver as purchase coin, simulate that there are limits on how much gold and silver can me mined. Let the game worlds run for quite some time! Then evaluate which of all those system lead to the most prosperous game population, choose that for the real economy.

javert 14y ago
Too many variables will be missing. For example, you won't see how different economic systems affect scientific research and (thus) overall technological progress, which is the means by which a relatively poor person today is better off than a king 400 years ago.
munger 14y ago
Also people play games to have fun or to escape, resulting in their actions being much different than they would be in real life.

rymith 14y ago

I miss UO. I used to work from home, so I had a box set up that would run a simple c program that would send keys to repeat a macro based on what I wanted to train, but at random intervals. I did this because I wanted to keep up with my buddy, who had the time to actually play. But I also had a small bit of code that I injected that would scrape the text. I would set my character on a boat, and then when a mod would show up, it would beep from the PC internal speaker (so I wouldn't get caught if my wife turned down the volume on the speakers). I can't count the number of times talking to some directoe or VP while this high pitched noise came across on a conference call while I panicked to explain the noise, have a conference call, and type enough to convince that I was a person. I miss that.

Bockit 14y ago
Nowadays they have macro programs to help with this that use LUA or custom scripting languages to run the game. I remember learning LUA by writing scripts. Probably my pinnacle here was one to harvest wood / mine automatically, recalling to a bank to drop everything off and then head to a new mine, rotating mines so they wouldn't run out and playing a siren noise and sending me an email when the anti-macro popup would come up. At this point I was more playing to see how advanced and resilient I could make my script, and less so to play the game, heh.
rsync 14y ago
I actually co-located a server in a datacenter in 1998 just to macro UO. I would pcanywhere into it from home and keep the macros going, etc., and it never lost connection or ping-timed-out since it was right on the backbone (as we said in those days...)

cwilson 14y ago

When I think back to the days when I played Ultima Online (14 to 17 I believe), for whatever reason my fondest memory is a "profession" I picked up, which was that of a blacksmith. We're not talking a cookie cutter category I selected on character creation here, we're talking I happened to have a certain level in a skill that allowed me to repair my own armor and weapons, so I turned it into a public service. I'd stand around in the forge area of the most popular town, about 3 - 4 blocks from the bank in town (the most popular area in the town), and advertise that I could do repairs (generally resulting in a tip). This required that another player literally GIVE me his or her items. As in, I could run off with them if I wanted. There was no trade window that allowed me to repair their items without actually taking them. They had to trust that I would give their items back after repairing them. I found this absolutely fascinating (and still do) for multiple reasons: 1. Over time you built up a reputation of being trustworthy. At first people would only give a smith they didn't know crappy items, but as you became more trustworthy and well known they would start to hand over their rare items for repair. I was literally building a reputation in an online game, in a real community, for providing a quality service (think about the impact this likely had on a 14 year old, who at that time had no idea what having a job, or building a reputation, was like). 2. Items HAD to be repaired in UO, so this wasn't something players could get around (unless they wanted to train up that skill themselves, and you were limited on how many skills you could train to their max level at any given time). You simply had to trust a blacksmith in order to repair your items. After players came back to town after long sessions of dungeon crawling and killing monsters (in many cases because their armor was in need of repair), they would funnel back into town and the first stop was generally to get repairs. 3. For whatever reason everyone stuck to a tips based system. I don't remember a market rate at any time for repairs that players set as a community. It was just assumed you tipped your smith. 4. The better armor/weapons you personally wore while smithing, the more likely you'd get customers who had better weapons/armor, resulting in higher tips (because they likely had more money). It was my first experience with advertising and building a personal brand. This is just a taste of why UO was such an amazing game and social experiment. It's a shame nothing has come close to recreating such an experience (EVE Online being an exception, but it still falls short in many ways). If I had to pick a second fondest aspect of the game, I'd probably say Rune Books. You could "mark" runes in the game with a spell, which coded that rune with the location you were standing in when you marked it, which you could then place in a book. You could then travel back to that exact location at will, at the cost of a spell and its required reagents (hell, the reagents system was amazing as well!). Players made Rune Books of all the towns, dungeons, and crazy hidden locations (or their own homes, favorite shops, etc) for personal use, but also to sell so other players didn't have to make them on their own (as it would require a significant amount of traveling on foot to do so). I remember being very fond of my Rune Book collection. What a game.

nilsimsa 14y ago

I remember playing UO and getting PKed the first foot out of the city. It was quite frustrating. At some point a group of players formed a mob and would hunt down those PKers who played dirty with low level players.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

shocks 14y ago

Interesting. I would like to see an article like this, about the economics behind Eve Online. That would be interesting.

dysoco 14y ago

I have always wanted to play Ultima Online, since years ago. But too bad it still has monthly fees... $10 a month might not sounds too steep, but I'm in a place I can't pay using credit card nor get dollars... and it sucks.

guiambros 14y ago

If you're interested in in-game economics, another very interesting read is Lessons From Habitat http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html, a game created in the early 80's by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer that ran on Commodore 64. Despite being written more than two decades ago, most of the conclusions from Lessons.. are still fresh and applicable to game mechanics today. Randall (@frandallfarmer) is also the author of Building Web Reputation Systems, published by O'Reilly - http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/3900 http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/3900. Another nice reading, if you're interested in the subject.

boxysean 14y ago

More UO nostalgia: I started playing UO when I was about 13. My parents paid the monthly fees for a few months, but I couldn't convince them to keep paying for it. ("Do your homework, Sean!") Frustrated, my friends and I found the free, independent, emulator-run servers and started playing on them. Finding the nuances between the free servers (called "shards"), we settled on one in particular and stayed there for the next few years. I got bored with playing pretty quickly -- I was never really good at games that required skill or huge amounts of time investment. I started talking with the shard staff, gained their trust, and "graduated" into being a moderator for the server when I was 14 by doing some minor policing (resolving disputes, busting people leveling up with macro programs like UOAssist, etc). I could warp anywhere and got to choose special colours of clothing and had this awesome counselor robe. Looking back, according to [1], I best fit a "socialiser" player. Then I got bored of simply moderating. There were a backlog of feature requests to the lone shard developer, who was busy trying to, y'know, have a family and work his day job. At the behest of the Italian couple who ran the server, I began developing for the shard when I was 15 (having not programmed before). I did lots of simple things like create weapons and funny items with special abilities [2], my favourite being a bag of skipping stones. Then I started doing more complicated things like recreate Triple Triad from FFVIII [3], and useful things like remake the guild system. These UO people were my friends, we hung out on IRC every day, and even did a couple of international Secret Santa gift exchanges. I got bored again around 16 or 17 and forgot about UO, but it had a lasting impact on me: At 18, I began studying computer science. I realized that the code I wrote to sort a list back in the UO days (not knowing any better) was actually the standard sorting algorithm, bubblesort. (actually relevant to the link -->) At 19, I started to learn about economics and related it back in a very real way to my days playing UO. I was tempted to go back and try to design a method of distributing wealth that reduced inflation. And by 20 I realized I was a very good programmer. (I'm now 26.) I still attribute UO at the Italians I've never met in person for that. [1] http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm [2] http://neverlands-library.com/index.php?id=4lvl http://neverlands-library.com/index.php?id=4lvl - can't believe I found this / someone documented this [3] http://neverlands-library.com/index.php?id=cards http://neverlands-library.com/index.php?id=cards

eclipticplane 14y ago

egfx 14y ago

I was an Elder in UO. We created short quests while Seers were responsible for rendering larger storyline quests. Seers weren't really allowed to venture off script and do things but Elders were encouraged to. We Elders had insane powers. We could appear anywhere in the world at anytime, walk around invisible indefinitely and into players locked dwellings. We were able to color and rename items. And make serpents and spiders appear in mass and in the middle of town by waving a beast making wand. This was actually encouraged under the Britain is under the plaque storyline. Being an Elder was boss, but stealing from mages in Occlo with my thieves guild in Baja. Also.