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

MMOs as virtual worlds are really hard. Red Dead Redemption online has all the great graphics, but play is mostly people randomly killing other people. No plot. This is a big problem with MMOs - big working worlds can be built, but mostly people just kill each other. Look at the success of Fortnite - 8 million peak concurrent players.

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

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

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

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

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

I think that’s an overly serious interpretation that also doesn’t account for a different game mechanics.

For instance, take a very early RPG, Miracle Warriors. We played this for weeks before we understood that you weren’t supposed to kill certain creatures, and that it lowered your reputation score. Even after we understood that, it’s not like we were really trying to role-play ethically – we were just trying to gather experience and money. Or what if your character is evil? It’s just a character. Eventually, there were parts of the game that you couldn’t access unless you had a high positive reputation.

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

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

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

The two things I loved most about UO:

* no opt-in required PVP with full looting

* the bugs / exploits

I had a very high bounty. :D

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

Favorite bugs:

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

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

* mouse tip hover + overloaded treasure chest trap

* dying bags in a trading window

I LOVED this game.

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

How are objects created in the first place? If I like your object, can I just make another one that looks exactly the same?