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We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

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Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#2
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.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#5
> 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)?

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#6

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.

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

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#7

> 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)?

Since only the server is authoring the entries, just a ledger.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#9
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?

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#10
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.
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