We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

> Yeah UO only worked because it was basically the only game in town.

As someone who was deeply involved with UO for a number of years, this explains a lot of it I think.

Once there was a choice of optional PvP in UO itself the players OVERWHELMINGLY voted against non-consent PvP by fleeing to Trammel.

That said, even after Renaissance the game and community itself was still in good shape before they caught the WoW bug and destroyed what they built trying to capture that audience.

I'm a former game dev, I worked in PHP on the server side of our game and honestly - C++ is mostly just the dominant language because everyone is constantly overworked and everything has always been done in C++. Java and C# are some counter examples you offered which, if done right, should rival the performance you can get in C++ pretty trivially - Java may have a larger memory footprint for some things (it's harder to sanely get down to the bare metal within some contexts) but it's still quite fast. I honestly think that sometime soon we'll probably see Rust shoulder C++ out for game development once someone (eyes Epic) writes an engine with native language hooks in it simply because you get pretty much all of the performance characteristics along with one of the most valuable things in the world - extensive and resilient static code evaluation.

You can make things efficient in a plethora of different languages depending on the setting (PHP, similar to how I used it, is often chosen because it's extremely readable, flexible and all the expensive performance stuff you're doing is usually in SQL on the server-side anyways) but there are definitely certain languages that are better suited to some tasks. I would really suggest not focusing in on language choice that much though, since there are much more important decisions to make when discussing high performance architecture and having access to pointer arithmetic is, at this point, honestly more of a curse (since you have to deal with horribly unmaintainable crap in some library you need) than a benefit. Over a decade ago I had my first C++ job which used the Qt framework and using references by default (which Qt strong encourages but doesn't force) is simply a much more sane approach to development.

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

In addition, in Eve nearly all items (ships, modules, ammo, even starbases) are player-manufactured, player-hauled, and player-sold.

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.