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…
We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
111–120 of 265 posts
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to speak for a whole community but I think the decentralization idealist would say that people can do their own moderation, instead of relying on a central entity which makes the same broad rules for everyone
Isn't everyone doing their own moderation exactly the same as no moderation?
Not at all. Doing your own moderation depends on having the tools available to mute/censor/block people you don't want to hear from.
For example, I used to play Rocket League. I played either solo or teamed exclusively with a few friends and mutual acquaintances. They have various settings to mute the chat and comments from other people. I'm not interested in all in hearing flames or nonsense chatting from random people I'm playing against, so I have all chat muted except for team chat (people I know and choose to team with). This is doing your "own moderation", and is the ideal circumstance is far as I'm concerned.
Unfortunately, however, Rocket League doesn't allow you do your own moderation, despite the proper tools being available. One time, someone I was teamed with (who similarly had all non-team chat muted), typed something in team chat that ran afoul of Rocket Leagues sensibilities, and they subsequently received a week-long ban. Nobody could see this chat except our team (myself and this other person). We had already engaged in our "own moderation" by muting everyone else. This was an overreach as far as I'm concerned, and would far prefer to have the power to see and hear what I choose, and not what the platform chooses.
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Few people actually enjoy being in a community without moderation though.
To welshwelsh's point, he wasn't advocating for no moderation, but rather good and limited moderation. For example, I doubt most would have an issue with something like moderation over cheating.
I think there's a bright line between "content moderation" where speech and behavior is being moderated, and spam and/or bug abuse which has nothing to do with content of speech whatsoever. Rate limiting inputs is not the same as picking and choosing who is allowed to say what based on arbitrary standards of speech content.
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
> Battlefield 2 Really is a shame what happened to that franchise.
I spent a bajillion hours flying helicopters. Really loved 3 & 4.
Haven't played since, though. What happened?
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to speak for a whole community but I think the decentralization idealist would say that people can do their own moderation, instead of relying on a central entity which makes the same broad rules for everyone
Isn't everyone doing their own moderation exactly the same as no moderation?
Not really. Take Minecraft for example – before the acquisition by Microsoft, servers were entirely run by individuals/groups who set their own moderation policies. Some servers were entirely PG-rated, some allowed cursing/sex stuff/etc. Mojang technically still had some level of control over things like skins (which were centrally managed), but otherwise it was choose-your-own-moderation for each individual server.
However recently (and widely discussed on HN[1]) Microsoft has started censoring the entire ecosystem, to the point where you can get banned from all servers for chat behavior in one server, because your MC account is now your MSFT account. So they can just ban the latter to block you from all of MC (except for cracked servers).
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#116This 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’…
I remember when MMO's were fun like this :(
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#117I 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 implic…
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.
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.
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since only the server is authoring the entries, just a ledger.
also known as database
No, a ledger and a database are different. The ledger is a transaction log. The database holds the current state.
Basic bookkeeping concept: every once in a while (usually daily) you take a snapshot of the current state and mark that point in the ledger. Then you take the previous snapshot, re-run the day's transactions, and you should get the current snapshot. If you don't, something has gone wrong. This is called "reconciliation".
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 eac…
Yeah, my point was that an internal PoW ledger (not decentralized but still technically a blockchain) would’ve been useful because: A) stack tracking per stackable type is trivial with UXTO, and B) adding a few seconds of PoW makes the resulting chain so hard to forge for crime-of-opportunity style attacks (preventing internal employees from making untraceable gold) that it could’ve prevented a few firings/calls to t…
You don’t need the proof part if all the server nodes are trusted. Just the hashes is enough. I think that’s the part the author was pointing out in the article and we’re reading a bit too far into it.
Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't everyone doing their own moderation exactly the same as no moderation?
Not really. Take Minecraft for example – before the acquisition by Microsoft, servers were entirely run by individuals/groups who set their own moderation policies. Some servers were entirely PG-rated, some allowed cursing/sex stuff/etc. Mojang technically still had some level of control over things like skins (which were centrally managed), but otherwise it was choose-your-own-moderation for each individual server.…
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