Live data from Hacker News

We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

blog.cotten.io

131–140 of 265 posts

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#132

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

Not only that but diablo 2 had such a prolific duping problems of this 1 ring. The ring itself became a currency. They eventually added a mechanic in game that consumed the rings for something else as a way to remove the rings from game without deleting at will.

I think SOJs became currency and the duping problem made them worthless and moved the currency to high runes? But what they did with the anni quest to get rid of the rest of the SOJs was clever

Oh man, thanks for the nostalgia trip!

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the challenges is finding the right proportional scale. If the difficulty or fun of say blacksmithing nice items for the community. And you have it balanced out that you expect 20% of players be blacksmith. But then either 10 or 30% be blacksmiths either items skyrocket in price and make it unobtainable to most or the floor bottoms out making it not viable for most to engage in a market. I think its solvable b…

I don't understand why MMOs could never figure out how to make resource gathering as fun (or more fun) than hack & slashing. Stardew Valley and other games - Death's Door, A Short Hike, Toem, etc - figured this out. Why haven't any MMOs done it?

FFXIV has a decent gathering approach

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

cottenio is the author in this case.

If there is the potential of internal employees being malicious, then maybe trust isn't guaranteed.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#135

This 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 think Garriot said originally he stepped out of the fire instinctively. Then remembered "Wait I'm invincible I can stand in fire." Then proceeded to stand in the fire and die.

Which is kinda funny as it's become a meme about WoW players standing in fire and dying when they couldn't just moved. (To much frustration to healers)

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Stay_out_of_the_fire

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason UO will never be re-created is that it was the first game of it's kind and thus every player had only one option. In modern times, the gamer population is so bifurcated that I'm not sure it'll ever be possible to have such a mix of player types in a single unforgiving ecosystem.

Plus newer game generation wouldn’t like the idea of being pk’d and losing items….

MMOs are still stuck with the concept of permanently undamagable items that can be worth hundreds of in-game hours because of insanely low drop rates.

If items had a finite lifespan and you could replace them quickly like in Minecraft, then the downside of losing your items would be far more acceptable.

This is also the reason why MMO economies tend toward deflation. Players craft thousands of food items that never perish and just pile up in some auction house or automated market place.

If every player sold their items when they quit there would be more items than players.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#137
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an alternative, may I offer you a wasm port? https://play.classicuo.org/ (I've never used this but I heard it runs well)

f. on a monday.. come one i gotta get work done. now i gotta go afk for the week a nd blame it on pg&e

It's Tuesday man

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this seems like another "how is that better than a centralized database" situation

Pretty much every MMO has implemented some type of censorship/shitty rules, so no company can be trusted to run a game

Communities on MMOs these days aren't like they were 20 years ago. They're FULL of racists, bigots, and morons spewing their shitty political opinions in the different world chats. Way more than there used to be.

I'd be happy for some moderation to silence all of those people.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#139
post #101

Earlier 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.…

But the point of an MMO is to share a space with thousands of people so individual servers with differing rules don’t really work in that context. And individual servers doing moderation is the same as individual server based games doing moderation, it’s just a difference in scale. I’m sure there are loads of other games people can play. For example Rust is infamous for a lack of moderation and has all the racist and otherwise edgey content in it your heart desires.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most cheaters do — but they’ll represent their viewpoint in terms that claim a “greater cause”, such as individual liberties or rights or whatever, so that they can try to rabble-rouse the crowd against enforcement in order to continue cheating. (This occurs with kernel anti-cheat drivers, for example, but there’s no way to measure what percentage of folks that is.)

Kernel anti-cheat drivers??? You mean the game is hooking into the OS kernel, with privileged access? That's not okay in any case whatsoever.
Post reply on HN