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We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

blog.cotten.io

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Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#141

Post by rvba »

JoeOfTexas wrote: post #90
pmoriarty wrote: post #88

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’…

Wow, talk about a train wreck lol.

It was incredible marketing for the game. I remember all the gaming press wrote about it. It would just inspire you to try to play the game.

If someone made an MMO today, it would make sense to stage similar events to get some nice viral marketing. The 'corrupted blood' incident in World of Warcraft gave the game a lot of free marketing even in normal press - who loved to write about it. From what I understand (many?) players enjoyed the few days of chaos too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#142

Post by meheleventyone »

ohmahjong wrote: post #134
agentultra wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The question then is the additional cost worth it. Employee tampering is rare and already dealt with in other ways. Also putting things on chain doesn’t prevent it because there are still employees making the game and thus can still add back doors that will be legit transactions.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#143

Post by palata »

kmeisthax wrote: post #32
palata wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are actually pretty damn good for some criminal use-cases...

Not even. Everything except Monero makes money-laundering analysis trivially easy.

Money laundering is one. What about ransomware? What about malware mining cryptocurrencies? Also I think North Korea is using cryptocurrencies to get money out of cyberattacks.

It does not feel like all this is prevented by trivial analysis, is it?

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#144

Post by b0afc375b5 »

synicalx wrote: post #116
pmoriarty wrote: post #88

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 remember when MMO's were fun like this :(

Maybe we just grew old. I recently paid real money just to support a private server of my favorite childhood mmorpg. After playing a couple of days I got bored and never played again.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#145

Post by palata »

cottenio wrote: post #84
DelightOne wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there ready-to-use blockchain libraries to simply create such a blockchain or does everything have to be custom-written and tested manually -> requiring the developer be an expert?

Apparently it was a valuable enough idea to Amazon that they spun it up as a service in AWS: QLDB.

Note: valuable as in "people are willing to pay for it", not as "it is solving a use-case better than alternatives"

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#146

Post by palata »

twodave wrote: post #43
TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article strictly points out the need for a shared concurrency models required in the functioning of a online game thats massively parrelled across both clients and various individual 'servers'. Unique, hash based, 'stacked' items that are non-fungible with a decentralized shared state across clients.... yes, technically that's 'Just a database' but a highly complex one. I get people hate the hype and 'uselessness…

If I understand correctly this can be solved with much less complexity via something like snowflake to guarantee ordering consistency. There are of course dozens of ways to achieve consistency across nodes, and a blockchain is one such solution. The reality is if blockchain were an optimal distributed store it would be used for that purpose in more places. Instead what we have is a bunch of buzzword shoehorning (whic…

Yep. I think the one place where blockchain shines is cryptocurrencies. If it's not a cryptocurrency, then there is a better alternative.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#147

Post by chii »

Operyl wrote: post #85
chii wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for example, EVE Online is mostly done via python (server side at least - not the frontend iirc). In fact, i reckon the reason a lot of games would have crashes is because it's written in an unsafe language like C++. And the reason there's so many successful plugins for minecraft is _because_ it's in an "easy" language like java.

Client uses a ton of Python too, mind you they have a very special interpreter. https://github.com/stackless-dev/stackless/wiki/

oh didnt know their client used python! Wow!

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#148

Post by sidlls »

bearmode wrote: post #138
welshwelsh wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Um, 20 years ago MMOs were also full of racists, misogynists, and others engaging in harassment and “spewing their shitty political opinions” both in-game and out (e.g. guild sites).

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#149

Post by palata »

eigenschwarz wrote: post #64

Darknet Diaries does a two part episode that covers, among others exploits, this infamous (and famously entertaining) UO zero-day exploit: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/7/ https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/8/

I wonder if Darknet Diaries will someday become the XKCD of security stories: "there is a Darknet Diaries for that" :)

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#150

Post by ezoe »

furyofantares wrote: post #22

> Not that I’m saying MMOs need blockchains; I would hope not! Lots of MMOs exist, for example. > but it turns out Proof-of-Work ledger technology had a use case here! Right, blockchain and more narrowly Proof-of-Work have loads of use cases. They're just the worst solution available for almost all of them.

Yeah, If it has a single authority to consult, there is no need of inefficient proof-of-work bullshit. Just like explained in the article, UUID and simple KVS can detect the dupes.
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