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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

#151

Post by RektBoy »

DixieDev wrote: post #30

I missed UO's hayday, but when I've played the big modern MMOs I find myself instead attracted to the idea that individual characters shouldn't be able to do everything. I feel like forcing players to interact if they want to gather specific resources or craft vital items would really help a game feel "massively multiplayer". Are there any modern MMOs with mechanics like this, e.g. life-skill limits or some other sou…

But you still can play UO in UO Outlands server, made by people who actually understands original concept, not like OSI-UO devs which turned UO, over the years, into care-bear themepark.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#153

Post by RektBoy »

rvba wrote: post #141
JoeOfTexas wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

No post body was provided.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#154

Post by stepanhruda »

bevacqua wrote: post #20

As someone who got involved in an open-source version of the Ultima Online server, this is a fun read Instead of `areaserv` like the article talks about, RunUO had the concept of sectors within a region[1]. Sidenote: To this day RunUO is one of the easiest codebases to understand i've ever come across We too had a pretty bad item duping bug, around how banks allowed you to create checks with money, and an overflow bu…

Hey I learned to code thanks to RunUO!

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#155

Post by wheybags »

Huh1337 wrote: post #140
altairprime wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Welcome to 2022, this is the new normal

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#156

Post by RektBoy »

erichurkman wrote: post #87
bevacqua wrote: post #20

As someone who got involved in an open-source version of the Ultima Online server, this is a fun read Instead of `areaserv` like the article talks about, RunUO had the concept of sectors within a region[1]. Sidenote: To this day RunUO is one of the easiest codebases to understand i've ever come across We too had a pretty bad item duping bug, around how banks allowed you to create checks with money, and an overflow bu…

> As someone who got involved in an open-source version of the Ultima Online server, this is a fun read Ultima Online emulators were what took small interest for me and blew it up into a career. But for me, it was pre-RunUO: SphereServer (aka GrayServer, I think) and UOX3. C++, with its own scripting engine built in. It wasn't exactly closed or open source. It also got me into Linux: while some emulation servers were…

Can you imagine that there are servers which is running on sphere to this day? It will be like 23years of runtime for this one server in CZ. Czechs had a lot of servers, I remember time when there was like 15 different server running, each with own lore and everything. Great times.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#157

Post by Ekaros »

imtringued wrote: post #136
josephd79 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

Or towards hyperinflation when the currency generation out paces any sinks thus driving the price levels to outright stupid levels, with only limiting factor being what players can hold and trade.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#158

Post by bearmode »

sidlls wrote: post #148
bearmode wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

>Way more than there used to be

If you played 20 years and today, you can surely notice the difference in the community?

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#159

Post by RektBoy »

> CEO “Mmm, I don’t think deleting them all [the duped items] is a good idea, you’ll hurt too many players.”

> I wanted to chafe and say something, maybe assert that he just didn’t understand, but reined myself in and after the meeting I went back to the team and told them that we were forbidden from auto-deleting all the dupes.

No wonder many players rather switched to private shards. C-levels were out of touch pretty soon. Also this shows how different your work cultures in US is in comparison to ours in some EU country (no problem here to call CEO out on his BS)

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#160

Post by hnbad »

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.

I think that pitch was inevitable given the author's tagline:

> Building interactive digital assets for the Metaverse.

Of course the joke is that the use case is as easily solved by a database, which he even explicitly says UO didn't have. The "double spend problem" has been solved by any database that supports cluster-wide transactions and there are a number of pieces of software that implement only this aspect of a database as a part of "turning the database inside-out" (usually with only a promise of eventual consistency, e.g. implementing only a write-ahead log).

Sure, a "proof of work ledger technology" could have been used but it would also have been the wrong tool for the job given that proof of work (or proof of stake for that matter) adds nothing to the solution but makes everything slower and more expensive. The only valid use cases I've heard of are interfaces between different companies and even in those cases I'm not convinced blockchain is a good solution, let alone the best one, rather than a buzzword someone used to get a raise by wooing upper management.

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