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We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

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Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#161

Post by lethologica »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #144
synicalx wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Same thing happened with me and WoW Classic. I was hoping that classic would recapture the magic I felt playing the game a decade ago but after a few days I was just bored and cancelled my subscription. I guess that feeling is just a moment frozen in time now.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#162

Post by Kiro »

fastball wrote: post #115
beachy wrote: 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.…

There's no difference between a Minecraft server implementing moderation policies and an MMO implementing them. The self-moderation we're talking about would be on an individual level.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#163

Post by Kiro »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #112
beachy wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peo…

Rocket League is a bad comparison. You only have at max, what 5 other players, that you need to block if necessary. In an MMO without moderation you wouldn't be able to keep up with blocking every troll spamming even if that was all you did.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#164

Post by Kiro »

noman-land wrote: post #97
EamonnMR wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Few people actually enjoy being in a community without moderation though.

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

An MMO without central moderation would mean a chat with 99% trolls spamming and even if you spent all time blocking people instead of playing you wouldn't be able to keep up.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#165

Post by baobabKoodaa »

aasasd wrote: post #117
Misdicorl wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think I know why you have this hazy memory! Oftentimes these robber groups patrolled around the edges of the "safe zones" where it's possible to call guards. When there were battles, it was often chaotic with multiple characters moving and mauling each other. Sometimes an innocent player would be attacked near the border, they would defend themselves and accidentally do some action which marks them as a criminal (for example, moving inside the border of the safe zone and defend against an attacker who is outside the safe zone and not marked as criminal). The innocent player defending themselves might call "guards", but because they've accidentally made some particular action, the guards would treat them as the criminal and kill them.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#166

Post by capableweb »

__d wrote: post #81
Dylan16807 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ultima Online invented a significant amount of technology we use today. Yeah, but not UUIDs. Those go back to the 80s.

I think they were invented by Apollo Computer as part of their NCS (Network Computing System). From there, they were adopted by the OSF (later Open Group) DCE RPC system, and from there, by Microsoft (who renamed them GUIDs).

In that vein, earliest mention of UUID I could find (thanks Apollo Archives):

> 2.4 Unique Identifiers

> An important aspect of NCA is its use of universal unique identifiers (UUIDs) as the most primi-

> tive means of identifying NCA entities (e.g. objects, interfaces, operations). UUIDs are an exten-

> sion of the unique identifiers (UIDs) already used throughout Apollo’s system [Leach 82]. Both

> UIDs and UUIDs are fixed length identifiers that are guaranteed to refer to just one thing for all

> time. The principal advantages of using any kind of unique identifiers over using string names at

> the lowest level of the system include: small size, ease of embedding in data structures, location

> transparency, and the ability to layer various naming strategies on top of the primitive naming

> mechanism. Also, identifiers can be generated anywhere, without first having to contact some

> other agent (e.g. a special server on the network, or a human representative of a company that

> hands out identifiers).

https://jim.rees.org/apollo-archive/papers/ncs.pdf

The paper is not dated but probably was around 1986 or later?

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#167

Post by bodge5000 »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #144
synicalx wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To be fair it does feel like something changed, online games used to feel a lot more social. As a kid you could just jump into an MMO and make new friends, that seems to have gone away now.

I guess they served as a proxy for what we now have with Discord, and now that we have "the real thing", its kind of naturally gone away. Which is a shame, because meeting people over Discord is much more difficult imo, or at very least not as beginner friendly.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#168

Post by lozenge »

samstave wrote: post #130
gfosco wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course GMs and staff had invuln flags... the Lord British character didn't play the game normally, he appeared for events.

Thats fine, im just saying as one of the most prolifics (we were the 24/7 testers at intel) etc... and being there that day - no way this wasnt lit on by default, if exist...

Yeah, they could have caught this with even the most basic Github Actions workflow.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#169

Post by barrucadu »

RektBoy wrote: post #159

> 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 pret…

How is it out of touch? Dealing with the cheaters who are duplicating items is one thing, but what about the victims who have bought items they thought to be perfectly legitimate? And before you say "delete the items and refund them", how are you going to get the purchase prices? Pore through game chat logs? What if the items have been sold on again? Manually find and reverse all the transactions?

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#170

Post by xani_ »

trissylegs wrote: post #135
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 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

Don't think it's related in any way to wow thing aside from a fact you can stand in fire in both games...

But I remember telling our DPS "THE GREEN FIRE DOES NOT HEAL YOU" in some boss fight...

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