Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

blog.cotten.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 265 posts

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#241

Post by asdff »

jghn wrote: post #230
chongli wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly I don’t think it can be done. I mean sure, the game could be written, that’s not a problem. The trick is to get people to show up and in particular get players to play who aren’t “UO fans.” UO was amazing because a ton of people played it who weren’t UO fans or even MMO fans because such things didn’t exist. The players were simply RPG fans wanting to try something new and what happened was magical and serendip…

It doesn't help that the majority of people who bemoan the loss of games like UO quickly reveal themselves to be the sort of psychotic players who are the exact reason games like that no longer exist. You'll hear things like "I miss being able to slaughter dozens of people and take all their stuff". Ok great, but your average player hates that sort of game. And you need a high prey/predator ratio to satiate such desi…

The skill gap issue is huge in games. When a game is popular you have plenty of people worse than you at the game to stomp. When it becomes niche its just you against the pros who play nothing but this one game for thousands of hours, and it becomes a lot more frustrating to get into a game.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#242

Post by asdff »

arduinomancer wrote: post #46

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

GTA Online had a number of methods to quickly rack up unlimited money when it came out. Not really external hacks, just regular old in game glitches were around. I used it to get a bunch of money in game, and rather than breaking anything, it just made it a lot more fun being able to drive whatever car or get whatever I wanted. Calling up a tank is a blast in a game like gta online! I pretty much stopped playing the game when they patched everything and reset the in game economy and made my character broke and boring.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#243

Post by Justsignedup »

aasasd wrote: post #105

I 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…

In ultima online players were split into 3 categories:

Blue Gray Red

and later Orange

Blue = "good". If you are in a "guard protected zone" and you attack someone "blue" guards will come and murder you instantly. As long as someone says "guards"

Gray = "criminal". You commit a criminal action, you are gray. If you attack someone gray, no consequences will be made against you. Only thing is if I am gray, and you are blue, and you attack me, you turn gray _only to me_. Gray expires in 5 minutes.

Actions that cause this: stealing, healing someone gray / red, attacking someone blue but not yet killing them.

Red = "permanent criminal". You are red as long as you have any player kills registered to you (they decay 1 kill per 8 hours I believe. A PK is only counted if you kill a blue player or participated in killing a blue player.

There were a few fun exploits:

You can transform into a creature. This meant you turned gray without any crime. Well if someone attacks you, you can attack back. So it was a scam we used to pull where there would be occasional attacks against the town, I'd run around screaming that I'm a noob and need someone to get a monster off me, and the monster would be a friend.

Well the friend had a nearby tamed dragon that can now freely attack the guy who flagged himself against my friend without consequences. And anyone who assists now has a dragon to fight (killable, but lots of resources spent, and usually would take a few people to do, AND my friend was a competent mage, so now you also have a mage gunning for you). We didn't always succeed but it was fun. I think we got suspended a few times for it. lol.

There were some tricks to getting people to attack the wrong target and thus flag themselves in town and get the guards to kill them. But it wasn't commonplace. Maybe during beta there were problems.

Oh yeah, orange. Orange were players participating in guild wars. Orange players can attack other orange players. It is basically permitted criminal activity among those participating in a guild war. And in Order vs Chaos you also got the best shield in the game for free for being on either side.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#244

Post by synicalx »

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.

The problem with re-playing an old game I think is that it's already "solved". There's no sense of adventure or mystery any more, and it just becomes a race to accomplish whatever objectives the player base comes up with. WoW Classic is a great example of this - people had Ragnaros down in like 48 days after launch or something ridiculous.

Even though it's not an MMO, I caught a brief glimpse of that same feeling earlier this year playing through Elden Ring. No one really knew anything and the world was huge and inscrutable at first, it was a lot of fun to explore and sort-of interact with people doing the same thing through messages, ghosts etc.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#245

Post by synicalx »

lethologica wrote: post #161
b0afc375b5 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was hyped for Classic for YEARS and when the release date got announced I booked a full week off work (and with the missus lol) so I could no-life it just like old times.

If the community could have had their memory wiped of Vanilla on launch day it would have been a different experience. But instead we just ended up with a bunch of seasoned veterans min/maxing everything to the extreme and burning through content they'd already solved more than a decade ago.

I still re-visit Classic every now and then, maybe just to level another character up to level 15 or so and re-experience the starting zones I like so much. But it doesn't have the same allure as when it was brand new and that's kind of sad.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#246

Post by stavros »

pixl97 wrote: post #222
jansan wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rainz was allegedly was banned from Ultima Online and all other OSI games for life. Rainz had used a Fire Field scroll on Lord British without any real hope that his assassination attempt would be successful. When Lord British died Rainz admitted he was in complete shock and even burst out in laughter. Rainz faced immediate repercussions from Ultima Online programmers and was summarily banished from the game. The off…

Rule #1: Do not embarrass the dictator.

Yeah, that was shit, when someone beats you with the rules you yourself wrote, don't be angry.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#247

Post by cptnapalm »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #80
namrog84 wrote: post #54

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?

I play Conan Exiles which isn't exactly an MMO, but has the same sort of resource gathering grind. While my character is new, I don't actually mind it, but once I'm no longer just surviving, but thriving as a character, the basic resource gathering becomes mind-numbing due to the shear amount of stuff I need. There's no way to automate any of it.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#248

Post by samstave »

Nexxius wrote: post #187
samstave wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there that day. >>" It turns out that shortly before this event, the server had crashed and needed to be restarted. Garriott forgot to reimplement his invulnerability flag " I never believed this... it was a fn PK game. I doubt he had such a flag.

I worked for Origin at the time as a UO Admin using the handle GM Snarf, we had a control console on our standard installs which allowed us to toggle "god mode", "smite", cast spell, create item, create gold, summon monster, etc. If you forgot to toggle god mode after logging into your avatar stupid things would happen and the players would screen shot it to spread the fun. I remember forgetting to toggle it before r…

So you are personaLLY to blame?

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#249

Post by samstave »

xani_ wrote: post #172
samstave wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

So spend man-hours on developing a feature for one player in the game. or just tell them to type that command once in 2 weeks when he logs on Yeah good fucking idea, let's waste dev time on that!

Yeah this death was lit dev / corp communication

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#250

Post by fastball »

Kiro wrote: post #190
xani_ wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a minecraft server yes, but this is forcing same set of rules to every server

That's not what we're talking about though.

Yes it is, we're discussing moderation coming from a single source vs moderation from many different sources.
Post reply on HN