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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

#251

Post by fastball »

madeofpalk wrote: post #177
fastball wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

You still have centralised moderation there - moderation is centralised on the server admins.

Yes, the world is not black and white, there are levels of decentralized.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#252

Post by capableweb »

the_only_law wrote: post #215
mod wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent a bajillion hours flying helicopters. Really loved 3 & 4. Haven't played since, though. What happened?

It’s hardly even battlefield anymore It’s like some unholy amalgamation of every shooter genre that’s been popular with kids in the past few years. It’s like hero shooter meets battle royale meets call of duty meets the battered corpse of what used to be Battlefield. It really feels like some out of touch suits said “see what kids like these days and rip it off”. The previous game had its own controversies, and many…

> Also there’s a complete lack of content. Twenty something guns if I recall correctly, and lack of content can kill games, even otherwise good ones.

The first game had something like 10 weapons and 10 maps if I recall correctly, but is considered a wildly successful game despite that.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#253

Post by lozenge »

superrad wrote: post #204
lozenge wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know if you're joking but Ultima online was obviously released 20 years before GitHub actions existed

Good point. Still, this could have been caught by fuzzing, which is a term coined in 1988.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#254

Post by DonHopkins »

gfosco wrote: post #126
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.

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

Reminds me of the "TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG" in Zork!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31846457

DonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Random Ultima Online anecdote #2 – Horses inside p...

My favorite object containment related ZORK bug (which I discovered in the origin ZORK on MIT-DM, but which persisted in the InfoCom version), involves the troll holding an axe, blocking the door to the depths of the dungeon, who eats anything you give to him:

    >GIVE AXE TO TROLL

    The troll, who is not overly proud, graciously accepts the gift 
    and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it.

    The troll, disarmed, cowers in terror, pleading for 
    his life in the guttural tongue of the trolls.
To have killed him in cold blood then would have been cruel, so I tried something else:

    >GIVE TROLL TO TROLL

    The troll, who is not overly proud, graciously accepts the gift 
    and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it.
POOF! No more troll!

(I've actually been able to successfully apply this technique of giving HN trolls their own weapons (quoting their own words back to them), then giving them to themselves (pointing them back to their previous posts), to make them disappear from HN!)

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=anticodon

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33070863

But giving the troll to itself triggered another bug, because apparently it forgot to clear the TROLL flag, so you could still not leave the room, because when you tried to go through the exit the troll previously blocked, it said that "The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture." even though there was no troll in the room.

Decades later I finally found the Zork source code, and it turns out there was actually a troll flag called "TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG" that it forgot to clear, which the exit depended on.

I wrote up the bug in more details, with links to the source code:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672436

[...MDL Zork source code and analysis at the link...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31846457

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#255

Post by DonHopkins »

lozenge wrote: post #168
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...

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

Kids these days... ;)

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#256

Post by Kiro »

fastball wrote: post #250
Kiro wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We are not. We are discussing moderation vs no moderation (i.e. where you need to block every troll yourself).

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#257

Post by dbttdft »

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…

I thought the reason we can't have nice things is because everyone wants a game where they can obtain things and keep them forever except for in extremely rare "fair" circumstances.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#258

Post by dbttdft »

TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #29
tiagobraw wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also known as database

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…

> Especially when the author gave a very clear use case for a very real problem in shared state computing.

He did not. One server can just keep track of a player's items then pass that state on when he moves to the next adjacent server. I don't even see the issue here except the codebase is described as something very messy with weird OO/hooking style non-abstractions that just cause bugs.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#259

Post by sage76 »

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’…

Ultima online just seems to have so many awesome stories.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#260

Post by ohmahjong »

agentultra wrote: post #180
ohmahjong wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cottenio is the author in this case. If there is the potential of internal employees being malicious, then maybe trust isn't guaranteed.

I can’t believe I missed that. I still don’t think the proof part is necessary even with the potential for internal employee tampering. With sufficient system authorization and security auditing catching someone tampering would be enough than wasting all that compute resource to prevent it for such a rare case. Cool story though. I really like UO back in the day.

I 100% agree - I don't think that I would ever reach for a PoW blockchain to solve this problem, but it has certainly generated some interesting discussion
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