111–120 of 195 posts
Economies are hard, as are game economies: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/snippets/the-evolution-of-u...
This is one of the things that impresses me so much with EVE Online - that the economy has stayed as stable as it has. (Sure, there has been some inflation, and some interesting swings at times, but it still fundamentally works .)
The price of pelts should have dropped to zero from the oversupply.
That sort of thing did happen but also quickly was removed.
They should have given Bambi a BFG3000 to defend herself.
MMOs as virtual worlds are really hard. Red Dead Redemption online has all the great graphics, but play is mostly people randomly killing other people. No plot. This is a big problem with MMOs - big working worlds can be built, but mostly people just kill each other. Look at the success of Fortnite - 8 million peak concurrent players. Second Life has a functional economy, but no NPC ecosystem. The economy is driven b…
The two things I loved most about UO: * no opt-in required PVP with full looting * the bugs / exploits I had a very high bounty. :D The chance that you could actually lose months worth of work always made the game heart pounding exciting when you were running for your life. Favorite bugs: * mage/carpenter could build tables, stack them, teleport to the top, and jump through people’s roofs to loot houses * stealing we…
Apropos of nothing, I've always found the behavior of the players of MMOs and online games one of the clearest telltales that sociopathy is a lot more prevalent that most people think it is.
I owe my career to this game. I was totally obsessed with UO from the moment I logged in for the first time and created my character, a crafter who was primarily a miner/blacksmith. That’s the thing about UO... nobody was the hero, everyone was just trying to survive and thrive in their own way; whether that meant crawling the dungeons as a warrior, bard, tamed, or caster; terrorizing those same dungeons as a player-…
>That’s the thing about UO... nobody was the hero, everyone was just trying to survive and thrive in their own way; whether that meant crawling the dungeons as a warrior, bard, tamed, or caster; terrorizing those same dungeons as a player-killer out to strip the dungeon crawlers of all their loot and gear; or, spending your days baking bread or running your own player shopping mall, your only limitation was your effo…
I need to read this but as a beta and long term player of UO, the bugs made the game even better.
Yeah! Like when the servers were going down we knew the last 15 Minutes weren’t saved and the whole world was going crazy and everyone was using his best weapons and turning red.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The resource quality and crafting system in SWG was an absolute masterpiece; I’ve yearned for a game with that amount of depth ever since the combat upgrade patch made it irrelevant.
I led the design on both games, and SWG was of course the application of a lot of lessons learned from UO.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apropos of nothing, I've always found the behavior of the players of MMOs and online games one of the clearest telltales that sociopathy is a lot more prevalent that most people think it is.
The term I used at the time was "virtual sociopath" -- you'd think sociopathy is more common if you glance at forums today, too... but there's a huge element of disinhibition brought about by non-personal contact. It doesn't mean the person is like that in person at all.
They just saw UO as a different kind of game as other folks did, something more akin to Quake where it was no holds barred PvP. There were multiple folks I knew who couldn't understand that someone wouldn't view the game that way.
Speaking of killing everything in UO, in what would be considered the "T2A" era of this game (I'm estimating something like 1998-1999), I remember manipulating the line-of-sight bug that let you attack NPCs inside town in such a way that the town guards wouldn't come (There were many "criminal acts" you could commit, like attacking or stealing from a player, and if you did them in town the guards would instantly kill you).
I would town kill NPCs to get colors of cloth that were not achievable using the dye tubs available to you. They would spawn with colors that were less garish than the ones you would end up with if you dyed them. I would chop their clothes up, sort them by colors, and use the raw cloth to create clothes on my tailor. It was a great money maker, because killing NPCs was quick and easy, and in the end it's just clothing items, but the product was not available anywhere else. If someone killed you in the process, you were naked except for a weapon anyway, and people generally did not understand what I wanted with the cloth in the first place so it didn't get looted.
From the housing system to the criminal system, UO was just the best MMO. You could do anything, but you had to suffer the consequences. I love the totally free-market economy it gives rise to. I feel like MMORPGs got a lot softer and less "libertarian" (if I can use that word without all the political baggage), for better or worse. Probably for better, because WoW was popular in a way that UO never would be.
I always heard Anarchy Online was great, but I never got around to playing it.