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Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

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Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#171

Post by the_gipsy »

space_fountain wrote: post #88
avar wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a big problem with MMOs - big working worlds can be built, but mostly people just kill each other. This isn't a problem with these games. It's intentional. Everyone knows how to mitigate it, you introduce a factor of significant loss aversion into attacking or being attacked, e.g. what EVE Online has where you might lose significant resources as a result. Players by an large don't like that, and just want t…

Something that a was part of for a long time which I thought had a good mix of this was Civcraft a Minecraft sever/collection of mods. It made pretty much all resources scarcer and plants and animals harder to grow (biomdepenedent). Then mods allowed users to reinforce blocks meaning it would take repeated breaks for them to actually disappear. (cooked stone meant 25, iron 255 I think and diamond 1255 or similar). Re…

Civcraft was one of the few games where the economy felt really real, and the gameplay truly emergent.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#172

Post by kungtotte »

nrb wrote: post #159
firekvz wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me tell you this, but.. WoW was the clone, it tried to copy already existings MMOs, the only reason WoW was sucessfull was because all the advertising it got Asia (KR/JP) had already huge mmo games before WoW

That’s not completely fair... WoW was successful because it was outstandingly polished (no other game was even close at the time) and fun to play.

It also got a massive amount of early hype by being a Blizzard/Warcraft IP and not generic fantasy.

All of the buzz surrounding it prior to launch was about being able to play as characters from the Warcraft universe, not that it was a polished MMO.

The IP got people to sign up, the polish made them stick around.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#173

Post by the_gipsy »

space_fountain wrote: post #151
ehnto wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My solution was to play modpacks that no sane person would be bothered grinding in order to grief. Svens and Test Pack Please Ignore are what our servers were based on. If you wanted to grief you would uabe to grind for hours before being capable enough to bother anyone. So in your case and mine it seems the solution was giving serious players tools to defend themselves that were resource or time intensive to defeat,…

Getting sort of off subject, but one of the things I liked about this set of mods was that they were entirely server side. It got a bit awkward in that it required text commands in the place of interfaces in a lot of places, but it meant that the difficulty of getting people to join was a lot smaller. I think at the peak it was still fairly small but a healthy 100+ on most days. My first big bit of software developme…

Do you happen to know any active copycat servers?

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#174

Post by kalekold »

sologoub wrote: post #161

UO was an amazing experiment in self-organization and survival in the world with little protection. At least for a while. The initial pre-facet gameplay basically split between the protected town space and free-for-all wilderness. As soon as one wondered outside town guard area, anything could happen - you could attack anyone and anyone could attack you, costing you all you carried. Or nothing could happen. That was…

Trammel completely ruined UO because of exactly what you describe. It was so sad and totally avoidable. I left not long after too.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#175

Post by kalekold »

codezero wrote: post #123
gluelogic wrote: post #120

I love any UO-related post! 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…

I played anarchy a bit. It was ok but mostly just pvp and bugs. Shadowbane was where the hardcore pvpers went as well as call of asheron I think? Edit: Asheron’s Call and Dark age of Camelot. Oh gosh. Kids these days have no clue! Or maybe they do.

Dark Age of Camelot was amazing. I remember many times standing in the frontier as part of a friendly army facing the enemy both armies equaling 100 to 200 people. Someone would give the order to charge and all hell broke loose. Defending keeps was also fun, throwing things off the battlements. Good times.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#176

Post by kalekold »

codezero wrote: post #122
geniium wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My favorite was stacking flour on the shore and teleporting through locked doors from the plank of a ship. Also there was a massive subculture of collectors who grabbed the rare items not locked down after a server reboot. The game shipped with a lot of bugs that they fixed by adding tiles after the fact and some weren’t locked down so people grabbed them up. My speciality was fruit bowls :P Once we broke into a GMs…

I remember asking a mage for a gate to another city, he opened one and I stepped through. I found myself on a tiny little desert island whose only inhabitant was an extremely large dragon lol. I wasn't even mad, I laughed out loud as I died.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#178

Post by stepanhruda »

nrb wrote: post #39

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-…

Me too! I bought a book about C# and read each chapter over and over until I understood what was going on, because I wanted to join work on a RunUO project. Which I did and it was my first experience with working on a team, using source control etc.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#179

Post by code_duck »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #72
code_duck wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be far more likely to hunt a species to extinction in a fictional video game where it doesn’t remotely matter at all than in real life.

So being wired to find that entertaining is a good thing? Regardless, given what we're seeing in real life I'm not so sure the appeal is limited to video game activity.

No? I don’t see how that’s a conclusion from what I said. And yes, it’s rather apparent that people enjoy hunting.

Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players

#180

Post by Brockenstein »

jghn wrote: post #34
da_chicken wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A common pattern was that players would have mountains of skullcaps due to building their tailoring skill, but were then upset when no shop would buy 3000 skullcaps from them. That's not really a problem with the shopkeepers. It's a gross mismatch in how difficult they made it to progress in skill versus the artificial aggregate demand for those products. If your game design requires that your players craft 3,000 o…

Yeah, this is not to say that there weren't other problems. I just wish they'd have solved them via fixing these sorts of root causes instead of just dumbing down the virtual world.

You can't fix people.
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