We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online • Hacker News Board

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#171

Post by zeroclip » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 11:21 AM UTC

twodave wrote: post #43

TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If I understand correctly this can be solved with much less complexity via something like snowflake to guarantee ordering consistency. There are of course dozens of ways to achieve consistency across nodes, and a blockchain is one such solution. The reality is if blockchain were an optimal distributed store it would be used for that purpose in more places. Instead what we have is a bunch of buzzword shoehorning (whic…

Can you describe how a snowflake ID would help? Imagine the data contains two Rare Items, when it should only contain one instance. They both have different snowflake IDs. How do you determine which is authentic? The timestamp on the duplicated item could have been spoofed.

I think the real solution to this problem is just to trust a centralized actor and single large database that is shared across all servers. Not what the author wants to hear, but most games don't need the level of decentralization of PoW or PoS for all of their game assets. But a fully decentralized MMO would be cool in theory.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#172

Post by xani_ » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 11:21 AM UTC

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...

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!

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#173

Post by JeddHampton » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 11:26 AM UTC

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.

The game could return to what it was but the community couldn't. You can't recapture the past like that. Everything has moved on. The game is known, not new again.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#174

Post by xani_ » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 11:26 AM UTC

welshwelsh wrote: post #89

arduinomancer wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah this seems like another "how is that better than a centralized database" situation

Pretty much every MMO has implemented some type of censorship/shitty rules, so no company can be trusted to run a game

And how the fuck would blockchain help here ?

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#175

Post by xani_ » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 11:27 AM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #162

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.…

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.

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

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#176

Post by zeroclip » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 11:30 AM UTC

I am very pro-NFT and pro-blockchain but disagree with the author. Blockchain is not going to replace a MMO item database. Blockchains have bottlenecks and are not needed if you and your users are OK with a centralized database to meet high performance requirements.

Now, imagine your goal was to create a distributed and decentralized MMO not owned by any single company, and permissionless so that anybody could built on top of it. For this it does make sense to use blockchain-like technology like a rollup that aggregates state deltas of many transactions, batching them into a proof that is posted to a distributed ledger.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#177

Post by madeofpalk » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 11:32 AM UTC

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.…

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

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#178

Post by xani_ » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 11:40 AM UTC

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…

>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'.

Uh, no. The servers are essentially independent. Each server have maybe few thousand clients at once.

The data most clients change is independent of eachother. Hell *you don't need to store most of them*.

All you need to store is basically some world state data (nobody GAF that non-boss monster just respawns after server restart ,no need to store that data in the database) and player possesion

>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.

Uh, no.

:: + a server signature to signify it was actually generated by that server.

Any change of ownership within a server is server changing account ID item belongs to + signing the transaction and resulting record. Alert on fraud if someone has same : pair.

You reduce the problem space to "do I trust the other server" which is much easier to solve. And even if you say allow malicious server with tons of accounts having cheated in items transfer to yours.... each item has that server's ID so you can trivially fix it by removing them from yours.

All that would need to be tracked above that are account transfers.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#179

Post by xani_ » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 11:42 AM UTC

ohmahjong wrote: post #134

agentultra wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need the proof part if all the server nodes are trusted. Just the hashes is enough. I think that’s the part the author was pointing out in the article and we’re reading a bit too far into it.

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

Okay? What makes you think this would stop them from just running some GPU in the corner and generating a bunch of expensive items to peddle ? They'd have all the access to make it look legit ?

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#180

Post by agentultra » Tue, Oct 04, 2022, 11:43 AM UTC

ohmahjong wrote: post #134

agentultra wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t need the proof part if all the server nodes are trusted. Just the hashes is enough. I think that’s the part the author was pointing out in the article and we’re reading a bit too far into it.

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.