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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

#21

Post by da_chicken »

jghn wrote: post #8

The promise of alpha/beta era UO really died quickly. Even more rapidly not long after that once EQ showed up and redefined the genre. There were other cool ideas beyond the ecology that got the axe pretty quickly. For instance originally NPC shopkeepers kept hours so you had to show up when they were around. Player didn't like this as it was inconvenient so they made them permanently stationed. Similarly there was a…

> 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 of something, it's probably a good idea to think about what they're going to do with 3,000 of that especially if your players are going to expect to make a profit or if they have limited inventory.

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

#22

Post by swozey »

pkaye wrote: post #11

I played it only for a few days because they had high level players going around killing newbies for fun. My first step out of town some guy kills me in one shot. I went back to continue and he does it a second time and third time. Eventually gave up in frustration.

This was honestly part of the fun for me. I played a miner/smith often. To be as light weight as possible so I could carry more ore I had to run around naked. I carried nothing but my pick, a llama and sometimes a smiths apron. The way the screen works I don't think there's really any possible way for someone to see you but you can't see them (not including hiding). I'd basically stand around mining for hours and spamming All-Names (this shows the names of everything on the screen) and as soon as I saw a guy with a red name, or really any name walk into my screen, I'd stop and get ready to bolt and hide.

It was far more dangerous to go get high value ore outside of the cities than it was to get low value ore. To get Valorite I had to actually pay people to guard me or kill monsters for me. Usually I'd give them discounts on armor or just free armor for doing so.

We all had that "walk out of the city and get mowed down" experience. It taught us to run through the woods and constantly hide and be ready to bolt. If you saw a dead body you knew to turn around and run.

Every city has different routes and the forks outside of most major cities were the dangerous parts. You had to go around them and dodge the animals that might be in the woods.

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

#24

Post by jghn »

abootstrapper wrote: post #15

UO was such a cool and open experience. I enjoyed it over the next generation “turn in quest” rinse repeat MMOs. In UO I played a blacksmith and a beggar. My friend played a miner and a fanatical priest. We never set foot in a dungeon and saved up enough virtual money to buy our own house.

These are some of my favorite tales from the early UO days. I also had a blacksmith friend. He never went adventuring, he spent his time in the town square doing blacksmithing jobs for folks. I had another friend who was an interior decorator who would decorate your home for a fee. So much more room to explore than your typical CRPG style game.

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

#25

Post by setr »

jghn wrote: post #8

The promise of alpha/beta era UO really died quickly. Even more rapidly not long after that once EQ showed up and redefined the genre. There were other cool ideas beyond the ecology that got the axe pretty quickly. For instance originally NPC shopkeepers kept hours so you had to show up when they were around. Player didn't like this as it was inconvenient so they made them permanently stationed. Similarly there was a…

Part of the issue is that it was a half-complete migration. Eg you were still gaining skill by generating 3k skullcaps, which leads to the problem of them existing. In order to have a proper economy, you need degredation of supplies (else everything inflates indefinitely, as supply is unconstrained). 3k skullcaps should be unwieldy (and players will naturally trash what they can’t hold), or naturally degrades, in which case they have to sell in much smaller batches, or be heavily used in other processes.

Otherwise they’re really just worthless sludge you get as a side-effect from normal play, and suddenly the dump for them vanished (the always accepting, infinite cash merchants).., and you’ve just got a massive pile of shit to deal with

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

#27

Post by hannasanarion »

aiiane wrote: post #6
sehugg wrote: post #5

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 .)

Part of that is there is no vendor trash in EVE. Everything is valuable to someone. Items aren't leveled or quality ranked, they have upsides and downsides that you can balance, there are practically no "strictly better" item relationships, even the noobie ships and guns are useful in the late game for low risk travel ships. This item structure, plus PLEX and insurance for money sinks, lets them control inflation and keep the economy healthy.

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

#29

Post by jghn »

swozey wrote: post #16
jghn wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding was that part of the problem was that they expected more of the RPing MUD crowd to show up, not the typical gamer crowd. Whether or not their calculations would have been similarly incorrect even if their userbase predictions were spot on is another question altogether

The Catskills server was the roleplay server and it had actual die-hard roleplayers, the Origin storytellers (counselors? I forget) did a lot of work to help them with events, etc. For instance an entire clan (Shadowclan Orcs) took over the NPC owned Yew Orc Fort. There were big Pirate groups too in Buc's Den. I remember the Paladins of Trinsic, Yew Militia and the Undead (they may have been called something else? Th…

I remember it well. I played on Lake Superior which had a smaller but also prominent RP scene at the time, albeit more villain oriented. For instance one of our more well known RPing PK guilds was featured in Wired: https://www.wired.com/1998/05/ultima/.

The two groups had a bit of a rivalry on the then main message board, Crossroads of Britannia. LS called the Catskills group "Care Bears" and they called us "The Biker Gang". To my knowledge that was the first usage of care bears in that manner, but I'm sure it predates us. I remember one time when they all came over to our server with "care bear" characters and "invaded" the main player run tavern, Silk's Tavern.

My roommate at the time was a prominent RPing PK on Catskills, I was a prominent RPing anti-PK on LS. Folks from both groups made road trips for a house party/gathering at Catskills own Elawyn of Yew's RL house.

On the LS side it often was the case that both sides of the RPing PvP world would concoct RP reasons to band together to combat general asshattery regardless of if they were red/blue.

Siege Perilous & T2A was right around the time I was getting out of the game. I was still playing, but much less as college was over and real job had begun. Combined with the game rapidly becoming less fun for me and I just found myself playing less and less

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

#30

Post by amyjess »

da_chicken wrote: post #21
jghn wrote: post #8

The promise of alpha/beta era UO really died quickly. Even more rapidly not long after that once EQ showed up and redefined the genre. There were other cool ideas beyond the ecology that got the axe pretty quickly. For instance originally NPC shopkeepers kept hours so you had to show up when they were around. Player didn't like this as it was inconvenient so they made them permanently stationed. Similarly there was a…

> 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…

Well, the big problem is that most craft skills weren't difficulty-based.

That is, you had a fixed chance to craft anything based on your skill, each attempt made the same exact progress towards improving your skill, and skullcaps used up the least amount of cloth. I think some items may have been gated based on your skill, in that you couldn't attempt them until you passed a certain skill level, but that was it. With Tailoring, regardless of whether you suceeded or failed, an attempt would use up however much cloth it took to make the item you were trying to make, so if the item costs less cloth to make, you could make more skill checks on the same bolt of cloth (IIRC, a skullcap cost 2 yards to make, and a bolt was 50 yards).

Tinkering was even worse. I remember with Tinkering, you'd double click your tinker tools, then select your pile of ingots. At that point, it would check your skill, and if you failed your check, it would say "Tinkering failed" and maybe use up an ingot or two (my memory is hazy on whether or not anything was consumed). If you succeeded, it would bring up the menu where you could pick any tinkerable item in the game, and if you got to the menu, you could make anything you picked as long as you had the requisite raw materials.

IIRC, Blacksmithing was the only craft skill that was difficulty-based from the start.

People really exploited this during character creation when making blacksmiths. You could create your character with up to 100 total points in up to three skills, with a maximum of 50 points in any one skill. The optimal starting layout for a smith was 50 Blacksmithing, 49 Mining, 1 Tinkering. You'd want the some Tinkering because your mining and blacksmithing equipment would often wear out and the replacements were all tinkerable. If you put in any Tinkering at all, you'd start with a free set of tinker tools, and since the skill wasn't difficulty-based, if you needed to replace your shovel or tongs, you'd just repeatedly attempt tinkering on your ingots until you finally succeeded your skill check, no matter how many tries it took, and once you made it to the menu (this leads me to think that failing didn't use up any ingots, but I could be wrong, and my memory on this is hazy), you could make your new shovel or tongs.

They eventually made all the craft skills difficulty-based, but it took several years to implement.

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