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We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

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Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#201

Post by charlieyu1 »

Ekaros wrote: post #157
imtringued wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MMOs are still stuck with the concept of permanently undamagable items that can be worth hundreds of in-game hours because of insanely low drop rates. If items had a finite lifespan and you could replace them quickly like in Minecraft, then the downside of losing your items would be far more acceptable. This is also the reason why MMO economies tend toward deflation. Players craft thousands of food items that never p…

Or towards hyperinflation when the currency generation out paces any sinks thus driving the price levels to outright stupid levels, with only limiting factor being what players can hold and trade.

Then players simply don’t trade gold. Eventually a new currency appears will facilitate the trades anyway.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#202

Post by Retric »

xani_ wrote: post #170
trissylegs wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Garriot said originally he stepped out of the fire instinctively. Then remembered "Wait I'm invincible I can stand in fire." Then proceeded to stand in the fire and die. Which is kinda funny as it's become a meme about WoW players standing in fire and dying when they couldn't just moved. (To much frustration to healers) https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Stay_out_of_the_fire

Don't think it's related in any way to wow thing aside from a fact you can stand in fire in both games... But I remember telling our DPS "THE GREEN FIRE DOES NOT HEAL YOU" in some boss fight...

That’s mostly just poor game design as players don’t worry about standing in fire when leveling up. MMO’s tend to add such arbitrary new gameplay mechanics in raids and nowhere else. Then everyone gets annoyed because players can only really practice in raids.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#203

Post by chii »

xani_ wrote: post #182
chii wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for example, EVE Online is mostly done via python (server side at least - not the frontend iirc). In fact, i reckon the reason a lot of games would have crashes is because it's written in an unsafe language like C++. And the reason there's so many successful plugins for minecraft is _because_ it's in an "easy" language like java.

> And the reason there's so many successful plugins for minecraft is _because_ it's in an "easy" language like java. Minecraft got mod support way after there was already a ton of mods for it. The way it got initially was basically hacking into game jars, not because it was supported in any way, it only got support later. Granted, Java JVM did made that easier, but still the reason it got so much stuff is because it…

> hacking into game jars, not because it was supported in any way, it only got support later.

decompiling java is much easier than decompiling C++ output. Adding code to such a decompiled source is much easier and safer, and thus much more accessible.

if minecraft had been in C++, i seriously doubt the initial mods from hacking it would've been possible.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#204

Post by superrad »

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.

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

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#205

Post by altairprime »

Huh1337 wrote: post #140
altairprime wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most cheaters do — but they’ll represent their viewpoint in terms that claim a “greater cause”, such as individual liberties or rights or whatever, so that they can try to rabble-rouse the crowd against enforcement in order to continue cheating. (This occurs with kernel anti-cheat drivers, for example, but there’s no way to measure what percentage of folks that is.)

Kernel anti-cheat drivers ??? You mean the game is hooking into the OS kernel, with privileged access? That's not okay in any case whatsoever .

No need to act surprised, and a rabble-rousing post isn’t necessary here. This is HN. We go around the same circular warpath about kernel anti-cheat drivers every few months for the past five years, and your argument is a poorly-presented rehash of a common viewpoint from those many, many discussions.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#206

Post by aasasd »

aasasd wrote: post #109
bevacqua wrote: post #20

As someone who got involved in an open-source version of the Ultima Online server, this is a fun read Instead of `areaserv` like the article talks about, RunUO had the concept of sectors within a region[1]. Sidenote: To this day RunUO is one of the easiest codebases to understand i've ever come across We too had a pretty bad item duping bug, around how banks allowed you to create checks with money, and an overflow bu…

> UO economies themselves being matter of study More than that, in regard to MMOs in general: both Cory Doctorow and Neil Stephenson wrote books involving exchange of money in MMOs, remarking that bringing a bag of gold to another dude in the game is an actual method of transferring money cross-border without oversight, used by mobs. I vaguely heard (and again mentioned by Doctorow) that the size of economy of larger…

Though the latter bit about the ‘size of economy’ is doubtful to me: the populations of top MMOs are in millions each, but surely the players don't spend the sums of their monthly rent and food bills in the games. This report from January 2021 puts the daily volume of transactions in WoW at about two million USD: https://massivelyop.com/2021/01/21/world-of-warcraft-players...

I eyeballed the rate for late-ish 2021 from this hastily found site, at 20 bucks per 200k gold—seemed to change little in the past year, so hopefully holds true for January 2021 as well: https://www.playerauctions.com/market-price-tracker/wow/

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#207

Post by Quick2822 »

bevacqua wrote: post #20

As someone who got involved in an open-source version of the Ultima Online server, this is a fun read Instead of `areaserv` like the article talks about, RunUO had the concept of sectors within a region[1]. Sidenote: To this day RunUO is one of the easiest codebases to understand i've ever come across We too had a pretty bad item duping bug, around how banks allowed you to create checks with money, and an overflow bu…

ModernUO is the most advanced implementation of RunUO/ServUO, worth checking out if you're starting a new project that isn't based on the newest UO content.

https://github.com/modernuo/ModernUO

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#208

Post by bovermyer »

andrepd wrote: post #199
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 was an absolutely amazing game and it's pretty telling that despite all the technological advances since, no game whatsoever came as close as Ultima Online to fulfilling the promise of the Computer MMO: a virtual, shared, persistent world. Maybe Star Wars Galaxies was the one who came closer.

Playable Worlds is working on an MMORPG that should come pretty close to the original idea. Raph Koster - one of the designers of SWG - is heavily involved.

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#209

Post by Huh1337 »

altairprime wrote: post #205
Huh1337 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kernel anti-cheat drivers ??? You mean the game is hooking into the OS kernel, with privileged access? That's not okay in any case whatsoever .

No need to act surprised, and a rabble-rousing post isn’t necessary here. This is HN. We go around the same circular warpath about kernel anti-cheat drivers every few months for the past five years, and your argument is a poorly-presented rehash of a common viewpoint from those many, many discussions.

Eh, we are talking about games hooking into OS kernels, "rabble rousing", if that's what you want to call it, absolutely is necessary. Do the games even notify the users that this is happening and what exactly it means to the security of their computer - the tool they (or their parents) probably use to manage their entire life on? I really don't think so.

Regardless of what you might think, since I'm not a gamer (the isometric Ultima Online was about the last game I was interested in, more than a decade or two ago) this is the first time I heard about it - and it's completely insane. How can we - the industry, the software engineers - allow it? Why do we even turn on the protected mode?

Re: We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online

#210

Post by altairprime »

Huh1337 wrote: post #209
altairprime wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No need to act surprised, and a rabble-rousing post isn’t necessary here. This is HN. We go around the same circular warpath about kernel anti-cheat drivers every few months for the past five years, and your argument is a poorly-presented rehash of a common viewpoint from those many, many discussions.

Eh, we are talking about games hooking into OS kernels , "rabble rousing", if that's what you want to call it, absolutely is necessary. Do the games even notify the users that this is happening and what exactly it means to the security of their computer - the tool they (or their parents) probably use to manage their entire life on? I really don't think so. Regardless of what you might think, since I'm not a gamer (th…

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=anticheat

The first post shown, and the first couple pages of results, will help you catch up on the discussions around these methods. I don’t have anything new to offer you that isn’t already hashed out extensively therein. Good luck with the reading, and welcome to HN.

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