Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think you mean oOooOO OooOoOOo
Oh man, what was it, Ghostspeak? Then you could ask a ghost who had killed them and if they were near you..
spirit speak
Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
31–40 of 195 posts
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#32The 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…
I've seen this happen in a lot of MMO's principally WOW and Runescape - as the game ages players increasingly value convenience and you see the more "grinding" elements of the game relax. The more successful games are able to walk the line between respecting what players have "earned" and keeping pace with modern convenience features such as instant teleports and configurable UIs and macros.
Stories like these are tremendously valuable to entrepreneurs. MMORPG ecosystems are some of the most complex pieces of software ever made with ravenous (and lucrative) userbases if you handle it properly. There are plenty of stories of innovative success and massive incompetence to learn from.
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#3323 comments so far and few if any seemed to be troubled by the fact the game players we're so willing to kill __everything__. Untethered?
Not uncommon among real people when they enter a new world. Take for instance, bison being nearly eradicated within a century of significant settlement west of the Appalachians.
Not to mention, new players were probably practicing combat. It's not like anyone would normally have concern for killing virtual goats and rabbits.
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#34The 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…
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.
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#35Economies 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 .)
I think it helps that CCP has an economist on staff to manage it.
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#36I 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.
sit
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Bi…
Aurics Moongates.com is still around if you want a trip down memory lane. During Alpha/Beta it was a place where a lot of us went to chat while we waited for discs to arrive.
Unfortunately most of the music doesn't load any longer. I always loved the Ultima soundtracks.
edit: https://soundcloud.com/mmomusic/sets/ultima-online
edit2: This sounds terrible not as a midi
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#38I'm surprised to see this here, I actually just stumbled on this video a little earlier on YouTube. It's actually a series with multiple entries. Here's the playlist [0] if anyone is interested in checking out the others videos.
Getting an inside look at game development is always fascinating. I wish more developers would talk about their experiences. You can usually take away incredibly valuable lessons from videos like these. For example, from this Ultima Online thing you'd learn about the importance of user-testing.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKBPwuu3eCYkScmqpD9xE...
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#39I 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-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 effort and imagination. The idea that you could stake out your own small part of this vibrant world, right down to building a house in the limited land space available; or making your name as an accomplished crafter who people sought out for their superior crafted equipment, it was so fascinating to me.
After a few years I found out about a project called the Ultima Offline eXperiment, they were working on a server emulator that would let you run your own worlds, with your own rules! (Their scripting engine was JavaScript, running on the server... 19 years ago) As a teenager with no prior software experience, this was incredible to me. I scoured the internet for anything I could find to learn C++ and JavaScript and started screwing around with the emulator. It was slow going at first, given the somewhat limited resources available on the internet at the time, but I stuck with it and from that point on I knew exactly what I wanted to spend my life doing. After that I moved to would become the de-facto emulator for nearly 2 decades, RunUO. Through that community I found contract work on projects that were unrelated to UO, and from that experience transitioned to a full-time career in software about 10 years ago.
This game was hugely important to me and who I became because of it, and it makes me so happy that stories about UO pop up every few years as a reminder of that.
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#4023 comments so far and few if any seemed to be troubled by the fact the game players we're so willing to kill __everything__. Untethered?
Not uncommon among real people when they enter a new world. Take for instance, bison being nearly eradicated within a century of significant settlement west of the Appalachians. Not to mention, new players were probably practicing combat. It's not like anyone would normally have concern for killing virtual goats and rabbits.
Or the extinction of the California grizzly within 75 years of gold being discovered. It’s a common pattern — maybe the issue isn’t with the game…