Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
1–10 of 195 posts
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#2The price of pelts should have dropped to zero from the oversupply.
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#3This was very cool idea and is one of the things that made me start playing. In the Official Guide book to UO you could find for each creature what it desired. From what I understand that was lifted from the database guiding the ecology system.
A great source for more information on the design of UO (including some bits on the ecology system if you dig deep enough) is Raph Koster's blog: https://www.raphkoster.com/tag/ultima-online/
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#4They should have given Bambi a BFG3000 to defend herself.
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#5Economies are hard, as are game economies: https://www.raphkoster.com/games/snippets/the-evolution-of-u...
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#6Economies 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.)
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#7It had to be balanced around the main carnivore species ruling the online world, the players. Which apparently wasn't done, and then simple respawn with some simple dynamic rules based on population and rate of death, would have done it much better.
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#8The 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 live economy, shopkeepers would only buy things that they needed/wanted, and prices were tied to supply/demand. However players demanded the ability to dump all of their junk to shopkeepers as a way to generate money. 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.
Ultimately it became clear that more would be players preferred "a CRPG where other people happen to be playing" than "a virtual world", so be it.
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#9The price of pelts should have dropped to zero from the oversupply.
That sort of thing did happen but also quickly was removed.
Re: Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players
#10It had to be balanced around the main carnivore species ruling the online world, the players. Which apparently wasn't done, and then simple respawn with some simple dynamic rules based on population and rate of death, would have done it much better.
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