How Gamers Killed Ultima Online's Virtual Ecology | War Stories | Ars Technica

The best thing about multiplayer is other people. The worst thing about multiplayer is other people.

So you took into account herbivores acting like herbivores, and carnivores acting like carnivores, but you failed to account for humans acting like humans...

"Can we get some B-roll footage of you around the house?" "Sure let me grab my wolf pipe"

Alright I'm gonna toss my $.0.02 in here and remind Mr. Garriot that new players had such abysmal skills and stats that they had no choice but to kill the harmless critters until their stats went up. UO didn't care whether you were striking an Ogre Lord or that rabbit; they both had a chance to give you a skill gain. They also did it for their professions. Cooks needed the meat for cooking; fletchers needed the arrows for archery; and leatherworkers needed the hides.

Summary: Design your game assuming every single player is a psychopathic murder hobo XD

I actually played the original game. The players weren’t the problem. The issue at hand was the incentives. First, your armor would decay with fights. The easiest and quickest way to replenish was by killing deer for leather. There is a reason part of the map was named hind valley. Second, if you are killing something that levels your skills at the same time as replenishing then that is a huge win. In other games you got basic xp. In UO there were skills you would level by doing them. Lumberjack, tailor, miner, parry, sword were some examples. If I farmed something that accomplished two things or more at once then I was making the best use of my time. Third, the original UO was PVP with corpse looting. You would almost always be better off to wear cheap farmable armor that is easy to replenish. That created a huge market for GM armor. More on GM armor later. People that didn’t farm for resources would shop for gear. The only time people wore the best gear was in town near the bank, so you didn’t need more than one set of rare mined GM valorite armor. Plus, if you were capped on say tailoring, then you could make grandmaster gear with slightly better stats. People would look for that gear vs non grandmaster gear. In order to be a grandmaster, you spent countless hours farming and crafting the same gear until you got enough skill points which at that time was 100. Regarding skills, you could craft armor and see no skill gain. At higher levels, you might need days of working skills to see a single .1 gain. I don’t blame the players for killing everything. I blame the game for creating a system designed to cause that behavior and later complaining about it.

I've played DAoC for 18 years and never got my best friend to play because he was still shell-shocked from playing UO as a simple lumberjack chopping down trees to make furniture and being griefed by some player who stole all his furniture and burned down his house and killed his character.

One of the problems here is that there was only a single visible way to interact with the animals- to kill them. This system is cool to create, and to watch as something that you created. But it is a system that occurs without player interaction- and often, at a rate that players would never be able to even notice it because they just passed the area by while going on a quest. So to the players, the animals were "things to easily kill for cheap rewards while going to other places". that is their only niche in the player's experience. I have the same problem with wildlife in Breath of the wild- that fox is cute, but the only way I can interact with it is to murder it for meat. Otherwise, it is no different from the rock on the side of the road (correction- that rock might be part of a puzzle, and thus would have more value than a noninteractable bunny.) If you want players to interact with a system in a specific way, then give them incentives. Give pet the bunny quests, give quests to protect bunnies from wolves. Give them an area where the effects of the system are obvious- such as a follow up quest to the protect quest, where the bunnies have over populated and eaten everything.

"We assumed..." 🙈 If tabletop RPG thaught me anything is that you NEVER assume your player's actions based on logic, NEVER

My brother and I played UO back when it was first released and early on the game was complete insanity. How so? Well, what MMO lets you kill NPCs, chop them up, harvest their organs (each organ was named and you could pick up each individually) and then EAT the dead NPC? Seriously, early on we could cook and eat NPCs we killed. Technically, you could kill, chop up, cook, and eat real players too, but it was easier and more efficient to kill NPCs because they had the AI of a blueberry muffin. I remember players being really annoyed when Origin (that's the company, not EA's Steam-like digital platform) patched the game and no longer allowed using NPCs as "walking meals." To be fair, Origin's reasoning was that killing and eating NPCs negatively affected the in-game economy as players needed to eat, so cooking food (one of the non-combat professions was cook or chef) for yourself or selling it was considered relatively important. BTW, remember the organs I mentioned earlier? My brother had inventory bags for each organ in his bank. There were bags that contained lungs, hearts, livers, intestines, etc. Why? Hell if I know, my brother was insane. He used to wear yellow robes and walk around proclaiming that the "Cheeseman is our savior" or some such nonsense while pickpocketing people. He wrote an entire book in-game about it. Yes, you could literally write in books, which was neat, but only crazy people actually put the time into writing anything lengthy. My brother spent most of UO as a thief, which meant half the time he was dead (and thus respawned in plain, ugly gray robes after wandering around as a ghost) due to people screaming "BUY THE BANK GUARDS!" This was a macro people created to do everything important in a town while providing the greatest amount of security from people who'd attack or attempt to rob them. He was also rich. He earned his fortune by stealing books from Lord British's library and then selling them to vendors. Yeah, that actually worked and made gold fast. We have a lot of good memories of UO. Of course, we're remembering the fun stuff, not the servers crapping out (and losing sometimes hours of work) or rampant lag or people being complete a-holes just because they could. Regardless, Origin really misunderstood its player base and naively thought the best of people.

-Wants to simulate the Dungeons and Dragons experience. -Forgets that every party goes full on murderhobo by the end

"just the fact that it's fun to kill would have been enough for them to eradicate all life on the surface" accidentally describes humanity smokes hash from the skull of a dead wolf

This guy knows how God feels.

They should have made "poaching" illegal, and multiple offenders would get a bounty on their heads for other players to collect. Let the players solve the problem.

I recall something similar happening when they tested Fable. The dev's didn't anticipate that players would massacre everyone in the capitol in order to buy up all the property. That's why your weapons are taken when you're in town.

5:22 "The gym of immortality." The dark wizard had to remain swole to be undefeatable.

As an ecologist AND an alpha and beta tester for Ultima Online back in the day, I can tell you that UO's virtual ecology had a very simple and fundamental problem: the world was simply way, way, way too small for the number of super predators (players) that existed. As in 100 to 1000 times more super predators than would be workable. Also, UO didn't really operate off of a proper logistical growth model or optimal foraging theories either, so animals didn't really rebound as you would expect them to in the real world. A virtual ecology is very plausible and possible for an MMO. The issue is that you need a big world in relation to the number of players that you have.

From a player perspective, Ultima Online had a virtual ecology however it was not the one the Developers intended.... The ecology system worked- however it was a online Prison Planet ecology, but was player based, not non player based like the developers wanted. Basically it worked like the following: There were natural resources, players would gather them (meat, ore, wood, herbs). New players would gather these, to raise stats, veteran players would be hidden nearby and would rob and or kill you for said resources- in doing so they would be attackable by other players without a karma penalty for a short time. Even more veteran players would be hidden nearby waiting to kill the robbers, because they would incur no morale penalties for doing so, gaining the resources the robbers gained. Then, even more veteran players were often the worst of the lot, as they were not interested in intervening to stop people from killing or robbing you as they do not gain resources that way, but rather had to wait to kill the karma-penaltyless robber/killer characters. The end result was a new player population performing mostly mundane tasks to level up skills, with a hidden lower population class that would rob and or kill them, and a third even more hidden even more lower population class that would kill the robbers to gain the resources. Ultima Online was a prison ecology.

"As soon as the humans got on, they killed everything" - True in this game, true in real life.

The game revolved around killing to progress, what did you expect?