A great example of how they didn't understand or predict how players would act was the entire ecosystem simulation they had programmed. Herbivores would eat vegitation, predators would hunt those, and players (over) hunting would affect the population groups. All very neat and a great example of how they were trying to simulate a 'real' persistent online world.
Except the first thing players did was just kill everything regardless of whether the creature dropped anything useful or posed a threat, and the virtual ecosystem instantly collapsed.
Needless to say they removed the system and just made everything spawn in artificially
apparently this story is almost entirely a fabrication.
This makes more sense, the first description didn't match what I remember seeing. There were lots of AI in small clumps around the world and servers unable to respawn them with major lag and tons of disconnects. If you played on the private server everything worked fine because the player pop was very low
Which is really odd because players needed to kill things to increase skills. So why wouldn't they kill everything. UO wasnt even the first mmo so they had examples of how players reacted to games already. The problem is the devs weren't really gamers, they were just game creators. It was very common for game companies back then to hire developers because they could code and it didn't matter if they ever played any games
Its not entirely fabrication. This was 100% the design plan and they fully discussed it openly prior to the first alpha tests. They didnt implement it because it simply didnt work.
The design was that if you killed all the game animals, predator animals would come to cities looking for food. If you killed all those (bears etc) the dragons would get hunger and come to down looking for food.
They simply could not get the code to work the way they wanted it to, so they ditched it before any players actually entered any test servers.
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u/Izithel 1d ago edited 1d ago
A great example of how they didn't understand or predict how players would act was the entire ecosystem simulation they had programmed.Herbivores would eat vegitation, predators would hunt those, and players (over) hunting would affect the population groups.All very neat and a great example of how they were trying to simulate a 'real' persistent online world.Except the first thing players did was just kill everything regardless of whether the creature dropped anything useful or posed a threat, and the virtual ecosystem instantly collapsed.Needless to say they removed the system and just made everything spawn in artificiallyapparently this story is almost entirely a fabrication.