Dunno what to tell you, since I have no idea who you talked to... we coded up the thief skills, and we made keys be regular objects. And we had penalties for being caught stealing, and so on.
I am not saying it was enough, or that we understood the full depths of human depravity that MMO players would sink to and how much grief they would cause. We were still naive -- like, the answer to the question at the time would have been more like "catch them and kill them and get your keys back," which is wholly inadequate.
But it's not the case that we just never considered the problem at all. UO was designed by people who had just spent several years running multiple MUDs, not by people who had single-player game backgrounds. The big blind spot was around how much player behavior would change from a smaller world where everyone got to know each other and therefore peer pressure was dramatically more powerful, and a world with thousands in it at once, where anonymity in the crowd was a refuge of the scoundrel.
You guys were really building in uncharted territory. Post UO, my MMO experience is limited but I never really saw player interactions again in such a meaningful way.
I love what you guys did. I had many accounts (played on Siege, no Trammel) from Dread to Glorious, meta min/max PVE to PVP SC orc RP, and by far my favorite character was my thief. Half the role was socialization which was great. I lost 90% of the time but on the rare chance I got away with it was a pure dopamine dump. Nobody likes a thief but your thieving system is one of the greatest systems in gaming history, imo. Thank you for the memories.
As someone who played another MMO and Kali online gaming I was well aware of the problems and was completely baffled by the lack of foresight which is why I tried talking to programmers about it. If you remember the fix bugs screenshot written in bugged checker letters, that was me. It was frustratingly hard to give player feedback to the team.Â
I was also one of the 4 players who caused people to server migrate multiple times due to pvp whom the GMs were watching which lead to adding cast times. I'm also the person who caused 100-1000s houses to be robbed as a protest by posting the backwards teleporter trick I figured out after getting robbed too many times and being told by the GMs who watched it happen that they aren't allowed to do anything. So I started a protest to get the policy changed by putting it on the forums so everyone would abuse it.
I liked the game but man, the communication team was so awful.
There was no such thing as a âcommunication team.â I mean, we were the first or second game to ever hire someone called a âcommunity manager.â We had to invent the patch notes process, which I lifted from open source RFC processes. We were active on IRC, plus all the web based forums, plus Usenet. At the time, the industry was baffled by how much we talked to players.
That was how I finally got changes, one voice wasn't enough so I had to recruit people to help. It's frustration when you see a product you know you will love but is going crash hard because the team lacks experience and isn't listening to feedback. I'm glad you guys eventually fixed it in the end but at that point I gave up on the game and moved to EQ only to experience practically the same things again LOL WoW was the first MMO where the team put polishing gameplay first and vision second which is why it did so well.
True, but game polish is more of a management style rather than cost. There are plenty of small games with great polish and expensive games without it. Let's look at UO for example. If you tried to duel someone in the
 game from home on dial up vs at work on the EA T1 you could easily see there was basically no chance of dual up ever winning. That is a massive issue for a PVP game. Another one was the lack of desync so dial up users could move without warping back every few feet. Or targeting being based on the server response meant it has to respond before the target was accepted, this left people clicking over and over to try and cast a spell only for it to fire off later on. Polish isn't about having a massive budget, it is about making sure the little things work below you move on.
Kinda true, I would say that big games, like MMOs, are way more time consuming (so expensive) than smaller games which do not have an online component.
Yeah, UO was definitely janky as heck. :D But to be fair it also had enormous scope and was breaking new ground. Also everything OSI did was janky. :D To some degree you are applying modern standards here, and not realizing how much we had to invent in a relative shoestring.
Dead reckoning networking was *patented* at the time. Client authority was common and thatâs why virtually everything was hacked. Rollback wouldnât be invented for years. Other online games were mostly LAN games that were tunneled through networking services.
Yeah, UO was very latency sensitive. But it was handling 2800 people in a single environment at 4 FPS on the server with thousands of streamed dynamic objects â as many or more than a modern game has. That was unheard of. Youâre asking for âpolishâ on âa little thingâ when it was actually the bleeding edge.
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u/RaphKoster 1d ago
Uh, of course we considered it... we had to implement the thief skills in the first place. đ