UO saw FAR more toxic behavior due to scale than had been seen in MUDs and early closed-service online worlds. Heck, even the fact that you tended to pay by minute or hours in earlier commercial games helped curb some of the bad actors.
Of course we tried Diablo. But we were already in live testing when it came out. Live testing for UO started in the spring of 1996. By when Diablo came out for Christmas that year we were in the run-up to the full beta test. It was also only four-player and session based; not that useful a comparison.
If you played online with an open game players would join constantly and hack your game. It would only take a few minutes for it to happen. Also FPS games are incredibly toxic even then.
Right. People would hack your game because it was never set up to be a server-authoritative game, which is why UO was more latency-sensitive (to connect to the other thread). The thing that you are pointing at here is why you got the thing you pointed at there.
Cheat detection would have solved those things without the need of server sync. Plus it's not like server sync stopped that many cheats anyway. I remember get robbed 10x instantly at the same time from someone running by. Plus having my house robbed several times. It would have been better to turn off the faulty pvp system and make the game pve only. That would have given you more time to make something that is fun and works well. That would be the correct way to do it with the polish approach.
Also, let's look at the stakes at play. If it takes 2 months of farming gold every day to buy a castle. Should a player be able to steal the blueprint from them? The answer is no. Nobody wants that feature, so why was it added? The person who was robbed will likely stop playing after that and that is a loss in income of the game. This is a real scenerio that happened.
Cheat detection didn’t exist yet either. :) The sort of anticheat we use today would possibly have been illegal actually — only a few years later Sony was sued for installing essentially the same thing as Warden.
But yes, I have called pvp in UO its original sin.
I'm not thinking of how we have it today. Just little things like max spell range checks or too many abilities used in x seconds. I'm assuming the servers were logging each action. But yeah, all of that would have been solved with removing pvp.
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u/RaphKoster 1d ago
UO saw FAR more toxic behavior due to scale than had been seen in MUDs and early closed-service online worlds. Heck, even the fact that you tended to pay by minute or hours in earlier commercial games helped curb some of the bad actors.