Criticism of Ultima Online
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Ultima Online has seen many major revisions throughout its history. This includes game-play revisions, staff changes, technical revamps, and even fundamental design changes. With few earlier MMORPGs to take lesson from, the staff behind UO was breaking new ground and had to solve complex issues that had never been faced in a commercial game on such a wide scale before. The importance of understanding psychology, social interaction, economy, and such became increasingly important as complex social behavior evolved.
Throughout the pre-release development of the game, a well-balanced, realistic economy and social structure was the goal. While not nearly all of the features planned for incorporation made it into the first release, the developers did manage to put almost all of the control into the hands of players in terms of what they could do to each other and the world as a whole. What ensued caused permanent repercussions still faced in the game today.
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[edit] Macroing
Many skills in Ultima Online can be advanced via simple, repetitive mouse clicks and movements. Because of this, and with the help of the in-game macro system, widespread unattended macroing once took place for the purpose of advancing skills or statistics and sometimes wealth. The same effect could sometimes be achieved by simply setting a roll of coins or some other weight on a user-defined hotkey.
On Siege Perilous and Mugen, shards designed to be more difficult than most, a modified skill gain system is in place that only allows small amounts of advancement each day. This was originally set in place to combat macroing on these shards.
Some have urged for Electronic Arts to include more advanced macroing systems in Ultima Online to make it less monotonous and more handicap-accessible. People who suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome often find the repetitive clicking painful and even prohibitive, and at least one class action has been threatened [1].
Unattended macroing is especially punishable, and if a character is found to be macroing (with or without the use of third-party programs), they will often be confronted by a Game Master and asked to respond -- failing to do so will at least result in a warning and could even result in suspension or banning of the account.
[edit] Griefing
Originally, there were very few artificial restrictions on how players could interact, and the developers intentionally provided mechanisms for both attacking and stealing from other players. Most frauds and other indirect means for creating an advantage via the exploitation of other players were also not restricted, with the exception of when bugs were involved.
Many players saw a "punch in the nose factor" (as Raph Koster, AKA Designer Dragon, one of the original Ultima Online developers, put it) involved, as players were able to harm other players directly with little penalty, which allowed too much griefing. Others saw it as creating a more immersive and complex atmosphere where unpredictable and challenging situations could occur spontaneously between players, but expressed concern over the barrier to entry for new players and the seeming imbalance which favored anti-social behavior.
Gradual shifts in game mechanics and introductions of new systems took place. The developers initially added a system whereby the server categorizes criminals and murderers from the innocent in the form of differently shaded character and name highlighting (blue for innocent, gray for criminals, and red for murderers) on mouse-over. This, however, was not without its problems -- many criminal acts could be accidentally performed while trying to do something otherwise legal, and the unfortunate player who suddenly became "gray" would most often be killed by NPCs or other players right away, regardless of the reason behind the criminal status. Players who killed others only because of their status and without regard for reason were often called "noto-PKs" since, at first, the notoriety statistic determined this status -- these players, too, were often called griefers. Later, the developers implemented a feature commonly known as "statloss," which decreased skills and stats upon death if the character was a murderer. Statloss was very controversial and was often cited as an example, by player killers and other PvP minded players, that the developers were siding with players who favoured the opposite style of gameplay. Eventually, the ongoing depredations of the 'red' community caused the creation of a separate, mirror world, called Trammel, where only mutually consented PvP and theft could occur (within or between player guilds) that were in a state of war with each other.
Criticized as going too far in the opposite direction, many players cited the introduction as the downfall of the Ultima tradition of interesting and complex behavior, stating that the server-enforced laws were often too simplified to be appropriate in many situations and did more to harm the long-term health of the game world than it did to help it. Regardless, almost all player activity moved to Trammel, and the old world (given the name Felucca) became practically abandoned. Most subsequent MMOs have followed the example of Trammel, and do not allow unconsented PvP or theft (if there is a mechanism for theft at all).
In those subsequent MMOs that have allowed consented or unconsented player combat, usually the items that may be taken from a player's corpse are limited (in some cases nothing may be taken). Ultima Online originally had no such distinction and all items a player had at the time of death stayed with the corpse, and every item was removable by anyone. This gave a huge incentive to griefing because it was much more lucrative to kill and rob other players than a monster. An average troll may have yielded 200 or 300 gold. However, a player would often yield a full suit of armor, magic items, and consumables (e.g. potions, magic components, bandages, etc.) plus whatever gold he or she may have collected from fighting. As a result, the richest players and the most successful murderers were often one and the same. Successful player killers could easily make literally ten times robbing others than what they would fighting monsters. Those new to the game, who had played traditional computer RPGs, would often use the tactic of hoarding that worked in single player games, and would carry a majority of their possessions with them. When killed by another player, their murderer was richly rewarded and they were severely punished. Many new players quit in frustration when this would happen, as literally dozens or hundreds of hours of work could be invalidated in ten seconds with a prepared ambush.
Some still question the methods used to deal with the griefer issue. Raphael Koster has said [2]:
Being safe from evil is, in my mind, an uneven tradeoff for the fact that you don't get to be heroes anymore, in that you can just opt out of fighting evil. It may be nobody wants to be heroes except when it doesn't count, when it isn't challenging, that people would rather fight "pretend evil" than the real thing, but I don't personally believe that. I still think people are better than that.
[edit] Housing
Another problem was that of player-owned housing. UO has always allowed players to purchase houses, and build them on practically any flat piece of land. For the first few months, the primary issues with housing were that losing the key meant losing the house (often to another player who stole it or killed the owner), and if someone managed to get inside the house (either by exploitation of a bug or by simply waiting until someone opened/unlocked the door), they could steal everything inside. These issues were later addressed by making house keys “blessed” (non-stealable, non-droppable upon death) items, and by giving special commands to “lock down” items, so that even those who got in the house could not pick them up. Ownership of a house was also eventually defined separately from mere key possession.
After a few months, when some players and guilds had enough money to buy many houses, there came the problem of using tents and other cheap houses to wall off huge sections of the world as private areas. It was a common solution to the above problems (before they were fixed), if you owned a large house like a tower, to build three smaller houses around the entrance, walling you in, and then using the recall or gate spell to get inside that artificial courtyard. Since some players abused that tactic to create gigantic “courtyards”, the developers eventually opened up all of the major ones by deleting selected houses and by putting the additional restraint on house placement rules requiring that there be empty space around a building before it may be placed.
By the time Trammel was introduced, there was literally not a single empty space of land anywhere in the game where a house of any size could be built. Vast amounts of wilderness were covered with a thick layer of housing, making places supposedly “wild” seem like cities. When housing was enabled on Trammel, tens of thousands of players simultaneously camped out and tried to compete for prime locations for various types of houses, resulting in massive amounts of telestorming, where players were transferred amongst the sub-servers of a given shard, causing random teleportation and extreme amounts of lag. For many years, housing space was scarce, due in part to rising numbers of subscribers and only slowly increasing limitations on the number of houses each account may own. Several worlds were created without the ability to have houses built within them to protect their atmosphere from becoming another city. Almost all house transactions during this time were of currently-owned houses being sold, or people waiting outside houses that are about to “decay” (disappear from lack of use) – even though housing is limited to one house per player. In recent years, additional housing areas have been made available for all players. Many subsequent MMORPGs used instancing for housing or simply did not provide it at all.
Customizable housing was introduced with Ultima Online: Age of Shadows. Originally, the concept was prototyped by Vex (a designer on the Ultima Online team). Customizable housing is considered a replayable game mechanic, a gold sink, and a tribute to a player's imagination. The massive amount of ingenuity put forth by the playerbase on their houses is a testament to how diverse the game has become. To this day, Ultima Online still offers the most comprehensive housing system in any online fantasy world.
[edit] Economy
Ultima Online has had a long history of struggling with its economy. While remaining balanced, money (or more generally, value) has been added to the game much more quickly than it has been taken out, resulting in the extreme devaluation of gold. Value often enters the game through the killing of monsters, the collecting of treasure, and through the crafting of items (which are subsequently sold to NPCs), while the primary way it leaves the game is through NPC reagent sales. Various gold sinks have been provided and the prices of items have steadily risen to compensate, but the effects are still felt.
[edit] Player vendors
One feature of Ultima Online has been the ability to set up a player-owned shop. A player can purchase a contract that would allow them to place NPC vendors around a house the player owns. This indirectly contributes to the housing congestion problems, as houses placed near high traffic areas can make a substantial profit. Vendors near dungeon areas can often sell consumable supplies for several times what other player and non-player vendors sell for.
Vendors contribute to the community aspect of the game in several ways. Advantages are given to items crafted by master player crafters (such as increased damage for weapons). Thus, master craftsmen can set up vendors and become known by the quality of their goods. In this way, vendors also encourage redistribution of items, as it makes it easier for players to get a fair price for a rare item, as non-player vendors usually pay a small fraction of a rare item's value.
[edit] Effects on magic
Casting of magical spells requires consumable items known as reagents. Reagents could be found naturally occurring in small quantities in the wild. However, the main source of reagents were non-player controlled vendors, which would stock a limited supply of the item and then restock after a period of time. As a result, demand was much higher than supply, and thus players would purchase a vendor's entire stock and then resell through their own vendor for many times the original cost. In this way, player vendors became a primary distributor for reagents. As the resellability that vendors provided increased, and the overall market value of reagents, magic use became economically prohibitive to many players. The financial investment to become a master magic user quickly swelled into ranges unfathomable by many gamers.
[edit] General inflation
Other MMO economies are often faced with the problem of inflation. This is due, in part, to the introduction of new players into the game and veteran players running out of choices to spend their money on. Each new player becomes a source of new income. This is reflected by real world economics. Inflation in any game, without a closed economy, is something that is nearly inevitable. Such problems were only increased in Ultima Online by the discovery of a quickly-squashed bug that allowed players to duplicate ('dupe') in-game currency.
Additionally, a research paper examined the Ultima Online economy in some detail, and revealed that the 'duping' bug, along with overabundant in-game resources and high vendor prices (coupled with 'price fixing' and 'hoarding' tactics employed by some players) caused great damage to the in-game economic system.
[edit] Bugs
Ultima Online has suffered from numerous bugs throughout its long history that differ in both origins and complexity from those seen in most previous games. Many systems employed in Ultima Online could be seen in previous Ultima games, and much of the mechanics remained the same, but the employment of a persistent client-server infrastructure had radical repercussions that have changed the ways developers have designed MMOs since.
Unlike most prior commercial games, once a bug was found and exploited in Ultima Online, the effects of that bug were usually a permanent part of the game world. Customers would be lost if a complete reset of the game world was done, and many of the repercussions of bugs exploited were either too complex or affected otherwise innocent players, such as a player unknowingly buying an item created through exploitation. To remove the item would be offensive to the innocent player who bought it and to reverse the transaction would be impractical.
Many of the exploited bugs arose out the trust that was given to the client. Much of the restriction placed on the players was initially done so by the client, and programs were developed that effectively send packets to the server that would not be possible to generate in the client itself. Many newer MMOs try to address this problem through software design adhering to the Model-view-controller pattern.
[edit] Black dye tubs
Black dye tubs are a famous example; they were originally created by sending a false packet when a color was supposed to be chosen. A third-party program over-rode the color packet generated by the client, and changed the color chosen to a color that would not be possible from within the client, in this case a darker black. Black dye tubs become so prevalent and in-demand that EA eventually made them a gift to players when certain criteria are met by the player, much to the dismay of those who paid large amounts of money to acquire illegal dye tubs, and to those who would rather not have exotic colors so prevalent in the world.
[edit] Speed walking
Speed walking was accomplished via a program called UO Extreme. It sent "walk" and "run" packets to the server faster than the client would normally be capable of sending. Until a permanent fix was put in place, anybody caught speed walking was banned from the game, but it was prevalent nevertheless. While the permanent repercussions of speed walking may seem less obvious, its use during PvP dramatically affected many players and caused many indirect chains of events that still ripple through the game world today[citation needed].
[edit] Walking through walls
The ability to walk through walls and other usually obstructive objects was accomplished by giving the client false information about those objects. Originally, the client was responsible for all collision detection with non-dynamic objects, and changing how it behaved could be accomplished in a number of ways. The "statics" files that contain all of the static objects in the world could be edited to remove all of the objects a player might want to walk through (in essence, deleting the walls outright). The obstructiveness of those objects themselves could be changed by either editing the clients item information files directly, or by using the clients patch file, called "verdata" to patch in false information about the obstructiveness of objects (leaving the walls in place, but making it possible to walk through them). Eventually, a verdata that did exactly that, began to circulate around the internet. Initially the more important areas, such as Britain and the other major cities, had all of their walls duplicated as dynamic objects on the server. Eventually, all collision detection was checked by both the client and the server, which led to a "rubber banding" effect later, when the server would deny movement that was allowed by the client (even traditionally legitimate movement).
[edit] Duping
A duping (duplication) bug exploit started soon after the game's release and was not resolved for over a year.[citation needed] It was accomplished by placing items on the ground (most often gold and reagents), teleporting far away, and shutting down the client before arriving at the destination. The virtual world had many computers (servers) controlling the different regions, and by moving a long distance, the character would be transferred between two computers, but by shutting down the client, the character would be lost in the transfer. When the player logged back in, the server would use its last backup of the character, which included the now-duplicated items.
The massive counterfeiting of gold and reagents that took place contributed to the massively unbalanced economy. Bartering began to take place, especially since many of the goods players wanted could not be bought from NPCs using gold. After fixing the bug, the developers attempted to drain much of the extra gold out of the system via special auctions (such as a one-time-only red hair dye auction), as well as by providing special items that could only be bought for large amounts of money (gold sinks). In the end, though, everything they attempted made little impact, and it is questionable how much of an impact such measures made in the first place.
[edit] Child controversy
Ultima Online was originally intended to ship with artwork depicting human children. This artwork appeared in the beta version, but was removed before the final version was released over concerns that the game might not get acceptable ratings if players found ways to abuse the children, even though they had no fighting animations. The artwork has continued to circulate around on the internet, though, in the form of a modified "verdata" (a file which the client treats as a patch to all of its other data files), and they are sometimes used on emulated servers, usually for background filler.
[edit] Player dispersion
Ultima Online debuted with three main servers, one world on each, and about a dozen towns. Even with the relatively few players at the time (which were still many times the expected number); most towns were described as vibrant and alive due to the high concentration of players. Almost every town had players on nearly every corner, and the amount of player interaction was very high. That player interaction is often cited as the primary appeal of the new, groundbreaking genre Ultima Online was promoting.
To cope with internet lag, additional servers were quickly added to distribute the load. New servers were occasionally added with the additional intent of allowing players to start over in an unspoiled world, where the long-term affects of bugs could not be felt, and where there were few high-level players with whom to compete. This was even done as a marketing tactic with the introduction of Asian servers, where only Asian players could connect for the first few months of their existence. Rarely, additional servers were added to allow for different play styles, such as "Siege Perilous", some being temporary like "Abyss". The number of servers is now in the dozens.
In addition, with every expansion came additional land to be explored, in the form of additional worlds. These greatly added to the amount of land, and thus dispersed players further. The addition of Trammel also further dispersed players, though most migrated to Trammel exclusively. When you multiply the number of worlds per server by the number of servers, it is clear to see that the amount of landmass available per active player is much higher than at initial launch, making the likelihood of meeting other players, even in traditionally popular areas, unlikely and most of the unpredicted player interaction has been lost. As players bought houses, that also removed their need to be in towns, and so further dispersed player populations.
[edit] Free Shards
Recently, free Ultima Online servers that are not affiliated with Electronic Arts have become increasingly popular. Connecting to free servers is quite simple; most can just be logged into with an auto-account creation, although some require applications or a similar process. Many groups and free servers have been created, although few are successful. Some of the most populated servers function more like the game's original incarnation. The popularity stems from the startlingly common belief that the game was at its creative peak before the release of the Renaissance expansion pack. There are some servers which modify some gaming mechanics, while keeping the mechanics of PVP interaction as they were before the Renaissance expansion pack. Due to the increasing amount of more popular MMORPG's, many of the free servers as well as the official Electronic Arts servers are dying.
[edit] References
- ^ Philip Ferreira (unknown). Ultima Online Problems. Reviewboard.com. Retrieved on 2006-08-09.
- ^ Raph Koster (unknown). Postmortem. Raph Koster's Website. Retrieved on 2006-08-09.
[edit] See also
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