How Ultima Online rares were born | Hacker News Reader

How Ultima Online rares were born

raphkoster.com

97 pointsVolscio24 comments

In my youth, I had what could only really be called an obsession with Ultima Online, I played it on and off (including playing on and running independent servers,) for the better part of a decade and the economics of the world were always really intriguing to me. When I started playing, it was totally possible to make a living as a humble miner. At some point, we started stealing ore - I'm not proud of it, but early UO was a very Hobbesian place.

But things started to get really interesting once everyone was capable of reliably accumulating more gold than practically necessary (I preferred hunting liches on the fourth level of Deceit) the de facto currency became overt displays of wealth. The built in prices became meaningless. There was a market for housing that differed in interesting ways from shard to shard. There were whole malls that housed secondary markets for bulk purchases of reagents and crafting supplies.

I literally went furniture shopping for my house at the carpenter shop in the mall run by Dragon's Claw in a castle outside Britain... and while I was there, I probably picked up some regs.

As a player, I remember the early days of the pure black dye tub. IIRC I bought my first one for 25,000 gold [edit: for reference, a boat cost 15k, and a house deed, 40k] and instantly dyed everything I owned this anti-color. It was a very trying time, waking up not knowing if your valuables were still there. But it's really interesting to read the events from the perspective of a very reasonably upset artist. The way they ended up handling the black dye tub, however, became the sort of precedent for this type of incident.

The most compelling aspect of UO was the diverse ways in which people made use of the world and its resources - and OSI seemed to be, on the whole, fairly receptive to these things. One other good example was the practice of "Server Wars." Every Sunday morning, the server would save and go down for updates. When this happened, everyone would get a grey message after which no activity would be saved, but the server would stay up for a while. This became the worldwide cue to go to your local graveyard for a colossal melee which would be wiped away when the server came up.

I could go on at great length about other ways in which the world of UO was great, but I'm moving tomorrow and really need to sleep.

Indeed. The economy of UO was awesome - yes it had its usual inflation problems, but still. Whats most impressive is that many markets developed in spite of (probably more because of) crude mechanics involved trade.

There was the grind - but it was awesome, actually. Since it was risky - beyond loosing a couple of minutes of gametime. You either played your gathering and crafting safe - making many trips to your hoarding spot, which made you profits painfully low or you could try to maximize your hourly rate - at insane risk to falling prey to an enemy.

This brings back so many fond memories. I made some many friends and learned that gaming wasn't just for young kids, I met all types of folks. Great Times.

Ah, one of so many reasons I loved UO!

@patio11, I think the scorn for virtual item sales was not always just one of condescension. Rather, the idea was born from a certain economic understanding. If the belief was that virtual item sales would be a fraction of subscriptions, but that virtual sales could upset gameplay and unbalance games, harming the play experience and undermining the community, they were to be eschewed. At least, that was an argument that I would see a lot.

Yeah, I saw that, too. It seemed to me that a lot of developers connected very strongly with their audience on the level of: "I am cash-poor and time-rich and should win, because I am willing to work for this. Victory should not go to people who are cash-rich and time-poor. I should beat their face in and people should be in awe of me, because I worked for my pixels."

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, I interpret you as saying "they wanted to preserve gameplay over a potentially more interesting business model, and that's a bad thing".

Maybe you're not a gamer, so that makes it harder to imagine. But games like Farmville aren't on the same level as something like Ultima Online. It's like comparing a fast food chain to an authentic French restaurant. Nobody will blame the restaurant that they're using a different model.

There are a lot of dragons who would vigorously contest the notion that I am not a gamer, or would if I hadn't spent years of my life getting together with my closest 39 friends to genocide them. My interest is mostly academic, about how for-profit companies convince themselves that suboptimal processes are in their best interests.

He's talking about 'hardcore' players having a colossal advantage over casual players in terms of the amount of virtual goods they can accrue.

In terms of gameplay this means your toon has better weapons and perks giving your character an artificial advantage.

By buying these goods for real money you get rid of the advantage, but 'hardcore' players, otherwise known as students and schoolkids, traditionally considered this cheating.

That's not preserving game balance, there's no skill there.

It is interesting for me, in a lot of ways, that MMORPG developers scorned virtual items sales and claimed they would never work (and later, that they would never work in the US) for literally decades while simultaneously trying to stamp out thriving markets in their games... and then Zynga blindsided them "out of nowhere" with how much money could be extracted through sales of virtual goods. There was always a strong ideological component to the "no real money transactions in our games" -- and for a while it not only defeated the clear business benefits of swapping stuff for money, it successfully convinced the industry that that was an unviable model despite them being literally engaged in a losing holding action against that very model.

I agree it seems obvious in retrospect, but put yourself in their shoes - pretty much every AAA, hardcore MMORPG maker in history has been one bad launch away from bankrupcy, with usually marginal at best initial products.

Are you saying that in their position you would have bet the company on the largely immature and unreasonable gaming press not having a field day bitching about your product nickle and diming players? Because even in hindsight, I'm not so sure I could make that call.

Indeed. I don't think people were ready for that model in 1997.

Just curious, do other people really consider Zynga products to be games? There's little to no gameplay, not really a skill progression, no storyline... To me, they're just activities that have been finely tuned for maximum addictiveness and profitability.

Getting back to your point, I think previous MMO developers didn't build Farmville because their primary focus (and I really think this is true if you ever listen to game developers/designers) is to make a fun game. Maybe I'm just cynical, but I really don't think that that's Zynga's goal.

If you dislike using Zynga as the example, you can use virtually every game produced in Korea in the last decade, or the current raft of "free to play" games in the United States, many of which were originally on subscription models and theoretically optimized for fun. Available evidence suggests that virtual goods are just staggeringly better as a business model compared to subscriptions for online games, particularly online games not called World of Warcraft.

Funnily enough, the few times Blizzard have dabbled in selling virtual goods for WoW, the success has been beyond crazy. They started selling a vanity mount this spring for $25 a piece,and it's been bringing in millions of dollars in revenue.

I don't think Zynga invented this. The big Korean games like Maple Story, Kart Rider, Sudden Attack had mixed game and real-life currency for quite a while before.

I remember going to a GDC (2007?) where western developers were heavily discussing the Korean model and whether it would work in the west.

Aside: IMO, Zynga is a bit of a cynical money making machine. The Korean model seems to be more about the game, while still making plenty of money.

Hell second life has been doing it for years.

The Korean games remain fun to play. 9/10ths of things on sale are one-offs like a longer duration healing spell or a temporary strength booster. They generally didn't alter the gameplay hugely. Sure it meant a same-level player could pawn you, but it didn't guarantee it and in most cases the player using these specials wasn't a match for an actual hardcore gamer.

Then there was the marginal 1/10th of products that were like a level 15 armor but a level 12 could wear it. It didn't genuinely change much again, because when I played these games I frequently attacked well out of my level range for the huge XP you'd get because I was genuinely good at fighting in them.

I see Nexon cash cards in 7/11, Bestbuy, Zellers and even in pharmacies. I see Zynga getting sued for millions of dollars for ripping off competitors ideas (Mob Wars, etc).

I'm always curious how Magic Online (http://www.mtgonline.com) gets left out of these virtual goods conversations. It had an 8 year celebration this past July and by a rough calculation (http://robowarp.com/2010/10/29/another-revenue-datapoint/) was pulling in 150k per day during release events for Scars.

Ever since I started tracking news on virtual goods it's always boggled my mind that it never gets mentioned. Perhaps it's just a little bit too different in that there's an incredibly small free portion and a huge premium portion and it's a direct translation of a physical product.

(I digress some but they seem to have the ideal customer breakdown. Very few freeloaders and a huge number of people who pay ~$15 to draft each time.)

I know it's a significant chunk of MtG revenue, but they're hobbled by antagonism from paper-card dealers. Promoting MtGO too heavily makes the paper dealers fearful of cannibalization. So far they've maintained the peace by focusing MtGO strictly on hardcore, tournament-oriented players. It's profitable, but so niche that most people aren't aware of them.

To some extent virtual items sales were scorned as a result of a very player desire for what you could call 'fairness'. Very many of the people who made up the MMORPG playerbase at the time would have been strongly opposed to any sort of virtual good transactions, and even now there is strong opposition to it when developers consider adding it to their games.

For example, CCP (developers of Eve Online) have recently begun experimenting with microtransactions, and were met with a strong outcry from their playerbase at the first sign of any purchase that could remotely affect gameplay. The outcry was strong enough that they backpedaled completely, as you can see here: http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=815

Now, this example is (I think) interesting in two ways: First, by listening to the player outcry, CCP is blocking themselves off from a very large potential revenue stream. Traditionally EVE Online has a tough time acquiring new players because it is famous for its extremely high learning curve and brutal 'fairness' in which players are subject to non-consensual Player versus Player combat in almost any part of the game world. Selling in-game advantages for money would potentially let them tap into a market of people who like the game but don't like being at a disadvantage compared to more experienced players. One could argue that Zynga's success was not due to believing in virtual goods, but due to their success at finding a new market that happened to have no opposition to virtual goods.

Second, the player outcry demonstrates that while the success of companies like Zynga has helped make it possible for game developers to turn a profit using virtual items sales, there's still a large number of players out there who can't stand the idea of selling in-game advantages and even resent the sale of cosmetic items. As a result, switching from subscriptions to microtransactions is a risky prospect for most established online game developers, and the bigger examples (like Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online going free-to-play) are cases where a developer moved to microtransactions out of desperation in response to declining subscription numbers. Even if they can make a microtransaction model work, if they alienate too many of their existing customers, they may not be able to stay solvent long enough to follow through on the transition.

There were lots of MMORPGs going that route long before Zynga. Mainly coming from Asia.

The idea of an item being rare due to emergent properties reminds me of something cool from Diablo 1. There was at least one unique item that shared a "kind" slot with another, lower level unique. Due to a bug, the game would always choose the lesser item. This might have made the other item not just rare but actually impossible to get, except for an interaction with another feature: if a unique dropped once in a game, the same unique would not drop again. This mechanism took the lower level unique out of the running, allowing the other one to drop - but only if this same kind of unique were chosen twice per game.

So the probability of finding the second unique was P(A|B). That is, the probability of finding it in any random game was probability of A given B. Out of the four billion 32-bit seed integers the random number generator for Diablo 1 might be initialized with, only a handful satisfied this requirement.

this reminds me of the missingno glitch in pokemon blue/red from my elementary school days (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MissingNo.)

It sounds like they might have learned the lessons of Habitat (http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html - long but worth it; if you want to skip to the relevant portion, scroll down to the "A Warning" section, or to the "Keeping 'Reality' Consistent" and keep in mind this was about 25 years ago).

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