Comment by trh0awayman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trh0awayman | Hacker News Reader

When will someone stop caring about money and make something like this again? Surely, the spending power of people who played UO is more than insignificant, it could at least break even.

Charge $20 a month (roughly the same as $9.95 a month in 1997), focus on creating a world and MUD-level game complexity. Stand on the shoulders of giants and get in front of exploits (which were basically new at the time).

I feel like people are starving for this type of experience again, but forced to feed on the scraps (WoW and clones).

Mortal Online was one such attempt recently, but it wasn't enough of a playable world. And any time someone creates a hardcore MMO, it attracts almost only PKs (because there are so few hardcore MMOs). There needs to be a healthy mix of people, of all Bartle types.

I can't remember where I read it, but I believe Raph Koster once said something like "Nobody pays $9.95 a month to get killed repeatedly by another player". While that is true, I also don't want to pay 10 bucks a month to only win. Surely, there's a way to blend these experiences. It feels very similar to the OSR vs trad gaming schism in D&D...

EVE Online is very much a sandbox like that, but quite different from everything else in theme and _definitely_ in mechanics. However it is the very definition of a Bartle's Killer game.

I think there's a deeper link between the kind of players who play hardcore MMOs and the mechanics of the game itself beyond the lack of games in this genre. The allure of real loss/real displays of skill draws naturally competitive people. Sure, you can pubstomp in TF2 but at the end of the match, what changed? Maybe someone has a new hat. In EVE you can blow up someone's structure that took them hours of space work or real money. There's no real "risk&reward" when the risk is basically nothing, no matter how great the reward is. What kind of person is drawn to this kind of gameplay? Sociop^H^H^H^H^H^H Competitive people.

>it attracts almost only PKs

This is it really. I've tried a few such games over the years and it felt like a majority of people were just trying to get powerful enough to kill & loot other players a little under their strength and then repeat the process to bootstrap themselves higher & higher. Players that want to play that way are attracted to such games, and they inevitably drive out players who want the balance shifted a little in the other direction.

I don't see how game design can easily shift this balance because it's more about attracting a different balance of players than in how you design the game itself.

It works when it's the only game in town - and everyone is playing on the server so the PK crowd is diluted, but once there are options people who don't like dying move to servers where they won't die, and the ones where PK is allowed become nothing but PKs.

> I don't see how game design can easily shift this balance

several options, tweak values to taste:

- Give defending players a boost/advantage against attackers until the winnable spoils are too lame to be worth the effort.

- Let there be a magical force which returns 90% (x%) of a loser's stuff to their magic box. Therefore the winnable spoils are too lame to be worth the effort.

- Allow "titling" of real estate and expensive personal possessions. Upon death, the title would be transferred by pre-set rules to someone specific, or in estate court to next-of-kin (respawned player). NPC Shops call the guards if they see mis-titled sales. Guards do random searches at the city gates and confiscate mistitled items. Those are then eventually returned to the next-of-kin/etc.

- Provide an option for mutual "yes lets fight!" where no taxes/boosts/etc are applied and winner takes all/most. (maybe they could agree on custom % of spoils too).

In UO, you could spend your whole character career in towns (although there were other ways to mess with people in town). In SWG too, where Koster was also involved, there was an entire life outside of combat.

In WoW, for example, everything revolves around combat - and any secondary skills (mining, enchanting, etc.) are support for combat, or require combat to advance.

It's not gone. If you don't like the weird settings on the official servers, you can still play on high quality free servers with healthy populations, like UO Forever. These servers tend to have more old school settings to keep the game more like it was when it launched, introducing new content more carefully.

I agree that it's curious that newer games don't offer the sandbox model though. Instancing is so boring and UO's land ownership concept remains fairly unique.

My malware bytes goes nuts when I try to visit http://www.uoforever.com - is this the correct URL ?

I used to play Second Age up until around 2011. I tried to play it again during COVID, but it was pretty dead. UO Outlands looked interesting, but I don't wanna play UO exactly.

I'd like to experience something completely new that focuses on being a world first.

You should check out UO Outlands. It's a completely redesigned world with new cities and dungeons, and multiple new progression systems for every type of player class now. Around 2100 players online during peak hours. It's really amazing and something that any fan of UO past or present should experience.

Albion Online is about as close as I have found to UO.

It has its warts, but as far as full loot sandboxes go, I enjoy it more than any other I've tried.

> When will someone stop caring about money and make something like this again?

When somebody else will pay for this.

I participated in one uo group, we gather money, buy powerful server, paid for hosting. All this based on big enough group with positive economy.

Exist games which cheaper than uo in terms of need server power, but they are much less fun.

There's a few games and communities that, I believe, create the same experiences but for a different generation.

But first, remember Eternal September; basically it will never be like it was back then, even if it is exactly the same. See WoW Classic.

Anyway, I think people are experiencing the same things nowadays in games like Runescape, Minecraft and Roblox, where in especially the latter two there are a number of servers offering MMO-like gameplay, including heaps of weird bugs. I wouldn't recommend them for people looking for an UO experience though. I never played any of those myself.

Raph Koster's current company, Playable Worlds, is trying to build something like this now.

I've been following it, but there's almost no concrete information about it. I assumed it would be more like Roblox, or something of that nature.

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