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I think Garriot said originally he stepped out of the fire instinctively. Then remembered "Wait I'm invincible I can stand in fire." Then proceeded to stand in the fire and die.

Which is kinda funny as it's become a meme about WoW players standing in fire and dying when they couldn't just moved. (To much frustration to healers)

https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Stay_out_of_the_fire

Don't think it's related in any way to wow thing aside from a fact you can stand in fire in both games...

But I remember telling our DPS "THE GREEN FIRE DOES NOT HEAL YOU" in some boss fight...

That’s mostly just poor game design as players don’t worry about standing in fire when leveling up. MMO’s tend to add such arbitrary new gameplay mechanics in raids and nowhere else. Then everyone gets annoyed because players can only really practice in raids.

In UO standing in fire walls was a method people used to skill up. UO was skill based, not level based. And you gained skill points by doing those actions. A good way to have a group build up spell resistance was to cast fire field, everyone stands in the fire, and have someone cast heals. Casting the field and the heals also improved casting abilities

Rainz was allegedly was banned from Ultima Online and all other OSI games for life.

Rainz had used a Fire Field scroll on Lord British without any real hope that his assassination attempt would be successful. When Lord British died Rainz admitted he was in complete shock and even burst out in laughter. Rainz faced immediate repercussions from Ultima Online programmers and was summarily banished from the game. The official reason for his banning was said to be because of the sheer number of complaints other players had filed against him due to his playstyle. He was also banned from all future OSI games, however Rainz refused to rule out that he might continue to play under another alias.

https://clanet.io/wiki/Ultima_Online/Beta_Pacific/Rainz

Rule #1: Do not embarrass the dictator.

Yeah, that was shit, when someone beats you with the rules you yourself wrote, don't be angry.

Wow, talk about a train wreck lol.

Thus continuing the time-honored tradition of the entire Ultima series: trying to find a way to kill Lord British. Garriot's self-insert is the king of the land of Britannia in pretty much every one of the games, and there's some way to kill him in just about all of them.

https://ultima.fandom.com/wiki/Killing_Lord_British

It was incredible marketing for the game. I remember all the gaming press wrote about it. It would just inspire you to try to play the game.

If someone made an MMO today, it would make sense to stage similar events to get some nice viral marketing. The 'corrupted blood' incident in World of Warcraft gave the game a lot of free marketing even in normal press - who loved to write about it. From what I understand (many?) players enjoyed the few days of chaos too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident

It really wasnt fun in the event the fun part was how it spread all over so fast afterwards and peoples reactions, the ingame experience for most was just dying over and over again :)

Ultima Online was an absolutely amazing game and it's pretty telling that despite all the technological advances since, no game whatsoever came as close as Ultima Online to fulfilling the promise of the Computer MMO: a virtual, shared, persistent world.

Maybe Star Wars Galaxies was the one who came closer.

Playable Worlds is working on an MMORPG that should come pretty close to the original idea. Raph Koster - one of the designers of SWG - is heavily involved.

Wow, I didn't know that! Gonna check it out.

Making an MMO true to the name is probably my dream lifetime project. If I had f-u money it's absolutely what I would be doing.

I remember when MMO's were fun like this :(

Maybe we just grew old. I recently paid real money just to support a private server of my favorite childhood mmorpg. After playing a couple of days I got bored and never played again.

Same thing happened with me and WoW Classic. I was hoping that classic would recapture the magic I felt playing the game a decade ago but after a few days I was just bored and cancelled my subscription. I guess that feeling is just a moment frozen in time now.

The game could return to what it was but the community couldn't. You can't recapture the past like that. Everything has moved on. The game is known, not new again.

Playing "solved" games is not as exiting. The effect is most clear with boardgames I think. Also if you were a kid at the time way more things are exciting in gemeral.

> Playing "solved" games is not as exiting. The effect is most clear with boardgames I think.

While this is probably usually true, a good counter example is Go, which actually become more fun after computers surpassed the abilities of humans. (Because, as it turns out, the boring parts of the game don't actually matter that much in terms of points.)

To be fair WoW is a completely different beast from Ultima. They might as well be different genres.

I was hyped for Classic for YEARS and when the release date got announced I booked a full week off work (and with the missus lol) so I could no-life it just like old times.

If the community could have had their memory wiped of Vanilla on launch day it would have been a different experience. But instead we just ended up with a bunch of seasoned veterans min/maxing everything to the extreme and burning through content they'd already solved more than a decade ago.

I still re-visit Classic every now and then, maybe just to level another character up to level 15 or so and re-experience the starting zones I like so much. But it doesn't have the same allure as when it was brand new and that's kind of sad.

To be fair it does feel like something changed, online games used to feel a lot more social. As a kid you could just jump into an MMO and make new friends, that seems to have gone away now.

I guess they served as a proxy for what we now have with Discord, and now that we have "the real thing", its kind of naturally gone away. Which is a shame, because meeting people over Discord is much more difficult imo, or at very least not as beginner friendly.

> As a kid you could just jump into an MMO and make new friends

Some of us were past "kid" when UO came out :)

But I do think the key phrase here is "as a kid". I was in university when UO came out, and it became my life. I had some strong social interactions with a bunch of people, although they tended to skew my age or older. However there was an obvious pattern. These were mostly people who did not have to take care children, either they hadn't had them yet for one reason or another, or their kids were already older.

There was a bunch of us who stayed in touch and played other games, but as the main pack of late 20-something & early 30-somethings started to have kids, they faded off. This wasn't the only reason, other types of responsibilities pulled people away, but it was the big one.

It's easy to sink time into things when you don't have huge time sink responsibilities in your life. And when you sink lots of time into social things, you tend to make strong connections.

Which server and game was that?

IMHO the fun drained away when MMO publishers decided to refocus on making money. Ironically this caused most of them to go to a Free 2 Play model (F2P), which requires the developers to implement ever increasing amounts of grind to create a market that can be monetized. To spend creative energy on building elaborate gambling systems to lock away as much of the content as they can get away with from the majority of the playerbase.

Asheron's Call?

The problem with re-playing an old game I think is that it's already "solved". There's no sense of adventure or mystery any more, and it just becomes a race to accomplish whatever objectives the player base comes up with. WoW Classic is a great example of this - people had Ragnaros down in like 48 days after launch or something ridiculous.

Even though it's not an MMO, I caught a brief glimpse of that same feeling earlier this year playing through Elden Ring. No one really knew anything and the world was huge and inscrutable at first, it was a lot of fun to explore and sort-of interact with people doing the same thing through messages, ghosts etc.

Ultima online just seems to have so many awesome stories.

I was there that day.

>>"It turns out that shortly before this event, the server had crashed and needed to be restarted. Garriott forgot to reimplement his invulnerability flag"

I never believed this...

it was a fn PK game.

I doubt he had such a flag.

Of course GMs and staff had invuln flags... the Lord British character didn't play the game normally, he appeared for events.

Thats fine, im just saying as one of the most prolifics (we were the 24/7 testers at intel) etc... and being there that day - no way this wasnt lit on by default, if exist...

Yeah, they could have caught this with even the most basic Github Actions workflow.

I don't know if you're joking but Ultima online was obviously released 20 years before GitHub actions existed

Good point. Still, this could have been caught by fuzzing, which is a term coined in 1988.

Kids these days... ;)

So spend man-hours on developing a feature for one player in the game.

or just tell them to type that command once in 2 weeks when he logs on

Yeah good fucking idea, let's waste dev time on that!

Yeah this death was lit dev / corp communication

Reminds me of the "TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG" in Zork!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31846457

DonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Random Ultima Online anecdote #2 – Horses inside p...

My favorite object containment related ZORK bug (which I discovered in the origin ZORK on MIT-DM, but which persisted in the InfoCom version), involves the troll holding an axe, blocking the door to the depths of the dungeon, who eats anything you give to him:

    >GIVE AXE TO TROLL

    The troll, who is not overly proud, graciously accepts the gift 
    and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it.

    The troll, disarmed, cowers in terror, pleading for 
    his life in the guttural tongue of the trolls.

To have killed him in cold blood then would have been cruel, so I tried something else:

    >GIVE TROLL TO TROLL

    The troll, who is not overly proud, graciously accepts the gift 
    and not having the most discriminating tastes, gleefully eats it.

POOF! No more troll!

(I've actually been able to successfully apply this technique of giving HN trolls their own weapons (quoting their own words back to them), then giving them to themselves (pointing them back to their previous posts), to make them disappear from HN!)

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=anticodon

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33070863

But giving the troll to itself triggered another bug, because apparently it forgot to clear the TROLL flag, so you could still not leave the room, because when you tried to go through the exit the troll previously blocked, it said that "The troll fends you off with a menacing gesture." even though there was no troll in the room.

Decades later I finally found the Zork source code, and it turns out there was actually a troll flag called "TROLL-FLAG!-FLAG" that it forgot to clear, which the exit depended on.

I wrote up the bug in more details, with links to the source code:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19672436

[...MDL Zork source code and analysis at the link...]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31846457

Easy to imagine that it existed, probably very useful during development

I worked for Origin at the time as a UO Admin using the handle GM Snarf, we had a control console on our standard installs which allowed us to toggle "god mode", "smite", cast spell, create item, create gold, summon monster, etc. If you forgot to toggle god mode after logging into your avatar stupid things would happen and the players would screen shot it to spread the fun. I remember forgetting to toggle it before responding to a customer call and getting insta-killed by a dragon.

So you are personaLLY to blame?