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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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

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