Bloody Ethics: It's not a game, it's a world

[Caspolemo]

I wouldn't be so quick to say gaming companies have been missing something. While I too enjoy the free for all style of UO, it's not a sound business model for a game. The stark reality of gaming is, most people do it casually, for fun. They aren't overly competitive, they have 1-2 hours a night to dedicate to the game, and they want to get right into the action.

I dont know if this has alreaddy been mentioned, since I havent read the entire thead yet... but I disagree. Maybe we have different meanings to what is called a casual gamer.

To me UO is the perfect game for casual gamers. There's no grinding except when you first start, and there's nothing in the game that cant be obtained rather easily. I was a casual gamer. I played a few hours a day, and rarely played on weekends. I loved UO though because it WAS a game i could log onto and get right into the action.

Once your skills are maxed, all you gotta have is regs and a weapon you can pretty much PvP all you want.

Also, I think the key thing the gaming industry has gone to is a risk/reward system. The game of this era is WoW and it is geared the exact opposite of UO. It has 100x more grinding to it. Most guilds have to grind all day to get supplies to raid that night. BUT when they raid and kill monsters, they get epic gear which gives them a concrete reason to be proud of their characters. They also took the danger out of games, which is another facet of UO that made it unique.

UO started leaning towards this new trend when they introduced power scrolls and trammel... and it went down hill from there.

UO wasnt about grinding or gear... or even raiding. It wasnt WHAT you did in UO that made it fun, it was WHO you did it with and against.

[Huzke]

When UO came out gamers were a niche market. We enjoyed killing and griefing each other. Great risk was an accepted reality.

The reason why games like UO cannot exist in the current gaming climate is that gamers are no longer a niche market and, rather, gamers such as those that enjoy UO in it's fetal states are a niche sect of a larger market. The greater majority of this new market are soccer moms and and other non-violent casual types that would rather play bejeweled than get PK'd in a dungeon. WoW and other newer MMO's cater to this style of gamer because, while far less vocal than the hardcore types, they make up the larger portion of today's gaming consumer market.

[xevec]

When UO came out gamers were a niche market. We enjoyed killing and griefing each other. Great risk was an accepted reality.

The reason why games like UO cannot exist in the current gaming climate is that gamers are no longer a niche market and, rather, gamers such as those that enjoy UO in it's fetal states are a niche sect of a larger market. The greater majority of this new market are soccer moms and and other non-violent casual types that would rather play bejeweled than get PK'd in a dungeon. WoW and other newer MMO's cater to this style of gamer because, while far less vocal than the hardcore types, they make up the larger portion of today's gaming consumer market.

That's one reason why I liked Diablo2 so much, because it had a hardcore mode where risk was very much present.

[jadedamion]

that was a great article

[Le Tigre]

if it's not a game but "a world" then having a community constantly grief-ing, isolating and dogging each other with over use of PKS on new players means the world sucks.

[Blaise]

Tigre, if you haven't found the good on this shard, then you're just not looking hard enough. The PKs are just a portion of the freedoms on this server.
You wanna be a goodie two-shoes, than be one. That's how I roll.
Yes, I die a lot, but oh noes, it's a video game.

I have made a LOT of friends here who are not griefers, scammers or PKs and in fact, quite the contrary.

So please, save your slams for the truly worthy, such as the griefers themselves.

PKs thriving on newbs is PART OF UO, that's just how it is.
What would be the incentive to get payback, if you never got murdered in the first place?

Trammel anyone? NO, THANK YOU!!!

[McSchnurke]

the world sucks.

I always appreciated the realism in this game.

[shodan]

Haha hmm...

"I was tired of writing kill-the-wizard stories," recalls the game's creator, Richard Garriott, who lives in a custom-built castle in Austin, Texas.

[ACSlayter]

I remember a lot of you guys. I didn't pvp because my connection and computer was awful, but I did have a pretty popular vendor house just south of the Empath Abbey. My mule was Big Buck. I loved playing on Sonoma. It had some of the most interesting places. I definitely remember the YMCA and 409.

I remember people would be doing the 'bone wall' in Deceit and 409 would come in and wipe everyone out. So fun....so long ago.

[Evil Galad]

I was sent this excelent article this morning. It's and interview with a couple of the game designers published just prior to UO:R and has a lot to say about why UO is so brutal, and why staff will not help you.

Great reading.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2000-02-08/ ... y-ethics/1

Great quote: "Next to the rough-and-tumble world of Ultima, EverQuest looks as plastic and contrived as Disneyland."

Hey, I was interviewed for that article. Thanks for the link.

[EVeee]

I liked the article. That being said, here's my amatuer psychoanalysis of Ultima Online 'morality':

The dividing line between right and wrong in Ultima isn't at all as cut-and-dried as the one in real life. The reasons that's true is that there are no permanent consequences and - we tell ourselves - no real or lasting injury to victims. If you physically attack someone offline, you may get yourself beaten, thrown in jail, or even killed. If you attack someone with the intent of killing and robbing them, in a single act you will have changed the course of your own life and others' forever. If you're killed, you can't run to a healer and rez. If only real life was that easy. There's no jail in Ultima - imagine having a limit of one account, one character, and waiting 10 to 20 years to be able to play again - that's real life. If you're caught or seen or left any evidence, you can't 'wait off counts' to turn blue again - you've created a permanent lasting record that will dog you for the rest of your existence. And the real and permanent damage to the victim and the victim's friends and family is obvious to everyone but the most sociopathic. All that probably seems extremely obvious once read and not worth saying, but it had to be since there have been so many comparisons between real life and this life, between morals in Ultima and offline. They're really not all that similar.

In playing Ultima, even people with a strong conscience who are naturally averse to hurting anyone and will resist doing it just because it feels wrong to them will eventually have a change of attitude. Eventually they'll get PK'ed. A lot. And ganked. And griefed. And it's not that they'll feel that 'It happened to me so now I'm going to lash out at others' but - and this is the best that anyone in-game can hope for - they'll become inured to it. Regardless of the intentions of their attackers, they'll start to feel less and less like a victim and start accepting it as part of the game. Which, after you project that viewpoint onto the other people you're playing with, is only a small sidestep from becoming yet another PK. You forget how it felt, you no longer sympathize, and if you think about it at all you'll assume that others will eventually become as thick-skinned as you. You become aware that it is not only possible but easy to have a red character mixed in with all your blues. Choose between right and wrong? Why choose? You can have both! Run the red out of his own small house and you can even maintain total anonymity if you like. How many times do you need to encounter blues in the wilderness or dungeons who recall out quickly and bring back a red character one minute later before it feels like everyone's doing it. And aren't they? This isn't imagination - that's the exact process I went through, step by step, when I played Ultima in this period.

The game doesn't just allow meanness, it passively encourages it. Don't get me wrong - I don't think there's anything for it. I highly doubt that a game that allowed PKing but punished it brutally would be wildly successful - and the goal of MMORPGs is to be wildly successful - but let's call a spade a spade, shall we? It's too easy to PK and grief and get away with it, and that is why everyone does it. Whether the motivation of the player is maliciousness or being opportunistic or role-playing or a really nice guy who's trying out something new, the root of the action itself will always be lack of consequences. The 19th century French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote:


If the dull canvas of our wretched life
Is unembellished with such pretty ware
As knives or poison, pyromania, rape,
It is because our soul's too weak to dare!

He would have loved Ultima Online


As far as online gaming as a whole, and where other games stand in comparison to UO, I've played for years now and I've seen patterns emerge and repeat. All popular online RPGs follow a similar course due to the fact that they are first and foremost businesses. They get amazingly popular and huge, but the greedy businessmen at the top who you never see, hear, or think about want it to be MORE popular and huger. If they've got 8 million subscribers, they want 12 million - and when they get 12 million subscribers, they'll want 15 million. They will never understand or accept that the company has reached its ceililng. In the effort to get more even when there is no more, they'll screw the veterans. Maybe people aren't joining because it's too hard - make the game easier! New players can build in a month what took older players YEARS to get! And let's give lots of great things away to new players who sign up! Especially cool items that vets worked really hard to get - new players are really jealous of those! Over and over ad infinitum I've seen it happen, and it doesn't work except in the very short-term but they just keep on doing it.

Another thing is the type of game out now - World of Warcraft, LOTRO, and others - they suck in many ways but they do one thing right that people just love and can't get enough of. They give them lots of stuff. Before MMORPGs there was pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons. And even back then an overwhelming majority of people I played with were what they called 'Monty Haul'-ers. Taken from the game show 'Let's Make a Deal', where you could win great prizes just by opening a door, the term referred to players who didn't want to work to build up a character but wanted everything given to them easily. If you tried running a real adventure module with them where they killed some goblins and an orc, got a few hundred experience points, a potion, and some silver, you wouldn't see them again a second time. I'd start asking people qualifying questions when I first met them.... what their most powerful character was and how long they'd been playing it - and when the answer was something like 'I have a 35th level ninja named Frazlock. He just killed Thor last week. I've been playing him about two weeks.' it was auto-retreat. But most people were like that. They'd play empty, fake games and build fake characters and be proud as could be of themselves, completely oblivious to their lack of skill or actual achievement. WoW caters to that large crowd. The fights are all the same in WoW - against any given enemy you're either going to win or lose and you will win or lose EVERY time exactly the same. Apparently there's very little randomization in their to-hit/damage combat system. There's the lovely joke of the fact that monsters can walk right through things like fences and other impassable objects to come and get you. Apparently every monster and you move at more or less the exact same speed. If forced to run away, you WILL get hit at least twice - apparently even a monster 15 feet behind you can still bite you. There are no tactics to be used outside of spells, no using terrain to your advantage or beating AI, so you absolutely MUST grind against lower-level creatures until you hit the point where you can beat a boss straight up. The world goes in one direction, more or less. You can switch, delay, or drop quests and fly griffons around everywhere but nothing is happening anywhere you go except the quests. And you can't even own a house, for Pete's sake. There is no part of that world that you can alter and make your own. It's no different than Morrowind for the original Xbox except now there are other real-life people playing that you can talk to. But you get tons and tons and loads of treasure with really cool names! And you can craft really cool items too! And it doesn't matter to people who don't stop to think about these things that all the vast store of cool items with super-cool names don't change the fact that the game blows. They're proud of and want to brag about and show off their rare items and that's all they care about, period.

Because MMORPGs are primarily businesses and because this method of game-making has proven to be successful, we will continue to see it. No company wants to be the one that makes the best game - they want to be the one that makes the best-selling game. Which, like any other company on-or-offline, means they will pattern themselves after the current model for success. And that company currently is Blizzard. So the future of online RPGs for the next few years looks pretty bleak, IMO. But there will be cool prizes

[fox_phyre]

tl;dr

summarize this in one word please

[Populus]

Long text

Good read!

[EVeee]

Long text

Good read!

Thanks! Glad to hear that I didn't bore everyone into hitting the browser Back button.

[Galendae]

Evee,

That was a serious wall of text. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz............

Galendae