Ultima Online Release

Since it was first released in 1997, Ultima Online has attracted a great deal of media attention. Following the hype generated with the transition to online gaming, Origin's worlds logged nearly 46,000 registered accounts in the first few weeks of the game's commercial release. Almost immediately, the controversy surrounding the game started to grow as Origin's six debut servers could not keep up with the incoming flow of avid gamers. One of the factors behind the heated debates was the gamers' skepticism regarding the pay-to-play system although this financial system had been practiced on AOL and on other gaming services for years.

Although UO was the most exciting and astonishing online gaming experience of the time, many problems and bugs tortured its players during the first two years.

Frequent lag and disconnects annoyed the players more than anything else. Players lost connection very often which made the community more than angry, especially because this often happened during fights and dangerous situations. The number of lag-deaths were uncountable. Fortunately the game performance improved a lot after a few months.

A counselor once mentioned something about how you can practically set your watch by the time the miner killers come out, as it's when their players get home from school. Of course not all teens are player killers nor all PKs are miner-killers. But when 2:30 PM rolls around, it always proved a bad time to be cavorting with a mountain. Unfortunately a lot of player killers had fun killing helpless miners and looting their hard-earned posessions. Massive annoyance and complaints resulted from this unsocial behavior. A lot of this changed after Origin implemented the reputation system two years later.

During the first year of UO the brave warrior often lost control when other players looted the monsters he had killed, although they did not contribute anything to the death of the creature. Dungeon were crowded with looters who were doing nothing but hanging around like vultures waiting for a good opportunity to snatch the gold out of dead monsters. The result was sad: If you only got near a player engaged in a fight, he would most likely threaten you as he saw in you the potential looter. After one or two years OSI finally changed the looting policy.

A most famous hobby of Britannia's scum was to kill house owners, steal their keys and illegaly take over posession of their houses including all the stored treasure inside. It usually took a player quite long to cumulate their gold, save money for a house and finally building it. Not few players were so disappointed about their loss that they even quit the game. House looting and house key stealing were the most annoying problems during the first three years of Ultima Online. Many years after the release OSI finally made some changes to the housing system and solved these issues step by step. The house owner didn't need the house key anymore, items could be locked down, people could be made friend and banned from the houses.

All the interesting spots in Britannia were regularly haunted by gangs of killers and thieves. Adventurers often returned from their trips as ghosts, losing everything they were carrying. Player killing was the most discussed issue in Ultima Online. Origin developers took several steps to abolish (or reduce) player killing from the game. First came the reputation system, then the murder counter which could make a murderer permanently red, then Trammel and Felucca. All these measures had been discussed very controversially. Although the murderers annoyed many many players, abolishing them somehow took the spice out of the game. Splitting up the world into Trammel and Felucca split up most of the communities and inflicted a lot of damage to the game.

However, not all murderers were mindless player killing "kewl dewds". The Shadow Clan - a player guild role playing orcs - added a lot of fun and adventure to the game. Soon other similar guilds appeared in Britannia, like the Undead, the Dark Elves and the Pirates.

Not only balance, stability and PK issues caused a lot of problems. There were quite many players who figured out game bugs and abused them to their own advantage or to the disadvantage of other players. In the picture you can see people killing players within the city from roof tops, and guards were not able to interfere.

Players exploitet the game to raise their skills rapidly (like the magic resist skill) and Origing game development  quite powerless, as the only measure they took was banning some players. It took the deveolpers too long to fix bugs, and over time this caused a totally messed up player economy. And messed up it is until today.

Players spamming the screen at the bank of Britain to find a match for their prize tickets.

09/2002

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