FWIW, I believe SBS has said they're aware of it and ostensibly are learning from UO's mistakes.
FWIW, I believe SBS has said they're aware of it and ostensibly are learning from UO's mistakes.
Well, people had to skill up in some way. Hitting training dummies only got a combat skill to 30. So yes, everyone swarmed the world going out killing and skilling. :P
There is a significant difference in both the technology and design of UO and CoE. Both traversing the world and killing anything of substantial size and speed will be incredibly difficult in CoE.
I'm not worried about it for these reasons.
Why does this vid seem to be getting brought up every day now. Old news.
It's an interesting lesson though. I remember when it happened and, though it's obvious in hindsight, it was a legitimate surprise both for players and the devs (and devs at large, I was working at Blizzard when UO launched and we talked about the state of their world a lot throughout its launch).
But, yeah, there were a couple of problems with UO's approach, the now glaringly obvious one being that they had literally no plan for what happens when a piece of the food chain goes extinct. I don't in any way blame them for that: They thought of Britannia as a world first and a game second, which is a noble focus from my perspective. BUT, it is still a game and you can't lose sight of that. You have to build your mechanics to account for the ways players are likely to approach your world or you end up in the worst possible position for a game designer: You find yourself lamenting that your game "isn't being played right." Which, candidly, sucks, because says more about howyou missed something as a designer than it does about your players and if you don't see that, you can't fix the problem.
Anyway, I digress. I really just wanted to reiterate that this is a problem we're aware of and designing to account for. Both by literally planning on extinction occurring and working out mechanics that can slow the rate at which it occurs despite player behaviors.
Hope that helps! :)
Posted By SoulSpark at 11:10 AM - Wed Feb 14 2018
Why does this vid seem to be getting brought up every day now. Old news.
The vid is just a couple of months old, I ran a keyword search for "ultima online" and didn't see any forum posts about it yet. Sorry if I missed it.
Posted By Snipehunter at 11:18 AM - Wed Feb 14 2018
It's an interesting lesson though. I remember when it happened and, though it's obvious in hindsight, it was a legitimate surprise both for players and the devs (and devs at large, I was working at Blizzard when UO launched and we talked about the state of their world a lot throughout its launch).... <snipped by Teland to save space>
Hope that helps! :)
I agree. It's been many years since the launch and we have seen many MMOs since UO. Lessons have been learned. I think one major component in CoE's favor is that players can choose animal husbandry and farming as professions whereas this wasn't a thing back then. There are also groups focusing on conservation. I shared the link just because I thought it was interesting, and entertaining.
Posted By Teland at 7:20 PM - Wed Feb 14 2018
Posted By SoulSpark at 11:10 AM - Wed Feb 14 2018
Why does this vid seem to be getting brought up every day now. Old news.
The vid is just a couple of months old, I ran a keyword search for "ultima online" and didn't see any forum posts about it yet. Sorry if I missed it.
Been posted a few times on Discord there's also a forum thread created earlier today which is still at the top of General called "Balanced Eco Called Out!" which mentions this same video. Just saying.
Heh, I linked that video and gave my opinion why I think CoE's ecology will not end up the same way about two weeks ago.
Basically, CoE will have a lot more regulation built in and there are in-character and out of character reasons not to go around killing everything. More on this in my original post.
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Posted By SoulSpark at 11:32 AM - Wed Feb 14 2018
Posted By Teland at 7:20 PM - Wed Feb 14 2018
Posted By SoulSpark at 11:10 AM - Wed Feb 14 2018
Why does this vid seem to be getting brought up every day now. Old news.
The vid is just a couple of months old, I ran a keyword search for "ultima online" and didn't see any forum posts about it yet. Sorry if I missed it.
Been posted a few times on Discord there's also a forum thread created earlier today which is still at the top of General called "Balanced Eco Called Out!" which mentions this same video. Just saying.
Relax. I can think of a lot more cancerous topics that have returned and been made redundantly. At least this one bears productive conversation.
I think the best thing this eco system has going for it is the SBS team. I havent played an RG team game since UO that was/is even worth talking about.
An ecology problem might pop in at one point. As much planning as Soulbound is willing to do, something's going to slip through the cracks. I wonder what'll happen then? Would they intervene or try to let engine and players sort itself out?
Ehhh.
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Posted By Desophyr at 3:04 PM - Wed Feb 14 2018
An ecology problem might pop in at one point. As much planning as Soulbound is willing to do, something's going to slip through the cracks. I wonder what'll happen then? Would they intervene or try to let engine and players sort itself out?
Caspian has done a number of video Q&As with Bicycle Walrus. This topic was brought up:
Bicycle Walrus: "Correct me if I’m wrong, in this game you could hunt a species into extinction correct? And in doing so that could have a dynamic effect on the circle of life… is that something you’re going to be keeping an eye on? Imagine for example in the real world, we just kill all chickens. I don’t know how it happens, now chickens are extinct. That’s a big source of food for us, and let’s say it gets to the point it becomes unsustainable. How do you plan on dealing with that?"
Caspian: "There’s obviously a lot of different food supplies, while things can become extinct, they generally become no longer available in an area. It is still possible for something to become extinct, but the players would have to try hard to hunt it down all over the world in order to eliminate it, like everything in this world it’s possible but we also want to make sure it’s extremely difficult to do that. The corollary to that is players can also breed them, they can take samples of them, go out noah’s ark and grab 2 of each thing and set their own little farms and breed them and create new versions of them, and as long as those private farms exist and people are trying to preserve the specifics in a reserve like that, it virtually guarantees there can be incidents like that, that can be repopulated in certain places. But yeah, ultimately the question you have is are we planning to interfere if players tend to hunt things to extinction.
Not at first, we’ll let them do it, maybe once, maybe twice. Until it looks like the server is getting to a point the server is unsustainable and there is no food and the whole population is gonna die, they’re gonna all become coup de gra’d because there’s no food in the world. But when it looks imminent it’s going to happen then we’ll have to interject in the world and do some cataclysmic event that will shift the world and make that no longer the focus."
The issues with UO ecology have been known for a very long time, as Snipehunter all but stated explicitly. If the referenced video is recent, it is simply a recent rehash of a long-known issue. UO's designers can be somewhat forgiven for understanding their failures only in hindsight. Designers since then should not be so easily forgiven if they did not or do not turn that hindsight as foresight. The difficulty of designing an ecosystem that players cannot exploit to the point of eradication is a reason why we have seen so few attempts to do so.
Posted By Protey at 7:58 PM - Wed Feb 14 2018
Not at first, we’ll let them do it, maybe once, maybe twice. Until it looks like the server is getting to a point the server is unsustainable and there is no food and the whole population is gonna die, they’re gonna all become coup de gra’d because there’s no food in the world. But when it looks imminent it’s going to happen then we’ll have to interject in the world and do some cataclysmic event that will shift the world and make that no longer the focus."
I'd destroy all food supplies just to find out what the cataclysm would be...
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