[code_duck]

The headline seems a bit dramatic and even incorrect. The system wasn’t destroyed, but fictional digital wildlife that they stocked their server with was hunted to near extinction, along with their notion that their system had a maintainable ‘ecological balance’.

My headline would be ‘Ultima Online developers created unsuccessful virtual ecological system’. I’d think they could have fixed this by increasing any penalty and reducing any gains had by killing “friendly” animals, but the article doesn’t go into detail about what they changed before removing it. If the only penalty for obtaining resources from the ‘wrong’ animal is that your character is immoral in a fictional world, I could see why they’d have these results.

The article also makes it sound like, or even states, that the problem was overpopulation on the servers.