[bevacqua]

As someone who got involved in an open-source version of the Ultima Online server, this is a fun read

Instead of `areaserv` like the article talks about, RunUO had the concept of sectors within a region[1]. Sidenote: To this day RunUO is one of the easiest codebases to understand i've ever come across

We too had a pretty bad item duping bug, around how banks allowed you to create checks with money, and an overflow bug leading to people being trivially able to print money — this led to runway inflation in some servers.

UO economies themselves being matter of study, for a Really interesting article, see [2]

[1]: https://github.com/runuo/runuo/blob/master/Server/Region.cs

[2]: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5bf1bc95506fbe3baadb7...

[erichurkman]

> As someone who got involved in an open-source version of the Ultima Online server, this is a fun read

Ultima Online emulators were what took small interest for me and blew it up into a career. But for me, it was pre-RunUO: SphereServer (aka GrayServer, I think) and UOX3. C++, with its own scripting engine built in. It wasn't exactly closed or open source. It also got me into Linux: while some emulation servers were run on home PCs, others were run on hosted machines. Debugging often meant the server administrators would give you root access to debug their running server. New Ultima Online releases meant being late for school to try and debug the client code changes to be able to quickly update the server, otherwise no one could log in.

It was incredibly buggy and never, to my knowledge, reached feature parity with the full game. The workarounds individual servers made through the rudimentary scripting language was impressive (many of these hacks were then copied into the core emulation scripts).

For trips down memory lane, these sites are still live -- and being updated? Wow.

https://www.sphereserver.com/

https://www.uox3.org/

[philliphaydon]

There was another server software prior to SphereServer, which I just cannot remember the name of. Despite running a server off it for 2 years.

Probe is one of the developers of Sphere who was admin to NOS (Novus Opiate Seclorum)

I believe he rebuilt NOS on POL which ultimately died :(

After NOS died I was admin for a shard which I think was called UOX, and built a server called Alphanine which we had ~250-450 players on. That's what got me into programming, at the time I believe I built the first in-game capture the flag (unaware of any other shard doing it, but got the idea from Team Fortress)

I really miss UO and the feeling I got playing as a kid. Nothing to date gives me that same feeling.

https://www.polserver.com/

[v8xi]

I was like 10 years old when I started playing on free shards - was even GM on one that had about 100 players and I remember putting an event together with giants invading a town and I had made a whole mini town out of little model houses in the mountains...

There really was something about it...I used to play with my brothers and we were just the absolute worst griefers but man did we have fun. For us, it was the lawlessness of it all. That you could actually steal from other players and it was a valid part of the game with skills like hiding and stealth to make it easier... My favorite was filling a pack llama with greater explosion potions, "all drop" and then magic missile-ing it in the middle of a crowded bank to kill everyone nearby.

[RektBoy]

Can you imagine that there are servers which is running on sphere to this day? It will be like 23years of runtime for this one server in CZ. Czechs had a lot of servers, I remember time when there was like 15 different server running, each with own lore and everything. Great times.

[benlwalker]

There's also now an open source recreation of the original client, all written in C# that actually uses a GPU so it renders 4k at 250fps instead of 800x600 at 12.5fps. It's a very mature and stable reproduction at this point.

https://github.com/classicuo/ClassicUO

[onlyrealcuzzo]

Now if they could just eliminate the grind, and get a thriving player base again!

[tcoop25]

https://uooutlands.com/

Over 2k active players daily (edit: by active I mean there are over 2k players logged in and playing at any given time). The devs are incredibly active, and there is a lot more to do here than original UO.

[canadiantim]

I tried playing uo outlands, but what really struck me was the lack of bugs. Tbh my favourite part of playing uo back in the day was exploiting bugs so uo outlands isn't really for me

[benlwalker]

As an alternative, may I offer you a wasm port? https://play.classicuo.org/

(I've never used this but I heard it runs well)

[w-ll]

f. on a monday.. come one i gotta get work done. now i gotta go afk for the week a nd blame it on pg&e

[Huh1337]

It's Tuesday man

[kethinov]

UOForever is quite active.

[retrac]

That's an amazing paper. Non-PDF version is available too [1]. It's quite a laugh and really makes you think. A lot seems obvious to me as a sometime-MMO player, but this was written almost 10 years before I started playing MMOs! I think my favourite bit is this:

> Indulgences. Services such as ‘red hair dye’ which players are willing to pay for but which don’t cost server resources. Extreme examples might be titles; for example, 10,000 gold buys a character the title "lord".

I think I'm going to call such features "indulgences" in the future.

> At first, the designers attempted to solve the deflation problem by pumping more resources into the world – they simply increased the total quantity of resources in the bank. But, no matter how much they added, the resources always flowed into inventory and just sat there. The problem, they concluded, was the lack of drains – not enough stuff was flowing out. However, players are (understandably) extremely resistant to rule changes which take things away from them. Thus, significantly increasing the decay or degradation rates is politically unfeasible. New drains were proposed: taxes, maintenance fees on housing, etc. Unfortunately, many of these drains feel too much like real world "work" and are therefore politically unacceptable. [...]

> Many may argue that this economy is not real; that it is merely a simulation. However, this misses the point. UO players are engaging in this commerce voluntarily; in fact, they are paying real money for the privilege! Proof of the reality of the economy can be obtained by observing the real-world prices fetched by players who auction off existing UO characters and property on the electronic auction house ebay.com. As of this writing, one character sold for $2000! It is this economic reality which makes UO a potentially very interesting research platform.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150709101636/http://www.mine-c...

[aasasd]

> UO economies themselves being matter of study

More than that, in regard to MMOs in general: both Cory Doctorow and Neil Stephenson wrote books involving exchange of money in MMOs, remarking that bringing a bag of gold to another dude in the game is an actual method of transferring money cross-border without oversight, used by mobs. I vaguely heard (and again mentioned by Doctorow) that the size of economy of larger games like WoW can dwarf not-so-small countries.

[aasasd]

Though the latter bit about the ‘size of economy’ is doubtful to me: the populations of top MMOs are in millions each, but surely the players don't spend the sums of their monthly rent and food bills in the games. This report from January 2021 puts the daily volume of transactions in WoW at about two million USD: https://massivelyop.com/2021/01/21/world-of-warcraft-players...

I eyeballed the rate for late-ish 2021 from this hastily found site, at 20 bucks per 200k gold—seemed to change little in the past year, so hopefully holds true for January 2021 as well: https://www.playerauctions.com/market-price-tracker/wow/

[Quick2822]

ModernUO is the most advanced implementation of RunUO/ServUO, worth checking out if you're starting a new project that isn't based on the newest UO content.

https://github.com/modernuo/ModernUO

[Soldjaboi]

So I can fire up a TOL server today?

[stepanhruda]

Hey I learned to code thanks to RunUO!

[bevacqua]

I learned C# and landed my first coding job thanks to it too