[simonw]

That was great! Ultima creator Richard Garriott talking about how they tried to include a "virtual ecology" system in the game with prey animals and predator animals... but the players just wiped out every living creature. It mentions "sharding" as a term they invented too.

[hinkley]

There was a moment when I was playing a rogue in WoW, when the ridiculousness of murder hobo games really hit me full force. I played a Druid, y’know, love nature, save the animals? And they had the same quests to go murder fifty alligators for their teeth and you had to murder twenty wolves to get to the alligators. Like what in the actual fuck.

So I’m playing the rogue, and we all have quests to kill the leader of the ogres, or the ogre shaman (you had to murder so many ogres), who is in the back of the cave. So if you play a Druid or a paladin or a priest you have to kill his whole tribe just to get to him, possibly even wait for more of them to show up to murder them as well.

Meanwhile the rogue, who’s supposed to be the most ethically challenged class in the game, can sneak past all of his friends, kill the one troublemaker, and sneak back out without having to take any innocent lives. What kind of weird messages are we sending here, Blizzard?