[mysticllama]

as i recall, they devised their own scripting language, and they relied solely on flatfiles to track world-state… then every day at a given time, each server would have an off-hours save where the flatfiles would be persisted. players caught on to this, and would take advantage by having "server wars" during these save windows, when changes wouldn't be persisted, and would all equip their best kit and battle at certain locations. all that said, it's not too surprising lots of creativity and ingenuity was required, given in 1997 the world had really seen nothing like it.

i remember getting it right after it came out -- i had just turned 11. when i tried to explain to people that it was a massive, detailed fantasy world where you could go on adventures with people in real-time, they'd look at me like i had two heads.

this got me into scripting and mods and was a big influence on why i became interested in software and hacking, and have had a career in it since.

[gabereiser]

UO:Renaissance was the best era of UO. Two worlds separated by moonstones to separate open-pvp with non-pvp. My younger brother and I would hang out in Briton in Felucia (open-pvp) and kill anyone trying to cross over with loot or anyone coming over with gear.

[xwdv]

No, the best time period was before this, when there was only one unified open-pvp world and people could kill you and even burglarize your house if they stole the key and knew where you lived, or even just killed you right at your front doorstep before you get a chance to close the door and lock it.

Casual players forced to live in a truly dangerous world with thieves and blood thirsty killers, we’ll never see these dynamics in an MMO again.

When Renaissance was introduced, what happened was most people lived purely in the non-pvp world and horded massive wealth and resources safely (which would have made you a big target in the old world), while the pvp side just became an arena for people to fight all the time. Boring.

[jghn]

In my experience most of the people who say this were exactly the sort of people that ruined it for everyone else by taking things too far. Turns out people didn't find it fun to be slaughtered by a horde of 15 teenagers with names like "frogsmasha"

[xwdv]

I didn’t always kill people, sometimes they begged for mercy and I made them hand over some loot and then took off.

But sometimes we killed people and cut up their bodies into pieces and fed them to pigs.

[jghn]

Yes, I did a lot of that stuff too. That's not my point. There has been a very strong correlation to the people who lament things using the sort of terminology you did and the crowd that caused the changes they lament.

Someone like Xavori on Lake Superior was a good counterexample. He was a well role-played villain. Meanwhile there were hordes of troglodytes with borderline (or sometimes not at all borderline) offensive names going around and straight up griefing people. And that latter crowd ruined it for everyone.

A big delimiter I use when talking to people about those days was to what extent they view the largest issue being there not being enough unwilling participants in their PvP/griefing. A lot of people liked Siege Perilous, which was awesome. But a lot of the problem players didn't - because what they really enjoyed was griefing other players.

[gabereiser]

I was there for that. While the gameplay was indeed more fun, the separation and “hoarding of wealth” made it popular. I had a castle on either side. My feluca stronghold was only to stash ill gotten goods until I could move them to trammel. I had more fun playing dodge the pain train and get to bank than I ever did pre-separation. Pre-separation was more natural feeling but the split gave a risk vs reward buff.

[wwilim]

You could try playing Tibia, it has exactly what you're describing, save for being able to enter other player's houses uninvited. It's kinda dead though

[modshatereality]

>No,

Thank you, anyone claiming otherwise is fucking sheltered. They never bothered to opened up a regular shard other than seige perilous which had extra difficulties cranked up so nobody bothered, and other games filled the gap (until those too were banned).

[mysticllama]

agreed, the introduction of safe zones ruined what made the game special. while the old way was brutal and could be outright toxic to new players, the pure lawlessness and unpredictability of open PVP was unique -- you could even murder players in town if you managed to do it without witnesses! the thrills i had in that game i haven't had since

[beebmam]

Oh this brings back so many good memories. The Britain graveyard was where shit went DOWN during these non-persistence windows. I remember there was a large Japanese player base on my server and there were Japan vs USA fights every day.