Classic Game Postmortem: Ultima Online

[Music] begin that means it's time for me to ask you all are you ready to login yes all right let's go welcome to the classic game post mortem for Ultima Online 20 years going strong in alphabetical order Richard Garriott lore British and what did you do on this game huh I was there a star long I original game director uh me originally designer

rich mogul what did you do on this game I always the live producer yeah all right we need to travel back in time to 1995 so just a reminder of what technology was like so the height of Technology was a twenty eight eight modem and a so this is you know your network currently is twenty two thousand five hundred times faster okay the state-of-the-art CPU is a 33 megahertz you know so you know a fork or PC is a thousand times faster than what we were working with back then okay sixteen megabytes of RAM you probably have a thousand times the amount of RAM that we were working with one megabyte 16-bit video card okay so you probably have eight thousand times the amount of video RAM right now and 260 megabyte

hard drive okay your phone the thing in your pockets has ten times the amount of storage that we were working with so that's just the kind of limitations we were working with and then and then we've got like so what was happening in the space of the kind of games that we were so the other games in the space where things like air warrior neverwinter nights and of course the realm so these these and dragon spires and if dr. cat was here we would go to actor had dragon spires tell him later that we gave him a shout out yes and then of course really the thing that I give the most credit is muds and moves and that's where of course mr. raff here came from and so that's kind of the the general environment that we were working in at the time things have changed yes things have changed quite a bit and then so that what was the start of all this it was what we affectionately call multum ah but but if but if you look

back at origins history you know when we first started making her when I really first started making Ultima back in the late 70s and early 80s they were always simulations of a party based live-action Dungeons & Dragons campaign and so doing a multiplayer Ultima is something we talked about year after year after year but star just went through the games that were out kind of ahead of Ultima Online and most of those were games you had to pay per minute or at least per hour to a dial-up bulletin board service and and so they were very expensive to to use and the total user numbers were pretty small and so years would go by we would sit down and we talk about it we even go talk to the people who made the games that you just saw flash by we debate whether we could justify spending an Ultima scale budget on an online game and year after year the answer was no it what the time was not right until so I was in QA at

the time actually and you know I but the inspiration actually for you oh I affectionately call it the rocket to the face and we were playing we would during lunch time doom had come out and we would have these you know these multiplayer sessions of doom and I came around a corner and you know we were eight we would race for the rocket launcher right and and the guy somebody beat me to the rocket launcher and I raced around the corner and I got a rocket to the face and and and it was this inspiration of like oh my god players are really fun to play with and more inspiration you know more fun than AI and and go and it was these conversations about a multiplayer Ultima and recreating that feeling of playing Dungeons & Dragons and having that social experience of playing multiplayer RPGs on paper you know and looking at the other things that were happening with muds and moves and so pitch you know going to Richard and saying really

you know and then looking at what was happening with the internet and looking at what was happening the World Wide Web had just happened I mean this is literally literally happened and websites were just becoming a thing and it was like now is the time we really should do this and we should convince our parent company Electronic Arts to give us money to make this happen and so that we came up with this pitch for Ultima Online it was still called multiply at the time multiplayer Ultima and then we started pitching it to you and and and as with me big companies the pitch process is you put together a design document which is mostly gonna be thrown away if you start working on the game you're probably familiar with this you put together you know the technology plan which also probably won't survive you know any form of utilization and you hand that over to the marketing team and the marketing team does sales projections based on that and then they do a cost return on investment based upon those sales and decide if they're going to green-light you or shoot you down but at this point in time don't forget there had never been any product released it was

referred to as a massively multiplayer game and so we went to go pitch this massively multiplayer game the sales department would look at and go like hey it's an Ultima that's cool there's least some audience but then they would look at the entire class of games that existed in the online space that were dial-up bulletin board service games with a maximum of five ten fifteen thousand users peak and they would look at this and this is back when games a top-selling game would probably sell a million copies and say look at that go okay fifteen thousand units a million units you know this is a no-brainer the answer is no and so despite us arguing that the times are a-changing the world wide web is going to be this great equalizer and everyone's going to be connected and the pricing model is going to change we were told no so we went back and you know licked our wounds six months later we came back to give the same pitch but we thought this time they're going to go for it because it's even more obvious that the world wide web is going to be real and we made our case again got the same sales

projections back again by the way they gave us a a lifetime sales projection of 30,000 units twice the success of the best-selling online game in their mind previously and so we're told no a second time then we go back literally the third time so the third time which is now a year later from the first time I gave the pitch we give the third pitch the third time if the same results a third time and we literally just refuse to give up the floor so we're in this pitch meeting and they say no get out and we literally do the stomp our feet and hold our breath we are not leaving until you guys get a clue here and at least let us they said you know our budget as a developer we go over a budget or under budget I was usually over by 25 to 50% every year we're only asking for we asked for I think a $250,000 yeah to build the prototype and I already had a piece of paper prepared for just sign here and you approve of us going over budget to prove that this can work

and finally after it was heated yelling and screaming they finally signed the piece of paper and you know basically kicked us on the ass as we left the room so so then so great we have money and and then it was like well now what do we do because nobody in the company had built a multiplayer game and it was like and then and I was like great I made the pitch and oh god I have to build this thing and so that we got the idea of like well let's go to muds people who build muds know how to build multiplayer games and so I assembled this scrappy little team and there's a picture of them and you know we were having breakfast and Raph had this really great point of if you look at that team it's a it's a pretty amazingly diverse team for the time you know we have a woman on the core team it was you know raps wife we have the really young team you know so the average age of that team was about 22 you know we we actually have older the first artists on the team was this guy Michael priest who was actually one

of the very first artists at origin when the first artist and the computer gaming industry yeah so and and that team that team of about eight actually was the same team throughout V all the way up until the beta so we had a really small agile team that team actually built 90% of the game all the way through the lifecycle of the game and so there's a power of small agile teams so the so act but actually at the very beginning it was just me and one programmer a guy named Rick della Schmitt who built a prototype using the Ultima 6 engine and all like all you could do with the prototype was you could run around pick up an object and then if you bumped into another character of that object would drop on the ground and I was it that was it and but you could get about a hundred people in the game at the same time and so we did a test with the whole company and we everybody got on like big giant a big conference call because

we didn't have any chat or anything like that and and everyone was like oh my god this is what is this this is interesting like and all of a sudden we had people were like oh I'd like to be on that team or like well I don't have any money so you can't be on the team and we built this prototype and and all of a sudden we got interest and we built the prototype and then and ended up using most of that foundational prototype tech for to build the whole project and moving on from there and then but then we were kind of the bastard stepchild because no one got it and no one was really interested because everybody wanted to build the next Ultima or the next Wing Commander because those were the big sexy projects and know what still no one got and I would also say that the the corporation was still actively trying to kill it I mean this really was no one in the corporation believed in this in this game nobody wanted this game to continue is that why you put us on the fifth floor like because we were on a fifth floor that was under construction that literally

they had knocked out all the walls and the windows so the elevator surfaced to bare concrete and if you turned right at the sign you went to see our team that was still in a converted hallway that was the only part left standing if you turned left you fell off the building five floors to your death yeah and that's true that's true it was a test and there were actually sheets of plastic hanging down in this converted hallway to keep the dust from the construction out of their computers yep but the noise of course came right through anyway as did the cold by the way yeah everything about this team was given the least possible support you can imagine it by a cutter but there was one point where we couldn't figure out why it was always always cold and the heat never came on and we've finally figured out that our server was sitting underneath the thermostat and that's why and that's why the he'd never came on and why we were all sitting with gloves on all the time trying to program with trying to type yeah that's right yeah so my wife

and I had been working in text modes right and these guys hire us and they hire Rick actually all three of us have came from the same text mud one called legend mud and we'd actually on the drives back and forth from the interviews and whatnot we were designing online game systems you can actually see here this is mostly my wife's handwriting she's actually the uncredited key other designer there were two key designers and Kristen is absolutely the other one and this was the only game she made and she got out of the industry you can see here the birth of things like abstract properties that underlie every object the birth of ideas that today are you know minecraft right she had an economics degree so here you see things like modeling overall economics flows we actually submitted the idea of a full world simulation with abstract properties and player of an economy and crafting based on abstract

properties in our job application which was probably weird so we submitted that and it had all of these crazy ideas like what if we have a resource system that's based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs so that a eyes want food and shelter and desire in that order and we can define everything like the branches the logs the sheep the the rabbits the walls the swords in terms of these abstract properties and this AI so that every kid thing can move along in all these different ways this didn't ship it broke badly you know closed economy real disaster but from the outset we were thinking in terms of this really vast simulation right even today I mean a four kilometer by four kilometer world at one meter resolution where every entity is running

abstract properties as a cellular automata simulation those of you who are programmers are going to cool but I mean it barely ran back then right we thought we could actually build four times that and then star told us we were like wrong so so that all went away and simulated all the way down to individual one meter charity which meant the people could you know build anything they want address any way they wanted they could craft anything they wanted just about everything in the game was going to be something that was dynamically created NPCs would set all the prices there wouldn't be much static data everything could be customized and colorized I mean we didn't know what was impossible so we built it anyway and and that's kind of that was kind of our our whole team's attitude was we would just do the impossible or just do what needed to be done and in fact so we built our own

website because and again you have to remember this was at a time where the web had just happened Electronic Arts our parent company didn't even have a public-facing website at the time and so we built our own website and we didn't tell anyone we had built a website we just did it and our lead programmer the guy Rick who basically built all of the foundational tech guy he loved llamas and so our whole website had llamas all over it and since there were only 10 of us yeah we that that's the original logo for Ultima Online that pretty much no one ever saw unless they saw that original website it's still my favorite logo for the game I wish we had used it and and and we and this by the way this website had this FAQ on it by the way one of the we think one of the very first fa Q's ever no there were tons on Usenet but but but for a mine for a commercial game commercial game made oh yeah and promised a huge list of features like

yeah I mean come on we promised the moon right and everything I mean think about what you owe was even compared to what there is today we were saying let us make a true alternate fantasy world where everything is alive where everything is simulated where every single dynamic object in the game persisted remember when you could drop on the ground right I mean you can't do that anymore right a world with true consequence part of the point was live the virtues for real like the training wheels are off now right we're not going to give you little quests necessarily so that you know how to act we were saying no you have to actually know you've had come on you've had eight games and nine games ten games at that point with all the spin-offs right you should know by now what the virtues are start behaving and a game where combat and crafting and role-playing were all equally important instead of killing being the only thing so we promised the moon and it turned

out people liked the promise well and what's interesting also about when we put up that first web site or something we announced on that website is by the time we got around to being willing to let people come in and test the game we'd now already spent our $250,000 that we had you know barely managed to eke out and we suddenly came to this point we're going like well now that we have this game you know it's much larger than these slow modems could download people couldn't download the whole game practically and so we needed to send people a you know a CD with the game on it for them to really be able to help us test it and that of course would cost us money and so we thought well we we don't have any money left we could have people sign up we wouldn't be able to afford to send them the discs because since we're now broke or even manufacture the discs yeah and so we said okay well we will now charge people for the privilege of being testers and there's the first early access right there yeah and and so

we weren't we weren't sure people would go for that but we put that up on our website hey we're the multiple guys making this ultima online thing and don't forget our sales projections for the game we're thirty thousand its lifetime and as soon as we put up this marker that said pay us five dollars to be a beta tester within a few days fifty thousand people had signed up to pay to be beta testers and that was the day EA got it okay yeah wait and see oh so they sort of woke up you know so we started we had all these people sign up we did our we started our beta and we started manufacturing these CDs which by the way those things are collector's items now on eBay but and EA woke up and they they so the other project that was happening at origin was ultimate 9 and what what's funny up until this point Electronic Arts had been like ultimate 9 is the

most important thing you know it's the next it's the next sequel to the big franchise and you know that's the thing you know let's do them you know each franchise has its sequel and you do that every year it's like the next madden etc etc and you know you're the bastard stepchild who we put on the the terrible fifth floor you know you don't matter blah blah you have this little scrappy team of whoever's and all of a sudden the everything flipped they were like the the slumbering giant woke up and they're like the the eye of Sauron switched over to us and it was like oh you are the most important thing and it's like all of a sudden you nine got iced and the entire Ultima 9 team got reassigned to us and it was like we're here to help and it's like we'll wait what what and I hope I don't forget all the EA middle management that came over to hell oh yeah and then we got a bunch of we got a bunch of experts from got flown in to help us as well so we all of a sudden went from this scrappy little team of you know tail 12 people up until this point who understood online games

yeah who knew how to make multiplayer games and and all the gives and takes that that took to you know all of a sudden we became a team of like 50 who and a team that did not want to be there who just had had their project cancelled you know who are super excited right and so a big takeaway there is you know don't don't take a bunch of people who are just off a cancelled project and assign them to another team especially at something they don't know anything about because because okay so one of the big things that when I came on board I realized is they had no they had a game but not the infrastructure to launch it so they had nothing no service component on it at all and I go oh my god how are we going to do this in the time that EA gave us to do this in and so I had to reach out we did develop a very

unique system we had keycodes now key code to use everywhere today to ledges to your product well we actually had to come up with that methodology to make that happen because no one else has done that before so we came up with a way to develop you unique codes and what it was is was system where I moved a mouse on a mousepad and it would generate random codes for us and that's the way that work and and that's what someone would sit down and do to generate all these codes to sit there and do that which was me and and then I had to come up oh my god we have no billing process in either DDA so they had nothing they didn't understand what digital products were or anything else like that so I had to reach out to em player to help us because they did have a registration system that we could use and then a billing system that we can attach to until we got our own up and running because I had no time to build to build that that takes a lot of time and then we realized well Europe doesn't

have credit cards for subscription I said what are we going to do here and I said oh crap okay well we'll put a game-time in a box so the retailers can sell it but we can't take that big cut out of it so we got to figure out a way to do this where we can at least get some profitability out of it so we sold game time on 60 and 90 day game time cards which no one's ever done before in a retail box so that people can prepay to pay so a lot of cool things came out of that but it was very rushed and we were like sitting there figuring out what do we do here for because again credit cards at that time in Europe weren't widely used so that helped that well well and to add to that too I mean at an even more fundamental level one thing to realize the whole idea of a customer having an account yeah a username and account didn't even exist like there was no like registration like create a username create a password we have to not for a single player yes not for because it

existed in the online service stuff right but not not packaged goods have anything like that yeah no so we actually although systems you see that you see today actually were born out of this that everyone adopted and then one of the big things we did before launch which I heard about is we used to have just servers that could hold up 170 people but then when we sold 50,000 unit beta periods we said oh my god we want to put thousands of people on the server how are we going to do that and everyone looked around and Chris Rick talisman is amazing person and he comes up with a seamless server idea so we actually were distributing the load of a map between multiple servers in real time which no one's ever done before in fact I don't think any other game has done that to date No yeah lots have now - the seamless yeah we did in galaxies but anyway so we had to figure out that was done pretty pretty close to when we were launching and then we had

to figure out okay all the details of that were never debugged very well as we all know and launched there were a lot of bugs ton of bugs with that duping was one of them because whose authoritative over what as you transfer between the servers was a big deal there and then one of the big things we learned is because we had to get this done very quickly designers were doing a lot of the heavy lifting on game code that's not good designers being programmers lead to a lot of bad things and and we realized that as we were going through and testing the game there was a lot of a lot of bugs because there were just things that designers don't understand as programmers would and we had to figure out how to deal with all those bugs as we were going to launch and then when we created this game we had to have login servers so we had a centralized login server that would take people all over the world logging into the game was in one source at that time and then we

would distribute the people to the appropriate shards that are going out to the different parts of the United States and in fact I want to make a comment about shards even that term shards was born out of a unfortunate crisis of our success we plan for everyone who was playing the game to live in one world we thought we'd built this world 10 times bigger in our own estimates we're ten times as big as he is we thought oh you know 30,000 will make at least 300,000 sales and of course the scissors are selling it pretty quickly in the first month or two sold over a million units and so as we saw that coming we realized we couldn't fit everybody into one world and for me that was sort of a tragedy that actually meant that we were going to have to separate people who from that moment forward would have different experiences than each other and so I thought you know how can we fictionally make that okay and make that these this

multiverse feel like a single world and so if you've watched the introduction to ultima online we made up this fiction where mundane the evil wizard out of ultima one who survived because of his Jim of immortality and you and Ultima one go and break it into shards that at that moment copies of the state of reality were copied into each of those shards and so you would go play in one or the other of those shards but in theory they could be unified again we actually had this big plot we put together about players being able to collect these shards and be able to reforge it and reunify these seperated worlds and that at least made me feel fictionally comfortable that we were splitting people up and of course we never did that recombination point but what I think is really ironic is I go to talks where people be talking about you know servers that have nothing to do with games where they'll keep a server up-to-date in the US and Europe and and Japan and they keep them identical but

they call them separated as shards other industries have picked up this piece of fiction about mundanes Jim huh yep and the neat thing about the charge is each one grew up differently so the role-playing shards were in the central us the PK shards were in the northeast of the country as well as in Pacific became where those were PK shards and it's amazing how each one evolved differently which was kind of cool but also when we are tracking bugs that sometimes we realize things would happen over here way before things would happen the central because the P carriers are doing something that the role play charge weren't doing and it was interesting to keep up with all that yep moving on moving on right so one of the things that that we did when we when we launched was you only get one launch now we say lon don't launch until you're ready and because we have now early

access and things like that you really have to be very careful about when to launch and I think that has been a lesson we've been trying to preach ever since you are launch it don't launch until you're ready and you see all the different catastrophes that happen when people launching because of other reasons basically I look at that is making short-term decisions on a long-term bet you have to balance out what's more important this thing is a living breathing organism sort of speak when you launch and you're just beginning so it's really important to get whatever you're going to reveal out the public test to be at a certain level of quality that you can get people to continually playing the game that's really really important one of the other things we learned because we broke up in shards was the whole population control so we had to have mechanisms to backfill our shards because what we didn't want to do is open up too many shards where you have a dispersed population problem

where suddenly you have low population on servers and high population on other servers and what that does you really can't close down a shard easily you just can't because especially a persistent world shard it's really really hard to do and collapse so basically what we had to do in order to do that is make sure that if you had people coming in we'd backfill to the low lower shards and other thing as escalation plans are really important so one of the things we did we had no escalation plan at all for whether anything happened so we had to develop a whole escalation plan or a run book on on the service and one of the biggest things about one of the things I always caught talk about is there's a lot of hidden work that do on a games as a service that we learned in Ultima Online 30 percent is the game and 70 percent is a service layer underneath it and it's really important to understand that and one of the things we went on the services side it was important is

understanding how to manage community because of what happened on UO if everyone remembers the lawsuit and things like that we got kind of silence for a while which hurt our that we started to see we actually had analytics on the game we actually could see da you Mau wau we had all that we axis could see the population starting to drop and turn start to happen because we couldn't communicate well because of the lawsuit and once I said you know what we're not doing that we're not listening to the lawyer we have to start communicating to our audience we could not act like a PR piece so there was a friction between PR because everything we said because we're connected gets broadcast everywhere and so what we learned is we went back in and started talking to me again our art we started climbing again and growth it was amazing to watch so that's how important is and again another thing that's really hard is we had a whole bunch of people playing in beta that never told us about the exploits they're having they waited before we go live then they had these sites developed because it was really important because

people could actually sell items on eBay and so they wanted to exploit things in the game so they can make a lot of money and said dr. twister was one of our favorite sites that would have a whole bunch of area people talk about the exploits in the game yeah it basically because we designed a game for a tenth of the audience in a world a whole bunch of solutions that we knew pretty well actually from previous online games from text mods broke under the pressure of the quantity of players one of those most critically and actually the single largest most damaging design choice was that we had open player killing it easily cost us well over half the users right we tried so many things I think there were how many did we you say yesterday seven seven complete redesigns of flagging systems notoriety systems karma systems bounty systems the bounty system turned into a high score table for player killers right because the

emergent behavior problem of people working around what was going on right we weed lost track of the power of a small community to control through peer pressure fell apart right and that was kind of a key lesson but it's nice to point out here though - it's interesting you know when we talk about when people come up to me and tell me their favorite stories from the UO era yeah it almost always almost invariably includes bad behavior of one kind or another yes people cheating exploiting peeking or you know in some other way you know taking advantage of others so about once a week I hear somebody say oh fort night h1z1 pub G yeah those are just spiritual successors to you a player killing yeah I know that about once a week from somebody if we hear stories like Phil gave it from Sony runs Sony he gave a speech of how he got in games and he gave a speech about you oh and about the PK and he did how much fun it was yeah and that's how he got into games he

loved it yep of course there was this other emergent thing so all of our objects were dynamic so they were streamed down except the ones that shipped on the CD and those were static but we forgot to lock down a bunch of stuff as static and that meant that it respawned every time the server booted and that meant people grabbed all of this stuff they looted the candelabras off the dining-room tables they stole trees patches of water would put the patches of water in their backpack and they could fish out of them because the simulation was that real these then became called rares and pretty soon people started transacting them on eBay and then people said well let's hunt for these on purpose on eBay in order to make money and then they said you know wait why do you intermediate the rares let's just gather gold and so gold farming was born first they started contracting to Mexico then eventually to China in order to swarm in and get all of the gold as quickly as possible and

then a bunch of companies said wait a minute why don't we just sell the gold directly and gradually micro transactions were born and eventually all of free-to-play because we forgot to lock down the frickin candelabra so free-to-play is our fault now Ari Gino's one of the biggest lessons I learned and this came from muds that I was involved in previously is you know we had people in the game literally as GM's and counselors and there were huge challenges for that we should never have done that it was something that we should have done a lot differently to have GM's in the game there were problems GM's could be bribed GM's could do things for players or make money themselves through eBay and that actually did happen one of the good things is we did have logging turned on so we can log everything that's happened so when but we didn't know about it until players reported it and we actually went in investigated so we had

a lot of issues of abuse because of that and we had a very powerful God client that we gave the game masters and counselors in the game to use and so we learned how to lock things down and in one of the biggest things is you can see the games today versus games then is we started pulling away from GM's present in the game 24 by 7 that's a huge cost by the way someone coming in the game responding to your things within 24 by 7 it's just crazy from a cost buy so we got we definitely was one of the biggest mistakes we learned and we and you can definitely see as games progressed they didn't do that anymore yeah gradually what we realized is that we had founded a community that actually at the time was approximately the size of San Antonio Yeah right we were running a city and so I actually started reading about politics and and government stuff because it became apparent that's what we were doing we were actually the government we had corrupt cops that we had to monitor so

we needed an internal affairs department we need all of these things we started modeling like a government one example of that is how we ran patch notes it used to be this is actually the very first patch note in Ultima Online very first patch one week after launch and what we did was we ran forums to communicate with players think of this as like running town halls we eventually actually called it the House of Commons we instead of just writing code would actually post proposed two changes to the law and allow a period of public comment just like in the real world and then it would go into testing on a separate server so that people could go in and try it out and then only after that process you know things could be sent back to committee or moved forward we literally just started running it as if it were a government yeah we had a whole organization online services group that would go through all of all the feedback that was coming in from test center in the community and also the from customer

support will come up and we all talked about what the next patch is going to be yeah it's important to realize there were people doing this job out there in the world but the title community manager was kind of not a thing no no right in fact I remember the first time we went to my brother Robert and said we want to hire someone whose job is going to be community management and my brother was like well well what is the productivity of their output you know what's their deliverable that can justify a headcount expense and he said well you know they're gonna talk to the community he's going like that sounds really valuable it was actually really hard to do me now we wouldn't ever start without it but I mean it was really hard to make that sales yeah I probably I probably spent 20 plus hours a week on that job you're the best Community Manager we had was rather and there's a certain thing we learned what you needed in a community manager and we were a connected community he was never used to that and because we

were connecting mmunity we had hundreds of thousands of people that had a voice out there and that's when something happened Larry Proust knew about it yeah that's how bad that's how it speaking of which yes I mean this is what happened right now it's this period of time was really hard for us because the lawsuit didn't literally got settled later but it was something that caused a lot of tension between the group the development group and EA because again we can't we can't just live without talking to our community we can't be silent it won't work and our numbers showed that until we started talking to the community again and if you're wondering why you can't find like original design Bibles for UO out there on the Internet it's because they're actually all sitting in an EI legal file cabinet for discovery for this lawsuit I had to send a stack of paper this tall and I never saw it again no we never did it was a sad the other thing is you know we talked about

community we had a big community of all Richard's on that um this one was like well one thing I just want to say about this too is just to go back to something we were talking about earlier is that you know we were a team of about 8 to 12 people and we got ultima online done in two years and three months yeah and which you compare now to the where the industry has gone to where we build these giant teams to build you know the these these amazing products but I feel like we've gotten into this trap where we think we need 300 people to build something and we forget about the negative momentum that comes with building these giant teams and I think we need to remind ourselves of how a small and agile team can do amazing things but it is interesting to point out the picture in the upper left of that screenshot there which is the team size at the end which is somewhere between fifty and a hundred people that you know only a few months prior to the

end was under ten people and by the way one month later after launch you see that huge team there want to guess how many and who was left yeah literally this is it everybody else moved on yeah and we had 12 people to run this thing and I was like and then we had we had to hire them out of the player base because nobody inside the company who'd worked on you I we were it everybody else moved to a most iconic moment I had was all my programmers left at once to form another company they just wanted to leave and I go oh crap what do we do now yeah all right now we can go here right the thing is the what we'd unleashed right you know to this day like for example I mentioned the patch No right so we also used to write essays essays that were here's what we think philosophically about the future of

virtual worlds today those essays are articles on Wikipedia right we didn't really realize quite the extent of the impact we were having all of these well-known community sites and networks IDN used to once upon a time started as the youõve alt yep right and you evolved right like you evolved in crossroads crossroads we had to sponsor them I actually had to pull them in and run on our servers because they couldn't afford the hits that they were getting on the on the sites and they were actually going under I said don't go under will just take you put you up until you get your grade on your feet again so about a year and a half until EQ and other games started coming out this story and Ashwin's call I started getting on their feet again and get enough ad revenue we actually hosted those sites to keep them alive that's how valuable we thought community was it was a great move to do because it definitely helped the whole community yeah there are there are guilds still running today holding annual conventions that are on their third generation of guild members in one

family today coming together shoutout L LTS anybody yeah the syndicate shadow clan and one of my favorite stories there was a really young guy newly Wed at the time who you know he'd done cartooning while he was at school he really wanted to be a cartoonist so he started making uooo uooo fan comic strip and I loved it so I featured it on the yule website it was all about Samwise the bard and scold the troll anybody here read PvP online yeah so today this is Scott kurz Harvey and Eisner award-winning cartoonist you know stuff like that it was what was born out of this community we had managed to build you know that San Antonio sized City and it gave us fruit in ways that we absolutely never ever expected so yeah I mean some amount of you here in this

room are probably here I get people coming up saying this is the reason I'm in games I get that all the time so that leads us to talking about some of the crazy so we'll go through this quickly because I want to leave time for questions but so that was the heartwarming part there was a little some CT ur sides to our community so within so we were very excited we were gonna start our beta and server spin up and I'm a male characters sponsor we're all online watch yeah a female character responds in and the first thing they say to each other is do you want a cyber and then and you could basically that that involved taking all your clothes off and bowing in front of each other and typing typing nasty messages that that within a week had evolved into a prostitution ring at the in one of the empty

buildings along the docks in the capital town of Britain run by a character named fly guy who used our our elaborate dyeing system with the clothing to dye his clay wore this Cavaliers hat you know it had a big feather in it died at bright colors he had a stable of ladies that you would pay him gold and then they would get and and the buildings were empty so he commandeered him and then you would go into the building where no one could see and then they would type dirty messages and so that was the first thriving business in our game not smithing mmm-hmm not carpentry so I mean the the world's oldest profession was true and I mean he made more money at the beginning than anybody else yeah so one of the things is one of the things we did for all our team was we put him through city s training so we actually had them come in and be actually GM's in the game because it

helped us and I was on call and something I got a whole bunch of messages and basically people were putting in these rooms into the banks where you couldn't see once you got into as you enter the bank and teleport you to an island it would take your clothes off and rob you and then leave you there without any way of getting away and so I got my calling us my god I can't believe this is happening and I go out there in the island there's a whole bunch of naked people yelling at me that's okay again okay I'll go get first let's get your clothes on and then we'll get it eh you moved out of here and teleported out but that was the amount of exploits in this game were just incredible I remember just real quickly on Christmas I was hours to knock so I wasn't Network Operations Center I ran the knock on Christmas Eve because I want to get the kid a people time off so we did is we had Santa's spawn or reindeer during to celebrate Christmas suddenly a whole bunch of spawning system went out of control and then we didn't realize that people could take the Santa suits off the Santa's and so we had a whole bunch of

Santa's running around naked saying ho ho ho and then a PK guild formed a Santa PK guild formed after he was notorious and the person that I hired as my lead programmer ran that Gil we didn't tell me until a year afterwards by the way I ran that Gil I said you oh I can't believe in here and then we gave out charcoal we thought was kind of cool to the you know to the people of the bad people the bad reputation people then we didn't realize that oh my god that actually could turn their armor into pure black which made it rare yeah and you know what was what was surgeon about these first days is you know the quality of the service was abhorrent and and it wasn't that we didn't know it I mean we were in there playing alongside everybody rights but but again going back to the lack of government you know in in the real world if you have complaints you know there's a variety of level of ghazal government you can complain to whether it's your school board or your neighborhood association

or whatever it might be in our case you know we had hundreds of thousands of players all in all seeing the same bugs all trying to tell us try to communicate to us in some way hey I believe I've seen a unique bug it's not unique but they believed it might be and and they're not getting a response individually back from us and so they think we're not listening right so they they're they're convinced that we are ignoring these very obvious problems that everyone is having yet at the same time they're really enjoying the game I mean they understood what this moment meant from a gaming perspective and so they didn't want to leave the game which they could easily have done it could easily have given up and just gone away instead they decided to have protests in the game and because by doing that by the way it made things much worse yeah and so they thought you know if we don't pay attention to the laggy service and failures this you know crashes based upon overloading areas we're just going to you know double down and make it even worse so they would love to go break into places this one is

in some town but they also did it in our castle and Lord Bruce's castle where we we actually had to go unlock the doors for them to let them in but then once they came in they all took off all their clothes they all started drinking heavily which makes you then vomit and then they all started so not only with the castle was just covered in puke naked bodies running around bumbling around and nobody's also screaming obscenities so and by this they hope they're gonna get our attention and we of course you know we thought it was the greatest things it's like bread my favorite was my favorite was when they all got in a line and turned around and bowed and mooned all of you in the city of Moonglow yes yeah we had GM's approach there because we wanted to control the crowd we had to teleport people out and they didn't like that very much they start mooning us so early on our philosophy was when things were going weird like this we didn't want to solve it by pulling away from the simulation so for example this here's the city of trinsic and a group of player killers said they formed a carpenter player killer guild and that

gate up at the front they just barricaded it with tens of thousands of armoires and desks and chairs so that nobody could get out and everybody who spawned into trinsic had leaved through the tiny little one tile wide gate at the bottom where they couldn't see what was happening and got you know hitting the back of the head the minute they came out and this siege of transit lasted all the way till the next patch which is when we patched in the ability for axes to chop furniture apart right so our approach early on was let's let's run with the emergence instead of away from it and that's a philosophy that honestly I wish more games still pursued yeah give them the tools and they actually had the tools to do that and get out of it yeah so real quick the because I want to get to the awesome part we had we had one player that using the clothing system again assumed this character of whole Cogan and would dress basically in red underwear and blonde hair and then and he challenged my character Blackthorne he kept issuing

these taunts to me to use the unarmed combat skill to do a wrestling match and so we totally embraced this and we had a series of wrestling matches they were player events and it was theatre troupes sports leagues you name it yeah but of course you know the the peak of players most famous events most famous event yeah yeah so yeah this one's literally in the history books you know during the development this this this event happened close to the end of the beta period we were debating exactly what the big it was all to go look it up but close to the end and as you might have guessed you know every now and then during the beta we would we would do wipes right we'd have to reset the whole surface we and enough changes the data structures fundamentally change and that meant all of us had to go rebuild our characters again including me and you know when you're when you rebuild your character one of the things that was really important for me to do was to turn on little flag called invulnerability mm-hm and because

already in all Altimas and in Ultima Online people were regularly trying to gank me and so I had the programmers you know put in my ability to make myself immortal and so people had given up trying because I was always immortal until this day mm-hmm when we had been going around giving speeches you know going down to town selling a buddy thank you very much for coming and participating the beta and we were getting ready to launch and how excited we were to be there and we were broadcasting the whole geom announced that would announce across all cities at the same time but we would teleport from city to city to kind of make an appearance and we were at the last appearance here on trinsic up on the parapet wall that you can see there when a gentleman by the name of reigns cast a fire field right around where star and I were standing and I strolled into it and I'm like haha you think that can hurt me because I had remembered to turn my invulnerability flag on and I thought haha I'm immortal - and so I walked in that fire field and fell over dead and and what was amazing about

this moment is to see what the reaction was both in the community of players surrounding and at origin because again we had no back-channel communication amongst ourselves other than the the in-house phone system and that phone system couldn't have all of us the same time there were like groups of us on the phone together separate from other groups and so the QA people see Lord Briscoe down and they're going like whoa how do we get him back to life you know and star sees me go down and I'm going woo cuz I'm a ghost and and and so everybody's scrambling to figure out what to do and star comes up with a brilliant idea yeah right so I unleashed a bunch of demons in the crowd and then we had GM's protecting him so no one could loot his body yeah but it is it was really funny just because at that moment it was it really was for us just one of these kind of joyous emergent moments yeah I mean

they the king was dead right and I think for all of us that was the moment that we realized right this was no longer about control right the new rulers of our virtual world and now we all play in all the time this was really the moment when we realized the players are the going to be the ones who topple the kings this was the moment we realized what we had set free you right we had set you free and you know no offense but Richard was no longer the ruler of fantasy worlds the power was now in your hands and from the bottom of all of our hearts I think we actually want to say thank you for that thank you so much thank you for killing Richard yes don't do it again

so um you know the CAS promised to give me time signals and those lights are so bright I can't even see the CA so we have five minutes five minutes so your time but perfectly good so there's time for just enough questions but there's way too many of you we have access to the two overflow rooms over there so if we run out of time please meet us over there please do remember fill out the surveys 5s are a wonderful number we really like the number five all right touch Kat we shout it out to you earlier you weren't here we gave you a shout out a screenshot and everything all right yeah what's up I'm gonna have to look on the vault I got here two minutes late and I missed my moment I just wanted to ask you guys during those first couple of minutes did you also give a shoutout to james van art stalin who tried to make multiple base ton altima Orko

briefly in the 1980s we covered some of the history of previous moment in particular but not laughing yeah yeah yeah shout out to James Van Arsdale into no I made the first attempt all right bring that up how many because there were how many were there it was actually you guys tried from yeah we talked about every years and years and years we just never really got momentum until multiple right nice quick anyone yes yeah I just wanted to say I was a long time player and both in the counselor and seer program the seer program is something that I've never really seen the equivalent of since it be any thoughts on that and having players doing interest events in a truly massive game yeah it's a pattern out of muds right um it's it's one of those things that you don't tend to see done as much because of legal risks of around volunteer systems which we had to work around carefully and because of scale right it

just you know it becomes hard to manage yeah let me take a run in it too though which is that the problem is when you give them anything any powers beyond any other user and so the way we the approach we're now sitting with our new game is to you know if you think about who in the real world are good storytellers or good chefs to make restaurants or good architects to make buildings there's a natural competition to weed out bad creators if you know what I mean the the the the their their work their land their plot of land the taxes on it becomes too much and they go away and somebody does a better job comes in in their stead and that's why normally in a virtual world of you if you unleash too much power to everyone equally not everyone is a great creator and so you end up with the world full of trash and so versus bequest power to Sears we're now believers in the quest the power to everybody just give an ability a cost to put things in the world that otherwise it gets cleaned up and that way only the

good creators stuff per se we had in Star Wars Galaxies ended up eventually launching a what was called a storyteller system which allowed players to gain access to a constrained set of tools so that they could build quests and run events for one another but it was a constraint set rather than basically handing an all-powerful client off to strangers thank you any more oh come on there we go oh that's a question thanks so much for making this incredible game I am curious about the degradation of houses and sort of major you know you worked a long time to get a house and then you managed to find a spot to place it and then you don't show up for a while and goes away yeah I'd love to hear more about the design sure we didn't have enough space yeah when when we expected one tenth of the number of players on the map we had left clearings for that many houses and instead one in ten players could find

space for a house there are features probably still live in the game where those clearings it used to be before players populated every space we would actually spawn NPC camps and buildings in those that you could come in and fight them the or camps and whatnot and after enough houses were placed that feature never happened again because people couldn't even there was no place to spawn those so we had to have decay and we had to have cleanup in the system tuning you know how quickly and how fast particularly given that there was on ability to store things in the house yes so to give people some perspective you guys think battlefield or something has a lot of dynamic stuff running around in it you know hundreds of players and hundreds of bullets flying any given arbitrary house in UO probably had 20 to 30 thousand dynamic objects simultaneously each of them capable of running scripted behaviors in real time right is so yeah we had to clean it up

we didn't have a choice yeah and it was also a matter of maintaining interest for other people as well so if someone would just go and claim land and then never use it that for us that was a waste of community space right and so that was another reason for the decay Thanks all right well why don't we that's it so we're out of time so what I move outside so we're gonna go to the overflow space 22 202 to and 202 for