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How Gamers Killed Ultima Online's Virtual Ecology | War Stories | Ars Technica

An Ars Technica War Stories episode in which Richard Garriott and Starr Long describe Ultima Online's planned virtual ecology and how players wrecked it. Players slaughtered the animals and also broke the in-game economy.

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Why HN readers recommended it

HN uses it as a canonical anecdote that designers badly predicted player behavior, and in threads about UO and sharding.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel
Ars Technica
Topic
mmo game design
Format
interview
Level
general
HN recommenders in dataset
3
HN mentions in dataset
9
Recommendation years in dataset
2018–2026

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

  • Heard the creator of UO claim this in a short 4 minute video I just watched [1] and thought it was a sufficiently interesting piece of trivia that it deserved to get posted. I recommend watching the video also btw. [1]: [VIDEO]

    bringtheaction on Hacker News · 2018-02
    In Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009)

  • Yew tube. (I expected trees..) I’ve seen a few in the series. Less technical but The NES comes to America is pretty good [LINK] And the Ultima online tried create programmatic eco system is kinda hysterical. 7 minutes (with lord British) [VIDEO] Ars (the publisher)has …

    acomjean on Hacker News · 2022-09
    In How Crash Bandicoot hacked the original Playstation (2020) [video]

  • We loved ultima 3 growing up. A bunch of us were playing it in middle school and we'd occasionally swap hints about how to advance. Before the internet thats all we had. Out of our group, at least one of us had a real copy …

    acomjean on Hacker News · 2024-01
    In Ultima (2012)

Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.

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