7 Hard Truths of UO - By J.

[Kraarug]

This was posted over 10 years ago... Is much of it still true?

Most players probably realize that the worst problems with UO are systemic; meaning no little fix could make things right. However, the same themes seem to come up again and again, without much resolution to what seem like fundamental weaknesses and problems without obvious solutions.

However, it is the belief of this author that every problem has a solution or at least a workaround. For these problems, however, neither will come easy.

The purpose of this essay isn't to come down on either side of the rift between designers and players, only to present observations that seem relevant to everyone involved, and maybe provide some insight as to why some conflicts never go away.

Hard Truth #1: Most people are stupid.

UO is supposed to be a shared-world environment that tests the abilities of those who participate in it. That's the intent by design, anyway.

It's well known that there are many ways to participate and many ways to enjoy and contribute to Britannian life, but the hard truth of the matter is that most players are too stupid to accomplish this task.

This should come as no surprise. Accomplishing this on a large scale is tough, and requires above-average insight and mental ability. It's no insult that most people just don't have the brain power to make this happen.

A corollary to #1 is that most people assume they are smarter than strangers. Even those who do measure up mentally will often be presumed stupid until proven clueful. It's a matter of course in UO. Unfortunately, that means it's more likely that those who could use help getting by in UO don't get the help they need.

There will always be smart, capable people, and upon their shoulders rests the future of UO, both in maintaining what's been done and finding new things to do. These are the people we want organizing and planning for everyone else.

Hard Truth #2: Most people don't care about others more than themselves.

If we don't care about one another, it's because we don't have any intrinsic reason to care, and it's also more likely that we have reasons not to care. If we don't care, we don't trust each other, and if we don't trust each other, we don't realize the full (theoretical) potential of UO as a world.

This relates to every attempt by a body of players to form interdependent groups, from guilds to player-run cities. The common story is that the larger a group gets, the more prone it is to break apart.

After all, there are only so many people to care about, even for the types of people who do care. Finding new people to care about usually takes a back seat to serving one's own interests.

Hard Truth #3: Everyone's reasons for playing are different.

This relates to most arguments regarding playing styles in UO. Not everyone likes to chop wood. Not everyone likes to slay dragons. Not everyone likes to talk k3wli0.

BUT SOME DO, and it's damned hard to include them all in the same world. Especially when it's clear that true diversity of player "styles" can't be tolerated in a multi-user environment. Thank Richard A. Bartle for that piece of wisdom.

Unfortunately, most players see UO through their own shade of corrective lenses. How they play colors their perception of how others play, or "ought" to play. Therein lies the root of the deepest divisions between players.

Hard Truth #4. It's easiest to be a stranger.

Ideally, you want to actually be able to make friends with the people you play with. Except it's easier to keep one hand on the mouse and attempt to blend into the background.

Interacting with other people when you want to is very very difficult in UO, not just by design. Unless someone wants to create a language of interpretive dance (perhaps by copying the language of honeybees,) the only means to communicate with other players is by using words.

Words have become a hindrance to life in UO, however. In "the field," talking in detail can leave players vulnerable to attack. Many players make use of contractions as a crutch (some to a fault, and often the most recognizable terms are used in reference to ill-defined concepts: think PvP, PK, RP) but an unhappy result is players never learning any other way to communicate.

Players might have the opportunity to learn greater communication skills if not for this hard truth. As for UO, it's the main reason why many possible relationships are unstable and temporary, and most that do exist have to exist outside the game through e-mail or the Web.

This leads to another insight into the nature of the animosity between "K3wli0s" and "RPers," as either side might call the other. One might not even be roleplaying so much as just talking, and the other, unused to having to deal with someone who doesn't respond to 'sup dewd' and 'wtf', reacts with derision: 'u suk!'

It's also likely that some players value not knowing or caring about certain other people; this makes killing their characters and looting their corpses that much easier. This reduces people to mere game features; nice for the reducers but insulting and often unfair to the reduced.

Hard Truth #5: Reality cannot be the ultimate mitigator.

This relates to all the arguments that UO should be made more or less "like reality."

Reality's a good thing, but so few people realize why it is a good thing. It's good because it's recognizable. Everyone playing UO (theoretically) is familiar with real concepts, forms and processes. Snow falls from the sky. Stick someone with a sword, and they bleed profusely.

However, reality is an all-or-nothing platform. If people recognize something as realistic, they're that much more likely to assume other things are realistic.

The problem with that is that REALITY IS NOT FUN. Reality is BORING. The sooner UO becomes ultimately realistic, the sooner people will cancel their accounts. However, the less realistic UO becomes, there's the danger of players never figuring out the style of play deemed "proper" by those who designed it.

On the other side of the coin, UO is fundamentally unrealistic in several special ways. In real life, when people die, their ghosts usually don't manifest and haunt their killers. Unfortunately, this has the same effect as reality on players' minds: the more unreal they like it, the more unreal they want it. (This has nothing to do with the game "Unreal.")

The danger is inevitable, sad to say. And the ultimate mitigator of UO will have to be a hybrid of reality and fantasy, which will be entirely foreign to players until they learn the "way of the world." Given hard truth #1, we know most won't.

As for what players will want, most will want both; reality is the anchor, fantasy the wings. So ultimately it makes sense to balance the two.

Hard Truth #6: Justice, like all virtue, is relative.

The virtue system of UO was designed for a single-player game, where the Avatar was supposed to consult inanimate objects like rocks and old books to perceive what is good and proper.

UO needs something different, because there is very little besides punishment as a deterrent to unvirtuous behavior. People do not learn this way, so they make up their own definitions of what is good and proper.

The resulting swamp of relativism is what leads many players to abandon all concept of virtue. Or, less likely, it might drive them insane.

This often leads to great aberrations. Read Musashi and JUSTICE! for a prime example.

Hard Truth #7: It's easier to tear down than build up.

This is the heart of the conflict between "roleplayers" and "PKs," or more accurately, those who want to build and those who want to destroy.

Of course, given hard truth #3, we know that not everyone values creation in UO. Still other players could see the matter as something other than creation versus destruction, the same as they regard fellow players as less than human (see #4.)

Origin, in its wisdom, has approached the problem by making it harder to be a destroyer. It's a valid approach, but it will forever fall behind the difficulty in creating something from nothing, especially when the danger of having that something destroyed remains ever-present.

http://web.archive.org/web/200010120022 ... ditor8.htm

[Duke Jones]

Great find and I agree 100%.

[Corwin]

Nothing especially insightful or useful here.

[Kraarug]

Nothing especially insightful or useful here.

except the fact that is was written 10 years ago and is still true, even though the population changed and or aged.

[Corwin]

Nothing especially insightful or useful here.

except the fact that is was written 10 years ago and is still true, even though the population changed and or aged.

Really? I don't think much of it is true at all, then or now.

First of all the guy starts out by saying there's a solution for every problem, but then fails to actually back that up. Of course he can't because MMO's do have unsolvable problems when it comes to catering to all player types.

But let's take a quick stroll through his list of Hardly Truths:

1) He says most people are stupid. What would have been more accurate would be to say is that the majority of gamers are lazy and when presented with an easy way to achieve something will take advantage of it. Solution? It's a game. Give them something fun to do and they'll knock themselves dead trying to do it.

2) He says most people don't care about others more than themselves. Fair enough. Again it's a game, but I'd say the majority of gamers do care about others - as in their friends, their guilds, etc. He blathers something about why large guilds fall apart missing the obvious issue that large guilds are more prone to splinter because a) they're large, and b) if they recruit openly it's highly likely they will add people who don't get along well with existing people. Large guilds tend to get large because they ignore good practices that would have naturally limited their growth.

3) He points out everyone plays for their own reasons, and those reasons are not compatible. Well, besides contradicting his initial comments that everything was fixable, he completely misses out on the reason UO attracted so many different players: open expectations. Few who bought UO really knew what it was going to be, what would be allowed, what wouldn't be allowed - and yet they were expected to pay monthly to join a club with unknown rules? That's a formula for failure right there. The solution is obvious: Set the expectations up front, enforce them, and you'll get players who accept them.

4) It's easiest to be a stranger? Huh!? It's hard to communicate in UO? Huh? Words are a hindrance? Huh? I'm not sure he even knows what point he's trying to make here.

5) He blathers on about reality in the context of a high fantasy MMPORG. Uhhh....

6) He says justice is relative. He says the game had systems meant to teach good and bad in a single player context. Huh? No they didn't. There was just as much incentive to abuse the virtues in the single player game as there was in the multi-player. The only thing stopping anyone *IS* punishment, that you might make less progress, that you might not be able to complete the game, etc. It has nothing to do with "relativism" it has to do with whether something is fun, challenging, rewarding; or simply outlandish in a way that gets you noticed. Justice cannot exist without consequences, but UO never had consequences so forget about that. The next best thing is to reward good behavior and penalize bad behavior to whatever level is necessary to strike a balance. Unfortunately, games are not very good at determining the true nature of an act.

7) He comments that it's easier to tear down then build up. He says this is at the heart of the conflict between "roleplayers" and "PKs. Oh really? What about roleplaying PKs? I'd say one problem is that the game design often makes it easier to tear down then build up. UO is after all a game system, you can't destroy something if the game's rules don't allow it to be destroyed.

He goes on to say this approach of making things harder to destroy is destined to fail, but apparently he never considered that Origin would get bought out by EA and implement something called Trammel where what a player creates cannot be destroyed.

Oops?

It's telling that he posted it on wtfman, albeit I was somewhat surprised it wasn't from the Crossroads of Brittania. If he'd posted it to the UO newsgroup, not only would it still be up in the archive, it would have been soundly thrashed by those of us who'd put far more thought in to all of those topics and a lot more.

By the way, the posting date on the article appears to be 6-10-99, and UO was about 3/4 of the way in to it's second year by then. So much had changed, already: T2A was released in Oct of 98, EverQuest with its PK switch opened in March of 99, Siege Perilous would open up in July of 99, and UO:R (trammel) would come in May of 2000.

The mass exodus to EQ before "J" wrote this article should have made the "solution" clear, at least EA could read the writing on the walls. The answer to all these problems was to divide the player base. A safe zone for those wanted to play in an environment where other players couldn't perform negative acts, a wild west zone where players could control the shard, and something in the middle for those who preferred a blend.

Finally players had a choice of which version of UO they wanted to play and they exercised it. Something was lost in the translation, and alas due to UO's complete failure, we may never again see an MMPORG released where all playstyles are thrown together without choice.

[GuardianKnight]

Corwin hit the nail on the head.