Ultima Online - Issues Faced

Issues Faced

Ultima Online has seen many major revisions throughout its history. This includes gameplay revisions, staff changes, technical revamps, porting the backend to Unix, and fundamental design changes. With few earlier MMORPGs to take lesson from, the staff behind Ultima Online were breaking new ground and had to solve complex issues that had never been faced in a commercial game on such a wide scale before. Understanding psychology, social interaction, economy, and other issues became increasingly important as complex social behavior evolved.

Throughout the pre-release development of the game, a well-balanced, realistic economy and social structure was the goal. While not all of the features planned for incorporation made it into the first release, the developers did manage to give almost all of the control to the players in terms of what they could do to each other and the world as a whole.

Another problem throughout Ultima Online's history has been flaws that allowed for cheating. In early years, methods to duplicate items were discovered and many took advantage of this loophole to mass produce gold and items, causing great harm in the game's economy and power structure. Even after this method was fixed, other methods were discovered over the years which bypassed server and game mechanics to duplicate items and gold. With the introduction of cross-shard character transfers, massive duplication between worldwide servers started to occur, greatly injuring the game economy.

Ultima Online was sued by former player volunteers ("Counselors") and settled in 2004 without admitting wrongdoing. AOL had their volunteers train customer service personnel it hired, then shut down the volunteer program. Concern over future lawsuits led Microsoft to shut down their volunteer program for Asheron's Call.