MMORPG Developer Proudly Shares Burning Down Bad Players’ Houses: “Felt Awesome”

The former game designer Tim Cotten worked on the MMORPG classic Ultima Online (PC) in the 2000s: he had a personal score to settle with item dupers and settled them in a spectacular way, as he proudly says on Ultima Online’s 25th birthday .

Who is telling?

• Tim Cotten is a veteran game designer who is always writing about his experiences in the industry.
• He was Lead Game Designer on Ultima Online from 2007 to 2010, and developed the Styvian Abyss expansion.
• Ultima Online is considered one of the UR MMORPGs: it was the wild and wild sandbox direction. Ultimately, Everquest’s more moderate and orderly theme park direction, on which World of Warcraft was later based, prevailed.

Cotten says: The game dev talks about “Item Duping in Ultima Online”. Already during the game’s beta, some testers discovered how to duplicate items in order to steal money and items. However, they did not report this error, but kept it secret in order to cash in at the official start of the game, as Cotten writes.

He says that in 1997, while still a player himself, Otten observed something very strange:

I was walking north of an orc settlement near the town of Cove when I saw two randos doing the strangest thing of all: running back and forth across this annoyingly lying strip of land, throwing small chests on the ground. I knew this area was the worst. It was a really annoying part of the map, with a sneak path through the mountains, and it felt tough walking over it.

Players used this nasty part of the Ultima Online map to deliberately dupe treasure chests through server lag and happily celebrated their success: “It works, it works,” they exclaimed happily.

Some MMORPGs are still based on Ultima Online today:

Developer tracks down duplicated items, but is not allowed to simply delete them

What did he do against dupen then? A few years later, Cotten himself joined the Ultima Online team. His goal was clear: hunt down the dupers and bring them down. But that turned out to be not so easy.

Cotten had an idea relatively quickly on how to find duplicated items: After a few weeks, he had compiled a list of rare, duplicated items using a “Global Hash Registry”. But what should he do with this information?

The problem was: he couldn’t just delete all “duped items” in the game. Because the head of the studio forbade him to:

Mmm, I don’t think it’s a good idea to delete all the duped items in the game. That would hurt a lot of players.

Cotten writes: In the excitement he hadn’t even thought about it. But it was true, duping had become so common over the years that even “innocent” players had come into possession of duped items – and they would be disappointed if important items were suddenly gone.

You should have simply taken items away from a large part of the player base. Then you didn’t want that.

Even simply banning “players with duplicated items” was not a good solution: How many items did you want to strike at?

Ultimately, however, it was possible to limit the group of dupers in Ultima Online to such an extent that a small number of “bad players” were found who had systematically exploited the dupe.

And since the developer allowed himself a little fun. He asked the community manager.

Customer Support will ban the dupers anyway. Why don’t we make an event out of it?`

And the community manager agreed.

Possession of the Duper goes up in flames

So this was the event: As Cotten recounts, it was found that the dupers had real warehouses: houses full of duped items and NPC vendors who sold the items. The smuggler ring spanned multiple servers, different groups of players, all following the same pattern: making insane amounts of money on Ultima Online and selling it on other sites for real money.

The plan was then:

• Delete the house and all its contents
• Spawning a lot of “House Debris” on the area of ​​the house
• Laying infinite fields of flame among the rubble
• Place a dummy with the inscription “An Image of the Traitor” in the flame fields

Now they chose a day and carried out the attack. The dupers received a mass ban after a server maintenance and Cotten and his helper roamed the servers and ignited their conflagration:

Dozens of homes were destroyed across the Ultima Online multiverse, with flames licking the cracks and a visible testament to our team’s dedication to dealing with scammers. It felt fantastic. And we were told never to do that again.

Because the action of the team only “just barely” went through with the bosses. Customer support was later told to be more “discrete” with cheaters in the future.

And there was stress later, too, when the players fought over who got the cheaters’ building plots in Ultima Online, because those were premium plots.

A month ago we told a similar story on MeinMMO. Then a developer punished some players who were just too curious:

Developer of a legendary MMORPG tells how he once intentionally triggered a shitstorm: “My boss called me at 1 in the morning”