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ArsTechnica has a very interesting video (with transcript) that features Richard Garriot, co-creator of Ultima Online, discussing the virtual ecology of the game and how it went pear shaped as soon as the game was released.
When creating Ultima Online, Richard Garriott had grand dreams. He and Starr Long planned on implementing a virtual ecology into their massively multiplayer online role-playing game. It was an ambitious system, one that would have cows that graze and predators that eat herbivores. However, once the game went live a small problem had arisen...
Source: http://video.arstechnica.com/watch/war-stories-ultima-online-the-virtual-ecology [Ed-Requires ecmascript]
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War Stories | Ultima Online: The Virtual Ecology
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It's raisins that make Post Raisin Bran so raisiny ...
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 27 2017, @08:32PM
00:00
Through the 20 years that we were creating Ultimas,
00:04
we were simulating the Dungeons & Dragons social
00:08
experience that we would have at home on the weekends.
00:11
And so we were motivated, and were constantly looking
00:14
for how and when we would make
00:16
what we originally called Multima.
00:19
(war drums)
00:24
I'm Richard Garriott, the creator of Ultima Online,
00:27
and we spent three years creating a masterpiece feature
00:30
that the players destroyed the moment the game went live.
00:34
(war drums)
00:43
(phonograph plays)
00:46
The year is 1995.
00:49
We are building what became Ultima Online in earnest.
00:53
The best PCs you could get generally were running a
00:56
Pentium, maybe had, you know 10 megabytes of memory inside,
01:00
and it was also right when the very first ever 3D graphics
01:04
cards were being shipped, but a very primitive version
01:06
compared to what we have today.
01:08
Starr Long and I knew that this was the moment to strike,
01:11
because we knew that we were moving from expensive
01:16
rare dial up to ubiquitous,
01:19
direct connection to the internet.
01:22
Fairly quickly there were a few things we realized we
01:25
needed in the game and a few things we thought would
01:29
really help the game.
01:30
For example, I think correctly, early on we determined
01:33
that in the long run our small team, we assumed, and hoped,
01:38
would be too small to continue to create content nearly
01:42
as fast as the players would be able to consume it.
01:46
Since we knew we would eventually lose that footrace,
01:49
we decided to try to build some automated systems
01:52
to help fill in that gap.
01:54
And one of those that we created was what we called
01:57
the Virtual Ecology.
02:02
The map itself, the terrain and the vegetation on the
02:05
terrain, would actually grow and create food for one
02:11
set of creatures in the game which I'll rightly call
02:12
the herbivores, so the deer and rabbits would roam the
02:16
countryside and they would multiply to a degree
02:20
that would come into balance with the rate of vegetation
02:22
that was produced in any general area.
02:24
So you'd find more deer and rabbits in the forest and
02:27
the grasslands and fewer in the mountain and the deserts.
02:29
And we would spawn the carnivores up in the mountains or
02:31
farther away at more remote places.
02:33
And they would wander around looking for meat to eat,
02:35
which generally would be the herbivores.
02:38
And if they emptied out the population of sheep and rabbits,
02:40
they wouldn't have anything to eat, and so they couldn't
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reproduce, and so therefore they would
02:43
come into a natural balance also.
02:44
When a herbivore found a piece of vegetation,
02:48
i.e. a tall piece of grass, they would consume it.
02:52
And it would become a short piece of grass.
02:53
And in fact, that was one of the beauties to watch,
02:55
is to watch, you know, the rabbit just going around
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mowing the grass, or the goats and the deer running
03:00
around slowly mowing the grass.
03:01
And then running out in one area and then identifying
03:03
in some distant area another place to go graze.
03:05
Just like real animals do.
03:08
The real trick was how to make sure that that balance
03:11
then how did that interact with carnivores who could
03:13
wipe them out, but then wouldn't care for the grass,
03:16
so the grass would all become, you know, herbaceous again.
03:20
And conversely, you know, players could kill either
03:24
the herbivores, which we thought in our mind's eye,
03:28
they wouldn't do very much, because there wasn't much
03:30
value in those herbivores, and instead we assumed
03:33
that they would tend to fight the carnivores, not only
03:36
because the carnivores would be attacking them, but
03:38
also we had created quests to
03:40
where the pelts of the carnivores were worth more.
03:44
And so we assumed that that was sort of the leap frog
03:47
target that everyone would take on.
03:49
The same way we rationally were playing the game,
03:52
we thought.
03:53
Frankly, the service didn't work.
03:56
At oh so many levels.
03:58
(war drums)
04:01
What we discovered the moment the game went live was
04:05
that players ran over the world like a swarm of ants
04:10
that consumed every living thing as fast as it was
04:15
possible to spawn it.
04:17
They killed every creature, so as soon as a deer, or a
04:20
rabbit, or a wolf showed up on the map, the nearest person
04:24
to it killed it, skinned it, took its meat
04:27
and took its hide instantaneously.
04:30
And the fact that the wolf was worth more than the deer
04:33
or the rabbit was irrelevant, just the fact that it was
04:36
fun to kill would have been enough for them to eradicate
04:40
all life, all living things on the surface.
04:43
And we spent the next few months trying to figure a
04:47
solution out by either decreasing the value of the deer
04:49
or the rabbits or increasing the spawn rates to try to
04:52
make them be so plentiful
04:54
the players couldn't kill them all.
04:55
We actually could not keep up with the rate that the players
05:01
would massacre anything and everything that moved.
05:04
(war drums)
05:09
So we actually changed the fiction of the game and
05:12
introduced a hack going back to Ultima I, where in Ultima I
05:18
the way you defeated the Dark Wizard Mondain was by
05:21
destroying the Gem of Immortality, and you broke it
05:24
into shards and so we decided that that moment also
05:28
splintered the world into copies in these shards,
05:32
and that was the fiction for shards, which are now used
05:35
by other MMOs and even database operators around the globe
05:39
who don't have anything to do with gaming, and have no
05:40
idea where the word shards came from.
05:42
So we knew we'd go past 100,000 players, however we really
05:45
had no idea that it would quickly ramp to a million.
05:48
It was also obvious immediately that we had this problem
05:51
with a virtual ecology.
05:53
Because this proverbial swarm of ants was unstoppable,
05:58
we had thinned the population in certain areas,
06:01
but we couldn't do that on the main map.
06:04
The main map needed everyone to be present.
06:07
After months of attempting to rebalance, or reenvision
06:14
this virtual ecology, sadly in the end, we literally
06:19
just ripped all the code out of the game.
06:23
And the saddest part of all of this is that outside
06:26
of people hearing the story directly like I'm telling
06:28
you right now, none of the players
06:31
ever even knew it was there.
06:33
(war drums)
06:37
The lesson of the virtual ecology was to us that
06:42
testing the game in house is an entirely inadequate test in
06:48
contrast to the reality of being in the hands of players.
06:52
Not only are players going to face the experience
06:55
differently, they will think about it differently than
06:58
we do in house, but also by sheer numbers, they will
07:01
crush or test things in a very different way.
07:04
In a virtual world where you give the players swords and
07:08
weapons to commit mass murder, I think that a virtual
07:12
ecology is going to be, going to prove to be very difficult.
07:16
But I look forward to some young whipper snapper proving
07:18
me wrong.