Old Findings

[Peter]

Digging deep in the Precambrian depths of internet history, I found a small note about a game that once existed, called "Ultima Online" in the tongue of the day. It is as follows:

uddy your a boy make a big sword sweating in the shop
You're gonna be GM some-day
You got sweat on your face
Making that mace
Hauling your ingots all over the place

Thinking;
I-should-I-should MACRO!

Buddy you're a kewl dewd hard shard
Spammin' on the screen gonna take on a Drake some day
You got PK'd real quick
You big fat dick
Ressing your body at the healer's in town

Thinking;
I-should-I-should MACRO!

Buddy you're a has been lam-er
Pleadin' with your mates to help you save face
You got no gold in the bank
You great big wank
Somebody has already put you back in your place

Thinking;
He-should-He-should MACRO!

Despite it cyclopian age, it seems to resonate with modern H&H quite well.

[Agarrett]

LOL

[firemage]

Nah, H&H is WAY better designed than UO.

In UO you practically needed a fully skilled char, until you could do something remotely interesting. And getting there meant hours of doing the same thing over and over again, producing vendor trash. Of course that promoted macro-grinding.
And you got so much loot from monsters, you never needed it in that qunatity. But the really interesting loot, like runic tools for crafting magical weapons and armor, were so rare that you had to farm for them for hours. And even then you could be unlucky and don't get anything.
Oh, and you could get magical items from quite low level items, making non-magic, and even low-magic, items worthless.

Ok, I'm talking about a free-shard here. Maybe the loot was better distributed in the original game. But the crafting system was basically the same there, just adding some more high-level resources and tools.

To be fair: UO was one of the first MMORPGs so of course they made a lot of bad design decisions.

[eql]

To be fair: UO was one of the first MMORPGs so of course they made a lot of bad design decisions.

i dont think they made alot of bad design decisions.
you mentioned you also played a free shard. UO did go on for MANY years with loads of crappy expansions etc. that made it worse and worse everytime. free shards tend to mix these up and edit them alot. so who knows what you were playing.

[Raephire]

In 1997-2000, I was That Damn Thief, I used a bug to kill people in town, I destroyed whole guilds

[juhubert]

i´ve been playing uo since the first hour. it had very much impact on my expectation on online games.

in the beginning - before the later expansion - it was a awful lot of fun to play. shurely onr spend hours and days grinding. i for myself did macroing for mining and some other skills with a toothpick in the keyboard - worked great.

but the real fun was the interaction with other players, be it trading or hunting/fighting.

it had been the great days before there was the split between pk/ non pk shards and so on.

does anyone remember the death chesters? we had been the first mmorpg pk guild, as far as i know.

or does anyone remember the great caroons of imanewbie? and the dastardly killer chicken?

that doest not bode well

[Raephire]

i´ve been playing uo since the first hour. it had very much impact on my expectation on online games.

in the beginning - before the later expansion - it was a awful lot of fun to play. shurely onr spend hours and days grinding. i for myself did macroing for mining and some other skills with a toothpick in the keyboard - worked great.

but the real fun was the interaction with other players, be it trading or hunting/fighting.

it had been the great days before there was the split between pk/ non pk shards and so on.

does anyone remember the death chesters? we had been the first mmorpg pk guild, as far as i know.

or does anyone remember the great caroons of imanewbie? and the dastardly killer chicken?

that doest not bode well

I ran with Imanoob, his house was west of britain past the crossroads mountains.

I killed people in town daily by making them loot blue corpses by using the games interface latency against it.

GUARDS GUARDS! full backpacks of lots of money deeds, runes, keys, mwahaha