Ultima Online is one of the longest-running and most influential MMOGs around and is currently 25 years old. (There is even a special shield to mark the occasion.) Such a prestigious anniversary has inspired some of the talents behind the game to reminisce about their time in the game, including programmer and game designer Tim Cotten. His story is an absolute doozy.
Cotten writes about a ubiquitous gremlin for gaming, and in particular massively multiplayer games like Ultima Online: Duplicate Item, or Duping. He first encountered the problem as a player of the game way back in the heady 1997 launch year, when he witnessed two players drop chests on a certain area of the map and excitedly babble “It worked! omg!”
“Yup,” Cotten writes, “they had managed, while excitedly scooping up, to work out a trick to drop a chest on one side of the ‘laggy patch’ while trying to pick it up/hand it over.” to the other player because they both walked from side to side and now each of them had a copy of the same chest: and its contents.”
The post is titled “That Time We Burned Down Players’ Houses in Ultima Online” and describes part of Cotten’s personal journey from poacher to gamekeeper, as he once saw from the outside, later, as a member of the development team, decided to fight.
The whole thing is worth reading, but I’m going to skip Cotten’s technical explanation of how Ultima Online generated his map and tracked player movements (the tl;dr version is “ingenious”), and how he eventually worked out a way to get duped items and the to identify players who had them. You can read the full message here.
The main point is that Cotten has implemented a global hash registration on Ultima Online’s rarest items, which he likens to “invisible dye” that would stain the duped items in a way only the developers could see. This code was allowed to run for a few weeks, and with the data collected, Cotten and his fellow developers were able to begin eradicating the dupes.
Except… the management didn’t want them to clean up the house. In fact, management had a pretty good point to make about this. Cotten says the response was something along the lines of, “Mmm, I don’t think they’re all getting deleted [the duped items] is a good idea, then you hurt too many players.”
“We identified the dupers themselves and their storage depots: they had houses full of their duped items and NPC vendors selling them to the players.”
Tim Cotten
“I hadn’t really thought of that,” Cotten writes. “Not at all. I was too excited about achieving my long-cherished goal of ‘catching a few dupers’.” Cotten bit his tongue, told the team they wouldn’t automatically remove all dupes, then spoke to Ultima Online customer service.
They agreed that removing the items was a terrible idea. “The dupes spread so quickly after they were created that if we removed them all from among all the players who bought them (with their hard-earned gold) from the dupers, we would affect a significant portion of the player base,” Cotten writes. “Of course some of them would be okay with the ‘morality’ of our action, but on the scale of hundreds or thousands of affected players (per shard) we were just asking for the frustration that caused a wave of silent stopping.”
Catching the dupers had raised as many questions about community management as game management, and Cotten realized answering them was harder than he expected. For example, the customer service team asked how many duped items a player should have before banning them. Keeping in mind that the whole point of deception is to sell these items to innocent players, how do you start calculating such a figure?
Still, Cotten and his team came with a goal. While any general action would inevitably have consequences for innocent players, the developers managed to systematically identify the players who took advantage of the exploit. These people would be banned anyway, so it was decided to make it an event.
“We identified the dupers themselves and their storage depots: they had houses full of their duped items and NPC vendors who sold them to the players,” Cotten writes. “The “duping ring” stretched across multiple servers, made up of different groups that didn’t necessarily work together. However, they all had developed the same behavior: earn tons of UO gold by selling dupes and then sell the UO gold on secondary markets for hard cash. money.”
Cotten and community manager Adida wrote a script that when “attached” to an in-game home, in his words, would do the following:
- Remove the house and all its contents. Everything. Immediately. recursively. *poof*
- Spawn a bunch of real estate “house debris” in a predetermined rectangular area that fit the same dimensions as the house it existed in. It was colored dark black to look like it had soot all over it.
- Spawn a bunch of eternal “firefields” among the rubble.
- Make a straw doll labeled “An Effigy of a Traitor” to place in the center of the burning debris.
In Britannia they certainly don’t do things halfway. The development team prepared, chose a day, and then launched the attack. The dupers were banned en masse on a timer just before their chosen server would come back online after maintenance, as Cotten and Adida teleported from house to house, “confirmed the script, watched the fires erupt with joy, and moved on.”
The duping rings had no warning, and because of the way the developers timed their attack across different servers, they didn’t have time to try things like logging in as alt to save their goods.
“Dozens of homes had been destroyed throughout the Ultima Online multiverse, and the flames licking the sooty rubble were a visible testament to our team’s determination to deal with cheaters,” Cotten writes.
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“It felt fantastic! And we were told not to do it again.”
The problem wasn’t with the players, even though there was some flak for doing something so “daringly public” against cheaters, but Cotten says the team’s actions “barely passed with upper management.”
It was clear that they should not be allowed to do such a thing again. Customer service was given discretion to deal with dupers using the tools built for it. And as good as it felt at the time, problems came from the economy after the Great Fire of Britannia: “especially when players wanted to compete for the now available, very premium, housing spots.”
There’s something irresistible about this story, not least Cotten himself: because you can still tell, even though he likes to remember something from decades ago, that this is a man who hates dupers. When Cotten writes about the burning down of the houses, stopping at each to watch “flames licking the sooty rubble,” you can almost imagine him licking his lips at the thought of such sweet justice.
Engulfing dupers en masse is yet another in the pile of fantastic stories to come out of Ultima Online: the all-time classic is how the invincible avatar of the game’s creator, Richard Garriott, met his own fiery end.
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