How Gamers Killed Ultima Online's Virtual Ecology | War Stories | Ars Technica
Ars Technica · 3 HN recommendations
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An Ars Technica War Stories episode in which Richard Garriott and Starr Long describe Ultima Online's planned virtual ecology and how players wrecked it. Players slaughtered the animals and also broke the in-game economy.
Why HN recommends it: HN uses it as a canonical anecdote that designers badly predicted player behavior, and in threads about UO and sharding.
“Instead the players indiscriminately killed both the carnivores and the herbivores, because the players were human.” Read on HN ↗