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