Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg (
More info?)
On Tue, 01 Feb 2005 00:51:35 GMT, bombelly@wahs.ac (foamy) wrote:
>In article <hpftv0hcsivai9bg5ufmmsdoc3b2rrsfna
>@4ax.com>, drocket <drocket@hotmail.com> wrote:
>I'm sorry, but this is so overblown I'm surprised you'd post it, knowing
>there'd be many such as myself who played on Day1 in Sept / 97.
>UO was nothing like you suggest. There were many problems, the UO
>two-step, and claims from Origin that any problems were the fault of our
>machines or ISP's., but I experienced little downtime whatsoever. It
>might have been specific to your server, but not mine. You also have to
>cut UO some slack, as it broke the ice and had no predecessor to learn
>from or get a good idea what to expect.
I'm probably exaggerating a bit, but not by all that much. You don't
remember the world saves that required all the servers to be offline
for 2 hours every night and wiped out the 2-3 hours worth of playtime
before the downtime began because they couldn't figure out how to
write a system that could save in real-time? The timewarp would begin
at about 2AM (after that, the servers were up, but nothing was saved),
then go down at round 4AM, and if God was merciful, they'd come back
up at 6AM. Sometimes. Actually, this really wasn't a problem _right_
at launch, but quickly became one after the first month or so, once
the itemcount built up as people played and collected junk.
Some of the problems were server-specific, such as the corrupted data
that would force them to revert the shard to an earlier backup, though
I would bet that that problem happened to every shard at one point or
another. I believe the worst revert was about 10 days, though reverts
of 1 or 2 days were pretty common.
I really have to disagree with your assessment of it having no
predicessor's to learn from. UO (and EQ, and most other MMORPGs) was
really little more than a MUD with a graphical interface. The vast
majority of problems were well-known issues that had been handled in
hundreds of games that had come before. There were a lot of design
issues with UO, but its problems at launch can be laid right at the
feed of EA, who forced the designers to put far more players on each
shard than they had been designed for, then launched the game several
months before it should have been. If more attention would have been
paid to what the designers knew about game design instead of the
bean-counter's budget report, UO's launch would have been a whole lot
smoother. Actually, that's probably true of most MMORPGs.
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