Ultima Online Devs Building Player-Run MMORPG 75
An anonymous reader writes: "A group of former developers for Ultima Online has created a game company called Citadel Studios, and they're working on a new MMORPG called Shards Online. '[CEO Derek] Brinkmann described the game as a player-run MMO, which means at the highest level they can run their own servers and change the settings of that world, altering how long nighttime lasts or how quickly players can gain skills. On the next level down, server administrators can take the form of god characters, who can spawn monsters in the world, create items and launch live events. And in the level below that, players can modify the gameplay code. ... The game is set in a multiverse, where players can travel through different worlds. While all the worlds are unified by the same rule-set, Cotten told Polygon that they are each themed differently, and these themes will offer players a different experience. There's a world inspired by high fantasy. There's a world that is coming out of a steampunk industrial revolution. There's a world that consists of a coliseum in which players can fight each other in player-versus-player battles.'"
Re:Ohhh... they just invented MultiMUD (Score:4, Interesting)
Clearly you never played UO. UO, being the first "real" mmo had fixed all of those problems from the start, by having no XP and items that decayed rather quickly. Basically your character had a capped number of skill points and you could lock skills at their current level or turn them up or down. So once you hit the cap, if you wanted to change how you played by, for example, going from Sword fighting to magic... you would set your swords to down, and your magic to up, and then use magic a lot until your magic capped out. This system had it's problems, but none of them were like what you describe above.
The primary problem with this system was that it was skill based, and I mean the skill of the PLAYER. Which a lot of people didn't like because... they weren't very good at it. Move over to an mmo like EQ and WOW and if you've been playing for 2 years, and some noob comes on, it doesn't matter how good they are. You put the time in, you're level 60, you're going to be that much more powerful than them. In UO, if you were good at that sort of thing, you could be just as twinked out as any other player in the game in a matter of weeks or even days. And even if you weren't you could still manage to kill them in PVP if you knew what you were doing.
In case you missed it... (Score:4, Interesting)
This has been going on for years already. RunUO [runuo.com].