Richard Garriott reflects on Ultima Online
Lord British looks back. On PK-ing:
We definitely did not expect it to pan out the way it did; as it began to unfold we had mixed feelings as how to respond to it. The theory we thought was sound — we made the towns safe and guarded, you’d leave and have more of a free-for-all. But one day I was GMing as Lord British, and I saw a female character shouting for help. Right as I was talking with her, a thief shows up with macros, steals everything she has and runs away. I teleported ahead of him, froze him to the ground, and told him to cut it out. He promised to do so, but stole from her two more times. When I confronted him about it, he broke character and said, “Of course I’m going to do that, I’m a thief, it’s what I do. I’m operating within the rules of your game, and of course I’d lie to the king of the land.” I was like, “Damn! You’re right!
And on the best part of any MMO:
Conversely was the amazingly uninteresting feature of fishing that we put into the game for completeness. Even though it was extremely basic, that feature became stunningly popular, and a bunch of apocryphal stories arose of whether fishing worked better in streams or rivers (it didn’t). So we doubled-down on it and increased the sophistication of the feature.”