Keep in mind that players like yourself are precisely the reason games like this don't really exist anymore.

Except for the bugs, a lot of this sounds great to me. I haven’t played an MMO style pvp game since Interplay (yes, dial-up modem banks) and this is the first tine an MMO game description has sounded fun to me.

It was a lot of fun. The problem was more of a culture clash. You had a mix of RPers, CRPGers, and more standard gamers excited for PVP possibilities.

There were plenty of people in the first two camps who were into PVP, that wasn't a problem for most folks. It was the constant griefing, dealing with bug exploiting goons, being teabagged by people named things like AzZBlaSTA which really wore people down.

I ran with a very PVP oriented crowd. My experience was that 100% of them who describe the game in the specific ways the GP did were what caused the average player to throw up their hands and look for a much more controlled world. It's not that these were bad people per se, they were just playing a very different game than the rest of us and the two sides were never really going to get along.

If a game offers a play mode but nobody does it, does it really exist?

Games like what?

Buggy games? Yes the do.

Games with real risk? It requires an aggressive player to make that risk real otherwise there is no point to making a game with risk if everyone is just smithing horse shoes for each other.

I’d argue that games like UO don’t exist anymore because most people don’t want to play a game where you can lose everything.

When I was maybe 13 or 14 I scammed someone out of a house deed using a bug related to having an item selected on your cursor while the trade window was open.

It was a really shitty thing to do, and I felt terrible and ended up giving him it back a few hours later.

Apropos of nothing, I've always found the behavior of the players of MMOs and online games one of the clearest telltales that sociopathy is a lot more prevalent that most people think it is.

Says the person using a throwaway account to offer a medical diagnosis from their armchair office to someone they’ve never met, solely based on a comment about a video game they played 20 years ago.

It's not really a throwaway, take a look at the account profile-- it's been around a few years, and has a decent bit of karma. It's about as much of a throwaway as yours, or mine for that matter-- not throwaway, but no reference to our real world identity either

This is a good time to drop a mention of the psychological analysis of the four types of MUD gamers[1]

[1] http://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

The term I used at the time was "virtual sociopath" -- you'd think sociopathy is more common if you glance at forums today, too... but there's a huge element of disinhibition brought about by non-personal contact. It doesn't mean the person is like that in person at all.

> It doesn't mean the person is like that in person at all.

While I defer to your expertise, I have to say I find it a bit difficult to believe. Being in an online game just changes the form of interaction between people, not the fact that they're interacting. (We couldn't, for example, say "Oh, X is a jerk over the telephone but s/he's not like that in person at all".) These players know full well that there was another human being at the other end of their misbehavior.

Whatever the online analogue of "in vino, veritas" might be, I would be willing to bet that it's true and that these players are actually revealing a significant aspect of their true nature.

Actually, we do in fact say that X is a jerk over the telephone but less so in person. It's pretty well studied. The generic term is "psychological disinhibition" and it used to come up all the time around the issue of email and tone.

Role playing.

via hanging around magical bubba, xavori and that gang I also came across many, well, less refined types who fit this mold. Meet them in RL and they were perfectly normal.

They just saw UO as a different kind of game as other folks did, something more akin to Quake where it was no holds barred PvP. There were multiple folks I knew who couldn't understand that someone wouldn't view the game that way.

Of course, even those two were quite different; Xavori roleplayed a lot whereas IIRC Bubba didn't bother.

I think the key difference is that one was a RPer who PKd and the other a PK who RPd. Most of the folks who hung around that Silk's Tavern group, both villains and good guys & myself included had a thinner veneer of RP than folks like Xavori. It's a big reason why it was never hard to concoct an IC reason why we were all banding together against a troupe of jerks, red or blue.

The article Hearths, Clubs Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit Muds ( https://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm ) looks at that aspect. The types of players the designers design for and the types of players that the game creates aren't always in alignment.

One of the games that I've played over the years that specifically embraces this is Kingdom of Loathing.

In fairness (though I agree sociopathy is probably more prevalent than we know) this could also just be the same dynamic as seen in the Stanford prison experiments.[0] Let someone take on a role, such as villain, and they live up (or down as the case may be) to that label.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment

I certainly indulged in a lot of the behaviors that you'd probably describe as sociopathic in UO. What hormonal teenager would pass up the chance to create anarchy with no real world consequences?

It doesn't mean you grow up to be a bad person, though.