The Dawn Of The MMO Era

Ultima Online actually had its first live test in early 1996. That test was termed the “alpha test”. The test appeared to take the Ultima 8 engine, including a system of gaining levels and gave a very limited number of players the ability to play in the immediate area around the city of Britain.

That early alpha test, for many gamers of the time, was their first experience in a Multiplayer Online World. Fantasy genre single player games, like the Ultima series, had been popular for years but online play was limited to MUDs (Multi User Dungeons), an ASCII based game and very limited graphical games like Neverwinter Nights that was hosted by America Online.

So the advent of the alpha test of UO was the ushering in of a hopeful new era. In playing the alpha, you could actually see the other players in the world with you and they moved in real time (or as close as one could get at 28.8kbps) and you could work together to kill monsters.

There were two basic types of monsters in that early test: orcs and skeletons. Players could kill each other but since the community was so small and there was really nowhere to hide, large groups of 20 or 30 players would form up and hunt down the offenders.

It is interesting to note that in hindsight that was actually a bad thing because it incorrectly formed the impression in early MMO developer’s minds that “player justice” would be sufficient to curtail anti-social play. However, in a world as massive as UO is, there were so many places to hide and so many players to try and track down that player justice was, and still is, an abysmal failure. There has to be an automated set of game mechanics to assist players. That lesson is still being learned in some gaming worlds, today. But I digress.

The early alpha test was very much like the first kick of the MMO baby in the womb. Gamers, developers and publishers looked on with excitement. The potential fun and the potential of revenue were clearly visible. And then there was nothing. Months passed during which there were infrequent communications from the developers.

The community thrashed around trying to define itself. As was mentioned before, this turned out to be in The Syndicate’s best interest since we were able to go through a growth spurt and a defining of ourselves that helped set us up for the successes that we enjoy today. For the community as a whole, it was a chaotic time.

Some examples of things that that occurred during those intervening months between the alpha and the beta of Ulitima Online, that help characterize the gaming world and The Syndicate of that era, include:

1. There were only a few forums in existence. Since fan sites were also extremely rare, most of those forums belonged to one guild or another. Password protecting them was also very rare so even if a group wanted to be private, that wasn’t very likely to occur. As such, large (large, by the standards of the day, meant dozens rather than hundreds or thousands) numbers of players would gather on those forums. Since the UO alpha test set some incorrect expectations in player’s minds lots of posturing took place on the forums.

   Some of the expectations that were subconsciously set were that the world would be small enough that you could easily keep track of everything going on and that players could, if they organized, crush everyone else and dominate the towns and countryside. Those expectations, coupled with the average age of a gamer being much lower than it is in the modern MMO era, led to an extra large does of testosterone on the boards and the advent of “d00d speak”.

   The bastardization of the English language that is known as d00d speak is an interesting study all by itself and it certainly was prevalent in those early years and became the mainstream for many who trolled the forums. Forums were known as boards or posting boards. And that gave rise to yet another piece of slang: the Troll. A troll is a person who “trolls” the boards looking for anything new to reply to. They often add no value and appear to talk for the sake of talking.

   The combination of d00d speak and board trolls, coupled with the subconscious expectations of what UO was going to be like, that we picked up from the alpha test, led to some chaotic, juvenile and often very explosive forums. Ironically, at the time, the concept of having multiple independent servers wasn’t even established so the player base didn’t realize that threats made and challenges issued were mostly moot since they would never actually come across the people they threatened in game.

2. Internet Security was very weak at that time. It was fairly common for forums and websites to get “hacked” and defaced as a result. This was further exacerbated by the average age of the player base at the time and thus the lack of appropriate foresight and a fully developed set of morals.

   Origin allowed guilds to register a presence on their site in those days. You could list your name, website, guildname and a few brief details. That led to one of the more notorious cases of hacking where someone broke into the Origin site and stole the database of guilds including the unencrypted passwords for every entry.

   In today’s terms most players probably wouldn’t care. Just reset the passwords and email everyone a new one and put in place better security. However, in those days it was a big deal both because it was a new phenomenon and because communications were much more rudimentary so even contacting everyone with an entry was a challenge.

   That hacking basically resulted in a freeze of the database followed not too long after by closing that service entirely. Again, in today’s terms that isn’t a big deal since there are many ways to advertise one’s guild. In those days there were very few ways to advertise it and that was the primary way for many groups.