Ultima Online is one of the longest running and most influential MMOGs and is currently celebrating its 25th anniversary. (There is even a special plaque to commemorate this.) Inspired by such a prestigious anniversary, the talented people behind the game, including programmer and game designer Tim Cotten, reminisce about their time working on the game. Tim Cotten tells an extraordinary story.

Cotten writes about the gremlins, or item duplication (duping), that are omnipresent in games, especially massively multiplayer games like Ultima Online. He first encountered this problem when the game was launched in 1997, when two players dropped a chest at a particular spot on the map and "it worked.

"Yes," Cotten wrote, "it did." As they excitedly boasted, they had managed to figure out the trick to drop the chest on one side of the "laggy patch."

The post, titled "That Time I Burned Down a Player's House in Ultima Online," chronicles part of Cotten's personal journey from poacher to gamekeeper.

The whole thing is worth a read, but it's also a good overview of how Ultima Online generates maps and tracks player movements (tl; dr version is "ingeniously"), and how he eventually developed a way to identify dubbed items and the players who have them Cotten's technical explanation of how he finally devised a way to identify the player with the dubbed item is omitted. The full article can be read here.

Importantly, Cotten implemented a global hash registry for Ultima Online's rarest items. He likened this to an "invisible dye" that would taint duped items in a way that only the developer could see. The code ran for several weeks, and with the data collected, Cotten and his fellow developers set out to eradicate the duped items.

However, ...... management did not want them to clean house. In fact, management was quite accurate in pointing this out. According to Cotton, the response was: "I don't think it's a good idea to remove all [the dumbed-down items].

"Actually, I hadn't thought about that," Cotten wrote.

"Not at all. I was too excited to have achieved my long-standing goal of "catching some dupes."

Cotten bit his tongue, told the team that he would not auto-delete all dupes, and consulted Ultima Online's customer service department.

They agreed that deleting items was a terrible idea." Cotten writes, "Dupes spread so quickly once they are created that removing them all from under all the players who purchased them (with their hard-earned gold) from the dupe would affect a significant portion of our player base." Sure, some of them would be fine with the "morality" of our actions, but on the scale of hundreds or thousands of affected players (per shard), we were just asking for frustration to cause a wave of quiet termination."

Catching the duper raised questions about community management as well as game management, which Cotten found more difficult than expected to answer. For example, the customer service team asked how many dumped items a player should have before being banned. Bearing in mind that the whole point of dumping is to sell these items to innocent players, how do you begin to calculate such a number?

Nevertheless, Cotten and his team set a goal. While any comprehensive measure would inevitably affect innocent players, the developers were successful in identifying players who were using the exploit in a systematic way. These players will undoubtedly be banned anyway.

"We identified the dupers themselves and their storage locations. They had houses full of duped items and NPC vendors selling them to players," Cotten wrote." The "duping rings" spanned multiple servers and consisted of separate groups that did not necessarily act together. Yet they all acted the same. They were selling dumps to earn large amounts of UO gold and then selling that UO gold on the secondary market for cash.

Cotten and community manager Adida wrote a script that, when 'attached' to a house in the game, would, in his words:

No half measures in Britannia. The development team was ready, the day was set, and the attack was launched. Cotten and Adida teleported from house to house, "attaching scripts, watching with glee as the fire erupted and moved on."

There was no warning about the duping ring and no time to try things like logging in as an alt and saving goods, as the developers were timing their attacks between different servers.

"The destruction of dozens of homes across the Ultima Online multiverse and the flames licking the soot-covered rubble were visible proof of our team's determination to deal with the cheaters," Cotton wrote.

"It was a wonderful feeling. And we were told not to do it again."

"The team was very impressed with the team's determination to get the job done.

Even though the problem was not with the players, but with the accusations of doing something "brazenly public" against the cheaters, according to Cotton, the team's actions "by the upper echelon of the upper echelon of the upper echelon of the upper echelon, . just barely slipped through."

It was clear that this would not be allowed to happen again. Customer Service was given the discretion to deal with the duper using the tools that had been built for this purpose. And after the Great Fire of Britannia, there were economic problems, no matter how good they were at the time.

The story has an irresistible appeal, not least in part to Cotten himself. When Cotten writes about burning down the houses and stopping at each one to watch "the flames lick the sooty rubble," one can imagine him licking his lips at the thought of such sweet justice.

Setting the dupers ablaze en masse is yet another addition to the mountain of great stories that have come out of Ultima Online.

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