All shall bow before the virtue of Justice!

The various Ultima 4 (yes, the one made in 1985, before many of you were born) remakes floating around the web were hit by EA cease and desist letters this week despite EA, um, giving the game away for free.

The fact that EA seems to have no problem with people downloading the 1984 vintage version, yet cracking down on rewrites that people can, you know, actually run as a web based app may well be related to Paul Barnett’s subtly hinting (note: for Barnett, this is actually considered subtlety) at a Facebook-hosted reboot of the Ultima franchise.

As always, Penny Arcade was first with the trenchant commentary, predating Lords of Ultimaville by SEVEN YEARS. Which is about 3 and a half Facebooks!

We already have two operating MMOs. We launched a game called Ultima Online in 1997, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and that’s still in business. It’s still got hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Then there’s Dark Age of Camelot, which we picked up when we bought Mythic; we also have a situation where we have well over 100,000 subscribers.

Well, those are orders of magnitude greater than the numbers rumored for both of those titles. SirBruce, the NOTED INDUSTRY ANALYST, speculates that UO’s subs are 75,000 at while DAOC’s may be as low as 45,000. My gut feeling is that both of those numbers are low, but not *that* low. But hey, he’s in EA management and I just work on those wacky web games.

Also, he thinks that competing with WoW on their own terms is eminently doable:

There’s always that ultimate killer app that comes out and creates a mass-market opportunity, and WOW is that for the MMO category. And what they’ve done is create millions and millions of players who are now comfortable with the way MMOs play, they’re comfortable with the models, and they’re looking for more.

Our job is to go after that new market and really grow a business. If it’s a situation where you’re directly competing with WOW, so be it. The key is to make sure that your product is different from theirs and bring something fresh to the equation. Something that fans will find exciting, and we think we have that in Warhammer. It’s also important for us to come out with new concepts and different IPs.

Note: insert some snark about how wildly different the Warcraft and Warhammer IPs are here -> <-.

GS: An IP based on a popular science-fiction franchise, perhaps?

FG: No comment [laughs]. So, we look at the models in Asia, where there are bigger games than WOW. Now, no MMO is bigger than WOW globally, but the market is growing here in North America. And it’s not just with high-end MMOs. You’ve got a lot of lighter titles like Runescape and, hell, even Club Penguin is a bit of an MMO.

So I see it as much more diverse market than simply, “I must beat WOW.” I thank WOW for a great few hundred hours of gameplay as well as making a market. But we’re gonna compete there and we’re going to succeed there in a lot of different ways by coming at it from a lot of different angles. I see it as a very lucrative, long-term part of our business.

Sure seems to be a lot of smack talk lately coming from the EA monolith.

Apparently a previous post made some nostalgic for Ultima Online a touch angry. (Nice format, by the way. Very tasteful.) And the reasons why, I suspect, are illustrative, although not in the way the author thinks.

[Edit: Ultima Online, the MMO, is still quite alive and well, thank you. I'm speaking more in the post below of the mythical "old school UO" where wolves were men and sheep were harvested, circa 1999. More of a state of being than an actual game. Sorry for the confusion. It's easy to make, reading message board postings of people lost in the past.]

Ultima Online was unique for its time in that it was… well… unique. If you wanted to play an MMO, well, there it was. And because of that, it achieved some very interesting things. Namely, it brought very different people into one world. It’s almost the antithesis both of the thousands of MUDs that predated it, and the dozens of MMOs that followed. It was, well, UO. And thanks to its design, it appealed to a great many people.

And thus the problem. It appealed to many people. And some of those just couldn’t get along. And the game’s mechanics allowed them to not get along in quite a spectacular fashion.

Imagine, if you will, if a game was released today that had a state of the art combat system, an intricate economic system that allowed for an unparalleled depth of business operation, and took place in a game world that was remarkably similar to a renaissance fair.

And imagine that, for whatever reasons, the game’s developers put no limits on player vs. player combat at all. Wanted to take a swing at someone? Go ahead. Knock yourself out. Whoops! We’re in a pretty hardcore PvP niche now. Even Shadowbane gives you safehold areas, right?

But wait – that’s not all. Remember that economic simulation? It extends to the dark side as well. The game’s developers, again, for whatever reason, allowed both for a pretty decent system of player housing – that could be stolen. That’s right, if you are careless and leave a key on you in a dangerous place, your killer could not only take your items (did I mention full item loot of victims on death? Sorry, forgot that detail – a fairly extreme PvP variant you don’t see much of any more) but could repossess your house. Think that one over for a while.

How viable do you think this game would be in today’s MMO marketplace? How many times do you think today’s MMO customer would meekly accept being killed and looted by someone whom they had no chance in fighting against. Losing their house. Abused after being killed verbally for being “carebear” (although that term came into vogue later, when choices began to appear in the market and said “carebears” opted out) and not part of the hard core elite. Entire skill trees devoted to allowing players to steal from each other.

How long do you think someone would pay a monthly fee to be a target?

Amazingly for Ultima Online, and in retrospect thankfully for the health of the industry, many paid for quite a while. Much of this was because it really was the only game in town. And when games began to appear that were not Darwinian full-PvP environments, not only did people began to leave UO, but UO itself changed in consequence. When you see a UO veteran spitting fire about “Trammel” or “Pre-UO:R”, they’re referring to that reaction – the rolling back of some of the more punishing full-PvP rules. No more were players vulnerable anywhere – half the world was now declared off limits to non-consensual PvP. Shortly thereafter, players could “bless” items and make them immune from theft and looting. Somewhat basic stuff in today’s MMOs. To some of UO’s players, this was the apocalypse, that they blamed for the end of their beloved game.

But it wasn’t, not really. No, what killed The Promised Land was growth. Choices. The ability for the “target” class to move from the dangerous neighborhood that was UO.

Take Shadowbane, another game that specifically appealed to the hardcore PvP player. Like UO, you could loot items from those that you killed. Like UO, there’s a Thief class that allows you to sneakily steal from people when they’re not looking. Like UO, you could attack anyone pretty much anywhere. But here is the pivotal point – unlike UO, everyone is playing the same game in Shadowbane. There’s not really such a thing as nonconsensual PvP in Shadowbane, because you signed up for the game knowing that you were going to fight. And if for some reason you weren’t interested in that style of PvP, well, there are other games and you’ll probably leave.

Ultima Online players did not have that luxury. And for some, those on the other side who developed a taste for causing misery, there actually developed a justification for it. You see it glancingly referred to in the article linked above – the “evil player”.

In UO, the “evil player” was not a PvPer (because PvPers crave challenge, something which the grief player assiduously avoids), but someone who indulged in specifically targeted grief. One sterling example would open a “gate” in an area full of new players, lure them through with a promise of gold or other wealth, and then, when they went through the gate to a small island, killed them and closed the gate, stranding their ghost until customer support fished them out. Heh heh heh. Stupid newbie. Should have known better. Heh heh heh.

The “evil player”, when called on this behavior, then claims to be an integral part of the game world. Evil needs to be fought against. It makes the game interesting to have someone to hate, right? I mean, they’re so altruistic! It’s a public service, being an asshole. Hard work and all that. Lost your house? Stupid newbie, everyone knows to carry 30 boxes and 20 furs to hide your key under so it takes a thief at least 10 seconds using a 3rd party macro program to steal it. Killed while hunting? Stupid newbie, suck it up and deal. Learn to fight and maybe someday you can be one of us.

Of course, no one wants to be a “stupid newbie”, and very few people will actually pay for the privilege. Yet, in Ultima Online, people did. Because quite literally, that’s all there was. Ultima Online was the only large-scale MMO on the market. If you wanted to play an MMO, you dealt with the PKs and the bank thiefs and the miner killers and all the other great examples of humanity UO brought out in people. The fact that people actually played in spite of all that actually speaks a great deal to the potential of MMOs.

But, for Surly Bob and the other “old school evil players” nostalgic for the glory days of Ultima Online – it won’t happen again. Ever. That moment in time was unique – and it’s gone. Because there will never again be a time where there is only one MMO. The market has matured to the point where there will always be choices. And in a dog-eat-dog PvP game, there will only be the PvPers, not the targets. Because now people actually have the choice of selecting which game to play, which game suits them best. If a person is targeted for the tender mercies of “evil players” – they simply will cancel and move on. The days of UO’s One World where many mutually exclusive play styles are forced to interact, on the terms of the more socially maladroit, are over. The market has fragmented, and cannot be put back together. People, when forced to play the role of “sheep” or “stupid newbie”, will simply leave.

Sorry, guy. Your time is over. Stupid newb.

I’m not going to go into whether or not there’s legal grounds for the ex-vols to sue Origin, nor am I going to analyze the impact of this lawsuit on the MMOG community. Instead, I think it’s relevant to look at Origin’s volunteer program itself, to see what would cause some of its staunchest defenders to turn around and do their damndest to destroy it.

Ten years ago, I was suicidal.

Now, obviously, I wasn’t terribly effective about it. Otherwise this really would be “The Rantings of Myschyf the Mad”. But for a good many years it was an obsession that danced around the back of my brain, I suppose a mirror for the alienation from all that I felt. I would mull over the pornography of death… catalogs of rifles, true-crime stories, police reports… and fantasize about how fragile everything… how fragile I really was. Hold up your arm, and realize how little connects it to the rest of you. After all, we were all just bags of tissue and liquids. There wasn’t anything remotely resembling a soul, nothing holy that required any special effort to save. Just parts. Lots of parts. Parts that could be broken.

Broken toys.

And when you have a broken toy, that is just a bag of parts, no special value, really, you don’t worry about repairing it. You just keep on playing with the broken toy.

We are all broken toys. There is no factory that we can be sent to for repairs, although many diligently try, whether through psychiatry, religion, self-medication, whatever. But you don’t fix a broken toy. It just sits there, mocking in its fragility, in the chest with all the other broken toys.

“OK, Lum, you’re depressing the hell out of me, but what exactly is your point?”

Just this: many of us, many broken toys, are attracted to escape. Escape hatches, not coincidentally, happen to be what MMOG developers are diligently crafting. Escape hatches attract those in need of escape.

Those most in need of escape cling to the escape hatch the tightest. They wind up, in many cases, as volunteers to help others escape, as well. After all, they’ve spent the most time there, they know everything there is to know about the game itself. It’s time to move, if not on, up. And joining the volunteer program offers the seductive allure of being part of something – part of the game that you’ve already spent entirely too much of your time on, and by God, this way you can leverage that. You can help others, and maybe help yourself as well.

I disagree with Myschyf on there being no altruists in gaming or in life in general. For one thing, I grew out of my suicidal fascinations by discovering the altruistic parts of myself. When I helped others, I found parts of myself that did not deserve to die. Maybe altruism is inherently selfish, but that does not make it any less noble. Helping others is good. Helping others makes one good. It’s not a bad way to start crawling out of the escape hatch.

And most in UO’s volunteer program really do serve – serve – with the aim of helping others. Despite taking an unbeliveable amount of abuse from nimrods who just discovered that they could type the word “fuck” on their PC and Daddy would never find out, to breaking up fights between drama queens who insist that their school of roleplaying kung fu is superior, to people who just don’t understand that having a specially colored robe does not necessarily mean that you can override house placement rules.

Unfortunately, for some, volunteering does not take the form of crawling up from the escape hatch, but retreating further inside.

Inside the cliques, the power schemes, the mindless paperwork, the jockeying for the attention of the barely adult GMs that supposedly oversee them, the whispering campaigns, the scandals, the transcontinental sexual liasons. All over a game – a community – an escape hatch.

We used to chronicle some of the worst offenses commited by little tinpot Sosarian dictators here on occasion. Around the beginning of the year, we stopped. Why?

Well, for one thing, it got better. Gordon Walton, head of customer service, and Jessica Mulligan, at the time head of the volunteer programs, were both hired by Origin in the fall of last year, and set the cleanup of the volunteer program as one of their highest priorities. They enforced guidelines for conduct, standards of behavior, and logging of who did what on which shift. It helped some.

For another thing, it went underground. Both because of the directives to clean up conduct from the top, and an awareness that those awful “rant sites” were watching, people got somewhat more circumspect with their misconduct. No more did GMs treat #uo-council as their personal harem, at least not openly. Favoritism still went on, mind you – the fact that the vast majority of senior volunteers were female is no coincidence – but it just wasn’t as blatant.

And most importantly, I didn’t want to deal with it any more. I had reached the capacity of my limit to care. I had spent hours on the phone with current and ex-volunteers who yearned for someone to care. Absolution. Deprogramming. I don’t know. They wanted someone to tell them there was a world beyond the volunteer program, that they could have friends outside of an IRC channel, that… that they could exist.

You might think I’m talking about a cult, instead of a customer service organization, and I’m not sure you’d be all that off. Cults are also popular escape hatches, after all. They reassure you that you’re not in fact a broken toy, that you have a purpose and a reason to be.

In any event, another sea change in the volunteer program took place later this year. For whatever reason – internal shakeups at Origin, disgust with the conduct of some, phases of the moon, whatever – the folks at Origin who were tasked with actually dealing with the counselors discovered they didn’t like them very much. The lack of respect for their charges began to seep from every email, every conference. “Here is what you will do. You will do this or leave.” “No, we won’t tell you why this happens. You don’t have a need to know why.” “We’re taking this power away from you now. We’re not telling you why.” “You no longer can have a free account. We can’t tell you why.”

To players this may not come as much of a surprise, since Origin’s position as one of the most communicative MMOG developers only shows how little communication actually happens in this industry – but to many volunteers it was a betrayal. They had joined the program to be on the inside, to have the knowledge and access that others were not privy to, and now they were denied this – they were just as in the dark as those they purportedly were over. They no longer were special.

Thus the rage began. The thought I hear expressed, time and again, talking to ex-volunteers involved in the current suit and from others, is that Origin ignored them. Origin wouldn’t listen to them. Origin wouldn’t acknowledge them.

Origin treated them as broken toys.

So we have this lawsuit. I don’t think it’s about money – money that would go more to lining lawyers’ pockets than anything else – but about something else entirely.

Lawsuits are, more and more, the accepted means of bludgeoning corporations and companies. My last employer, who was truly slime that oozed across the earth, used to brag about the number of lawsuits he had collected in his bottom desk drawer. Money – and suborning the judicial branch of government to beat it out of others – is the reagents, the magic spells of this world. It’s the way to strike back. To demand that you be paid attention to. To speak in a voice that is not ignored.

Whether or not the lawsuit is credible – whether or not it has any chance of success whatsoever – is irrelevant. Whether or not the litigants are in the right or in the wrong is meaningless. They have spoken. The industry is listening.

Will Origin still have a volunteer program in six months? Will other companies dare to make their own? I don’t know. The magic eight-ball is saying “Signs point to ‘NO’” at this point, and I don’t feel confident enough to contradict it.

But I can only wonder if, if some people sat down in a room and simply talked to each other for a half an hour, if all this could have been avoided. If someone could have taken the trouble to listen to someone they particularly didn’t want to. If.

Because, god damn it all to hell, every single fucking person involved in Ultima Online and Everquest and Asheron’s Call and Shadowbane and Anarchy Online and My Little Pony MUD and every other fucking online game has a voice. They have a purpose. They are human beings deserving of basic respect and courtesy. They are not merely for you, you executives and game masters and volunteer coordinators and SLCs and ASRCs and MHHRPDQs to post “funny stories” about on your company blackboards. They are not merely grist for your gossip mill. They are your fucking customers. They are paying your goddamn fucking salary.

If you cannot take anything else from the flaming hell that the experience that the UO Volunteer Program is rapidly becoming, then take that. Every single fucking person you deal with on a daily basis is deserving of respect and common courtesy, no matter how much you feel superior over them.

Even the ones who do your work for you, for free, because they are so ungodly codependent that they don’t know any other way to help.

Do I support the UO ex-Volunteer lawsuit? Of course not. It’s a massive Mongolian clusterfuck. And it’s truly sad that, for some, the only recourse they have to being heard is in screaming so loudly that the pillars of the world they used to live in threaten to topple.

Because in the end, we’re all broken toys. We are all the same. No special robe, no acronym by your name, no 3l33t access changes this. We all yearn for a connection to a world that rejects us.

We all want something remotely resembling a soul, something holy that can be saved. Because we all suspect, in the back of our mind where we fear to look, that we’re just parts. Lots of parts. Parts that could be broken.

Broken toys.