ULTIMA ONLINE 10, WHICH ONLY RUNS ON VOODOO XXXIV CARDS… [Author: wirehead]

…In my mind, one of the really big lessons for Ultima Online had to do with the following little story. Imagine you built a city and the city could hold a couple hundred thousand people. And so one day you opened up the highways and said, “Hey, everybody come over and live.” And couple hundred thousand people show up on your doorstep to come live there. And let’s suppose that when people move in, there are a variety of kinds of things that happen. First of all, there are potholes in the streets, so there are some actual physical issues and problems in the infrastructure of the city. But let’s also suppose that there are some laws that people don’t like. Let’s say the law for murder is too lenient. So what’s going to happen once these hundreds of thousands of people show up on your doorstep? They’re, of course, going to want to voice an opinion and have that changed.

Well, in the real world, in a city, most neighborhoods have a little neighborhood association that gets together and talks about neighborhood watch or school bus issues, and things that they think are important. That little group will lobby the school board or whoever might be appropriate, or they might lobby city council members. And city council members might meet with the mayor of the city, and there’s a bureaucracy of infrastructure through which government and citizens communicate with each other. Well, in the case of Ultima Online, we built a city, we invited hundreds of thousands of people to come, they did come, there were potholes in the street, and there were laws that some people disagreed with. However, there were no neighborhood associations, there were no mechanisms…there was no bureaucracy through which to communicate up and down. So what happened is, hundreds of thousands of people with an opinion about the murder law decided they want to e-mail somebody. Who do they mail? At the very least, they mail Origin, and often they mailed me. And so suddenly hundreds of thousands of people are e-mailing Origin and/or myself with very legitimate concerns or issues from major to minor. But of course, there’s no way one person can respond or even a hundred people can even respond to anything like that traffic flow. And so what immediately people think then is that nobody’s listening, that nobody cares, and that the company has moved on to other issues, oblivious to the fact that we still have the entire company devoted for at least a year and a half to just this one problem. It was a very important and interesting learning process, to where now at Origin, Ultima Online Live is probably a third of the entire company if you look at the total personnel devoted to it, from game masters and ministers of information, web folks and game developers, and marketing and the whole bit…

…There’s an analyst out in California named Amy Jo Kim who’s been studying Ultima Online. And she has been very insightful in a lot of her thinking about online communities. One of the major tenets that she puts forth that I agree with is that when you create an online game, the creators have an idea of what it should be or what they want it to be, and that’s what people see as the invitation to come. And people who decide they like that invitation come to be part of that. But once they’re all there, they’re in control, in the sense of if they decide that they no longer like the vision of the creators, and that they want to move it in some other direction, it’s futile to try to continue to herd them back. It’s kind of like if there was an old ladies’ knitting club, and the original founder moves off, or if she’s just outnumbered. Maybe they decide to turn it into a car club if they want…that’s just the prevalent opinion of the masses. That was an interesting lesson for us, too: how to understand what the people are really interested in. How to see the important data through the chaff, because on any issue, there are lots of opponents and supporters, and its hard to know what the true general opinion is, and then deciding how to respond to that…it’s really interesting. We are now in a service business more than we are in a creator/content business…

…[The Ultima Online] code-base… what’s interesting…it’s only been really over the last six months…we went through a very concerted effort to basically re-write the entire game. Not to change the functionality, as much as make the game code much more stable and robust so that we could continue to modify it and add to it more successfully. A year ago, one of the reasons why changes were so slow and difficult and buggy was because the code was not prepared for this level of modification and addition and continuity. But now it is…