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Ultima Online Journal Two
Grandmaster Forum Poster
One of UO's legacies is the dubious honor of giving birth to the forum whiner. I use the term whiner because it is essentially the best term, even if you have a good idea or complaint. Before UO, there really wasn't another game that allowed fans to have the ear of the developer and thus influence development after release. Daggerfall was perhaps one of the few exceptions.
I touched on the in game issues with magic in the previous section and those were discussed in spades on the forums. Beyond just the unfairness of the magic system, a number of topics were being bandied about on places like UO Vault and Crossroads of Britannia. Enter the lead designer for Ultima Online, Mr. Raph Koster aka Designer Dragon. It would be disingenuous to comment negatively or positively on having the lead designer in direct contact with players because I was certainly there debating along with everyone else. In today's MMOG market, it is not uncommon for someone to be hired specifically to facilitate communications between player and developer. These community relation managers, as they are called, simply don't have the power to inact change like a lead designer. Today's Community Manager is sincere enough, but they are too much of a filter for the development team to accurately gauge the level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the playerbase.
Anyway players got to bitch and Designer Dragon got to explain the philosophy that OSI was implementing. Things like 'We want to give player's the tools to build a community' and 'Breaking into houses is a creative use of magic'. Oh yeah I forgot to get into the entire list of house break ins. I'll have to remember to do that when I pick up the story of Great Miney in the next section, but I digress. Forum whining changed the way games are made because now the player voice has a larger influence on gameplay than pre-UO.
To DD's credit, he took the heat. He was under pretty heavy fire at times from irate players. Some developers would have just thrown up their hands and took their ball and went home. DD took a professional stance for the most part and laid down some straight talk. In today's market you are more likely to hear code words and other jargon to placate customers. DD would tell players things they didn't want to hear and he didn't try to sugar coat it. It is also fitting that like UO, the forums shared the same wild frontier atmosphere. In today's market it is highly unlikely many of the unruly posters would be allowed to continue posting.
For my part, I tried to keep the flames to a minimum although I certainly vehemently stated my opinion. I was not above occasionally using outrageous analogies or overstating the problem to be heard. Over the course of my tenure in UO, the hot topics for me were Recall, underpowered melees, too many houses, and various issues regarding crafters. I want to point out that the PK issue was never a priority to me, although there was some overlap among Recall and PK debates. As I stated many times, Recall benefited the PK more than it did the non-pk. But enough of that, I don't want to re-fight the Recall debate again because it is a dead horse post Trammell.
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