A long-established online game Ultima Online has held a `` festival to burn down the cheetah's house with an eternal flame ''
The online game
That Time We Burned Down Players' Houses in Ultima Online | by Tim Cotten | Oct, 2022 |
https://blog.cotten.io/that-time-we-burned-down-players-houses-in-ultima-online-7e556618c8f0
According to former Ultima Online developer Tim Cotton, there were a lot of bugs in Ultima Online when it was first released. One of them has a bug called ' Duping ' that allows items to be duplicated.
This bug takes advantage of lag between servers called 'areaservs' that are responsible for processing Ultima Online's maps. In 1997, Ultima Online divided the map into multiple areas and processed each on a separate server because many players played at the same time on a map that boasted an exceptionally large size. And when a player, NPC, etc. straddles the boundary of an area, the data of that object or event was exchanged between servers, but a delay would inevitably occur. This caused a bug where two players could pick up a bag full of items at the boundary of the area. This is how Duping works.
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Mr. Cotton and the management side also took measures such as building a system that predicts the movement of the player and summarizes the data of the objects that cross the boundary in advance, but since it was not possible to solve the fundamental problem, the response was delayed. tended to be
So Mr. Cotton comes up with the idea of tagging valuable rare items with the date and time of acquisition and the ID of the areaserv. When the server identifies a tag disguised as a long, seemingly nonsensical string like ``29bb546a415ff874e5129549fe8064249e8f1b2996fa2e7d52879d2ec24e06fd'', the server thinks ``this item is unique in the world''. And when the tag is resent, the item will display 'I AM DUPED'. However, it was said that this display was visible only to customer service representatives.
After successfully identifying the fraudulently duplicated item, Cotton and his team presented it at a meeting attended by a triumphant executive, but were met with an unexpected reaction. That's the general manager's words, 'It's not a good idea to delete duplicate items, it will hurt a lot of players.'
A devastated Mr. Cotton received the data from the customer service representative and analyzed it. This is because many players purchased the item with their hard-earned gold without knowing that it was an illegally duplicated item. This is because the hard work of players who do not have it will go to waste.
A community manager advised Mr. Cotton, who was worried about dealing with the cheetah who grabbed his tail, ``Why don't you make it an event because you're going to ban the cheetah anyway?'' . So Mr. Cotton planned the following events.
Instantly destroys Cheetah's house and its contents.
- Appears a burnt 'house rubble' in the same size range as the house was.
・Makes an 'eternal fireball' appear in the rubble.
- Place a straw figure in the burning rubble that says 'An Effigy of a Traitor'.
The management that decided the date and time to hold the event first banned all cheaters at the same time as the server was updated. He then activated a script written by Mr. Cotton and his colleagues to set fire to the cheetah's house.
Regarding the sight of dozens of houses burning down at once on multiple 'shards (servers)' of Ultima Online, Mr. Cotton said, 'Our team's determination to deal with scammers seems to have materialized, and it feels great. I did,” he recalls.
The management acted to expose the cheating player, so there seems to have been some resistance to Mr. Cotton's event, but the upper management managed to get through it. However, it seems that Mr. Cotton and others got angry from the upper management saying 'Don't do it again'.
Mr. Cotton, who is working on Metaverse at the time of writing the article, said, ``Some people who have bitten non-fungibility tokens (NFTs) have similarities in how rare items are tagged with unique hashtags and how NFTs work. Ironically, we were stuck because the problem was 'fungible items', but Satoshi Nakamoto solved that problem too. I'm not saying that online games need blockchain, but blockchain technology has had such use cases.'
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