I do not come here to compare this life with my real life, I come to escape and enjoy my fantasy.
The first time Richard "Lord British" Garriott himself answered a page in Ultima Online concerning a repeat thief and killer, he teleported the thief to jail, and explained that he would be banned if he continued such devious behavior. But the thief retorted that it was Richard Garriott who created a world in which such play styles were possible, and then he demanded that Garriott cease harassing him for merely playing one of many possible roles in Ultima Online.
Lord British considered the man's words, and realized the thief had won the argument fair and square. As a compromise, though, he did teleport the thief far to the other side of the world from the victim who he had repeatedly attacked that day, and warned him never to attack that person again. He was still the King, after all.
In the following years, the devs worked to disincentivize thieving and scamming, as it had never been intended to be near to the heart and spirit of the Ultima experience; but to do away with it entirely would have been an even graver disservice, as that would have been an
attack on personal freedoms inherent to the sandbox, rather than to the thieves themselves. I've always considered this a welcome aberration, because I know that games like Eve Online, where sociopathic mercenaries and scammers are featured prominently and positively in the games advertisements, are much more representative of the sandbox concept. Before Ultima Online was released, Lord British and company expected the virtuous players to police the criminal elements of Britannia. But this was the first real MMORPG, the Wild West. It was to their shock and surprise that when the gates opened, the criminal element immediately set about killing everything in sight, including each other, as well as those few policemen by comparison.
More policemen came, with time; even those who never planned on patrolling for bands of Reds saw the need to protect their communities. I was among those. And just like in real life, we never outnumbered the Reds. But we learned to put up a good fight, and when we chased them off a victim here and there, we chalked those up to good days. Later, much later, we would learn to our own shock and surprise that it was not our tight-knit communities who had given birth to the Reds, but it was the Reds who had caused our tight-knit communities to exist. Born from necessity.
The spell that created Trammel separated us from direct combative contact with the worst monsters in the game--other people--but it was never designed, nor could it have been, to separate us from all forms of contact with them. And this here is the most important paragraph in my reply.
A true sandbox will always stand a fair chance of challenging one's tolerance for diverse forms of game play on any given day, and Ultima Online is among the finest sandboxes.
I find this behavior despicable as well, but you must realize that you are sharing this fantasy land with other real people, with their own individual fantasies--which you might not care to know about in detail. There will be days when a GM or dev appears to save you from the bad guy. Our history is sprinkled with just enough of these days to give us an often cruel hopefulness. In the greater scheme of things, these are anomalous events. In practice, demanding their occurrence turns out to be not much different than demanding some rain. Rather than worry yourself over how much like the real world Britannia is behaving today, it is far more relevant perhaps to consider how badly the average Britannian character (not player) would prefer to live in our real world over their own, if they could only escape their nightmarish reality.
Of course, don't ever let this detract or distract you from the beauty and wonder and just plain fun to be found in Ultima Online. But that is for another topic, and one that many posts and threads and books could be written about.
