Ultima Online is an excellent game, I have no regrets about the time I spend in Britannia. But I know it's just a game. Loosely functional, anti-social packs of in-fighting PvPers and cheaters having a large impact on a game designed for social interaction and cooperation? PvPers facing exile for mingling with PvMers?
In defense of the original dev team, I don't think anyone could have possibly seen that coming. It's still hard to believe. Not only is it surreal, but it's actually kind of dumb. Why are these people here? Is there some reason that would make sense to a normal, functioning member of society?
This of course excludes legitimate PvPers who don't have weird emotional issues, capable of understanding the concept of different play-styles for different people.
I think that devs in general tend to take the rose-shaded view that most PvP in a game will be basically consensual, and in UO's case (if you have the really old school Ultima Online strategy guide like I do!) they assumed a lot of it would be RP related or controlled and limited to guild wars/diplomacy. And this was, essentially, accurate for a lot of beta and the "honeymoon" after launch -- for the first 2 years or so there were still enough people newly come into the game discovering everything that few were bored and developed enough to find sitting around ambushing players and miners to be a preferrable, more fun activity to other things they could be doing. At the very least I do not recall it being a major, major issue until around year 2.5 onwards, where it became bad (and it never had anything to do with RP, or guild wars, or factions, it was always pure spite and greed) and got worse until the player outcry was deafening. And every bit of it was justified, to be honest-- whatever people may think of Tram/Fel now, if you were anything other than a PK at the time Tram/Fel was imminent, you remember how bad it was and that it was common sense something had to be done. (Whether Tram/Fel was the best possible solution is a controversy that continues to this day and is a fair argument, though perhaps a dead one.) I would submit in closing on that though that people who claim not to be sociopathic PK's, who are nostalgic for the day of the exciting "risk" of being killed in the open, are almost certainly either remembering it too fondly in hindsight, or were not there for when the whole world was basically Felucca. Or you never left town.
Getting back on the point I started with... I think, at least from what I can see, devs rarely start out with a vision that encompasses either widespread, profitable PK behavior or widespread, systematic griefing playstyles. At the very least, whatever they do take into initial design consideration regarding these two problems tends to be insufficient enough that PK's and griefers will always recall back fondly on a game's opening or the period shortly after launch, before it got "nerfed" to protect the "whiners." Protections always have to come later because frequently a game when it hits the store shelves has little in terms of foolproof rules to prevent systematic griefing or opting out of any form of normal gameplay in favor of profiting and advancing purely by killing other players and erasing their work. This speaks to devs favor at least in my humble opinion because they aim towards the best of what an online community can bring to the table (fun stuff like RP pk's, organized guild wars, helping new players instead of murdering them effortlessly, not preying on much weaker players, etc.) rather than the worst, even though the worst always, to some degree, insinuates itself into online gaming.
Today, if you are camped, griefed, killed on sight or otherwise immediately and mercilessly treated anywhere in Felucca, even "upstanding" members here will show up to say it was totally understandable and justified. After all, you were in Fel. The problem with the original game was that the whole world was Fel and if someone is sociopathic enough to believe that your mere presence, and the mere reality that they are capable of killing you without very much risk, is sufficient and self-explanatory motivation and justification to kill you, and kill you again, and grief you, then coexisting playstyles is simply not possible. I don't understand this mindset. I don't like it. I don't feel it's just an equal and alternative playstyle to everyone else's, it's a playstyle (and I use the term loosely) that depends entirely on stopping or, at the very least, persistently disrupting and damaging, pretty much everyone else's. I'm not talking about PvP or guild wars or RP murderers (who kill you one time and move on). I'm talking about griefing --- though, if you were in Fel, the reaction seems to be that it's all one and the same and that PvP only comes in one flavor-- a notion I disagree with, having seen many different stripes of death throughout UO's life. I think the griefer lawl I pwn u and den I pwn u again and agin! mindset is dominant today-- but I think it's a conceit and a weak attempt to justify it by pretending it's the only type of PvP the game ever knew and no one should reasonable expect to see anything else.
Perhaps this is more of a spiel. Or a rant. *Shrug*
