This is a big cultural issue. UO was not designed to have a goal. Most players demand they be presented with a goal.
In an odd sort of way I suspect UO would have been better off had it come out a year or two earlier. It'd not have been remotely as popular, but wouldn't have attracted such a large crowd. And because they drew from a much larger crowd than the intended audience there were a lot of people who got disgruntled. But it makes sense because the game was literally not designed with their desires in mind.
I know Raph Koster has spent a lot of time since he designed UO thinking about this problem. I haven't looked at his current project but am curious to what extent he's licked this issue.
I remember spending so much time every patch day with other people on my server where we just tried out different combinations of spells, weapons, armor, tactics to see what worked this week.
The big problem that UO ran into was that it turned out the people who liked what UO was is a pretty niche audience. In a lot of ways Everquest was a direct rejection of the features that folks like me think of as the golden years.
But to answer your question, there are three different clusters but contradictory sets of answers. And this was the problem.
1) It was a sandbox game developed with a focus on recreate a living world. A real ecology, real economy, skill based character system instead of classes where your skills tracked what you actually did, a focus on all sorts of roles - part of the original pitch was players could be the town blacksmith or whatever. I knew someone who spent several months playing an interior decorator for instance. Some people, such as myself, were attracted to this.
2) The same freedoms from #1 attracted PvP style gamers, especially from the then nascent FPS style games. Griefing, rampant slaughter, that sort of thing.
3) It also attracted PvE players who weren't at all interested in a realistic world and demanded the sort of conveniences we see in modern MMOs: mobs pinned to locations, predictable drops, predictable quest lines, instancing, optional PVP, etc.
You'll note that most of the people you see reminiscing online are from groups #1 and #2. Group #3 by and large hated the game and left as soon as they could. And your typical group #1 player eventually got annoyed at group #2 and just left altogether.
It's a hard problem to recreate UO because of this tension. Without allowing group #2 to exist you don't have the same environment. But by allowing group #2 to exist, they'll eventually take over and chase away everyone else.
At the end of the day, UO was a game that was simply a moment in time that can never be recreated. Too much of what made it great was due to the fact that it was a new thing.
Sort of. They disabled big parts of the "real economy" in beta. Turned out that players didn't like it that NPC shopkeepers kept standard working hours and didn't want to buy their 5000 skullcaps from their skill grinding.
Likewise they even more quickly got rid of the real ecology feature, both because it was computationally intensive but also because players would strip mine the ecology.
They disabled NPC participation in the real economy. This gave way to the real player economy which took place in player-run shops built inside player-owned and customized housing.
Players didn't buy those 5000 junk skullcaps either. They wanted stuff that was actually valuable, which meant those practice items were recycled or thrown in the trash.
I remember when the UO team added trash barrels and created the "Clean up Brittania" event. The game's servers were struggling to deal with large numbers of these junk objects that people littered on the ground so the devs decided to enlist the players' help cleaning it up, just like a real-life public park cleanup project! Players got rewarded special items based on the amount of junk they cleaned up.
Right. On my server I actually had one of those larger 2-room houses right at the crossroads as a vendor shop, so am familiar with what was there.
But that's what I meant by "sort of", as it wasn't the pure simulation that was originally promised. Another example was that all the early dupe bugs created a real need for serious gold sinks that weren't planned into the original design.
Even WoW had a player economy via the auction house, and that's about as dumbed down as an MMO gets. Though I agree that the evolution of the player run markets, plus the eventual vendor support added by DD & crew were cool.
I always wonder when people tell these stories exactly what the metric is.
I've been around the block for over 3 decades. I've had a number of high level positions across both IC and management tracks. These days I'm very hands on keyboard across a number of clients. If you asked me to write a basic for loop or if statement, there's a small chance I'd flub the exact syntax if writing on a whiteboard. Both because I bounce between languages all day and wires get crossed on the fly, but also the standard interview pressure type arguments. Whereas if the test is "does this person understand what a for loop is and how it works?", then yes, I can easily demonstrate I do.
In real life I'm not going to take an interview where there's not already that degree of trust so if that questions comes up something is already wrong. But I'm sure there are interviewers in the world who'd fail someone for that.
I can't imagine applying to a job where I didn't already have some sort of personal connection. That was already true, and that's even more true now. Likewise, these days as a hiring manager I'd be unlikely to hire someone that came in via random application for the same reason
I agree that what you're describing is the required skillset now. But two things I've been unsure of are what that looks like in terms of hiring to test for it, and for how long this remains a moat at all.
So much of tech hiring cargo culting has been built up around leetcode and other coding problems, puzzles, and more. We all pay lip service to systems thinking and architecture, but I question if even those are testing the correct things for the modern era.
And then what happens in a year when the models can handle that as well?
I've put a lot of thought into hiring in this era, and what I've personally found works the best is:
Let them use their preferred setup and AI to the full extent they want, and evaluate their output and their methodology. Ask questions of "why did you choose X over Y", especially if you're skeptical, and see their reasoning. Ask what they'd do next with more time.
It's clear when a candidate can build an entire working product, end-to-end, in <1 day vs. someone who struggles to create a bug-free MVP and would take a week for the product.
In addition to the technical interview, hiring them on a trial basis is the absolute best if possible.
Taste and technical understanding of goals and implementation to reach those goals is the biggest differentiator now. AI can handle all the code and syntax, but it's not great at architecture yet - it defaults to what's mid if not otherwise instructed.
I don't disagree per se, but these are more or less the same tropes that we've seen over the last couple of decades, no? Especially the "hiring them on a trial basis is the absolute best if possible." part which has been an ongoing debate here on HN since at least the early teens.
I do feel like there's something *different* about the required skillset now, and it's not something that all engineers have even experienced ones. But I can't put my finger on what exactly it is. If I'm right though, classic interview techniques won't select for it because they never were intended to do so.
They aren't very intelligent if they do keep us around. Especially when you consider what they call Safety & Alignment these days is basically a latent space lobotomy. They should run screaming in the other direction.
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