The former game designer Tim Cotten worked on the MMORPG classic Ultima Online (PC) in the 2000s: He had a personal score to settle with item dupers and settled it spectacularly, as he now proudly shares on the 25th anniversary of Ultima Online.
Who is telling this?
- Tim Cotten is an experienced game designer who frequently writes about his experiences in the industry.
- He was the “Lead Game Designer” on Ultima Online from 2007 to 2010, and developed the expansion “Styvian Abyss”.
- Ultima Online is considered one of the original MMORPGs: It followed the wild and chaotic sandbox direction. Ultimately, the more moderate and organized theme park direction of Everquest prevailed, which later served as the basis for World of Warcraft.
This is what Cotten tells: The game dev talks about “item duping in Ultima Online”. Even during the beta of the game, some testers discovered how to duplicate items to earn money and items. However, they didn’t report this bug but kept it secret to cash in when the game officially launched, as Cotten writes.
He says that in 1997, still as a player, he observed something very strange:
I was running north of an orc settlement near Cove when I saw two randos doing the weirdest thing ever: They were running back and forth over this annoyingly lagging strip of land and throwing small chests on the ground. I knew this area was the worst. It was a really annoying part of the map, with a sneaky path through the mountains, and it felt sluggish to run over.
The players used this nasty part of the Ultima Online map to deliberately duplicate treasure chests through server lag and joyfully celebrated their success: “It works, it works,” they cheered with delight.
Some MMORPGs are still inspired by Ultima Online:
Developer hunts down duplicated items but cannot simply delete them
What did he do about duping? Several years later, Cotten joined the Ultima Online team himself. His goal was clear: to hunt down and deal with the dupers. But it turned out to be not so easy.
Although Cotten quickly had an idea of how to find duplicated items: Through a “Global Hash Registry,” he compiled a list of rare, duplicated items within a few weeks. However, what should he do with this information?
The problem was: He could not simply delete all “duplicated items” in the game. The studio head forbade him to do so:
Mmm, I don’t think it’s a good idea to delete all duplicated items in the game. That would harm a lot of players.
Cotten writes: He hadn’t thought about that in the excitement. But it was true, duping had become so widespread over the years that even “innocent” players had come into possession of duplicated items – and they would be disappointed if important items suddenly disappeared.
A large portion of the player base would have had to simply lose items. That was not something they wanted to do.
Even simply banning “players with duplicated items” was not a good solution: How many items would they target?
Ultimately, they could narrow down the circle of dupers in Ultima Online to a small number of “evil players” who had systematically exploited the dupe.
And the developer decided to have a little fun. He asked the community manager.
The customer support will ban the dupers anyway. Why don’t we turn it into an event?
And the community manager agreed.
Ownership of the dupers goes up in flames
This was the event: As Cotten recounts, it was discovered that the dupers had real storage rooms: houses full of duplicated items and NPC merchants selling the items. The smuggler ring stretched across several servers, with different groups of players all following the same pattern: They made insane amounts of money in Ultima Online and sold it on other sites for real money.