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This has been going on for years already. RunUO.

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Maybe you will. I sure as hell won't, because I won't buy a game that uses DRM like that on general principle. I don't care how awesome it is - my life will not be duller or less meaningful if I never play it.
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That's quite an extreme position to take - I take the more moderate view that I will buy it only once there is a DRM-free version available to download. In fact, I have a number of PC games where I bought the game but it remains in its cellophane wrapper, because I never actually installed it from the DRM-ridden DVD. I would never buy a Ubisoft game, for example, unless there was a working, DRM-free version available online.

In terms of false activation servers, you don't need to wait 20 years because that already happens, e.g.
http://arcemu.org/ - world of warcraft
http://www.runuo.com/home/ - ultima online
http://segs.sourceforge.net/ - city of heroes (in development)
http://site.swgemu.com/forums/index.php - star wars galaxies
http://www.eqemulator.org/ - everquest
http://sourceforge.net/projects/evemu/ - eve online

http://forum.ragezone.com/f168/ - many more

In fact, I put something like that together myself for a small indie game that required internet access to run. Monitored requests / responses, replicated the functionality of the server locally and just redirected the server address to localhost using the hosts file. Didn't even need to read any assembly language.

Important note: depending on your jurisdiction, contributing to the development of or even using some or all of the above server emulators may be illegal / against the terms of service for the relevant game.

For anyone interested in programming in C# but don't know any good reasons to actually get into it, I give you one: http://www.runuo.com/ - You're welcome. =)

I don't think they would use a database in the way it seems you are suggesting. When I trade an item with a player, certainly fields in a couple of DB tables aren't being updated. What most MMO's do is keep everything in memory and periodically serialize to disk. Take a look at RunUO (it's fully GPL'ed) for a system like this. Granted RunUO is a a single server only solution, most MMO's run single shards or "servers" on clusters of computers, each serving zones within a world, and they also don't necessarily serialize the entire world at once (they do some tricks to get around duping that could occur by not doing so).

Is EqEmu

I have NO idea what version of EQ this was designed for, but it's long dead now.

If you're interested in server emulation, the best right now is Ultima Online and the famous RunUO server . It's pretty much perfect and all you need is .NET and it works.

Look no one should really even want Wish opened up. It had a HORRIBLE engine. They decent premises for how the world was going to operate and the gameplay but they were just premises and ideas; if you played the beta you would see that almost none of them were truely implemented. Open source advocates should be way more pumped up about the upcoming release of RunUO than they would with even a full server and client being released by Wish. We'll see what license RunUO goes ends up with. However they did say it will be OSI approved (no not Origin Systems Inc... heh).

The RunUO Team has been working on RunUO for about two years, you can see the success of our work in one of our game servers over at UO Gamers.com which is free to play and you can even download the EA Games client for free legally from

RunUO itself is available to anyone via the download section and is very easy to install and has a great community to get support from. The main website is located at RunUO.com and the support community forum can be found here. We hope that the users of Slashdot enjoy RunUO if you give it a try and if you need anything please feel free to let myself or any of the developers or community members know on our forum.

The RunUO Team has been working on RunUO for about two years, you can see the success of our work in one of our game servers over at UO Gamers.com which is free to play and you can even download the EA Games client for free legally from

RunUO itself is available to anyone via the download section and is very easy to install and has a great community to get support from. The main website is located at RunUO.com and the support community forum can be found here. We hope that the users of Slashdot enjoy RunUO if you give it a try and if you need anything please feel free to let myself or any of the developers or community members know on our forum.

The RunUO Team has been working on RunUO for about two years, you can see the success of our work in one of our game servers over at UO Gamers.com which is free to play and you can even download the EA Games client for free legally from

RunUO itself is available to anyone via the download section and is very easy to install and has a great community to get support from. The main website is located at RunUO.com and the support community forum can be found here. We hope that the users of Slashdot enjoy RunUO if you give it a try and if you need anything please feel free to let myself or any of the developers or community members know on our forum.

First off, lemme make a lil' disclaimer: I'm one of the Core developers at http://www.runuo.com/, the largest Ultima Online emulator around, so I may be a bit biased :)

Anyways, the article seems to have been written by someone who hasn't kept up on the latest UO news. In the past month, EA/OSI released a new expansion with a large landmass, the "samurai empire" expansion. Also, just in the past week infact, They opened up a brand NEW shard, compeltely clean with no players on it. If UO was dying,it wouldn't make economic sense to invest money and time in putting up another server.

In the article, it also lists as a 'reason' for UO's demise as the lack of stores in which to purchase The latest expansions or Gamecodes without the use of a Credit Card. A little searching shows this page listing EB-Games austrailia as a place t' buy 'em.

Another thing that the author didn't take into account is the popularity of free shards. RunUO, in addition to providing highly customizable software, also sponsors 3 shards, all from differing time periods. Combined, they have over 50,000 accounts. And these are active accounts. we purge unused accounts every 90 some days.

Hybrid, Our biggest shard with about 37000 accounts, is based in the Pre-AoS era, with peaks ov over 2000 online at any one time.

Our other shards, Rebirth and Demise, are a super old school shard from the Pre-T2A area, and a Shard from the current era of ultima online, AoS/SE respectively.

Those are just 3 shards. There are MANY more out there which help keep UO alive.

Long live Ultima Online!

I'll just remind you that Ultima Online is a skill based game. I've heard they've altered the formula to add prestige classes (gasp! classes), but even then there're plenty of free shards that use the 100% skill based system. On a side note, I've also heard some changes to UO are quite good so the pay service is still worth looking into.

I by no means think UO is the end-all to MMORPGs, though. I also think you're right in saying we could all do without levels. Back when Bioware was designing Neverwinter Nights I was part of a big debate on whether the engine should be real time or turn based (that long ago). My argument was that the rules (2nd edition) had tables for the time duration of movement and combat phases and there's no reason not to let a computer handle all the conversions. At the time I didn't think about it, but now I think the same can be said for leveling and character progression. There is much the computer can handle without the interaction of the player and I think character progression is no exception.

But, I don't play MMORPG's and don't plan to ever so all this discussion is moot. If I cared so much about the genre I would be working on my own game right now because I could. But I think MMORGPs and internet games in general are dull in comparison to games in meat-space. Tabletop role playing, board games , card games, multiplayer console games, LAN games. Oh yeah, they're fun. MMORPGs and Yahoo chess? Like playing my pocket calculator but less interactive. At least it makes moves in a timely manner and doesn't disconnect in the middle of the game or act like an ass hat or a 3D animated screen saver of "roots" "nuke" "nuke" "heal" "sit". No thanks. I'll have the guys and girls over at my house on Fridays and we'll have a better time the old fasioned way.

I say Mac owners stick it to Sony by making a compatible branch of Everquest Server Emulator or other EQ server emulation software (links?).

The Ultima Online server emulator community is thriving now that RunUO is around. Huge indie servers like In Por Ylem have a couple thousand users. They had to upgrade to a dual Xeon server and are on a 100mbit connection which is supported by PayPal donations because of the load.

Of course, for UO the clients are still upgraded which is not the case for EverQuest on Mac, but I'm sure there can be substantial server side improvements using existing content and client quirks.

Another mirror at runuo.com (Plug: Check out the site while you're there! ;-) )