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My list:

Rogue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
Seriously been playing this game since the early 80s and have never "Won" there are thousands of variants but there's a particularly nice Android version: https://play.google.com/store/...

Ultima 7/7.5: http://www.gog.com/game/ultima...
Revolutionary when it came out. My friends and I in high-school literally sat their with our mouths hanging open the first time we launched the game. The MMO based on it was one of the first I'd call a true mmo: http://www.uo.com/ (let the flame wars begin on that statement, just so you know ahead of time: I don't care)

https://www.everquest.com/ -- first 3D mmo worth its salt. Huge time sink though.

Robocraft -- Build robots out of legos... then blow them up. Super fun. It's my current game. http://store.steampowered.com/...

But when you buy a MMO, you have to know that it's not a permanent thing.

Yet amazingly, Everquest and even Ultima Online are still running, after 13 and 15 years respectively.

The consumers have gotten over the glitz factor being the number one selling point with MMOs and are now showing interest in gameplay aspects that before they didn't even have the vocabulary to discuss.

If you think Wow has made people smarter about MMOs then you are reading the wrong forum threads. I would say that while Wow does well at what it does, it's not an MMO that educates the audience overall.

Now go look at the new Star Wars MMO in development and you have daily questions about will it be released with a native Mac client or how will it handle PvP/RvR or crafting vs looting gear.

Yes, and those same questions were being asked when the "other" Star Wars MMO was coming out. Star Wars Galaxies was one of the most ironic games ever to be released. Ironic why? Because the engine was fantastic (for the time) the graphics were a mile above anything else at that time. Also ironic as the developers spent just simply TOO MUCH time developing the combat mechanics. What might have started off as a good idea to make for innovative gameplay soon turned to a completely imbalanced and un-group rewarding system.

So yes, people are asking about game mechanics. People like myself who looked forward to the "other" Star Wars game for around three years of it's development, who played in the beta, played in the live game - and quit due to a horrendous "reworking" of a bad combat system after the developers had heard enough complaints about it. I am asking now because I am scared to get my hopes up that they won't dick it up again like they did last time.

Lastly, as for examples where graphics do not rule the landscape, you would have gone much closer to making a great point if you had suggested Ultima Online instead of Warcraft. Ultima took off in 1997 and is still being played today. While the subscriptions they got peaked at around 250,000 it was in a time where the market for MMO was around 250,000 - so that's saying a heck of a lot. That game is still around due to the simple yet amazingly playable mechanics in every aspect of the game. Combat, Crafting, Game Achievements and much much more.

I know this post has been a little agro maybe, but just because you strongly feel that Warcraft has taught you a lot about MMOs (which it may well have) it's certainly not a game that I would call educational compared to other MMOs. Has it taught a player who has never played MMO something? Yes. Did it have much to teach people who had played MMOs before Warcraft? Not really.

Warcraft is amazingly successful due to one simple fact. They might not offer the world, but what they do offer is amazingly polished. Eg:
Quests? Quests work. Ones that don't are quickly fixed or lost in the thousands that do work.
Solo play? You can solo play from level 1-80.
Group play? Groups function very well and there is benefit from grouping.
Classes? Sure, they are always rebalancing classes, but that's why there aren't gimp classes.
Content? There is so much to do now that it's just getting silly.

Yes, they have had more time to polish it all up, but that's not a negative thing. It just means that the bar has been raised higher for others following in terms of polish.

Sorry, but a game where you can max a toon out in 3 days won't survive for long. Add in rampant botting, and it was doomed to fail.

Yes, of course, this would be why UO is still alive now! Don't believe it? Check it out for yourself at UO.com and stop spouting rubbish.

UO did allow a characters skills be to maxed out in a relatively quick time compared to other games - but I can tell you right now that a freshly maxed out player pitted against a character who has been maxed out for a few months was a non contest. UO was one of the rare games that relied almost totally on player skill when it came to combat rather than game mechanics.

Perhaps I am getting too old, but every time I see AoC, I keep thinking that someone typo'ed when they meant to type in DAOC.

My brain happily refuses to acknowledge Age of Conan even though a few of my good mates talk nothing else MMO besides this (and the "good old days" spent playing every MMO going all the way back to Ultima Online)

Character, Alt., Mule, Toon , Avatar, Alter-Ego, does it _really_ matter what we call it? At the end of the day, its _just_ a game. My wife and I call our other characters 'toons. Not sure why you get bent out shape, when there is no _official_ definition for 2nd, 3rd, etc, characters for MMORPGs. Blizzard decided to call them characters but they don't have a monopoly on the slang usage.

WoW is cartoony -- bright, and colorful palette. Which is one of the reason I like playing it, and one reason we abbrev our Alt's as 'toons. Our main guild calls them Alt's, other guilds call them 'Toons. To each their own!

--
Where is the Bowcrafting skill in WoW?
So let me get this straight, I can make armor, but I can't repair it??
I miss UO ...

Ultima Online.

With all due respect... Ultima Online.

I am not sure about buying, but I can tell you it was worth to sell my house on Ultima Online http://www.uo.com/ for 300$ before closing the account and leaving the game for something else

You may think EQ1 is going to die but remember that people still play Ultima Online. I admit that 2d graphics from the mid 90's have a certain charm to them... But not that much charm.

This is what tons and tons of Ultima Online players (especially former players) say. Go on any UO-related forums and look for the complaints about the game... for instance not long ago they made it so you can no longer skip the intro logo movies of the EA logo with the stupid kid saying "challenge everything", and the Origin logo (umm why the hell are they showing me the intro logo animation of a company that doesn't even exist anymore?)....

Like, hey assholes, I already bought your game. You don't need to tell me every fucking time I open it who made the game. I already know. Your logo is all over the package, and the game, and the installer, and the manuals, and the website...

Also their in-game support is absolutely useless, and the tech support guys give you the complete "runaround" every time. *No matter what*, I've always gotten a canned, copy&paste response, or at least the same basic phrases over and over. "Game masters can not return lost items, please refer to [whatever Help URL] for more information." Hey, I didn't ask to get my item back, I'm just saying my stuff keeps disappearing, so fix the bug, retard. Address the fucking problems and maybe you won't have people quitting on a daily basis.

Instead they just spend all their time making new retarded addons for the game, which are 100% money grabs. No one gives a shit about your "Samurai Empire", what we really want is for BUGS TO BE FIXED. How many nifty little places there are is irrelevant. The UO world is already HUGE. People are perfectly happy with the existing one.

But I guess fixing bugs just doesn't get them enough immediate profit. In the long run they'd get far more users because the game would always work properly, and friends of players would be a little more impressed. I guess the EA fools are just too short-sighted to realize this...

Oh, and now they just started this "Return to UO for free" thing for people who have closed accounts (as in, stopped playing indefinitely). http://www.uo.com/return.html

Obviously a huge money grab, since they want the old players to come back and start playing again.

Anyway I'm ditching my account once the current paid-for period runs out. I'm sick of the way EA just screws around and only cares about their profits. I guess driving anything other than a late-model Jaguar or BMW is out of the question for their corporate exec's.

One of the biggest recent controversies that pissed off a huge huge number of UO players: EA offered a 7th Anniversary gift item (very valuable in game) because it was the 7th year anniversary of UO's existence. The 6 years before these items have been given in-game for free, automatically. The item would just be there in your inventory when you logged in. This time they conveniently decided you had to click a box in your player settings that says "It is OK for EA and its worldwide affiliates to contact me about EA products, news and events, special offers, and other information." ... Then you'd receive the game code for the gift item in your email, eventually, when they sent the codes out.

Forum thread where this was announced: http://boards.stratics.com/php-bin/uo/showthreaded .php?Cat=&Board=uouhall&Number=5237256&page=4&view =collapsed&sb=5&o=&vc=1&what2=postlistdev&selv=&vw hich=

Needless to say many many people were pissed off. It was simply a way for EA to advertise to you even more, and it was very immoral because they were basically bribing users. In fact, that's exactly what it was. If you want the item, you have to receive their spam. There was NO REASON they couldn't just give the item to you in-game as they have f

Sweeeet!

I did a search on Ultima Underworld on a whim. And I found this page with some information on the game and a map of the "Stygian Abyss" and even better I found this link where you can download a demo.

I can't believe it. I'm going to have to download it and see if I can get it running.

I... Think... I'm... Going... to... cry.

Sweeeet!

I did a search on Ultima Underworld on a whim. And I found this page with some information on the game and a map of the "Stygian Abyss" and even better I found this link where you can download a demo.

I can't believe it. I'm going to have to download it and see if I can get it running.

I... Think... I'm... Going... to... cry.

Christ almighty, are you really that fucking stupid? Here is Ultima VII, and here is Ultima Online. RTFA, check out the links, and then come back and say something. I won't even bother to go into the timeline regarding the release dates of Ultima Online and EverQuest. Fucking 'tard...

There's a surprising number of games listed on that site, but no Ultima IV, apparently because its first goal was to entertain and not enlighten/educate/etc.. However, a large number of players took to heart the system of virtues expounded in the game; even to this day I evaluate myself as "high in compassion" but "lacking in spirituality." Social impact? A lot of pimply-faced youths were at least exposed to the concept of virtue and its value to civilization.

(Incidentally, Ultima IV fans may wish to check out the remake projecet.)

Well the difference is that it's the company itself that is offering it...

D'oh!

And guess what? UO is owned by EA too!

Ultima IV and Ultima V in particular had awesome music. I think the music stands the test of time better than the games themselves. You can get midi files for the Ultimas here. Check out the Ultima IV remake project too.

To play Ultima Online the way it was supposed to be, you can play on the Siege Perilous shard. It is one of the official UO servers, but with a special "old-tyme" ruleset, designed for veteran players and to enhance player-to-player interaction. For example, no [Young] status, PvP fights are allowed everywhere (no Trammel), and vendors will not buy from players, making crafters having to directly interact with the fighting classes. Siege Perilous has a small but tight community, and there is material for everyone to enjoy, from the hardcore roleplayers, the assiduous crafters, and down to the berserk PvPers.

If you want to give Siege Perilous a try, I suggest you join NEW. It helps a lot until your character is strong enough to stand a chance on his own.

There is also a japanese equivalent of Siege Perilous: Mugen (page in Japanese).

To play Ultima Online the way it was supposed to be, you can play on the Siege Perilous shard. It is one of the official UO servers, but with a special "old-tyme" ruleset, designed for veteran players and to enhance player-to-player interaction. For example, no [Young] status, PvP fights are allowed everywhere (no Trammel), and vendors will not buy from players, making crafters having to directly interact with the fighting classes. Siege Perilous has a small but tight community, and there is material for everyone to enjoy, from the hardcore roleplayers, the assiduous crafters, and down to the berserk PvPers.

If you want to give Siege Perilous a try, I suggest you join NEW. It helps a lot until your character is strong enough to stand a chance on his own.

There is also a japanese equivalent of Siege Perilous: Mugen (page in Japanese).

I've seen your kind before...bright eyed, idealistic, a happy go lucky kid with stars in their eyes, thinking that everything will be right with the world that they've had a hand in creating.

Then you find out you're dealing with EA Games.

They really don't care what you think.

You have no rights. It's their game, their servers, and their world. You own nothing in it.

You want to cancel? Go ahead. Those that stay behind will pick up the slack on their bottom line.

Hell, you know they can end The Sims Online or any other game at a moment's notice like they did with Majestic Online, right?

The virtual world concept isn't new. It's been around for a long time. EA's got a lot of experience with it.

You and 10 other people (even 50 other people) mean nothing to their bottom line on any game.

To paraphrase The Tick, reality is a harsh mistress.

The trials and tribulations Richard Garriott and his team at Origin underwent in order to bring Ultima Online to the masses.
The article completely fails to mention the fact that Richard Garriott and the Ultima Online team turned the largest and (in my opinion) best MMORPG ever into a waste of time for everyone involved, with players, having played for four years deserting it mere weeks after them bringing out the Age of Shadows expansion pack. For those unaware of what happened with Ultima Online, the Age of Shadows expansion pack irreversibly changed the game for the worse, causing floods of players to leave to other games, such as Everquest, Diablo 2 and Star Wars Galaxies. Leaving Ultima Online left a sour taste in mine, and I'm sure many other fans of the games mouths.

is one of the towns in Ultima.

I always find it interesting finding out little tidbits about what inspired designers in your favourite games. Ultima Online was a good one, with each of its game servers named after something local to where it is located - they even wrote a wee summary of the story behind the name.

With that thought, here are some of my biggest disappointments (in no particular order):

1. Unreal Tournament 2003 : I played the original UT from the day it came out, up to the day the UT2003 demo (actually the leaked alpha) was released. I actually bought a new computer to play UT2003. I can't even tell you how disapointed I was by UT2003. The biggest reason is it seemed like Quake2003 and didn't have the feel of Unreal or Unreal Tournament. On top of that, the weapons were weaker than the ones in UT. The great thing in UT was all the weapons were useful, and most of them were top tier. Lastly, the characters seemed to be so much smaller than the original UT (no, it's not my monitor resolution either).

2. Ultima 8 , "pagan". After playing Ultima 1-5 and loving them I took some time off (ie the time between me having an Apple II and an a PC) and came back to playing computer games. The first PC based RPG I bought was "Pagan". It came on 8 disks ( I guess to match the sequel number...), and didn't run on my PC even though my PC fit the specs. After a few calls to Origin didn't help I gave up. A few days later I took it to a friends house and played on her PC. Then I realized the game sucked anyway and I wasn't missing much. It's funny how game companies can turns classics into crap after a few too many sequels.

3. Super Mario Brothers 2 - Way too easy, and too different in a craptacular way than the first one. Nintendo hit a home run with SMB3 though.

4. Wargods - From Midway, one of my favorite gaming companies came this crap. Sure, it looked really cool but trying to get off a 15 button fatality in 2 seconds was no fun. Never mind the complexity/sillyness of the combos. Ugg.

5. Mortal Kombat 3, 4, 5 - While I'm on the midway kick, Mortal Kombat has sucked for a long time now. It's downfall was trying to emulate the killer instinct dial-a-combos and putting in a run button in MK3 (which was correctly colored yellow...the CHEESE button). 4 was pretty bad, and 5 was aweful. This is a shame because 1 and 2 were both very good IMO.

6. Street Fighter Alpha 1 - chain combos..Ugg. Capcom much like Nintendo followed this up with a great game in SFA2. Maybe the mark of a good game company is to fix their own crap when they screw up a sequel.

I'm surprised that MMORPG vendors aren't already allowing players to buy power directly from the vendor

Then I replaced the Apple ][ with an Amstrad PC

And I should have added this to the original post, but yes I do know that Applesoft and Qbasic are fairly similar, both being BASIC.

Never finished V, because there was a musical puzzle that I couldn't solve without the materials

Come on, everyone knows how to play "Stones"... =)

(no PDFs on the CD set I bought),

Let me guess: "Ultima I-VI Series" published by Encore? People were driven mad by the lack of documentation on that one. Not me, I was probably insane before that too. Can't remember.

Some helpful people have published the documentation for I-VI precisely for the reason that no proper manuals existed. The basics (including the missing copy protection questions) are in the Ultima Archive (It's on a website controlled by EA, so it can't be too WaReZy)... There are others that have complete manuals and the books that come with the games, with colored art, too lazy to google for them right now. =/

Presumably, most people here have a fair familiarity with the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game) phenomenon, but here's a rundown of the major products out there from my bookmarks, for anyone who's interested but not wholly informed. Feel free to correct any of this if my understanding of any of these games is in any way flawed:

Anarchy Online
Asheron's Call
Dark Age of Camelot
Everquest
Shadowbane (just released - very buggy)
A Tale in the Desert
Ultima Online

Horizons
Eve Online (final beta - close to release)
City of Heroes
Dragon Empires (in beta)
Everquest 2 (in development)
Lineage II (in development)
Star Wars Galaxies (closed beta)
Imperator (very early development)
World of Warcraft (very early development)

Most of these games don't release specific subscriber base numbers. However, a series of very good guesses is compiled here.

For one, numbers don't lie. Ultima Online's subscription totals dropped drastically in the year that EA started imposing it's will. I played that game, Ultima Online, before the EA integration, and it really was surreal how much weight the consumer's voice carried. After EA came on the scene the corporate influence was so evident that each and every little change carried it's stench. It was amazing, really, now that I actually take the time to reflect. UO had started to become a EverQuest (Sony's baby) clone with an outdated engine. Subscriptions went from 500,000 strong to 220,000 in a very brief time - the most reported cause for quitting wasn't because of the competition (in fact, many EverQuest players were actually first time MMORPG customers). The leading cause of quitting wasn't a bad product. Most people that quit UO in the now infamous exodus was because of the disloyalty that EA showed it's long term customers in the form of terrible support, a change to a time-sink-centric experience, and the elimination of intense community interaction in game development. Hell, they even cut their customer support staff in half at a time when more people then ever were trying their game out!

However, I don't know how right I am. My info comes from first hand experience as a player and the occassional chat with my pal that worked in customer support for Origin (the company that runs UO under the EA umbrella). He was laid off right after I quit playing a year and half or so ago.

Well, in any event, I hear that Ultima Online subscriptions have gained by about 15,000 over the past year since they started listening to their consumer again. The new expansion has caused a little buzz amongst the MMORPG crowd as well.

Sounds like fun. Have you tried Ultima Online?

Is that what they wanted say?

And, shockingly enough, the folks who hang out on the MyUO Boards (often characterized as the polar opposite of the regulars at UO Powergamers) also agree that this is a very bad idea.

The two communities have something in common. I think the world is ending.

(Note: you might need to have a UO account to access the MyUO link.)

Few things missing..

He mentions ten, but forgets kali and kahn (sorry no link) Kali was the first commercial IPX tcp wrapper. Duke nukem, doom, descent were all played over kali.

Also to note, dwango. The thresh sponsored dial up doom networking service.

Then onto Ultima Online for the first graphical mmorpg.

Too much missing for my taste.

In Ultima Online, you can now change your character name, which was previously fixed. But, quess what, it costs $29.99. Can you believe it!! A simple DB query, I believe. Sheesh.

In Ultima Online, you can now change your character name, which was previously fixed. But, quess what, it costs $29.99. Can you believe it!! A simple DB query, I believe. Sheesh.

And not just because of it's heritage and geek appeal either.

The lead designer for SWG is Raph Koster. Most of you probably don't know who Raph Koster is - but you'd know (or at least know of) his work. Does Ultima Online ring any bells? Raph Koster was the lead developer for UO for quite some time - from it's introduction through until the introduction of the second expansion (and possibly a bit longer than that). UO was VERY popular - at least in part due to Raph's influence. He has shown an ability to work with a product which has a heritage (people have been playing Ultima since the days of the Apple ][e), and the ability to work with someone important to that heritage (Richard Garriott in the case of UO). So I can't see the heritage SWG inherits from the SW movies, or the involvement of George Lucas, being a problem to him at all as he goes about developing what should be another successful MMORPG.

All in all, I wish Raph, and the other developers, the best of luck, and I am definately looking forward to seeing how SWG goes once it's released. I may even play it! :)

I am addicted to a couple of things and one of them is Games, although i am less addicted since i started using Unix only, but still freeciv and freechess are a bit addictive...and the 4 years a kept playing the massive multiplayer games like Ultima Online and Planetarion before where pretty hefty addictive....
and there for it was my Atari-ST for which had about a 1000 floppy disks with games on it...and some other stuff ofcourse :)
But after all i learned how to use computers pretty well, i learned some programming and wrote a Arkanoid version once and now i have had some Sysadmin jobs and now i am Programmer or so they say, i still lack good hacking skillz...

Still i think my game addiction wasnt really bad for me, only it made me forget there was a real world out there although i dont really lack social skills, i have a handfull of friends and i go out to the pub since i was 14 and i still do now when i am 22...i have a girlfriend...so life seems pretty oke...still i live in a fantasy world, but i dont think thats cause of the games....

Now i am addicted to more things like IRC, Smoking and Sex...
I learned a lot of nice people tru IRC which are really very nice,
IRC also keeps me from doing my work at 100% cause i can use it at my work ;P
Smoking yes is a bad habbit i guess....and Sex well figure....

Overall aslong an addiction doesnt harm you in the real world around you and you can live a life you want to everything is great....

Quazion.

Well, from what I remember, the boys at Id Software saw Ultima Underworld and that was what inspired them to create their ground-breaking game (can't remember where I heard this story though). They did Origin one better with W3D of course, giving pure action as opposed to the somewhat more complex role-playing that was always (well, almost always anyway) the hallmark of the Ultima games, so perhaps it's not quite so right to consider UUTSA as an FPS game, even though it arguably it inspired that genre.

As computer games advance, they allow users to descend into a reality of their choosing and completely immerse themselves within it. Networked RPGs like Ultima Online were the first generation then games like Asheron's Call and progressivlely more advanced games, each involving the user at a deeper level. There are people who spend their lives playing such games. They have become the Dungeons and Dragons of the technology era. Thankfully, we have not heard of kids killing themselves over computer games yet though.

The newest generation of networked RPGs out there go for complete immersion where the player will recieve faes phone calls and emails from game characters, and the games will effectively encroach on everyday life.

In short, no, I'm not suprised that players are upset about the loss of virtual posessions from a game universe (although I can see where the argument could be made that they paid for those posessions and should have tem returned). It's kind of a sad comentary on the human condition though.

--CTH

--

Somebody obviously hasn't learned that releasing a buggy product receives BAD REVIEWS and NEGATIVE FEEDBACK! Censoring that feedback isn't going to change the quality of the game.

If there was more time spent improving the game rather than trying to engineer public opinion, they wouldn't have this problem.

What's wrong with "osi" by the way?

Origin Systems, Inc., is the company that produces Ultima Online

What's wrong with "osi" by the way?

Origin Systems, Inc., is the company that produces Ultima Online

If you are about phantasy, games that happen in your mind, try (kind of ancient) MUDs (MultiUserDungeons). You can find the biggest list here. The games are quite entertaining, much like the Sim Stuff, you can marry, you can choose a profession, even extend the games as a wizard. You interact with people you never met, you can be someone you always wanted to be (or just be yourself). If you are more into visual entertainment you might want to try other worlds (new stuff, not so much imagination required) like Everquest or Ultima Online. Have fun exploring ...

Check this out. It's the map...it's freaking huge and it still has blank spots where the guy couldn't go. What a game.

I don't think adventure games are dead - as far as I know Ultima Online is doing great with thousands of people paying them ten bucks a month to play.

It's possible that more people prefer shotem'ups than adventures - but as I remember it was exactly the same back in the 8-bit "home computers" days and somehow adventure games didn't die back then...

I have been working with the various UO(Ultima Online) server emulator teams through the years and we have had minor complaints and letters, faxes, etc.. but no real action has been taken to my knowledge. Right now there are piles of servers running "Sphere" possibly the fastest/best UO server emu- not to mention some servers with over 1000 active accounts. Early in the development of a different emulator(uox), one of the devs put in a few lines of code that would verify that the person connecting to the server had an actual origin account, this was of course cracked quickly, though it did seem to make osi happy.

-XtAt

I run a fairly large EverQuest-related humor site, so I've been following this issue since it started (even if only to make fun of it).

What's happening here is a thorny problem where individual "privacy" headbutts with everyone's best interests.

A quick background for those not in the know, Verant Interactive produces and maintains EverQuest, a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game. Thousands of players connect to Verant-administered servers and play alongside other players in a persistent world. It's the second major-market title in the MMORPG genre started by Ultima Online.

The way these games work is centralized servers store all the state information about the virtual world. To be general, nothing is stored client-side. This is required, because unlike games like Quake, the world is persistent. An early incarnation of this type of game was Diablo. The main difference between the newer games (UO and EQ) and Diablo is that with Diablo, all your character information was stored client-side. This became a major problem for the game, as it was only a matter of time before the file formats were reverse-engineered and people started modifying their characters to be super-powered.

By storing the information server-side, this type of cheating is avoided. No matter what you do, there will always be people who want to cheat, and if the information is stored server-side, people will try to exploit the server to cheat, or will "enhance" their client software in order to give them an unfair advantage in the game. Ultima Online has had a long history of dealing with this type of problem. Many security weaknesses in the UO servers were discovered (and fixed), but at the same time, these weaknesses were exploited by people, most often to do devestating things to other players of the game.

Recently, EQ has had the same things happening to it. A program known as "Show-EQ" has been around for quite some time, which simply gives a player an unfair advantage in the game. Verant has dealt with this in a subtle manner, changing their client/server data stream every so often to set back development of the utility.

In the past couple weeks, other programs for EQ have begun to pop up, with more nefarious purposes. The EverQuest servers have been crashed on more than one occasion by these programs. This is what brought Verant to suggesting drive-scanning. It's one thing if someone is just cheating, but it's another thing completely if they're maliciously trying to crash the game.

They took their first countermeasures not too long ago, by adding a feature to the client software that scans your Windows task list and looks for these "external utilities". If it finds one, it flips a "I'm a cheater" flag on your account and you end up with a cancelled EQ account.

They proposed to extend their search to the hard drive, to see if any of these programs even exist on your system... and this is where people started to get upset.

Verant has been very open and forthcoming about the proposed changes, keeping active discussions regarding the issue on the various websites dedicated to EverQuest, offering reasoning and explantions of the scanning process, and they even required all users to answer a poll question regarding the issue on login to the game (which turned up 80%+ in favor of the scanning).

Even with the overwhelming support of the scanning by their playerbase, they responsibly decided to back down on the issue.

Now granted, what they suggested could be a huge tool for abuse and privacy intrusion, but they did not try to "sneak" it past their users in any form. What they were proposing was nothing compared to some of the things that people thought they were planning on doing (there have been some heated arguments about it the past few days).

In short, its not really that they intended to intrude on people's privacy, but that they were seeking to increase the quality of their service and actually have a way to enforce their "no cheating" rules.

Verant should be commended on their responsible handling of this entire incident, not trashed in the court of public opinion based on reports that only tell half the story, like the one posted here on Slashdot.

That's what would be so much fun. You'd have to build towns, defence. Know who to trust and who to expell. If the world had defined boundaries (with use of drawbridges,moats,e-drawbridges[tm]) you could keep kiddies out - ensure tests before letting people in.

A Real World situation would be too anarchic but with certain environmental laws you could benefit those that work together and choose not to be violent. That would be the basis of creating an online world that didn't just irritate the masses

So perhaps moderation points for players? meta moderation? Expressed by how tall you are?

As for real world situations I think the lessons learnt from Ultima Online would have the jump on most.

With python, the object is the way, the truth, and the light. Let no man cometh unto his data save through the object. In perl, OO is an option, not a requirement.

Hmm? You can quite happily store your data in interwoven dictionaries, lists, and tuples if you like, and never write a single class. If you want to talk about classes being a requirement, talk about Java.

With python, you cannot generate C code to compile into an a.out.

With python, the pattern matching is not tightly integrated into the language. It is merely loosely bolted on, which introduces inefficiencies and quoting clumsinesses.

True, but it also means you can leave it out if pattern matching isn't of interest to your application domain. People who want to run massive numeric simulations, build virtual environments, or run a large online role-playing game may not care about processing text. (Coincidences are funny things; while checking the third link, I went to reference.com and was startled when my search pulled up Python code on my screen -- someone forgot to make a CGI script executable, I suppose. reference.com is an application that does care about text searching, I would imagine.)

The greatest problems with regexes in Python 1.5 are:

1. Parts of re.py are still written in Python, not C, and are therefore slow. Fixing that is on my list for 1.6.
2. PCRE doesn't do a lot of optimizations and analyses. Mostly this is because the compiler doesn't build a parse tree and traverse it, but instead tries to construct a string of bytecodes in a single pass.
3. Unicode regexes are an open issue at this point. I've been casting longing glances at the regex engine in Mozilla, which does build a nice parse tree and supports Unicode, and hope to work on splitting it out into a separate library.

With python, you cannot determine your calling context, nor behave differently dependent upon the same.

With python, writing an eval string is a pain in the royal butt due to the insane whitespace problem.

With python, you have no equivalent to Apache's mod_perl.