Ultima Online Patch Introduces Economy-Wrecking Bug?

Thanks to PlayMoney for its weblog post revealing a recent Ultima Online patch designed to shore up the economy may have introduced new problems, as "the very same game patch... also [seems] to have introduced a gold-gusher of a bug, allowing some people to conjure themselves up a few hundred million gold pieces in the space of a week." The author references a thread on UO Stratics which includes allegations about "one guy that claimed to have made over 700mil to date on [a particular game server] with this bug", a total of $9947 under current dollar exchange rates if successfully auctioned. Although the other new economic rules "seem otherwise to be working out fine", and this exploit was "fixed last Friday [5th]", the author is concerned that "by the time the new money gets fully circulated, gold will be selling for $7 per million", half of the current $14-per-million auction price.

Comments

Re:wait...

[illuvata]

once it gets sold on ebay it is

Publish, not patch

[Kethinov]

Ultima Online Patch Introduces Economy-Wrecking Bug?

It was a publish, not a patch. A patch denotes a bug in the client while a publish denotes a bug in the server. This means that this bug can only be exploited on EA servers; the player run UO server community remains unaffected because they use such server emulators as Sphere or RunUO which EA has no control over. FYI, player run communities use EA patched clients, so new client bugs affect the player run community just as badly. But not these publishes. Publishes are the pay to play players' problems.