Gamasutra: Replay Interviews Rich Vogel

Another great find arriving via Twitter is this interview with Rich Vogel, a former Ultima Online associate producer who is now the VP of Product Development for BioWare Austin. It’s a lengthy interview, and I don’t think I could do it justice in excerpting it, so let me instead relate the one piece of it that really struck me:

When did you realize [PK/griefing] was starting to go out of control?

RV: It took about three months until we realized that we had a lot of systems in place that needed to be checked. About four or five months after launch we actually had gangs going around ñ literally had real gangs in the game going around causing trouble.

We had servers near the Northeast, which were bad servers and then we had servers in the Midwest, which were very calm and nice. It’s interesting how they all felt different. In the Midwest we had role players, right, and they loved it, they really took to it and were very proud of their servers.

In the Northeast we had the gangs and in the Pacific we had the gangs. Just unbelievable trouble on both the east and west coasts and it’s just literally how they all developed. The Pacific was one of our worst. It was kind of like the broken window syndrome. You just had a whole bunch of bad people in one area and it just grew.

I find it utterly fascinating how griefing and player-killing in Ultima Online were, in the main, regional problems. There is an immense and largely unexplored wealth of gamer psychology and demographic information contained in that simple observation, and I find myself wondering if it is a phenomenon that has carried over — in various forms — to other MMORPGs?

(photo credit)

4 Responses

  1. Sanctimonia says:

    That is awesome. I’ve never heard anything like that and it really is interesting. Makes sense, in a way. We get spoon fed the idea that everywhere is the same, that any city is a microcosm of the state, and the state of the country, etc. But it’s apparent that regions do have different cultures with respect to, well, respect, and this is some virginal evidence of that.

    It would be interesting to see the results of a survey conducted on the subscribers to UO in the various regions in an attempt to isolate what elements of their character resulted in the pattern behavior.

    Also reinforces my desire to move to the midwest, where I can live in relative peace and quiet with minimal interference from the nanny state (yeah, right).

  2. Zygon Dragon says:

    That’s pretty spun out. Guess its like what Garriot was saying in his ABC interview. They had loads of players getting up to mischief 🙂

    Strange in WOW does not seem to happen. Well not to me. Guess my Shaman kicks arse. haha 😀

  3. Handshakes says:

    The reason it doesn’t happen in WoW is because the game mechanics don’t allow it to happen. In WoW, even on full PvP servers you can’t fight non-consensually anywhere you want, it is all zoned up and heavily regulated. In UO during the time period the guy in the interview is talking about you could take your maxed out character to the newbie areas and start slaughtering people with impunity.

    Which is also why few have made anything out of the regional game behavior shifts. Apparently there is a disproportionate jerk face population on the coasts (a belief I have long held to be true anyway 😉 ), but you can’t do anything to change that. The real workable problem was in the core UO game mechanics which allowed and even promoted PK griefing behavior.

    Which is why we got Trammel, which simultaneously saved the game while removing its soul.

    Designing real PvP in MMOs has always been something of a trapped treasure chest that nobody has been able to crack. You either go over the edge and your game world gets filled with mass murdering psychopaths like in early UO or Darkfall, or you restrict it so heavily that it is essentially pointless ala WoW and the gang.

    That said, if anybody fancies a lesson in off-beat MMO open world game design solutions, check out Face of Mankind. I promise you, it will be refreshingly weird. And you may just learn something.

  4. Zygon Dragon says:

    Nicely put. 😀

    I never did play UO but I imagine you could really play your role well.