Former Ultima Online developer Tim Cotten has — in the spirit of reflecting on the game’s recent 25th anniversary — published a lengthy story that in part chronicles his own first encounter with the game. That’s where it begins, at any rate; the meat of the post is from a time after he had joined the development team and had to deal with the problem of dupers creating multiple copies of rare items in the game.

Tim sets the scene with a scenario that long-time Ultima Online players are probably all familiar with:

It was 1997 and I was running around north of the orc encampment near the town of Cove when I saw some randos doing the weirdest thing ever: they were running back and forth over this annoyingly laggy patch of the game map while dropping little chests on the ground.

…

Imagine my surprise when these two players started excitedly yelling to each other in text (which floated over their heads) that “it worked! omgz!”

Yup, they had managed to, as they excitedly bragged, figure out a trick to drop a chest on one side of the “laggy patch” while trying to pick-it-up/hand-it-over to the other player as they were both crossing from one side to the other and now each of them had a copy of the same chest: and its contents.

He then goes into detail about the server mechanics that were at work behind the scenes, which were both incredibly clever as a means of creating UO’s open world experience (this in contrast to the zoned approach that many MMOs which came after Ultima Online opted to use):

…each game server (or “shard”) you played on was actually divided into “areaservs” and there was some incredibly well-written “mirror” code that handled communicating gamestate, object conditions, and events from one side of the border to the other.

…

The areaservs were essentially copying your player character and sending over a bundled message between themselves containing all your info. Once a player crossed the boundary it destroyed the old copy of the player on the initial side.

…

Naturally, any given bug with the areaserv code represented the greatest probable source of “duping” exploits, especially when coupled with purposefully manipulations of a player’s gamestate before the server backup/shutdown sequence each morning.

The solution that Tim and the rest of the UO team came up with was both elegant and effective, although higher-ups at both Origin and EA had to rein in some of their wilder proposals for dealing with dupers. However, one measure that did get approved — barely, and then only once — was to seize the in-game houses of the biggest dupers, and then stage elaborate bonfires to symbolize those properties being burned to the ground (whilst also banning the accounts of the dupers themselves).

It’s a lengthy and entertaining read, and offers some keen insights into the inner workings of the long(est)-running MMO and the challenges its team faced.