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Morti

Member

Registered: 2018-04-06

Posts: 1,323

Storytime with Morti: Ultima Online Test Server

Hi, I'm Morti. But I wasn't always Morti, there was a time when I was The Great Lord Hawking Grandmaster Archer of Catskills over two decades ago. Ultima Online was this revolutionary new type of game. As a child, I had loved Ultima Exodus and Ultima Quest of the Avatar for the NES, and when it came to roleplaying games, there was basically Dragon Warrior, Ultima and Final Fantasy, and while Final Fantasy went on to the Playstation, and I don't know what happened to Dragon Warrior, Ultima went MMO. Now before Ultima was even on the NES, it was a PC game, but I couldn't tell you what those PC games were like. I wasn't that into computers in the 90s. My first PC was my older brother's Tandy 1000, purchased in 1989 and passed down to me in 1991, when it was clear to my older brother, that I was a lot more interested in these computer things, than he was. I played Bard's Tale, I played Sim Earth and I played a few other games on that old Tandy, but by the 90s, it just seemed a little too slow. So I saved up my paper route money, held off on buying Magic cards, and bought myself a Gateway 2000, 200 Mhz with MMX technology, for a few grand.

I played a lot of games on that thing, bought all the Magic the Gathering games, bought all the Blizzard games, but the one thing I was looking forward to most, was this new multiplayer game we'd read about in the PC magazines; Ultima Online. When I ordered UO, my MtG friends from school were already staying over at my house every night of the weekends, now they were finding excuses to stay the night on school days, just, so we could stay up all day and all night, to play UO. I let every one of my friends have a character on my account, and all the extra character slots, went to my own attempts to fill in the character classes they had not chosen. One of my friends even had two characters, a bard and a tamer, and while I loved playing his tamer, for the horses mostly, I loved playing his bard even more, because I could make all the monsters, fight themselves. Then by the time some new servers were announced, my friends managed to get their own PCs and we played simultaneously. That was when I went Archer on the new server, Catskills, and, as far as I can recall, was the first person to achieve the titles Great Lord and Grandmaster.

We played Ultima Online, for months, and because my super power in real life was that I only needed a few hours of sleep a day, which I could get in school, I played UO probably more, than anyone else on the planet. I wasn't the greatest UO player, probably due to my lack of sleep and, people who were GM, Game Masters that could bend the rules, liked to play PK when they weren't on the job and messed with me, but I persisted. And I achieved many great things, in the world of Sosaria.

Then, just as I was moving on from UO and branching out into other titles, one of my friends had asked me if I had played on the new test server yet. And when I asked him what it was like, he had told me that a lot of the stuff on the server was cheap, and that there were, teams, divided by colors, and you could sign up for your team near the banks, in the major cities. "What's the point of being on a team?" I asked. And he told me, that there were points, for kills, and a leaderboard for each team's score. And, having been messed with by PKs and GMs, I wasn't too interested in the PK aspect of the game, but, also, I was still pretty good at casting spells, like flamestrike and energy bolt and, maybe, in a team, I could actually enjoy the PVP aspect of the game.

But then, he told me about something else. He said that each of the colored teams, had also had their own castles and in the castles, there was, if I recall, a stone. If you clicked on that stone, a timer would start, and if you managed to live long enough for that timer to finished, you captured it from the other team and could get points, for (here details are a little fuzzy) returning it to your own castle. So, it was like capture the flag. Now, if I recall, killing a player gave your team 1 point, but capturing their stone, or, flag, gave you something like 8 points, maybe it was less, but, it was more than 1, and I didn't really care for grouping up and killing other players, so, I decided to give that a try.

So, I joined the test server, geared myself up, and was really looking forward to getting into the black or the red team, because the colors black and red, were cool, right? I clicked on the stone, and saw the list of teams and their scores, and, sure enough black, red, were fairly high up. Now, what I did know at the time was that if I chose a color, all the other colors would be able to attack me, any where in the world, but what I didn't know, was that when you signed up to get a color, you didn't get to pick, in fact, the stone assigned you to the team with the worst score. And I, was assigned, to the orange team. I was so pissed. Orange? What a dumb color.

But that, was about to change, almost entirely, because of me.

Being on the team, the stones in town, if I recall correctly, allowed you to be teleported to your team's castle, and there you could talk with other members of the team, there, was your stone, and it was that castle, that you had to defend. Or so, you may have been lead to believe. But you didn't get the most points, by being defensive, oh no, preventing people from stealing your stone, was nothing, compared to taking the stones of others. A few hours of playing on this server, made that pretty clear. Standing around defending the orange stone from other invading colors, was not the way to play.

Now, I'd like to take you back to Catskills for a paragraph, and to my home, a very average home. It was a two story building, it had boxes for all the loot of the world, it had decorations, but what homes in UO, were best for, was for keeping your recall runes, to other places in the world. As a person with a fair level of magic, 40 or so, you could cast the spell of recall, on runes, but you had to be level 70, if memory serves me, to cast the spell of Mark, on a blank rune, and wherever you were standing, casting recall on that rune, would take you back there. It was not uncommon for people to have runes for every town, every dungeon, or even most of the shrines of the world. People would buy blank runes from the magic shops in town, where the vendors also sold reagents for spells, and use them to mark places all over the world. But you didn't want to carry, dozens, or even hundreds, of your runes with you around the world, because if you died, you had to go back to your corpse to get them, and if someone found your corpse before you managed to get resurrected and get back to your body, they could loot them, and your stones would be lost. So you kept your runes, at your house.

When I started, on the test server, it was still pretty young, maybe a week old, but already there were teams with something like 400, 500, as much as 600 points, and I think the orange team, had something like 50-60, maybe 90 or so. We were at the very bottom. It was clear I needed to get those stones from the other castles, as fast as possible, and in order to do that, I was going to have to treat those castles, like I treated dungeons, like I treated the world, back in Catskills. I was not a normal player, on Catskills, with 20 or 30 runes, to just the entrances of dungeons and towns, I had stacks, and stacks of runes, to all sorts of vendors, throughout each of the towns. I had runes, to areas all throughout the dungeons, I had runes, to parts of the world, no one ever bothered to go, and I managed my runes, arranged them, in such ways, that they became a map, of the world, a map that only I could read quickly, unless I trained another person, to read that map as well. And that was what I set out to do for this test server. Not only, would I map the world around each castle with runes, but I would arrange those runes, in a  house, near our castle, and teach my team, how to read them, and use them, quickly, to outsmart, and out travel, the teams of the other colors.

And so I set out, to each castle, with loads of blank runes and reagents to cast mark, not to kill or to capture flags, but just to make runes.

Each castle was the same, they had multiple exits and entrances, the same internal layouts, and the stones were in the same place, at the center of the castle. I started off by marking runes for all 8 of the directions outside of the castles N, E, S, W, NE, NW, SE, and SW, just out of sight, of anyone that might be inside the castles. Then, I played tricks on the people inside. I'd pretend to come from one direction, cast a spell at them, and then run out into the woods, drawing them out after me, then I'd recall back to my house, and recall to the opposite side of their castle, and run in, and mark the inside of their castle near that direction. I repeated that for each direction, and each castle, until I managed to get at least, a dozen runes, for every castle. And, if in the process of marking runes, I happened to get the opportunity to take their stones, I took them.

As people became wiser, to my diversions, luring them out and teleporting home and back into their castles, and they began to stay inside, I then began to trick them and I would cast a spell, that allowed me to transform into a giant creature, called an ettin, that would make it difficult for them to tell what color team I was on, because when you were transformed into one of these creatures, you appeared as one, to the other players, and while they could tell you were not really an ettin, they couldn't tell what your real name was, or, what your color was. So, I would transform into an ettin, after having attempted to raid the castle, and then pretend to be someone on their team, that had chased after me and was coming back to their home to defend the castle. Many of them bought it and I would go near the stone to protect it, and they would take their turn, chasing after me, out in the woods, and I would take their stone.

Then, people began stacking objects, to block their stones from view. Generally, stacks of leather, that would pile up and obstruct the stones. When running in to a castle, I'd quickly have to combine stacks, to regain visibility of the stone, so I could click on it. Other colors learned of this, and everyone was trying to cover up their stones with stacks of single leather. This gave me a great opportunity, as an ettin, to come off as one of them. When I would get to the stone, I would begin piling up the stacks of leather, that I had just previously unpiled the last time I was there, and people would thin I was one of their team members, because, why would an opposing team member, stack the leather back up? And they would go about their business, of scouting the surrounding area, looking for where I may be recalling in, and, I would once again, unstack the leather, click the stone, recall home, and move on to another color to pull off the same tricks, all over again.

I was having so much fun, taking the stones from the other castles, that I rarely checked the scoreboards, when, a few days after I had started, one of my friends told me that the orange team was about to reach 1000 points, and that no other team was even close.

I was very happy, with what I had accomplished on that test server.

Even though, there were maybe only 100 other people playing on it, and of those hundred, maybe only 50, were playing the color team game, I had managed to outsmart, all those people, in a very short amount of time, and had a lot of fun, in the process.

I tried to teach a few of the other members of the orange team, and they helped, now and then, but most of what I managed to do for the orange team, I did on my own.

I think the scoreboard reset a few times, after a team had reached some cap, and every time it did, the orange team was always the winner, until they shut down the test server and we all moved on to other things.

I hope you enjoyed that story. Some of the details are a little fuzzy. I haven't played UO in 20 years, so, I may have forgotten some of the details, or mixed some things up. Anyone that played UO back in the late 90s, will tell you how awesome an idea, it was for that time. How much it went on, to inspire games like Everquest which then lead to World of Warcraft, and I have a lot of experience with those games as well, but you just can't beat the original idea. The way we were all, graphically in the same world, on that scale, it was amazing.

One Hour One Life, has been a lot like UO, 20 years ago, for me. It's been very special, very original, very unique, for other reasons.
And I've loved playing it with you, for even better reasons, than I enjoyed leveling skills, gaining titles and capturing flags, in UO.
We've survived this world together, we've built towns together, we've starved together and we have been reborn, time and time again, to one another.
There is nothing quite like this, and there never will be. Please, continue to return, and enjoy it, with one another.
No matter how it changes, try to enjoy, what makes it unique.
Take care of each other.