Memorable Moments – Starr Long, Richard Garriot, Anthony Castoro

The UO Herald UO.com has posted some interesting articles over the past week from previous members of the UO team, and I will admit that the title here is a little misleading – we have some Starr Long stuff that is coming up, but not today, later in the week, but I wanted you to know that we do have it in the works.

First up, and these are very short excerpts because you need to read them in their entire context on UO.com, is
Anthony “SunSword” Castoro discussing a unique bug that caused a lot of anxiety among some:

So every time some creature died in the game, there was a chance that the game would spawn a bird. And every once in a while, that bird would get stuck. This went on for YEARS until some servers (maybe Lake Superior?) had no deer, no wolves and no rabbits.

I loved this story because I was playing on Lake Superior during that time and remember the problems LS was having, however what LS players were being told on the UO.com forums didn’t match up. If I recall, we were told that there were too many players, and/or too many items, and it was crashing the database(s) and shard, or it was a hardware issue (hardware wasn’t powerful enough).

The reason why what we were being told didn’t match up with Anthony’s story is that because of how unique that bug was, the UO team probably thought it was in fact an overcrowding situation, instead of such an odd bug. We did get new hardware I believe, and one day they put in some fixes, and everything started working smoother, and most of us just assumed new hardware + optimization = solution. I heard about this bug over the years, but never saw the full story (and maybe it was out there on some blog somewhere) of how it was fixed.

I really like that we finally get some official closure on a very mysterious chapter of LS’ history 12 years or so later. You maybe shaking your head going “I don’t get it”, but to me it’s just cool to get a really cool story out of it.

And now Richard “Lord British” Garriott, which I really don’t want to spoil since you need to read the story that made him think about this in the first place:

After that, I began to think more carefully about the rules we ourselves put in the game, and the inevitable play styles that would come of it.

I brought up this portion of Richard Garriott’s article, because if you followed our live coverage of the 15th Anniversary party, Starr Long talked about about it as well, and how initially players enjoyed the intensity of it all, but not for long, and how Trammel was needed.

I have talked to past UO team members, and have read many interviews. I have never seen or heard from any team members, who were active around that time, who say that Trammel wasn’t needed. This runs counter to views that some players have (such as “Trammel killed UO”). I have heard from and read about team members who would have implemented things differently had they seen the long-term effects, however within the context and time constraints, this was the best solution. Best solution? No, but it did work – this was ultimately proven by the fact that UO doubled in population after the Fel/Tram split.