Ultima Online – an unusual way to kill in the city. The most infamous bugs of online games
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Even the good, old Ultima Online, a game unmatched in terms of freedom of exploration and the number of different opportunities, had its share of bugs. Here's an example. If you flagged yourself as a criminal and used some kind of enhancement ability, such as a blessing, on a player with the "magic reflect" effect, then this effect was redirected to you. It doesn't sound terrible, does it? The catch is that Ultima Online recognized that the player who bounced the spell at you also becomes a criminal.
It was enough to call the guards, who immediately dealt with them. As if this were not enough, it was possible to collect their belongings, since such a person died as a criminal. This allowed players familiar with the mechanics of this MMORPG to go around the cities, able to get high-grade items from the bodies of others. Needless to say, those killed weren't happy.
Before the bug was fixed, special "police" teams created by the community were created to patrol the streets in order to eliminate such "criminals."
MURDER OF LORD BRITISH
The second bug in Ultima Online concerned Lord British himself, the digital avatar of the game's creator, Richard Harriot, and one of the most important characters in the Ultima universe. This NPC is specially designed so that it remains basically invincible. However, there were ways to kill Lord British, and they required thinking outside the box. This was a kind of an easter egg that took on a new dimension in Ultima Online.
During the beta testing of the game, on August 8, 1997, a special event was organized with the developers. They wanted to run an unusual server stress test, so they invited all players to visit some of the more popular characters in the Ultima series. Within the game, all of them, including Lord Briton himself, were controlled by the creators of Ultima Online. At the same time, they made sure that all the heroes are invincible, so that there are no nasty surprises.
The servers couldn't take the number of players, though, and they restarted forcing everyone to log in again. The developers then had to re-enable immortality for their characters, but one of them, Richard Garriot, apparently forgot about this. A player by the name of Rainz decided to try his luck and attacked Lord British with a spell. Imagine the surprise – the unique NPC falling dead in front of thousands of players. Another employee of the company, playing as Lord Blackthorne, upon seeing the attack, called demons that attacked the audience, which did not make anyone any happier.
After the whole affair, Garriot uttered the famous sentence: "If something exists in a MMORPG as a living creature, someone will try to kill it."
