Announcing Our New ISA Financing Blueprint and $100M in New Financing - <AUTHOR> https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/announcing-our-new-isa-financing-blueprint-and-100m-in-new-financing <comment><USER3> I went to a bootcamp with an ISA. I'm thankful for the temporary relief it offered, but I'm almost positive most of the students in my cohort don't have coding jobs right now. I'm convinced the low admission standards ("Never code before? Do this module of Ruby.") and the ISA demotivated them to always keep learning and hustle their way into interviews, which is what everyone who learns MVC app development in three months will need to do.

Anecdotally, the older or previously successful students who could keep up went on to succeed, but these people already knew how to hustle. Bootcamp can't teach people how to hustle.

(I learned to hustle after previously participating in an even bigger scam - <USER2> state school humanities undergraduate education. ... )

<comment><USER4> What job and salary did this state school humanities degree promise?

I don't know, I'm not a genius, but I kinda figured which majors may not help me in the economy.

<comment><USER3> It's clearer now, definitely. This was in the late 90s and both my parents were humanities academics.

I ended up getting a master's in English and taught essay writing for a while. Many decisions later, I work as security analyst and end up writing a lot on the job, so I like to think things have worked out. I guess. I wish I knew C and more low level cs concepts like some of my coworkers.

<comment><USER5> It's not too late to learn. Just start playing around with stuff

<comment><USER6> Yeah. You could take just a single intro to cs class (or c)and go from there. Programming has so much demand you can start later in life than probably any other field.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks like there has been some departures in their senior leadership in the wake of continuing fallout from the NYMag article, and this announcement might be an attempt to overshadow that

[https://twitter.com/KateClarkTweets/status/12302421245005701...](https://twitter.com/KateClarkTweets/status/1230242124500570114)

<comment><USER8> Adam left because he had a number of serious illnesses happen in his family and (thanks to previous success) has the luxury not to need to work full-time and can focus on his family. We've always upheld that family is more important than Lambda School and are fully supportive. He's still staying in as an advisor just not in a full-time role.

Jeff started as an investor in Lambda School but fell so in love with the company he came aboard full-time. After a couple months he realized he couldn't do both investing and full-time work simultaneously, and decided to focus on investing with my full blessing.

Those two leaving had exactly 0% to do with any news articles.

<comment><USER9> Austen, I think what your company is doing to help folks become developers is rather rad. Starting your response by laughing off concerns like this OP shared is not good.

<comment><USER8> Fair, will edit. It's a shock of genuine amazement that that's become the narrative.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The timing and content of this announcement is...confusing. I'm definitely not an expert in this, but the details here of the financing seem pretty general and straightforward, i.e. the type of document I'd assume they would've already drawn up when partnering with edly several months ago [0]. And that still doesn't explain why Lambda and Allred wouldn't have this info prepared by the time The Verge and NYMag (the latter which was a 5 month investigation) came calling around. It also doesn't explain why edly took the partnership announcement pages down the same day that @dhh started tweeting about them [1].

And then there's the issue of two prominent Lambda executives (one of them an investor, IIRC) stepping down this afternoon. [2]

[0] [https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/12/21135134/lambda-school- st...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/12/21135134/lambda-school-students- edly-isa-debt-swapping-partnership-shares-investors)

[1] [https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1227317343539335168](https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1227317343539335168)

[2] [https://twitter.com/KateClarkTweets/status/12302421245005701...](https://twitter.com/KateClarkTweets/status/1230242124500570114)

</comment><comment><USER11> So they're basically admitting to what the news articles were accusing them of in the first place. And what they're describing seems to basically be a CDO. The thing that gets me about this company is that it very much seems that to the public they're saying "Aww man doesn't it suck that student debt is a $1.6Bn business" whilst saying "Aww man we're going to get some of that juicy juicy $1.6Bn business" to investors.

If Lambda school worked, their ISAs would be paying off at this point, they'd be seeing a profit from their first cohorts and so not only would they have fresh cash to invest, but VCs would see the ROI and growth and throw down some cash. It seems very clear to me that they've failed to demonstrate the business model. So they hand off the core of their business (taking the risk students don't pay off) to a 3rd party and try to just spin some cash from the classes. If I were them I'd be looking for an exit, quick.

<comment><USER12> They are not doing anything wrong so I'm not sure why anyone is "accusing" them of something.

I've read this post, what they do is clear and makes sense to me.

Most of all it preservers "if the student doesn't get the job, LambdaSchool fails" property. This alignment of incentives is really the only thing that matters and it lacks in traditional colleges (which is why Lamda will either fail or, in the long term, will kill traditional colleges or force them to change).

Comparing what they do to CDO is done to make a negative association. "CDO are bad, this shares some similarity of CDO, this is bad".

The bad aspect of CDO was that it was used to hide bad investments by packaging them together and re-selling as a better investment.

What Lambda is doing is more like pooling of risk used in insurance: if you (as an investor) bet on ISA of a single student, you have a high-risk, binary outcome (loose all your money or get some reward).

If you bet on 1000 students as a group, you significantly de-risk the whole thing while only reducing potential reward a little bit.

<comment><USER13> Fully agree with you. People who'd prefer no non-govt school are using scary words like "CDO" to manipulate the conversation instead of look at its merits. There's still a high probability for failure for any new model, but I'm excited to see innovation on the finance side, and people need to regard finance like engineering, as a tool that can be used for good or evil. This seems mostly good.

As far as Lambda's management/culture situation, I've heard it's turbulent, but that's also par for the course with most startups, especially in growth mode. This will always be hard because student outcomes can sometimes feel this turbulence, but it's not like the students think this is a sure thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> _Interesting_ timing, given the recent articles about Lambda School.

It appears they are _doubling down_ on the ISA brokering with Edly. (Which had _deleted references_ to Lambda after they were exposed.)

<comment><USER15> Yeah, this announcement is clearly meant to overshadow NYMag's investigative reporting.

<comment><USER16> Which is here: [https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools- job-p...](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/02/lambda-schools-job- placement-rate-is-lower-than-claimed.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't quite understand the "100 million in new financing for ISAs" is this a new round of funding from VC's or something else ?

<comment><USER18> It's investment into the ISAs themselves. Students will sign up for an ISA with Lambda School who will then package up a lot of ISAs and sell a percentage stake of them to investors. Lambda School gets some of their cash upfront and investors (in theory) get a revenue stream as students pay them back.

They've partnered with Edly, a marketplace to sell ISAs founded by Chris Ricciardi, the "grandfather of collateralized debt obligations".

<comment><USER17> So does this announcement mean they have sold 100mn worth of isas on edly already?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> ISAs are a good idea, but there's no way you can start a _hyper-profitable_ business around it. It's literally a ponzi scheme under those circumstances as the total amount of students "pending" will always exceed those who are paying out as the mandate is to grow.

The potential solutions are three fold:

1\. Limit growth of students - impossible if your organization received venture capital.

2\. Reduce the cost to educate - Unfortunately if you make education a commodity, ironically it will be replicated, leading to alternatives, ultimately leading to (1).

3\. Guarantee the loans somehow

I think the only type of organization that could pull it off is one that doesn't mind waiting a long time to do it sustainably. Probably a not-for- profit. Alternatively, you could sustain it by doing it at a loss, e.g. you have some other organization to ensure (3).

<comment><USER13> I believe that's why you do the ISA packaging described in the article where you sell the ISAs off to the get the cash to keep going while someone else gets to think about the long-term cash flows. Banks do the same thing with loans.

This all works unless the instruments aren't audited well where the risk is higher. (think: ratings agencies in the housing crisis) Here the risk is that payback is bad, but we don't know yet, so investors are left holding the bag.

This latter scenario is really only bad for the investors and wastes the student's time, but then again the current college system already does this, so at least this doesn't shackle them with debts they can't pay.

Of course later investors won't buy the ISA packs if they first blow up, but seemingly no one gets hurt if it all goes up in flames.

<comment><USER8> You should read the attached article because it's not structured as a one-off sale; it's actually aligned between student and school, with the focus being repayment cashflow.

<comment><USER13> Even better - but for clarity, it's still generating some cash up front, addressing OPs question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hey, CEO of Lambda School here.

We've been working on this for over a year, and it finally closed today. We've been intensely focused on incentive alignment since the early days of Lambda School, and finally got to design an incentive-aligned ISA financing mechanism from scratch. Glad to have it out there.

<comment><USER20> No matter what anyone says, at least you're _trying_ to change the "give $200k to college full of cushy administrators" problem that has turned higher education into an absolute disaster. If someone else has a better idea, go ahead and try it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have not read the NYMag article, but I personally think this approach makes a lot of sense.

My own favorite higher education reform idea is to have the gov't fund higher education by paying schools a percentage of the student's increase in W2 earnings for a period after graduation. That would avoid the 'indentured servitude' aspect, because the gov't would be paying, but would only reward schools that could increase students' W2 earnings.

To the extent that lambda school is exploring models that do something similar, it might eventually make space for a gov't funding model build around the insights they have had (like the one in this announcement, about how to pull future revenues forward to fund the school in a practical way).

<comment><USER22> There's already a highly successful model in most modern countries where the government fund all education and recovers some of the cost the higher progressive tax brackets, leaving the rest as a public good as an educated populace is a good thing.

No need for fancy securitization or business models!

<comment><USER13> There wouldn't be a need if our government was good at school execution and innovation, but it isn't.

I fully agree with gov't providing education for everyone, but it's not a panacea. Non-gov't innovation could discover really interesting models that gov't wouldn't take the risk on. We just need to make sure there's no fraud going on.

<comment><USER22> > Non-gov't innovation could discover really interesting models that gov't > wouldn't take the risk on.

When it comes to education the literature is littered with failed "innovation" models that sound good but fail. In fact, we could commission research institutions (publicly owned universities!) to do the legwork...in fact many of them have varied educational models. The government merely funds them; it doesn't execute the teaching model. (And Lambda's teaching model is pretty bog-standard, all said and told)

For profit vocational schools have existed for eons. If the only novelty is the "ISA" \-- which is not all that new, innovative or effective what with progressive taxation -- then what exactly are Lambda offering? Overpriced, poorly executed courses for 0-upfront cost, subsidized "teaching" by TAs w/o any actual knowledge?

The price of failure in this space is very high. It's gambling with student's futures. Fast iteration and failure recovery is not easily possible. This is not a space where VC acceleration makes sense.

<comment><USER13> The reason we should encourage new private educational models beyond publicly funded research / execution is for the same reason we do for almost everything else in the economy: the gov't and private sector have different incentive structures / possible funding modes that allow for different kinds of programs to be developed / run, sometimes both can work.

I don't see how student failure risk is higher than a 4 year degree or vocational school (i.e. the null hypothesis) - either way has time / foregone wages you spend without knowing you're going to get it back. Lambda's programs are actually less risky than a 4 year agree on a time/wage basis, and we have to see how they are on an $ ROI basis (i.e. how long is payback on the degree and how much is the net wage increase).

Also, we allow high-risk private sector stuff all the time: aerospace, automotive, medical, etc. all have literal life and death stakes beyond a school that doesn't work out. Regulation should be proportional to the risk involved, and I just don't see it with the Lambda / ISA model.

As far as what Lambda offers, it seems like they're currently the strongest executors from company growth perspective in the ISA/bootcamp space, and we'll have to see how they do on the factors I named above to see if it's effective. Being a trailblazer is high risk / high reward. I welcome their attempt.

Please correct me where you think I'm wrong. (said earnestly)

<comment><USER22> >Also, we allow high-risk private sector stuff all the time: aerospace, automotive, medical, etc. all have literal life and death stakes beyond a school that doesn't work out. Regulation should be proportional to the risk involved, and I just don't see it with the Lambda / ISA model.

Except getting yourself into huge amounts of debt $30000! is life ruining for basically everyone that Lambda is targeting.

We don't allow experiments on high risk populations with medical testing without informed consent. This was faulty in the Lambda case, where they out and out lied about their funding model. We don't allow the public to fly on planes without tons of testing. We don't allow people to drive cars that haven't passed independent crash testing.

So Lambda's ISA shouldn't be allowed to be sold to the public without independent financial advice, like any other complex debt product. And yes I think the same should apply to student loans.

You and I cannot just go and enter into a debt futures contract (well, maybe if you're an "accredited investor" i.e. rich enough to be ok if it goes south). So why do we let vulnerable folks enter into a shady financial agreement with an operator who's more concerned about growth than a good education? It's not good for society for every 1 new engineer there's 3 debt- enslaved washouts. Lambda's still profitable at those horrible numbers.

>As far as what Lambda offers, it seems like they're currently the strongest executors from company growth perspective in the ISA/bootcamp space, and we'll have to see how they do on the factors I named above to see if it's effective. Being a trailblazer is high risk / high reward. I welcome their attempt.

The problem is that their failures ruin people financially. Growth at all costs is a _bad_ thing. Going slower and getting things right is required to create a good product that first does no harm.

<comment><USER13> (1) I think you're misunderstanding the Lambda model where you don't pay the loan unless you make over a certain amount and it adjusts as a proportion of income. It's designed to get around the actual "debt enslavement" issues of the current government debt. __*

(2) A few months of education isn't a plane crash or fatal drug, it's a major inconvenience, but no more than any other bad life decision people make freely all the time (taking a bad job, buying a boat, etc.). As I said, regulation needs to be proportional to the down side.

(3) If you make everything really restrictive there is no innovation. Going slow does do harm. Harm that you don't see because it's a positive externality and hence never happens and you don't see it. Growth isn't the enemy and neither is regulation, you just have to be smart about it, and I would argue you're too far on the conservative side.

 __* The only exception, which I believe is still unclear legally, is whether ISA aren 't releasable under bankruptcy, which I would definitely oppose as a big supporter of bankruptcy law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Inflating job placement stats and using brand new students to write curriculum is shady, but I don't get why the ISA is controversial. The incentives between student and school are still aligned and better than those of traditional higher ed. If the students don't get jobs, no one buys the ISA, the school goes under.

</comment><comment><USER24> Here's the other thread, for anyone who's missing context: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22366474](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22366474)

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm 100% concerned that this post was AstroTurf'd to the front of HN given the negative article posted against Lambda hours before. This managed to hustle up in less than 15 minutes and kept climbing.

<comment><USER26> I took a quick look at the early votes and they look legit to me. Several of them came from people posting the article all at once, which converts into an upvote of an existing submission if there already is one. Perhaps the presence of the other thread contributed to this being particularly topical today.

Edit: a bit of confirming evidence is that most of those early voters voted for both threads, i.e. this one and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22366474](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22366474).

<comment><USER25> OK thanks for checking it out I feel a lot better about it then.

<comment><USER26> In the future, it'd be helpful to email questions like this to firstname.lastname@example.com. The site guidelines ask you not to post about this in threads, and also it's basically random whether we end up seeing it. An email is nearly certain to get seen, and if we see it, we'll look into the issue and get back to you.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER25> Will do, I had not thought of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Is Austen Allred the Elizabeth Holmes of coding bootcamps?</comment>


Ask HN: What should an Internet "Bill of Rights" include? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> More upvotes, for one.

More seriously, I think that a few things are in order for services:

1\. Information collected about a user must _always_ disclosed ahead of time, and such explanations must be _always_ worded succinctly and clearly.

2\. Information collected about a user is _always_ available to be downloaded by that user--there should be no cases where a user is not able to replicate what their service has collected about them. Note that this does not include secondary, derived information (for example, statistics calculated from the data collected).

3\. The sharing of a user's information must _always_ be disclosed before it happens, and the user given a straightforward opportunity to disallow that sharing (perhaps at the cost of their continued service).

4\. A user must _always_ be able to request _all_ data gathered about them or derived from data gathered about them be expunged from a service. Population statistics calculated from this data do not have to be altered.

5\. A user must _always_ be allowed to create new accounts without having to link them to pre-existing accounts--in effect, anonymous accounts.</comment>


PhD abstract in most common 1k words: 'Using Computers a Bit to Ask Quest...' - <AUTHOR> http://aperiodical.com/2014/01/an-approach-that-uses-computers-a-bit-to-ask-questions-on-numbers-and-stuff-in-big-school/ <comment><AUTHOR> Quoting from the introduction:

        Quantum computer scientist Scott Aaronson posted an
        explanation of his research using only the 1000 most
        common words in English, inspired by the xkcd comic
        'Up-Goer Five', which did the same for a labelled
        diagram of the Saturn V rocket (the 'Up-Goer Five').</comment>


Patreon Sucks - <AUTHOR> https://patreonsucks.com/ <comment><USER2> I decided to look into this and it was a gigantic waste of time so here's what I found so that you don't have to. From the page:

> Allegedly, I was "raising funds in order to take part in activities that are > likely to cause loss of life." Despite this being not even remotely true > [..]

The money was being raised to allow the OP to be on the "Defend Europe" boat, which exists "to hamper the rescue of refugees in the Mediterranean".

\-- [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/anti- immigran...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/anti-immigrant- ship-far-right-refugee-boats-stopped-suez-canal-c-star-defend-europe- islamophobic-a7851341.html)

(Also, how had no-one registered the "patreonsucks.com" domain before now?)

<comment><USER3> You don't even have to go that far, there's a contradiction on that very page:

> Allegedly, I was "raising funds in order to take part in activities that are > likely to cause loss of life." Despite this being not even remotely true,

> I love getting to cover the dangerous ideas and stories I do, and I can only > do it thanks to the amazing support I continue to receive

Seeking danger = likely to cause loss of life.

I'm also really confused. There's a picture of a woman, a signature "Lauren Southern" but text in the reward saying "you can tell your friends I'm your boyfriend" and "© 2017 dave cahill" in the footer.

<comment><USER2> Heh! I wouldn't go quite that far. I think "dangerous ideas" is being used in a countercultural or anti-authoritarian sense in that sentence, not a physically hazardous one. Dangerous ideas (e.g. Bitcoin?) are fine when they aren't intersecting with killing people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Big liberal silicon valley companies

Stopped taking it seriously there.

Patreon has been the biggest boon to content creators on the Internet - especially those creating content for YouTube - in quite a long time. Something tells me the whole story isn't here.

<comment><USER5> She has a video describing it, too. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtImwK5TI4g&t=0s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtImwK5TI4g&t=0s)

Pretty interesting, nevertheless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is it really true that to support random podcasts with patreon that:

      * you can't have a one time payment
      * entry level is $1 a month
      * patreon takes 35% of that?

<comment><USER3> 1\. You have to subscribe but you can cancel after a single payment, some creators even recommend this for their higher tier "rewards".

2\. Yep.

3\. Nope, no idea where you got that number from. Between subscribers and creators, there are 3 fees: Payment gateway (~2% I believe), Patreon (5%) and transfer from Patreon to account ($0.25 for Stripe, 1%/$20 for PayPal, $3 for Payoneer). An absolute maximum of 10% seems closer to reality, with the average being more like 7%. Source: [https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/204606125-How-...](https://patreon.zendesk.com/hc/en- us/articles/204606125-How-do-you-calculate-fees-)

<comment><USER6> If the minimum payment transfer is $0.25, then the minimum take is 25%. Seems pretty insane to throw a $1 a month to a producer and have 25% of that end up with patreon.

<comment><USER3> And since I can't edit my other comment, I'll add that if you can find any payment processor that can do transfers for less than that, I'd like to see it. I don't work for Patreon but I am a Patron and I'm pretty happy with it and the creators I support seem to be too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting.... at the bottom of the page it has © Dave Cahill [1] with a link to another website [2].

The two websites have similar navbar and footer.

[1] [http://imgur.com/a/4rUd0](http://imgur.com/a/4rUd0) [2] [https://www.davecahill.com/](https://www.davecahill.com/)

<comment><USER8> Presumably he's her boyfriend or just a friend and made the site?</comment></comment>


An Analysis of Ludum Dare 23, 24 & 25 - <AUTHOR> http://www.spottedzebrasoftware.com/blog/ludum-dare-analysis.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone, this weekend was Ludum Dare 26. Ludum Dare (or LD) is a 48-hour game making competition and normally has over a thousand entries. I didn't have to participate so instead I wrote a tool to extract data about the past three contests and did a little analysis which I thought I would share.</comment>


Space Is the Place (1974) [video] - <AUTHOR> http://ubu.com/film/ra_space.html <comment><USER2> If anyone isn't familiar with Sun Ra, I recommend reading his wikipedia page - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ra).

His worldview was a fusion of music, theology, the arcane and afrofuturism, fueled by what I believe was a mental health issue. A truly fascinating individual.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not listen to some unrelated 90s Synthiepop with the same title while you wait for the thing to load: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q-uBKnqT2A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q-uBKnqT2A) \-- or "Never trust a Klingon" from the same band: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OL1kk- vEOo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OL1kk-vEOo)

P.S.: Watched the first minute and I got the impression that it might be worse than Barbarella, which I thought was impossible. But it reminded me that I should watch "Dark Star" again... O:)

</comment><comment><USER4> Side note, this was issued previously on DVD, although now that's out of print. It's since been reissued on DVD with an accompanying book: [https://www.amazon.com/Sun-Ra-Space-Place- Limited/dp/0986115...](https://www.amazon.com/Sun-Ra-Space-Place- Limited/dp/0986115401)

</comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for posting this! I remember seeing Sun Ra with June Tyson and John Gilmore sometime in the 70s performing Space is the Place. Never knew there was a movie.

</comment><comment><USER6> _If you find Earth boring, just the same old, same thing..._

</comment><comment><USER7> Bird is the word? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gc4QTqslN4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gc4QTqslN4)

<comment><USER8> I was going to post the exact same thing. :)</comment></comment>


You Can't Force Viral Marketing - <AUTHOR> http://www.awdp.org/articles/238/You-Can%27t-Force-Viral-Marketing

<comment><USER2> This reminds me of yesterday's item for Hired For. I went to <http://newyork.hiredfor.com> and entered my e-mail address, so that I could be put on their _exclusive_ invite list. (Their italics.) After submitting the form, I got this:

"Thanks! Want to get an early invitation? Invite at least 3 friends using the link below. The more friends you invite, the sooner you'll get access!"

Jesus Effing Christ. You just took my neutral-to-positive attitude toward you and pissed all over it with your greedy social media whoring.

I don't know who you are, Hired For. I am not about to tell my friends (or even my internet "friends") to visit your site unless I'm willing to vouch for it, and the only way you're going to get me to vouch for it is to, I don't know, _let me use it_.

Coerced sharing is not sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, alot of new startups are working on using similar social media 'whoring' as you put it. It seems to be a great way to generate a bit of buzz. Connect.me used a similar technique and had thousands of registrations with in hours and a new startup for startups called Launchrock.com is essentially a holding page application designed for this exact role.

<comment><USER2> I see an opportunity for a lifestyle business focused on providing start-ups with teaser sites like this that are tied in with social media bots and so- forth to efficiently exploit bleeding-edgers.</comment></comment></comment>


Ultima Online spent years developing a system that was destroyed by players - <AUTHOR> https://gametyrant.com/news/ultima-online-spent-3-years-developing-systems-that-were-destroyed-by-players <comment><USER4> MMOs as virtual worlds are really hard. Red Dead Redemption online has all the great graphics, but play is mostly people randomly killing other people. No plot. This is a big problem with MMOs - big working worlds can be built, but mostly people just kill each other. Look at the success of Fortnite - <USER2> million peak concurrent players.

Second Life has a functional economy, but no NPC ecosystem. The economy is driven by land ownership and fashion. Second Life has landlords, who pay money to Linden Labs for land and get a bulk discount, then rent it out. They have most of the problems of real landlords - collecting rent, handling evictions, dealing with tenant complaints and tenant disputes. Most of the administration of Second Life is handled by landlords. The biggest operations make US$ 6-7 figures this way.

Fashion is a big deal in Second Life. There are designers with followings. Fashion shows. Women are in the majority. This is entirely player based - players are buying from other players. LL takes a cut when converting from Linden dollars to US dollars, but it's under 10%.

Objects in SL have privileges, but not quite like files. The privileges are Copy, Mod, and Transfer. This is key to making the economy work. Owning an item with Copy privilege lets you make more copies, but you can't give them other people. With Transfer privilege alone, you can give or sell the item to others, but can't make more copies. Items like furniture and vehicles are usually Copy, no Transfer, so you can buy one chair and set up a room, but not set up a car dealership. Clothing is usually Transfer, no Copy, so only the owning avatar can wear it, but you can sell it at a rummage sale. Anything which is both Copy and Transfer can be duplicated and sold. All this is server side, so it's hard to break the protection.

SL now has a NPC system, "animesh", but, as is typical for Linden Labs, they just implemented it and gave out a few demo objects. Everything else is up to the users.

SL runs about 40,000 concurrent users, which would place it at about #12 on Steam if it were on there, around where GTA V is on Steam.

<comment><USER5> Essentially MMOs aren't just one hard problem, they are a collection of hard problems.

There are some excellent game theoretic problems in there, the ecology is just one of them. One of the more interesting experiments in the StarWars universe game was the market economics of things like furs.

What I noticed during my years of WoW playing was that the market functioned very much like the 'in app purchase' market of more casual games. For example you could sell magic reagents which an enchanter could use to level up their skill, this was a quick way for someone to exchange gold for skill points. It created an economic stream for players who could "farm" the correct materials to disenchant to get the most in demand reagents (as I recall Greater Eternal Essence was a big seller).

Success in an MMO is in part a balance of these opportunities where a character can trade time for value.

In the Ultima online case the skins were just worth essentially vendor cash, but without that market force in the middle, the economy tanked. Now if vendors paid less and less for hides as the rate of hides redeemed for cash increased, it would provide a natural limiter on the value of that activity.

A truly successful MMO would provide a way for the MMO owner to tax the activity of the players in a way that generated actual cash for them to pay for servers and developers. Then the game becomes self sustaining.

<comment><USER4> _A truly successful MMO would provide a way for the MMO owner to tax the activity of the players in a way that generated actual cash for them to pay for servers and developers. Then the game becomes self sustaining._

Which is what Second Life does. Land payments support Linden Labs.

There is a new generation of virtual worlds - VRchat, Sansar, Sinespace, and High Fidelity. The last three have numbers of concurrent users well below 100. VRchat had around 10,000 at peak, and is now down to around 5,000. There's also Facebook Spaces, which is a VR interface to Facebook that didn't catch on, and Decentraland, which was an excuse for an initial coin offering and whose blog is down. Those are all holdovers from the VR boom that didn't happen.

The next new technology is Spatial OS, a back-end game engine for really big MMOs and virtual worlds. A few games are just starting to use this. The company behind it is valued at $500M, which means they have to charge so much to use it that big game developers are staying away. You have to run it on Google servers, and they don't publicly disclose the price schedule. It's generally said to be high, though.

<comment><USER6> Based on this and my own investigation of the tech, I predict Spatial OS is going to tank. Hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I owe my career to this game.

I was totally obsessed with UO from the moment I logged in for the first time and created my character, a crafter who was primarily a miner/blacksmith.

That's the thing about UO... nobody was the hero, everyone was just trying to survive and thrive in their own way; whether that meant crawling the dungeons as a warrior, bard, tamed, or caster; terrorizing those same dungeons as a player-killer out to strip the dungeon crawlers of all their loot and gear; or, spending your days baking bread or running your own player shopping mall, your only limitation was your effort and imagination. The idea that you could stake out your own small part of this vibrant world, right down to building a house in the limited land space available; or making your name as an accomplished crafter who people sought out for their superior crafted equipment, it was so fascinating to me.

After a few years I found out about a project called the Ultima Offline eXperiment, they were working on a server emulator that would let you run your own worlds, with your own rules! (Their scripting engine was JavaScript, running on the server... 19 years ago) As a teenager with no prior software experience, this was incredible to me. I scoured the internet for anything I could find to learn C++ and JavaScript and started screwing around with the emulator. It was slow going at first, given the somewhat limited resources available on the internet at the time, but I stuck with it and from that point on I knew exactly what I wanted to spend my life doing. After that I moved to would become the de-facto emulator for nearly 2 decades, RunUO. Through that community I found contract work on projects that were unrelated to UO, and from that experience transitioned to a full-time career in software about 10 years ago.

This game was hugely important to me and who I became because of it, and it makes me so happy that stories about UO pop up every few years as a reminder of that.

<comment><USER8> >That's the thing about UO... nobody was the hero, everyone was just trying to survive and thrive in their own way; whether that meant crawling the dungeons as a warrior, bard, tamed, or caster; terrorizing those same dungeons as a player-killer out to strip the dungeon crawlers of all their loot and gear; or, spending your days baking bread or running your own player shopping mall, your only limitation was your effort and imagination. The idea that you could stake out your own small part of this vibrant world, right down to building a house in the limited land space available; or making your name as an accomplished crafter who people sought out for their superior crafted equipment, it was so fascinating to me.

This is absolute magic to me. Wow. It sounds like an absolute dream. It is my opinion that the possibilities of a shared, persistent, virtual world were never fully realised. The description you make: of a fantasy world, persistent, vast, "real" (as in, internally consistent and fair), a world you can _live_ in... modern MMOs offer absolutely none of that. It's a shame.

It speaks volumes that probably the best realisations of the MMO were... Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, maybe Everquest? Maybe even some primitive MUDs and, oddly enough, a couple Minecraft servers. Instead we're stuck with WoW (and its clones), which was an _excellent_ game in its own right, but it wasn't a _true MMO_ in the sense above described.

<comment><USER9> > we're stuck with WoW (and its clones), which was an excellent game in its > own right, but it wasn't a true MMO

because most companies didn't realize what they were copying when they copied WoW.

True MMO - aka, a sandbox game. See this very indepth critique, if you want more about this topic [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvK8fua6O64)

<comment><USER10> Let me tell you this, but.. WoW was the clone, it tried to copy already existings MMOs, the only reason WoW was sucessfull was because all the advertising it got

Asia (KR/JP) had already huge mmo games before WoW

<comment><USER7> That's not completely fair... WoW was successful because it was outstandingly polished (no other game was even close at the time) and fun to play.

<comment><USER11> It also got a massive amount of early hype by being a Blizzard/Warcraft IP and not generic fantasy.

All of the buzz surrounding it prior to launch was about being able to play as characters from the Warcraft universe, not that it was a polished MMO.

The IP got people to sign up, the polish made them stick around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The promise of alpha/beta era UO really died quickly. Even more rapidly not long after that once EQ showed up and redefined the genre.

There were other cool ideas beyond the ecology that got the axe pretty quickly. For instance originally NPC shopkeepers kept hours so you had to show up when they were around. Player didn't like this as it was inconvenient so they made them permanently stationed.

Similarly there was a live economy, shopkeepers would only buy things that they needed/wanted, and prices were tied to supply/demand. However players demanded the ability to dump all of their junk to shopkeepers as a way to generate money. A common pattern was that players would have mountains of skullcaps due to building their tailoring skill, but were then upset when no shop would buy 3000 skullcaps from them.

Ultimately it became clear that more would be players preferred "a CRPG where other people happen to be playing" than "a virtual world", so be it.

<comment><USER13> > A common pattern was that players would have mountains of skullcaps due to > building their tailoring skill, but were then upset when no shop would buy > 3000 skullcaps from them.

That's not really a problem with the shopkeepers. It's a gross mismatch in how difficult they made it to progress in skill versus the artificial aggregate demand for those products. If your game design requires that your players craft 3,000 of something, it's probably a good idea to think about what they're going to _do_ with 3,000 of that especially if your players are going to expect to make a profit or if they have limited inventory.

<comment><USER14> Well, the big problem is that most craft skills weren't difficulty-based.

That is, you had a fixed chance to craft _anything_ based on your skill, each attempt made the same exact progress towards improving your skill, and skullcaps used up the least amount of cloth. I think some items may have been gated based on your skill, in that you couldn't attempt them until you passed a certain skill level, but that was it. With Tailoring, regardless of whether you suceeded or failed, an attempt would use up however much cloth it took to make the item you were trying to make, so if the item costs less cloth to make, you could make more skill checks on the same bolt of cloth (IIRC, a skullcap cost 2 yards to make, and a bolt was 50 yards).

Tinkering was even worse. I remember with Tinkering, you'd double click your tinker tools, then select your pile of ingots. At that point, it would check your skill, and if you failed your check, it would say "Tinkering failed" and maybe use up an ingot or two (my memory is hazy on whether or not anything was consumed). If you succeeded, it would bring up the menu where you could pick any tinkerable item in the game, and if you got to the menu, you could make anything you picked as long as you had the requisite raw materials.

IIRC, Blacksmithing was the only craft skill that was difficulty-based from the start.

People really exploited this during character creation when making blacksmiths. You could create your character with up to 100 total points in up to three skills, with a maximum of 50 points in any one skill. The optimal starting layout for a smith was 50 Blacksmithing, 49 Mining, 1 Tinkering. You'd want the some Tinkering because your mining and blacksmithing equipment would often wear out and the replacements were all tinkerable. If you put in any Tinkering at all, you'd start with a free set of tinker tools, and since the skill wasn't difficulty-based, if you needed to replace your shovel or tongs, you'd just repeatedly attempt tinkering on your ingots until you _finally_ succeeded your skill check, no matter how many tries it took, and once you made it to the menu (this leads me to think that failing didn't use up any ingots, but I could be wrong, and my memory on this is hazy), you could make your new shovel or tongs.

They eventually made all the craft skills difficulty-based, but it took several _years_ to implement.

<comment><USER15> That sounds a bit off - mining was next to worthless to start with as you gained it very fast. Probably 50 smith, 50 tinker would be better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've seen plenty of articles along this line, but the author always seems to blame the players for the system failing.

To me it looks like their ecological model failed because it was deeply flawed.

Real ecologies aren't really closed systems. There's generally constant energy coming in from the sun, and that energy is the limiting factor. Humans, at a simple level, build wealth by preserving the products of this energy.

But in original UO, a player having 10000 shirts would cause the amount of wool produced in the world to decline. That doesn't make any sense so it's not surprising that it didn't work.

<comment><USER17> >Real ecologies aren't really closed systems.

Neither was theirs — things spawned! It was just overexploited, much like our own ecosystem.

>Humans, at a simple level, build wealth by preserving the products of this energy.

A rose-colored summary.

We also frequently engage in futile activities that _seem_ profitable, but in fact destroy wealth by failing to appropriately manage the biogeophysical life-support system of Spaceship Earth. See our current ecological collapse - climate change, soil erosion, wilderness destruction, higher rates of species extinction, aquifer pollution/depletion, overfishing, ocean acidification, ocean plastics, etc.

What is ecologically optimal should also be what's _economically_ optimal, because ultimately they're part of the same overall system. The imaginary economy/ecology divide (like the imaginary human/environment divide) is itself a source of inefficiency, because it incentivizes ignoring problems by pretending to push them "outside the system."

If we can't make economy and ecology align our species is SOL & JWF — shit out of luck and jolly well fucked.

In my opinion, this is the biggest and most intractable of the possible Fermi Great Filters. Not destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons or nano-goo, but restraining our own species from self-annihilating global ecocide via perverse economic incentives (aka "Capitalism, the Bad Parts™").

The free market is an incredibly powerful decentralized decision-making tool, but it should be used to enhance humanity's long-term survival rather than undermine it.

<comment><USER18> I think you're on to something wrt to the Fermi Paradox and the Great Filter.

I sometimes wonder if it's possible at all for any species that evolved to compete for resources to survive the stage where humans are now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> UO was such a cool and open experience. I enjoyed it over the next generation "turn in quest" rinse repeat MMOs. In UO I played a blacksmith and a beggar. My friend played a miner and a fanatical priest. We never set foot in a dungeon and saved up enough virtual money to buy our own house.

<comment><USER12> These are some of my favorite tales from the early UO days. I also had a blacksmith friend. He never went adventuring, he spent his time in the town square doing blacksmithing jobs for folks. I had another friend who was an interior decorator who would decorate your home for a fee. So much more room to explore than your typical CRPG style game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I was the original lead designer on Ultima Online and the key designer of this system. A few notes, because this article has MANY inaccuracies.

1\. Ultima Online wasn't even in development for three years total. An early prototype was February to September 1995, done by Rick Delashmit. Starting late August and early September 1995, the core team showed up. We showed the game at E3 in spring of 1996 in alpha form. We showed it in beta form at E3 in the spring of 1997. And we launched on Sept 26th, 1997. The ecology was in the alpha test, and was removed during the beta after being rewritten by an engineer who didn't really like or understand it.

2\. "Not many players know about" this is false. The strategy guide published simultaneously with the game even lists all the resource values for how much meat, hide, feathers, whatever, each creature represented. All of those statistics remained in the game and still are there to this day twenty years later. What was disabled was the AI. The values are still used by crafting, harvesting, and lots of other systems in the game.

3\. Said AI is exhaustively documented on my website here: [https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/03/uos-resource- system/](https://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/03/uos-resource-system/) (first article, there is a sidebar with links to the follow-ons) and also collected in my recent book POSTMORTEMS, which has a huge pile of historical info on Ultima Online as well as Star Wars Galaxies and other games I've worked on.

4\. The reason the AI was disabled had nothing to do with why the ecology collapsed. The AI was disabled because of the cost of doing radial searches followed by pathfinding. "The way players fit into this equation was that the they would embark on quests to kill the carnivorous animals and the pelts that they gained from those quests would be worth more than those gained from the herbivores" doesn't make any sense. :)

5\. The ecology collapsed for a different reason: we had a closed economy loop at first, where everything was spawned from a fixed resource pool. It fell victim to player hoarding: when players killed sheep, they then made zillions of shirts from the wool to grind crafting advancement. Then they hoarded them or sold them very slowly. The result was the central bank ran out of wool, and then couldn't spawn more sheep. This is documented in one of the earliest detailed analyses of MMO economies, Zach Simpson's "In-Game Economics of Ultima Online," a very influential piece which led to the widespread use of the term "faucet-drain economy" in online game design. See [https://web.archive.org/web/20020730225856/https://www.mine-...](https://web.archive.org/web/20020730225856/https://www.mine- control.com/zack/uoecon/uoecon.html)

6\. "This problem is also what spawned multiple instances of servers (or as they called them, "shards") that people know and recognize from most MMOs today." This is not why we ended up with shards, either. UO was originally designed for a concurrency around 250, much like Meridian 59 and other MUD heirs of the day. Its original lifetime forecast was only 30000 or so units, but we knew from early on we'd need multiple servers, even at that population count. Meridian 59 launched with a whole bunch of them, for example. After we got 50000 tester sign-ups, we were asked to hugely increase server size, which led to Rick inventing a server boundary mirroring technology we called "multiserver," which allowed the map load to be shared across clusters of machines. The entire game was then rearchitected for that in between 1996 and 1997. The term shards came from the fiction of earlier Ultimas, see [https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding- came...](https://www.raphkoster.com/2009/01/08/database-sharding-came-from- uo/)

7\. "At the time when 3D graphics cards were new" \-- they were nonexistent when we started.

8\. The source for the article is a more accurate video at Ars Technica, which has war stories from Richard Garriott. But Richard's memory is, alas, faulty on some of these finer details.

9\. There are some great Quora answers on the tech stack for the game and whatnot which have been on HN before, but if you're interested, you may want to check them out.

I will say, it's awesome and flattering and super cool that so many people still harbor so much affection and so many memories from this game. I was around 25 when I was leading design on it, and the early days when we were doing the impossible are still some of the fondest memories of my career. For lots more war stories, do check out either the book, my site, or this postmortem presented at GDC for the game's 20th anniversary: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnnsDi7Sxq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnnsDi7Sxq0)

<comment><USER21> Hi Raph, I don't normally do the fanboy thing, but you are an idol to me. 12-year old me grew up reading your UO patch updates regularly. When I found your personal blog a few years ago I think I spent a week straight reading through it.

UO remains the only MMORPG that I have ever played that felt like a truly immersive virtual world. It ruined all MMO's that came after it for me. I played the WoW beta for about two weeks before the grind became apparent and I lost interest. Who the hell cares about only completing pre-made quests? In ultima, you defined your own adventure, and if you succeeded in it your fame could actually be known among players on your shard and not just a mechanic of the game's code. To me, this sets the benchmark to what an MMO is supposed to be.

There's also a slightly darker/mischievous part to my experience with UO: Macroing (the act of automating your character via third party programs) really introduced me to the world of programming. At first it was using point and click step-by-step UI recording software, but after a few years I had a fully fledged ore mining bot that could even do things like respond to a red name appearing on the screen by recalling to a safe house programmed in an actual turing complete language. Although I'm sure that had to be a pretty big pain point for you, I'm not sure I'd have a career as a software engineer if that hadn't happen.

<comment><USER20> You're welcome, I guess. Assuming you like your career.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This was very cool idea and is one of the things that made me start playing. In the Official Guide book to UO you could find for each creature what it desired. From what I understand that was lifted from the database guiding the ecology system.

A great source for more information on the design of UO (including some bits on the ecology system if you dig deep enough) is Raph Koster's blog: [https://www.raphkoster.com/tag/ultima- online/](https://www.raphkoster.com/tag/ultima-online/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Direct link to actual source (includes transcript if you prefer reading): [https://video.arstechnica.com/watch/war-stories-ultima- onlin...](https://video.arstechnica.com/watch/war-stories-ultima-online-the- virtual-ecology)

</comment><comment><USER24> The headline seems a bit dramatic and even incorrect. The system wasn't destroyed, but fictional digital wildlife that they stocked their server with was hunted to near extinction, along with their notion that their system had a maintainable 'ecological balance'.

My headline would be 'Ultima Online developers created unsuccessful virtual ecological system'. I'd think they could have fixed this by increasing any penalty and reducing any gains had by killing "friendly" animals, but the article doesn't go into detail about what they changed before removing it. If the only penalty for obtaining resources from the 'wrong' animal is that your character is immoral in a fictional world, I could see why they'd have these results.

The article also makes it sound like, or even states, that the problem was overpopulation on the servers.

</comment><comment><USER25> It had to be balanced around the main carnivore species ruling the online world, the players. Which apparently wasn't done, and then simple respawn with some simple dynamic rules based on population and rate of death, would have done it much better.

<comment><USER12> My understanding was that part of the problem was that they expected more of the RPing MUD crowd to show up, not the typical gamer crowd. Whether or not their calculations would have been similarly incorrect even if their userbase predictions were spot on is another question altogether

<comment><USER26> The Catskills server was the roleplay server and it had actual die-hard roleplayers, the Origin storytellers (counselors? I forget) did a lot of work to help them with events, etc. For instance an entire clan (Shadowclan Orcs) took over the NPC owned Yew Orc Fort. There were big Pirate groups too in Buc's Den. I remember the Paladins of Trinsic, Yew Militia and the Undead (they may have been called something else? They had the Necropolis).

It was some of the most fun I've had in a game ever.

The servers really had different cultures. I really loved Siege Perilous while it was doing the Color Wars. The map was 4 castles with 4 different teams, you'd spawn inside your team castle surrounded by chests full of GM weapons/armor that made you immediately become a GM of that item (say Grandmaster Halbredier) then run out and fight the other teams. It was almost like a Battlefield game. Then they changed it to some boring mode for beta testing.

I was 11-12 when I got into UO in 1996. I could talk about it all day. I miss it.

The 2nd Age I think is when I quit. Whenever they added riding cockroaches and neon colors and all that other stuff.

[http://www.shadowclan.org/about.html](http://www.shadowclan.org/about.html)

<comment><USER12> I remember it well. I played on Lake Superior which had a smaller but also prominent RP scene at the time, albeit more villain oriented. For instance one of our more well known RPing PK guilds was featured in Wired: [https://www.wired.com/1998/05/ultima/](https://www.wired.com/1998/05/ultima/).

The two groups had a bit of a rivalry on the then main message board, Crossroads of Britannia. LS called the Catskills group "Care Bears" and they called us "The Biker Gang". To my knowledge that was the first usage of care bears in that manner, but I'm sure it predates us. I remember one time when they all came over to our server with "care bear" characters and "invaded" the main player run tavern, Silk's Tavern.

My roommate at the time was a prominent RPing PK on Catskills, I was a prominent RPing anti-PK on LS. Folks from both groups made road trips for a house party/gathering at Catskills own Elawyn of Yew's RL house.

On the LS side it often was the case that both sides of the RPing PvP world would concoct RP reasons to band together to combat general asshattery regardless of if they were red/blue.

Siege Perilous & T2A was right around the time I was getting out of the game. I was still playing, but much less as college was over and real job had begun. Combined with the game rapidly becoming less fun for me and I just found myself playing less and less

<comment><USER26> Aurics Moongates.com is still around if you want a trip down memory lane. During Alpha/Beta it was a place where a lot of us went to chat while we waited for discs to arrive.

Unfortunately most of the music doesn't load any longer. I always loved the Ultima soundtracks.

[http://moongates.com/](http://moongates.com/)

edit: [https://soundcloud.com/mmomusic/sets/ultima- online](https://soundcloud.com/mmomusic/sets/ultima-online)

edit2: This sounds terrible not as a midi

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I recommend Raph Koster's latest book "Postmortems" for a digest of his experience developing Ultima Online, including some background on the ecology that never shipped. [https://www.raphkoster.com/games/books/](https://www.raphkoster.com/games/books/)

</comment><comment><USER15> UO was an amazing experiment in self-organization and survival in the world with little protection. At least for a while.

The initial pre-facet gameplay basically split between the protected town space and free-for-all wilderness. As soon as one wondered outside town guard area, anything could happen - you could attack anyone and anyone could attack you, costing you all you carried. Or nothing could happen. That was the genius of the game play - just like in the real world, once you went out into the wild, it was you against all.

In this vacuum of law, guilds emerged that controlled and protected parts of the wilderness. You joined one of them and helped build society from scratch. Patrols were organized, crime was fought. Turf was defended. Crafters were protected.

A pseudo medieval society emerged with their own casts and hierarchies. All shards were different.

At the time, I played Pacific shard for the MOD guild. Then the rule change came that ended all of this - they split pvp and non-pvp realms. This is when the wipeout happened.

Without the pvp players, the non-pvp realm became overrun. You could sit and wait in the most dangerous dungeon for hours to get a chance to slay a dragon. Previously, this was prevented by pvp players attacking the dragon hunters, now people could just kemp out in the most valuable armor and carrying most valuable weapons. Things you wouldn't think of using before for fear of losing them to another player were now fair game.

Many of the veteran players retereated to the Seige Perilous shard with extremely punitive rules and hard game play, but many left. Siege lasted for 3-4 years for me before I finally gave up.

In the end, the lawless, ruleless gameplay that required society to emerge was such an amazing experience that I'll be forever thankful to the devs for allowing us to experience it. Such things help one understand and believe in humanity, despite all our flaws and the few bad apples that emerge.

<comment><USER28> Trammel completely ruined UO because of exactly what you describe. It was so sad and totally avoidable. I left not long after too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm surprised to see this here, I actually just stumbled on this video a little earlier on YouTube. It's actually a series with multiple entries. Here's the playlist [0] if anyone is interested in checking out the others videos.

Getting an inside look at game development is always fascinating. I wish more developers would talk about their experiences. You can usually take away incredibly valuable lessons from videos like these. For example, from this Ultima Online thing you'd learn about the importance of user-testing.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKBPwuu3eCYkScmqpD9xE...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKBPwuu3eCYkScmqpD9xE7UZsszweVO0n)

</comment><comment><USER30> In this case players had the ability to move around and attack things. If trapping live animals or training pets were options then players might have tried that instead. Pets in particular trigger protective impulses in people. The issue is not the players but a simulation focused on violence and extraction.

<comment><USER31> Oh, you could tame animals to make them your pets.

One Halloween I logged into UO, and my character had been transformed into a deer, as some kind of a sick joke! All my inventory was gone, and all I could do was deer stuff.

Then some bastard came along and TAMED ME. That totally sucked! I had to follow him around obediently all day. I guess I'm lucky he didn't skin me and make me into leather armor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I played it only for a few days because they had high level players going around killing newbies for fun. My first step out of town some guy kills me in one shot. I went back to continue and he does it a second time and third time. Eventually gave up in frustration.

<comment><USER33> lol owned

<comment><USER34> Think you mean oOooOO OooOoOOo

<comment><USER26> Oh man, what was it, Ghostspeak? Then you could ask a ghost who had killed them and if they were near you..

<comment><USER12> spirit speak

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Economies are hard, as are game economies: [https://www.raphkoster.com/games/snippets/the-evolution- of-u...](https://www.raphkoster.com/games/snippets/the-evolution-of-uos- economy/)

<comment><USER36> This is one of the things that impresses me so much with EVE Online - that the economy has stayed as stable as it has. (Sure, there has been some inflation, and some interesting swings at times, but it still fundamentally _works_.)

<comment><USER37> Part of that is there is no vendor trash in EVE. Everything is valuable to someone. Items aren't leveled or quality ranked, they have upsides and downsides that you can balance, there are practically no "strictly better" item relationships, even the noobie ships and guns are useful in the late game for low risk travel ships. This item structure, plus PLEX and insurance for money sinks, lets them control inflation and keep the economy healthy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Related: A collection of slides on in game economics by the former (in 2000) director of technology at Origin (not a UO team member): [https://web.archive.org/web/20020730225318/https://www.mine-...](https://web.archive.org/web/20020730225318/https://www.mine- control.com/zack/uoecon/slides.html)

The model economy (related to Muds) in Imaginary Realties by Dan Hastings, preserved by Richard Bartle : [http://mud.co.uk/dvw/themodeleconomy.html](http://mud.co.uk/dvw/themodeleconomy.html)

The basics of these economies is that there is a faucet of some resource and a drain drain on that resource (it goes somewhere and is ultimately destroyed... some how). The economics aspect has a very hard problem with balancing those faucets and drains.

</comment><comment><USER39> I love any UO-related post!

Speaking of killing everything in UO, in what would be considered the "T2A" era of this game (I'm estimating something like 1998-1999), I remember manipulating the line-of-sight bug that let you attack NPCs inside town in such a way that the town guards wouldn't come (There were many "criminal acts" you could commit, like attacking or stealing from a player, and if you did them in town the guards would instantly kill you).

I would town kill NPCs to get colors of cloth that were not achievable using the dye tubs available to you. They would spawn with colors that were less garish than the ones you would end up with if you dyed them. I would chop their clothes up, sort them by colors, and use the raw cloth to create clothes on my tailor. It was a great money maker, because killing NPCs was quick and easy, and in the end it's just clothing items, but the product was not available anywhere else. If someone killed you in the process, you were naked except for a weapon anyway, and people generally did not understand what I wanted with the cloth in the first place so it didn't get looted.

From the housing system to the criminal system, UO was just the best MMO. You could do anything, but you had to suffer the consequences. I love the totally free-market economy it gives rise to. I feel like MMORPGs got a lot softer and less "libertarian" (if I can use that word without all the political baggage), for better or worse. Probably for better, because WoW was popular in a way that UO never would be.

I always heard Anarchy Online was great, but I never got around to playing it.

<comment><USER40> I played anarchy a bit. It was ok but mostly just pvp and bugs. Shadowbane was where the hardcore pvpers went as well as call of asheron I think?

Edit: Asheron's Call and Dark age of Camelot.

Oh gosh. Kids these days have no clue! Or maybe they do.

<comment><USER28> Dark Age of Camelot was amazing. I remember many times standing in the frontier as part of a friendly army facing the enemy both armies equaling 100 to 200 people. Someone would give the order to charge and all hell broke loose. Defending keeps was also fun, throwing things off the battlements. Good times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm loving this UO talk, I just found this Postmortem by GDC published in Sep 2018 (so I think it's new? I've never seen it)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnnsDi7Sxq0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnnsDi7Sxq0)

This is a much watch if MMOs fascinate you. They're very transparent. Absolutely great video.

edit: Oh my god they bring up FlyGuys prostitution ring..

</comment><comment><USER41> The price of pelts should have dropped to zero from the oversupply.

<comment><USER12> That sort of thing did happen but also quickly was removed.

<comment><USER20> Players hated making things that had no value. They knew full well there was no market, but they were conditioned to expect a reward for doing it anyway. I suspect players would be much more tolerant of it today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I need to read this but as a beta and long term player of UO, the bugs made the game even better.

<comment><USER42> Yeah! Like when the servers were going down we knew the last 15 Minutes weren't saved and the whole world was going crazy and everyone was using his best weapons and turning red.

<comment><USER40> My favorite was stacking flour on the shore and teleporting through locked doors from the plank of a ship.

Also there was a massive subculture of collectors who grabbed the rare items not locked down after a server reboot. The game shipped with a lot of bugs that they fixed by adding tiles after the fact and some weren't locked down so people grabbed them up. My speciality was fruit bowls :P

Once we broke into a GMs house and stole an all red sword.

Also using circle of transparency to mark a rune inside a house.

Teleporting demons and dragons into peoples towers. Gosh the fun never ended.

<comment><USER28> I remember asking a mage for a gate to another city, he opened one and I stepped through. I found myself on a tiny little desert island whose only inhabitant was an extremely large dragon lol. I wasn't even mad, I laughed out loud as I died.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I never played UO and I've never spent a great deal of time playing any MMO. I know it would take a lot of effort but I think a neat solution would be that if all the animals were killed then people would start starving to death.

I wonder if social pressures could somehow be codified into a game. If someone goes around killing all the players then maybe none of the vendors will want to do business with that person or something? Though I'm sure there are ways players could still explain that and I'm sure people who have spent a lot more time thinking about MMOs than me could explain why that wouldn't work

<comment><USER20> This and many other experiments were tried in the MUDs and early days of MMOs. The idea of denying services to those who killed a lot worked pretty well on many UO player-run shards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> All video games are crippled by player's wish fulfilment trumping any attempt to make genuine mechanics. Everything must be fun in the end.

</comment><comment><USER45> Interesting complaint, but didn't ultima also have a system where you could only raise skills by killing things over and over? It's successor - <USER3> was even more hostile to having fun. Wow softened up this horrible trend

</comment><comment><USER46> Sounds like they just left it to pure ecology to somehow balance? Did they think of making depopulated species harder to kill, or make them mate faster?

<comment><USER20> We actually wanted the scarcity, so it would affect prices and desirability. We just didn't expect _everything_ to be scarce.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> 23 comments so far and few if any seemed to be troubled by the fact the game players we're so willing to kill __everything__. Untethered?

<comment><USER48> Not uncommon among real people when they enter a new world. Take for instance, bison being nearly eradicated within a century of significant settlement west of the Appalachians.

Not to mention, new players were probably practicing combat. It's not like anyone would normally have concern for killing virtual goats and rabbits.

<comment><USER49> Or the extinction of the California grizzly within 75 years of gold being discovered. It's a common pattern — maybe the issue isn't with the game…

<comment><USER24> I would be far more likely to hunt a species to extinction in a fictional video game where it doesn't remotely matter at all than in real life.

<comment><USER47> So being wired to find that entertaining is a good thing?

Regardless, given what we're seeing in real life I'm not so sure the appeal is limited to video game activity.

<comment><USER26> I have friends with hunting ranches where I could go shoot anything I want, like Axis deer, Ostriches, etc. I don't hunt. When I played UO I killed thousands of rabbits to get pelts to raise my tailoring skill. I don't see how these correlate whatsoever. I've also mowed down people in Grand Theft Auto but am very cautious around pedestrians in real life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> They should have given Bambi a BFG3000 to defend herself.

<comment><USER20> Early on, creatures learned skills just like players did. In the alpha, this led to wolves who hunted bunnies, and some bunnies the bunnies escaped and learned a little, and eventually there were both dire wolves (their name actually changed to "wise elder wolf" or something) and vorpal bunnies. These latter ones killed many unsuspecting players in the alpha, and we had to remove the creature learning because it was bad UX> We left in a vorpal bunny template in the launch game, however, as an Easter Egg.

<comment><USER39> I remember the vorpal bunnies. I seem to remember a bug where they would sometimes appear as an energy vortex sprite...

Can you elaborate on why the creature learning was bad UX? Did people get irritated when the wolves were killing their rabbits?

<comment><USER20> It was bad UX because people couldn't easily tell the difference between a vorpal bunny and a weak one. The name wasn't enough. UO had a "consider" style skill but no one used it (I forget the name, "evaluate" or something). Eventually, "consider" was streamlined in MMOs into color coding mobiles, a la WoW. But in UO, people relied on the creature's sprite to assess difficulty.

The energy vortex sprite was a different Easter Egg iirc. And sometimes, you could get energy vortices that were llama-shaped...

<comment><USER39> Yeah! The purple llama.

The skill was probably Animal Lore.

Best MMO ever! Thanks for giving insight into it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The two things I loved most about UO:

* no opt-in required PVP with full looting

* the bugs / exploits

I had a very high bounty. :D

The chance that you could actually lose months worth of work always made the game heart pounding exciting when you were running for your life.

Favorite bugs:

* mage/carpenter could build tables, stack them, teleport to the top, and jump through people's roofs to loot houses

* stealing weapons and armor off people and killing them with it

* mouse tip hover + overloaded treasure chest trap

* dying bags in a trading window

I LOVED this game.

Edit: what awesome bugs, exploits, and rares do you remember?

<comment><USER52> Apropos of nothing, I've always found the behavior of the players of MMOs and online games one of the clearest telltales that sociopathy is a lot more prevalent that most people think it is.

<comment><USER20> The term I used at the time was "virtual sociopath" \-- you'd think sociopathy is more common if you glance at forums today, too... but there's a huge element of disinhibition brought about by non-personal contact. It doesn't mean the person is like that in person at all.

<comment><USER52> > _It doesn 't mean the person is like that in person at all._

While I defer to your expertise, I have to say I find it a bit difficult to believe. Being in an online game just changes the form of interaction between people, not the fact that they're interacting. (We couldn't, for example, say "Oh, X is a jerk over the telephone but s/he's not like that in person at all".) These players know full well that there was another human being at the other end of their misbehavior.

Whatever the online analogue of " _in vino, veritas_ " might be, I would be willing to bet that it's true and that these players are actually revealing a significant aspect of their true nature.

<comment><USER20> Actually, we _do_ in fact say that X is a jerk over the telephone but less so in person. It's pretty well studied. The generic term is "psychological disinhibition" and it used to come up all the time around the issue of email and tone.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I use my developer skills for good? - <AUTHOR> I have been thinking about this for a while and a recent post[1] brought the question back:
How can I use my developer skills for good?
The post was about the elephant population in Africa and in general I have a strong interest in preserving nature. Are there organisations or open source projects that I can contribute to that have proven to be effective in this regard? I spend my increasingly scarcer free time on different hobby projects, but nothing that will do much good to the world. Maybe there are some ways in which I can change that.
Does anyone know of any organisations or projects that could always use some very part-time input from experienced developers?
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16471579 <comment><USER2> Donations are more valuable than part-time development. You're not gonna write some Python script that does for them what they could have done with a $500 check instead. Troubleshooting their back-office CSV imports won't pay for fences to keep poachers off reserves.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes of course, I know that and I already donate to good causes. I am just looking for a win-win situation where I get to have fun developing something that helps out people to preserve nature or help out people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I contribute in my free time to an organization called Love Justice (Previously known as Tiny Hands International). They're focusing on sex trafficking prevention globally, and we're currently struggling to keep the tech up with the organization as they are scaling. We initially started off deving just for the country of Nepal, but the organization is now expanding to over a dozen countries and we are working primarily on adapting the web app to support that.

They have some really cool stuff in the road map that we just don't have enough volunteers to keep up. Trying to use facial recognition to identify traffickers and discover repeat offenders, trying to map out trafficking networks as they travel through various countries, etc. But full disclosure, the cool stuff isn't really in active development right now as we're addressing other issues.

You can check out our repos here: [https://github.com/Tiny- Hands](https://github.com/Tiny-Hands) \- Currently we're using Django for the web server and AngularJS for the client. Hit me up if you'd want to get involved or learn more! (my email is my username with gmail)

</comment><comment><USER4> If you're looking to to do pro bono part time work you could consider becoming a coding instructor for a local learn to code program in your area.

If you're interested in doing work for international NGOs you could also look for a full time role at one of those organizations</comment>


ACTA rapporteur denounces ACTA mascarade - <AUTHOR> https://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/ACTA_rapporteur_denounces_ACTA_mascarade <comment><USER2> So... he washes his hands of the whole affair _after_ his job is done. Wouldn't it have been more effective to have exerted some influence on this process or leave it to spare his delicate moral sensibilities _before_ it was too late?

</comment><comment><USER3> "ou du peu de protection qu'il offre à nos indications géographiques". -> "or how little protection it gives to our geographical indications."

Does anyone have a better translation of that phrase in context? I'm curious what it means. My best guess is a reference to the idea that different EU members should be allowed to have somewhat different rules, but that seems like a bit of a long shot. I'm thinking this is a technical political term that didn't come over well.

<comment><USER4> I believe he is talking about trademark-like terms that designate the provenance of certain products, for example Cognac as opposed to brandy. For more see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%27origine_contr%C...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appellation_d%27origine_contr%C3%B4l%C3%A9e)

<comment><USER5> Yes, this is it. In Europe, this is something very important. For example, you can only name Camembert a Camembert cheese coming from the area around the Camembert village. As customers, it allows a quick check: this is the cheap "like" version, this is the real one as they have a European label on the packaging too.

<comment><USER3> Ah, yes, that does make more sense. Thank you both.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Was `rapporteur' his actual English language title, or is there a better translation? It seems to correspond to the sponsor or original author of a bill.

<comment><USER7> Yes, but only because English shamelessly ripped off the term from French. <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rapporteur>

<comment><USER8> English partly developed out of French (specifically Anglo-Norman French) following the Norman invasion in 1066.

Besides, it was French that shamelessly ripped off Vulgar Latin (re + portare, "to carry back")!

<comment><USER7> Sure, some of English is based on French, and there are a few words taken unmodified. But when it comes to legal terms, Norman French was used by lawyers in English-speaking countries for centuries. As a result, ideas and terms from French law are just taken wholesale by English-speaking legal systems (including grammar and syntax very foreign to English). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_French#Survivals_in_modern_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_French#Survivals_in_modern_legal_terminology)

<comment><USER8> 'S what I just said. From your link: "It [French] was used in the law courts of England, _beginning with the Norman Conquest_." If the average person habitually used legal terminology the way they use words like, say, "toilet," the Frenchness of those words would be completely inconspicuous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One problematic fact for trying to fend off this legislation is probably that google and wikipedia will likely not "go dark" for non-US proposed legislation.

<comment><USER10> The Italian Wikipedia was blacked out for such a proposal earlier. The rest of the European Wikipedias could do the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> So.... I dont understand. Is he about to publish something?</comment>