[MUD-Dev] Broken Economies (was RE: Learning about MUDs)

[Madman Across the Water]

Timothy Dang wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Apr 2001, Koster, Raph wrote:
 
>> UO actually did this. There was a "clean up Britannia" program

[snip]
 
> I remember hearing about that, but don't recall hearing how well it
> went. That's great! Do you think people really did just get rid of
> their trash, or did they accept that it was a generally good thing,
> and throw out stuff which they might have prized?

As a player at the time, and a reader of the UO newsgroup, it looked
to me that people mostly got rid of "trash", and some valuable items
that, realistically, they were never going to do anything with. And
then some of them went out and _created_ as much trash as possible so
they could throw it out to get shiny things, but that was to be
expected.

Do not underestimate the amount of trash people kept in their (then
limitless) houses. I heard stories about people finding recently
collapsed houses with dozens of chests filled with milk and coconuts
and plates and 4 dozen suits of ringmail. (The milk was particularly
funny- one newsgrouper found a check full of over 100 pitchers of
milk, evidently. That's it. Just milk.) When you kill orcs and they
leave ringmail, there is no use for it once you have even slightly
better armor, which is almost all of it. But when there is no item
limit for storage in your house... wow. The stuff people held onto!

All this is anecdotal, of course- I'm sure someone else here can pipe
up with things like actual numbers of gigs of space saved by removing
those items from the world. But the players could tell the difference
in lag, that's how substancial a success it was- and it's really the
only measure the players cared about.


Adam
(determined to participate a bit more. :)
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