Over at Tobold’s, I seem to have set off a discussion for the second time in a week. It starts because Tobold asserts,

I think that RMT is possible to eradicate. You just need to make gold “bind on pickup”. That is, you need to remove all possibility of asymmetric trades where one player can give or send gold to another player. And you need to change the auction house system to make it anonymous and blind, so that players can’t buy a worthless rock for 1000 gold and transfer money that way.

Technically, you would have to make every item in the entire world bind on pickup. Eradicate all forms of trade. Remove healing. Remove grouping. Remove all forms of assistance between one player and another.

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This post is about Linkrealms. In the end, anyway. Time for another anecdote, which I have told some of before.

There were always questions about what to do with Ultima Online after it launched. EA was moderately baffled by the project, and the lawsuit didn’t help. People had figured out the network protocol, they had figured out the asset file format, they had figured out the map format… it wasn’t long until there were people making better tools for UO data than we had in-house.

The most notable of these was probably UOAssist, which prompted the creation of a program called “UOPro” for tools that we approved for usage and didnt’ consider exploits… as I recall, the UOPro program didn’t last very long. My favorite, though, was the one that let you edit hues, the palette files that were used to tint clothing and monsters — our in-house tool for that was so terrible that we promptly stopped using it and used the fan-created one instead.

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