They agreed that deleting the items was a terrible idea. I was too excited about having accomplished my long held goal to 'catch some dupers.'' Cotten bit his tongue, told the team they would not be auto-deleting all the dupes, then spoke to Ultima Online's customer service folks. 'I hadn’t considered that, actually,' writes Cotten. 'We identified the dupers themselves and their storage depots: they had homes full of their duped items and NPC vendors selling them to the players.' Tim Cotten Cotten says the reaction was something along the lines of: “Mmm, I don’t think deleting them all is a good idea, you’ll hurt too many players.” In fact, management had a pretty good point to make about this. This code was allowed to run for a few weeks and then, with the gathered data, Cotten and his fellow devs could set about eradicating the dupes.Įxcept… management didn't want them to clean house. The important point is that Cotten implemented a global hash registry on Ultima Online's rarest items, which he compares to 'invisible dye' that would stain the duped items in a way only the developers could see.

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