PvP Memoirs: The Toll Booth

As part of my grand PvP commentary, I’ll be covering some of my fond memories of PvP in order to, hopefully, show you how much fun it can really be. Of course, some of these experiences will probably scare a few of you off, as there were times when I was incredibly… mean. Yes, I was a “PK” back in the days of Ultima Online. I’m not proud of it, but damn I had fun.

The first Memoir of a PvP Junky will cover what I’ve always referred to as the toll booth, which basically amounts to a chokepoint designed to allow me to gank people. There are many great ways to cause a chokepoint in MMOGs, but the best ways to do so existed back in the early days of UO. I will cover two of our ingenious methods for creating toll booths–one using tables, the other using houses.

First, I shall twist you the tale of the single-room home toll booth. It’s not very complicated, really. For background in one brief sentence, I will tell you that me and mine ruled the entire area of North Minoc on over to Vesper, and this is where the bulk of our shenanigans took place. We also ruled over Buccaneer’s Den for quite some time. For visual reference, check out this map. The areas within the red lines indicate the places my clan prowled, and I’ve labeled Toll Booth A and B (A is the location of the single-room home toll booth).

The single-room home toll booth was a triumph of simplicity. We placed a small house within a natural chokepoint–below a mountain and above the water. It left room for only one person to pass to “the peninsula” (what we called the area north of Toll Booth A and east of the mountain range). The thing about UO’s mechanics that made this particularly nice (for the bad guys) was that once you passed through someone, you would lose a little stamina. If you didn’t have full stamina, you couldn’t pass through a second person. This effectively trapped the victim if they were surrounded by other players or objects until they got their stamina back.

It’s easy to imagine, then, what we did. We positioned one person at the bottom right corner of the house, and one at the bottom left. Both were outside, and you couldn’t pass into the peninsula without walking through them. The way we roped people in, though, was that we were always hidden. You couldn’t see that there were two people standing there, so people would just wander into the trap unknowingly (the peninsula area was great hunting, too, so people came by regularly). When we were feeling creative, the two hidden guys never revealed themselves, and there was a person inside demanding payment to cross. Invariably, he was refused until the victim couldn’t leave the front of the house. If they continued to refuse payment, the guy inside opened the door and killed them (or the hidden players did).

See Figure A. The red outline is the house, the blue dots are us, and the green dot is our target. If you ever played UO, you might get a little amusement out of the way the victim responds. If you didn’t, you won’t get it, and that’s okay because I don’t like you.

The other toll booth, labeled Toll Booth B so appropriately on the map, was a bit more involved. It was invented out of necessity, because we scared people away from the peninsula almost entirely. Here is how it worked: On occasion, I would spend hours crafting tables. After creating a good 50-100 tables, I would pass them out to the other members of my clan, and we would trek from our castle to the road north of Vesper. We would then create an elaborate gauntlet with these tables, extending them out into the forest.

While it was entirely possible for players to move these tables, they usually just took the one-person-wide pathway we provided them in the road. From there, it was similar to the other toll booth. One of us would demand compensation for passage while others were hidden to prevent escape. Again, we would let people go if they gave us all their gold, but we usually killed them (I would often be the first person they had to pass through, and I often stole all of their gold before we demanded it, thus preventing the possibility for them to pay up and ensuring their demise… so mean).

What have we learned from this, class? Being creative to jack other people for their grip is really fun. That’s a strange moral for a story, but it’s true. Now, if only that were possible while still having some drawbacks, it would be a good addition for a game. Unfortunately, there were no repercussions in Ultima Online for this behavior. There are ways to provide realistic (within the context of a game world) consequences for such actions, and I’ll go over some eventually within my PvP ramblings.

Other PvP Posts:

• PvP Intro
• PvP as a Requirement