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.
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.