Vzácné předměty v Ultima Online byly původně bug

“Rares” in Ultima Online weren’t really a feature.They were a bug.

True black clothing started going for hundreds overnight. So we removed it (the artists hated it as an abomination). Which just made the color rarer, which drove up value even more.

The upshot of rares? Players started launching websites and forming communities around collecting, building lists and making real money and creating strategy guides around rares.

After banging our heads against this sort of thing for a few weeks, we embraced it instead. Players felt clever. They had invented a minigame out of our bugs, and it was a minigame people were willing to pay thousands of dollars a month to play.

Our wisdom was not in inventing an awesome cool collectible feature. It was in surrendering control to the awesome power of emergent behavior.