Hello!
I used to play UO back in 1998 and made a lot of friends who are still in touch to this day.
Most of us were Brazilians. We had a very strong community scattered on several shards, mainly on Chesapeake, Atlantic and Catskill I guess.
We had soooooo much lag back then. Used to play with like over 3k ping and a lot of packet loss, I have no idea how we stood to it haha. But it was soooo much fun. Everyone helping each other, living an almost real life (or maybe even more real than real life...) in the game, slowly improving on so many different skills and interests, creating our own legends, building houses, guilds, cities, wealth, pets, etc.
At some point, tired of making many protests in Lord British's castle asking for a server for us, trying to unite the community and among the conflicts that picking any of the shards we already had a decently sized community, we decided that everyone would have to give up and start fresh on... Hokuto! And we would make it our shard, haha. What an idea, moving to Japan, as if the lag wasn't bad enough haha. But, actually, 3000 or 3500 ping is almost just as bad, can't really feel the difference. We made a quit big guild there, the biggest at the shard back in time, everyone wearing Brazil's flag colors. But shortly after we started to get much better connections with the change on international routes and backbones that could drive our ping as low as 300ms on US's east coasts shards, so we ended up giving up and moving back. This time not everyone, but a good amount of people from others shard ended up starting on Chesapeake, and it started to really be the main shard of our community, eventually we had the biggest (in numbers) guild there too for some time.
I personally always loved playing a tamer. I love nature and animals in real life, specially horses, so I was in heaven when t2a came and we could tame wild horses there. The dream of eventually taming a dragon was really a big one, deep into my soul. The nightmares that we very rarely got to see moving inside the cities really amuzed me too. Taming back then was very hard and very rare. I slowly grew my skill and ended up being able to control dragons and white wyrms while they were still rare, it was awesome. But I couldn't tame them. I actually had my first white wyrm given to me by a pk, who i can't remember the name. But it was a red who used to hang around ice dungeon or buc's bank, using a tamed white wyrm and walking on foot. He had a small name. He probably killed me, and, like it probably only happen in UO, we ended up talking and becoming a bit like friends, and he ended up deciding to give me one wyrm. It was awesome! I was soooo happy, I played with that wyrm for ages, taking all care to not lose it, haha.
In that time we had a bug that when the pets crossed a server line they would lose all base dmg, besides the dragon breath (who was based on HP on those besties had a lot of HP, so remained very strong. So my wyrm wasn't exactly a big killer. But, with the HP it had, it still could make very short work of most normal monsters and nearly any player, as also there was a bug that we could make it follow someone (pet's command follow, then clicking the person) after telling it to attack the said target, and it would follow the player on a very crazy speed and they couldn't really get hid of them until dying hehe.
I remember once I was hanging with a friend on her two-store house (rare and valuable back there, when many people couldn't even afford or find a spot for a small house) and she logged out. I lost connection shortly after, still inside her house, and logged back outside, with my wyrm locked in (we needed keys to open houses at that time I think, haha). I made a lot of attempts to take the wyrm out by the house's window, but couldn't (the flying on windows did work, I even remember reading about people who used nightmares, so also used to fly in the beginning, to invade and loot people's houses by the windows). Wrost, the wyrm started getting sad on a bad luck stream issuing commands, and I couldn't feed it. I patiently waited her for a long time, and she didn't come back. I started talking to everyone on ICQ and found out her phone number and made my, maybe, first interstate phone call (very expensive for us at that time) to her real life house, asking her to log back in so the wyrm wouldn't go wild, and she promptly did and saved me, haha.
I also liked pvp a lot and even had my qstaff mage be my most played char for some time. But I couldn't leave taming behind, so I eventually started to duel using the tamer, picking a bear in place of the hally/katana/qstaff/shortspear combo. Taming was so strong that even using a single bear this way it was very strong on duels, probably still overpower. Crazy. And at that time we could use 20+ dragons if we wanted (even doing hit kills on the dragon's initials breath). People used to duel like this using a drake, but i found it was wayyyy too powerful. I went down to a grizlly bear, but also found it was too powerful, almost unbeatable. It had enough HP to not be killed before i could heal it, and i could focus on defense while the bear slowly took a decent chunk of enemies' HP. Sometimes I had to let myself go a bit down too, to lure the attackers on trying to finish me and forget a bit more of their HP... then, at some point, I would turn offensive and they had to low HP that had a decent chance to die, while it was almost impossible to kill, without magic weapons or poisoned blades like we dueled back then, someone who could focus on defense. So at some point i started to duel with bears weaker than grizzly, and only then I started to be on a disvantage and started not being able to kill people. Crazy stuff.
And if the tamer was such unbalanced even using a single bear, imagine using multiple dragons? It didn't take long until taming become very, very mainstream and everyone started to level one up, and OSI started to change the mechanics to make it more balanced. I confess, tho, that killing that exclusivity we previously had made me a bit sad. I didn't care for the balances, but it didn't feel good to see so many people who didn't had the taming heart becoming tamers just because it got so strong, later, after the balancing, still keeping it up at least for pvm.
Among the richest players back in that time were the GM smiths, that also were very rare. We had one in Brazilian community. He didn't like pvm or pvp. He really liked crafting, buying metal from miners in the bank, setting up his shops, etc. He was very rich in game for our standard. It was nice when professions really meant something.
GM resist was also very rare and so powerful that mostly top famous pvpers had it. Everyone saw the game as if it were based on player skill and not in game's equips or chars. But then, when someone who had lower than GM resist ended up somehow maximizing the skill (almost always it was due to some very short lasting bug upon some patch) or getting a new char with GM resist, they suddenly very often started to rank among the top pvpers too, sometimes starting to own other 7xGMs that used to kill them over and over when he only had 6xGM.
When trammel launched the game really went down for us. After the hally/katana template died it went even worse. None of us really liked the hit killers axers, the poison all around game-play, the harm harm harm disturbers, etc. Some still kept playing, some even were very good pvpers on those new systems, on top champs guilds (champ in case of chesa) when powerscrolls came, being factions leaders, etc., but none really had as much fun as before and, at some point, none was left.
Brazil is big and we were very young so, aside from those who lived on the biggest cities, most of us didn't met personally back there. But we grew older, shared important moments among this nice group of friends, helped each other pick what they would study in real life, started working, eventually moved and sometimes ended up on each other city and got real life help in the process from this community, saw the babies coming, etc. I really don't know of another game that made those kind of relationship so often like UO did.
We had a few friends from all around the world too. One of us, who actually was from my city, even moved to US to marry an American he met in the game.
Recently a few of us moved, by coincidence, at about the same time to a different country and got together there and restarted on the game, and now I'm here, relearning stuff or finding out about the new things that were made along those 20+ years and getting my way on this forum, that appears to have a deep community like those I got used to in UO. Hope i get accepted in it.
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