Hi all,
A little background on myself. I fell in love with Ultima when I was first introduced to Ultima 3 back on the old Commodore 64! (yeah...I am old...LOL!) When I saw UO on the shelf of a Best Buy back in 1998, I was like 'Hey...I remember that!' I had no frickin idea what the 'Online' part meant, but it was Ultima! I loaded it, started in Moonglow, and after watching 'NPCs' talk and run around the bank, it dawned on me that there were other people playing at the same time! (I then embarrassed myself by trying to talk to an actual NPC not knowing that not everything was player controlled.)
Over 8 years later, mostly playing on Europa as Cyrus the Virus, watching the birth of Trammel (and the beginning of the end in my opinion), the Malas land grab, the introduction of samurai and ninjas (wtf?), the final straw was cross sharding and the mass duping of items which diminished the value of my years of acquired rare hunting, I left the paid servers and discovered the beauty of free shards!
My wife and I both played, and when our two sons were old enough, we brought them into the fold, ultimately taking over a server from a family we had become friends with when they became financially strained.
It was great...at first. My wife and I took to it like fish to water, creating new dungeons, me struggling to teach myself to code/script new things without crashing the server (thank god for backups!)
It was fun until dealing with the constant onslaught of policing players that always tried to find exploits of grief others became a full time job. So we handed the server off and decided to walk away for a while.
Fast forward a few years, my sons are adults now, one actually works with me, and one of our co-workers mentioned UO and we were all surprised anyone had heard of it after all these years of 3D games. So, we downloaded it again, found a shard we used to play was still up, but ur accounts, understandably long gone. No worries, we'll just start over.
OMG...the training! I remember GMing Lockpicking on an OSI server manually...so I remembered EasyUO to the rescue!
UO...a harder habit to kick than cigarettes! I look forward to joining your circle!
