This is the tale of a man. A man with passion, strength, and tenacity to see his dream come true. Come with me on an adventure through the mind of a man who may have aspergers and maybe some other unidentified illnesses, who has a deep passion to relive the glory days of Ultima Online. Almost two years ago, a very subborn and confused hermit came out of the woods and remade his old UO shard. It was unusually popular, peaking at around 2200 concurrent users. That's considered pretty good for a UO shard last I checked, but as history continues to show, it never lasts. Like Lum, Azaroth was an old school UO player who enjoyed the game for its sandbox-like design (pking all day erreday). Unlike Lum, he couldn't quite move on when UO:Renaissance split the game into pve and pvp worlds. Az was inspired one day when looking deep into the abyss and saw ronald mcdonald cutting open a child and eating his flesh. Thus, his adventure to relive and improve the glory days began. The first time around, things went about as well as expected. You know how some of us got mad at pks and cheaters and macroers for being jerks? Yeah, that happened to the owner of an old school UO shard. Who didn't see that coming? The second time was slightly more promising. New stuff, like city ownership, was supposed to add some more fun and longevity on top of the obviously superior old school sandbox design. From what I can tell, that longevity lasted about a year, as Az became disillusioned again and ignored his own server for months at a time. Now he's fired up and ready to go on yet another revamp of his server. I can't find anything substantial about this revamp, so I'm going to guess this is just a wipe and we'll see some fixes and tweaks to the current system.
Plus, the inevitable meltdown aimed at paying customers would be gold. That was the initial plan. People kept calling it "IPY 3", so eventually I had to cave and actually make IPY 3. Which is fun, to be honest. Quietly working on Ultima Online is much more relaxing and enjoyable than actually running the live server.
You know, letting the public know the identity of the person in charge of a particular server and letting that person tweak rules and drop rates and whatnot, within reason and a range, might be a fun way for a company to collect data on what rule balance changes are actually fun and fair and make people keep or return to playing. It'd also foster a sense of community, but you know, what is that.
