Anyone play official Ultima Online?

Dhalphir

WoW just isn't doing it for me anymore, and I'm thinking of getting back into Ultima Online. What I want is to hear from anyone who still plays on the official servers, or who plays on a really good player-run server, who can tell me some things about the state of the official servers at the moment.

jotate

Haven't logged on since summer 2005. Last I heard, EA was redoing the game engine in an attempts to salvage the few people still interested in playing, but longing for a non-1997 look.

Also, the economy was *wayyy* out of control. They had no effective gold sinks aside from Item Insurance, but that wasn't even close to enough to counteract the epic thousands and thousands of gold people were farming. Effectively making "starting fresh" an impossible task.

There were and are still decent player run servers, a friend of mine still messes around on one occasionally. The trouble is dealing with the fact that most of them get going, get good, and then die because the admins get bored and move on.

Sorry, this wasn't much help towards your questions, I just enjoy reminiscing about the game that sucked away 5 years of my life.

starmanbrand

I only have a bit of experience with AoS expansion, or as I like to call it: The expansion that screwed the game more than Trammel.

I'll just do you a favor and punch you in the head if you even CONSIDER paying for UO.

Not sure about the policy on these boards, but seeing as how we had a game on about a freeshard, those are your best bet.

New UO has different races and mages are still the hardest to become, but are now the weakest since they completely changed combat.

DO NOT PLAY.

Seg

I see adverts around for some UO free trial that is running right now.

http://www.uoherald.com/kingdomreborn/

jotate

For any mods that might be considering locking this thread due to the encouragement of playing free shards, EA (and Origin before they sold the game) have always been okay with free servers. They obviously don't encourage it, but to my knowledge have never discouraged it.

Drakmathus

magery is still the best skill in the game and getting GM isn't hard with a 100% lower reg cost suit. Gather up about 10k in gold (which isn't hard considering new characters start with 1k) go find a player vendor selling 100% LRC suits, buy one and (attended) macro away.

bushido/chiv combinations are complete bullshit when it comes to PvM, these builds are able to solo the gauntlet in dungeon doom and peerless monsters all day long.

The races aren't that big a deal. There is human and elf. Humans get better regeneration of health, stamina and mana, a higher carrying capacity and a base ability with all skills (even if you have 0.0 in a skill you treated as having 20 or 30 in it). Elves get higher mana, night sight and better stealthing/hiding (harder to track). Gargoyles are going to be introduced soon, I would hazard a guess that they will get crafting bonuses.

Dhalphir

So basically, find a good freeshard or don't play, is the consensus?

I used to play on the freeshard Battle for Sosaria, then it became Sosarian Rift, lasted about 3 days and the admin got bored.

Drakmathus

i'd play official if i had a pc. But I'm a sucker for that game. I wish someone would port all the old ultimas to the UO engine. It'd be so great.

Drakmathus

I built the PC. I'm on atlantic. The new client sucks nuts. I wish they'd quit trying to update the graphics like that.

Oboro

Go play 2D, duder. I'm on Great Lakes but I think I have some old (read: 9 years old) toons over on Atlantic, haha.

Drakmathus

my brother has guys on Great Lakes (we use the same account, but he isn't playing now). I'm kind of afraid to log into them because I'm not sure which ones are red and he has tons of shit from his house stuffed onto his guys.

JNighthawk

Dhalphir wrote: »

So basically, find a good freeshard or don't play, is the consensus?

I used to play on the freeshard Battle for Sosaria, then it became Sosarian Rift, lasted about 3 days and the admin got bored.

Seriously? B4S was the best server I've ever played on. Who were you? I was Joshua Nighthawk. My first day there, I reported the duping bug that ended up causing them to wipe the server, and they gave me GM mining/smithing because I reported it instead of abusing it. Unfortunately, they fixed the exact problem, but never the underlying cause of the duping, so they eventually had to wipe because everyone had full SS suits.

Dhalphir

JNighthawk wrote: »

Dhalphir wrote: »

So basically, find a good freeshard or don't play, is the consensus?

I used to play on the freeshard Battle for Sosaria, then it became Sosarian Rift, lasted about 3 days and the admin got bored.

Seriously? B4S was the best server I've ever played on. Who were you? I was Joshua Nighthawk. My first day there, I reported the duping bug that ended up causing them to wipe the server, and they gave me GM mining/smithing because I reported it instead of abusing it. Unfortunately, they fixed the exact problem, but never the underlying cause of the duping, so they eventually had to wipe because everyone had full SS suits.

I was either Dhalphir or Pineapple.

I forget which.

I can't remember whether I had adopted Dhal or not yet.

All I remember about that is that my friend and I lived together in one of the castles that B4S had, and we had pretty much every dye tub in existence. We used to invite people over to our castle and let them pick a colour to dye their armor with.

Everyone always chose the ice blue or the black.

But yeah, I always found it HILARIOUS that the best way to make money was to "pick cotton".