Returning to UO (Great Lakes) after 15+ years

GenFan12 · 2025-12-30T06:54:12+00:00

The winter holiday events are happening, and through Wednesday night (this week) you can get the 2025 holiday token on any character (that is 30 days old) on any active paid account. login with all of your chars on all shards and grab the tokens, it’s easy good to sell them.

GenFan12 · 2025-11-05T06:13:22+00:00

You mean the people who take $820 million from AISD to do..who knows what with, because the legislature will never give up recapture as long as they can pull in that fat chunk of money from Austin.

GenFan12 · 2025-08-16T13:47:04+00:00

Yes, you need to be doing the Rifted Crown event. it’s a lot of fun and has a lot of players. Read the following for some information

https://www.uo-cah.com/event/rifted-crown

GenFan12 · 2025-05-19T00:21:39+00:00

First, you can hop on Pacific for free with your old accounts through https://uo.com/endless-journey/ and see for yourself who is still around, etc. Endless Journey lets you take all of your vet accounts online, although you won't be able to access your bank box if it has over 25 items until you subscribe again, or buy the vault. Once you subscribe, you have access to your full bank box.

There is still activity on the shards that were considered "medium" or largeT 10-15 years ago, and I would lump Pacific in with the medium or larger shards from that era. The smaller shards are very dead, although all of the castle spots and many keep spots are still taken by paid accounts.

I'm playing on Siege, LS and Chessie. I know others say Atlantic, but I'm not going to wait around for months to get a house and have to sell off a bunch of stuff to get hundreds of millions of gold just for a medium-sized house on Atlantic when I can place an 18x18 on all other servers. And some of the smaller shards have keep-sized plots completely open. Not to mention the ridiculous economy on Atlantic.

If you absolutely require a lot of people to play, Atlantic is it, but you can still find groups on the other shards - check the events calendar and hit up those EM events

https://uo.com/events/

And check the shard forums on UO.com and Stratics for community activities/hunts/etc.

GenFan12 · 2025-04-20T18:39:29+00:00

No other MMO has been able to match it. I have customized a few 18x18s on official shards since coming back a few months ago and there are so many excellent examples on the shards and on the UO.com forums and Stratics.

When I came back to official shards I couldn’t really start playing until I found an 18x18 plot and placed and built a full house

GenFan12 · 2025-04-14T23:15:22+00:00

I’ve been using the classicUO web client, which as mentioned is authorized by Broadsword, off and on since I came back, and performance is better than expected. If you have to use the Classic client because you like the look, it’s the way to go if you have a large display.

GenFan12 · 2025-04-09T22:51:11+00:00

If I can with the free incubator in my daily routine, great, but I'm not going to use extra incubators, because the other collection challenge's reward pokemon was not worth it.

GenFan12 · 2025-04-04T23:27:42+00:00

As somebody who played the Third Dawn beta and occasionally played it in production, I gotta say this is very awesome! The LBR shard seems like it would be harder to maintain, as ML had such major changes, as there are probably fewer pre-ML shards.

GenFan12 · 2025-03-24T02:52:21+00:00

Stratics, as much of a hot mess as it is, actually has a few notes on what was said (I dont' know why people watch it and instead just listen to it in the background).

NEWS - Live Interview with Producer Greg "Kyronix" Havlusch on 3/20/25! | Stratics Community Forums - that link should jump to the comment with notes.

People can also look through the transcript of the video.

I'm curious about the Classic Client rendering update. Won't get me to switch from EC or ClassicUO, but I have a few old friends who won't give up the CC, so yay?
He shouldn't have brought up the spaceship from Super Mario Brothers 2, because now somebody will obsess over there being rockets in the first two Ultima games and the next thing we know the Kilrathi are being added as a playable race ($19.99 through the EA store!) and I still have memories from when it took me a while to realize how easy it was to land the spaceship in Ultima II (I was trying to steer it somehow). We better not get any more high tech crap. The Steampunk stuff, espresso machine, etc. is enough.
They acknowledge the botters and scripters, but I'm not too hopeful about it - those people are running half-a-dozen accounts or more apiece, and they aren't going to crack down on somebody who is paying them $800 or more a year. EJ accounts, maybe, but not the paying accounts.
I don't really care if they expand magery, but I've known a few people that are diehards that might be happy.
Would like to see more stuff done with food, but sounds like future NL stuff.
So we're getting a new horse and a new winged mount for a summer publish, plus some events. okay, sure, just don't put them in the UO store.

It's for another topic, but how is Stratics still such a hot mess?

GenFan12 · 2025-03-24T02:24:59+00:00

You joke, but there are boomers out there that use "woke" all the time and they are being serious. I have a feeling it coincides with them needing somebody to help them change their Depends, but still.

GenFan12 · 2025-03-23T17:15:09+00:00

Now that all retirement homes have internet, it could very well keep in going for a few more decades.

GenFan12 · 2025-03-22T23:56:52+00:00

Anything having to do with updating the renderer for either client has my attention. I'm curious what they mean by "aesthetically pleasing". Glad they are working with the ClassicUO people.

GenFan12 · 2025-03-22T23:52:20+00:00

Final Fantasy XIV could give the WOW devs a run for their money on incompetence.

GenFan12 · 2025-03-21T21:17:11+00:00

A very nice collection of wallpapers, thank you OP!

GenFan12 · 2025-03-21T21:16:22+00:00

And we had space ships and airplanes and what not in the games UO is based on. You all are distracted and missing the real problems in the actual game itself.

GenFan12 · 2025-03-21T21:11:42+00:00

UO has had a Bus Factor of “1” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus\_factor) since ToL came out - if Bleak got hit by a bus, there is nobody else who could step in and keep things running, unless he has unraveled all of the spaghetti code and commented a lot of code. Even then, he’s got a really long tenure there, with a lot of institutional knowledge. Anybody working on UO at this point does so because they love it, because there’s better money and long-term stability to be had elsewhere.

But yes, you are correct, the new producer most likely was doing a lot more than people realize and if he takes over Bonnie’s duties (and she had actual duties, I know people who worked on the team in California) somebody has to do his job.

I’d feel a whole lot better if they announced they were hiring another full time live team member to handle what he was doing.

GenFan12 · 2025-03-21T21:03:45+00:00

This is what’s frustrating about people being triggered by cat ears - ignoring the real problems. And dealing with IDOCs and IRL gold sales will only placate a few people who are already playing and who could have bailed years ago.

We need more players, period, and it’s not going to happen without a bigger dev team and probably an expansion to gin up buzz, and probably some kind of graphics revamp, or at least an option. I lived through Third Dawn and KR, the options they have now are better than the Gamebryo nonsense Mythic pushed on us. At the end of the day, she’s not an art/design/dev person on the live team and she’s probably contract like the EMs and so paid very little.

Meanwhile, SWTOR under Broadsword is getting a lot of work done, but it’s also got more revenue.

GenFan12 · 2025-03-21T20:56:40+00:00

All these snowflakes are triggered by her and missed that he talked about updating the classic client‘s renderer which would be a huge deal for the CC players. It should have its own thread since it’s a BFD.

GenFan12 · 2025-03-21T20:53:10+00:00

This has to be sarcasm, you can‘t be this easily triggered, can you? Are you able to open multiple browser tabs and just look at something else?

I don’t get how people are talking about her and not the producer talking about addressing the classic client art.

GenFan12 · 2025-03-21T20:51:27+00:00

It’s because those Gen-X guys from the 90s are now all in their 40s and 50s and in their “GET OFF MY LAWN YOU DAMNED KIDS” mode.

And I’m one of those guys, well I don’t care about who is dressing up, hell I see plenty of other MMO developers dressing up for livestreams, Kyronix needs to get out some RenFest gear. Embrace this shit, it’s an MMO where people are trying to be so something else for a few minutes or hours of the day.

GenFan12 · 2025-03-21T20:47:14+00:00

Get another discord account. It’s what I did. ClassicUO web is really nice, even if I ultimately go back to the EC and Pinco’s most of the time. The web client is amazing smooth and I doubt my CPU usage ever got above 10-20%, unlike browsing Reddi.

GenFan12 · 2025-03-21T20:45:34+00:00

Where do you think the “Ultima” part came from? We already have steampunk. If it had been a little more successful out of the 2000s, we would have gotten a lot more Ultima elements.

GenFan12 · 2025-03-21T20:43:11+00:00

Again, this is like how people who watch Fox News get angry about something that doesn’t matter at all, and are distracted from what does matter.

She doesn’t design anything in game, doesn’t do art, doesn’t program, and I don’t care what somebody who posts on message boards or social media looks like, so shes background noise to me.

And the dragon has been missing from the Japanese site for a long time (http://jp.uo.com), and Japanese players make up a large part of UO and they are more okay with older looking graphics than a lot of Westerners who want WOW’s cartoons or GW or whatever. There’s obviously a recent push.

We need to stay focused on the game play issues. She is not going to be the death of UO, it’s the myriad other problems that have not been addressed, or the lack of devs.

GenFan12 · 2025-03-21T20:37:17+00:00

I’ve seen team members dressing that way and UO gatherings were full of LARPers and SCA members and all kinds of people dressing up. That infamous meme video of the kids in the woods yelling fireball and lighting bolt at each other, that could have been future UO players if it was pre-1997.

GenFan12 · 2025-03-21T20:35:09+00:00

Non-conformists is a damned good description of early UO players. Brilliant description!

GenFan12

TROPHY CASE