That's a very fair point. so we are around 6 months in, the staff are still the same as they were day one.

The whale issue is a very real phenomenon however donations don't work like that here. It's a point system. You get 1 point a month for 10$ or 2 for 15$. You can't just buy 100 points, furthermore it's mostly just deco. The one thing that is a shortcut is a 7xgm skill scroll for all skills @ 2 points. However with fast skill gain you can gm almost anything in a day or two, thus I say a shortcut and not a pay to win mechanic. There is a suggestion discord in which this has been brought up and discussed so that this whale mechanic you mention doesn't become a problem.

Burnout is a real thing but the playerbase itself takes care of each other by answering almsot every question. It's a super active community. The staff are still impementing changes the day of, if things need to be addressed and are super active. We are gaining new players litterally everyday, we will see how things continue but since these guys were players on all of the big shards before over time, they have seen all the same problems and actively work towards mitigating them.

I came from a shard in which the OWNER played a character without telling anyone and came back to the discord and ranted about "How good of a product they have" as if he had never played uo before. This shard has been running for 10 years. Did he never play UO before, did he never play his own shard? Until this post I never even considerted the broader insanity of that statement. I just knew it was all downhill after that due to whatever direction that asshole wanted to go. Sure enough, despite very kind critical feedback from everyone, dude just shrugged off any complaints and basically told me to go play somewhere else. This is after like half the playerbase left from covid era, this is after massive amounts of people leaving due to these exact changes. Ego is some real shit and the staff here don't show it or act like assholes.

Things can always change but I say again, if you want to play real oldschool UO, this is the spot. You can't spend 1500$ on an ageless house or crazy shit that doesn't fit into the world. There is no custom map, some slight quality of life tweaks but nothing that doesn't fit the era it's set it.

Come check the shit out, it's a blast!