I know UO has changed ALOT in the past years starting with Trammel and going into whatever else has happened since then. I respect that it has new players who know/want nothing else. This is fine but at the same time I see threads about populations on many shards being low. My question is this.

Why doesn't EA make an Official PRE:UOR shard? Look at all of the free shards out there that have done this. Many have good populations also and these are free player-run shards!

If EA were to make an official one I would bet it would be the most populated shard on the server. They would literally get back hundreds and hundreds of players who still rant (like me lol) about the good old days of UO.

To me it seems like garunteed money in the bank for them. I don't understand why they won't do this.

Also my apologies if this has been covered before

The problem is people have different ideas on what a Pre UOR shard is

I'm 90% sure they're not going to bring out a pre uor/aos/lbr/t2a shard, it's been debated and argued about across many forums

I don't think even EA remembers what a pre UOR shard was

(Before I forget though, no discussion/advertising of free shards )

Ah. Thanks for the heads up!

I think it could be a good idea. If it brings in more customers it couldn't be a bad thing, you know.

(I personally wouldn't play it even if it were free, but that is just me)

Im with Tuka.

I've tried those retro freeshards for a couple years. All they are are gank squads. It's not fun. Trammel was a good idea, trust me. I've been through the whole anti-trammel phase. I think the general misconception is that UO "vets" hate trammel. For me it's not trammel, it's the gameplay. Resist system/insurance/special moves/weapon attributes/arties/neon weapons etc. Bleh. Pretty much everything implemented when AoS hit. Everything got so complicated. Before I could become GM in my "class", grab a weapon and some regs and then head over to fel to PvP (I didn't know anyone. I just jumped in). Then I could go back to trammel and make some cash or RP with the guild. It was simple and it was the best game I have played to date.

And on that note I'd like to thank Adam for keeping this site up for so many years. Damn good work man.

Do we all think that EA can or will afford to invest in developing a third type of shard. We already have issue's with production shards vs Siege/Mugen. It just seem to me that there wouldn't be enough of ROI on it.

Very true.

Uh.... I don't think EA cares what old school players want. The fact is UO is a very old game. It is relatively easy to upgrade the number of locations a player can go to by adding a new facet to the moongate gump. And, well, it does boggle my mind that they actually changed the Trammel and Feluccia maps considerably to add the new ML locations.....

But, really, how profiitable was the original game with its Fel-only ruleset? The game went from Beta to an official release to one expansion (adding in T2A). You can tell that they really must have enjoyed making all those secret passages into the Lost Lands. But then they decided the best way to save the game from the crapper was to make another facet called Trammel with the third expansion.

I'm sure in the old days, having two facets wasn't such a big deal. But after people stopped going to Fel in favor of doing extensive PVM on the safer shards, the programmers decided to give us Power Scrolls and re-wire Fel to give people who aren't normally into PVP the chance to go to Fel.

You're just lucky they didn't decide to purge Fel completely from the game and make everything just Tram-based. They could have done that, but they didn't. Sure, they've added insurance with AoS.

True, there are people out there who are so hardcore in love with the original play style that they've volunteered massive amounts of money so people could play old school style for free. Those free shards are..... FREE. They aren't allowed to make a profit. But they do take donations. I'd bet very few of the players on free shards actually donate.

The subscriber base of UO is probably the lowest amount of customers that EA has. The majority of their money is perhaps coming from sellling sports games or licensed games like the Lord of the Rings... I forget if EA published the Harry Potter games.

To be honest, I realize UO isn't really as important as many of its stoutest fans think it is. Maybe they respect us more than the makers of Lineage & EverQuest do (considering both of those games have sequels that were actually published). Or maybe they don't?

The decision to make Trammel was based on losing subscrptions to rampant PKing and massive customer complaints. Player events went down the tubes because of CONSTANT raiding without giving those folks the time to enjoy the game themselves.The plus side of that particular expansion was the doubling of housing space.
It's always been my view that the mistake Origin made at the time was they should have made the existing shard Trammel, and the new one Feluccia. The inability of many fine player run towns to make the housing transition cost us many of those towns. And that was a shame. With those towns went many RPers who particpated within those towns.

The number of subscribers is only relevent to the ROI or profit margin.

~ Se'an