I'm one of those players who's been playing UO off and on for years and I'm coming back from a fairly long off. Working up a blacksmith again, I'm noticing a trend in skill gains that I remember as being vaguely familiar. Let's take today, for example. I'm at 94.x smithing, I start making circlets and I gain .3 within about the first 40 of them. Then I go for another 30 or so without a gain. I switch to royal circlets and gain another .3 within about 20. Since then I've made another 100 royal circlets as well as about 30-odd regular ones and gained twice. This is one of my better days, actually. I've had the same thing happen before on other skills recently (tailoring or tinkering, for example) where I get several gains in rapid succession followed by a sharp drop after I've been going a while.

I can think of three hypotheses for this.
1. The GGS has been changed to make the first several attempts after a time more likely to gain, instead of making one attempt guaranteed.
2. The anti-macro code is still in effect and punishing people for trying to gain skill by making the same thing over and over.
3. Random statistical clustering.

Does anyone who's been following the updates more closely than I have know which one it is?

#3