cost vs. reward! My way of thinking is they can take legal action and get them shut down but how many players will start paying to play after that? my guess is very few. Most free shards imo again, are run by people with relatively not much money so the monetary gain is nill. All this legal action considering the number of free sites out there would be very costly. Also I tend to agree with Dip, many UO vets play freeshards for whatever reason, low money, liked it how it used to be, whatever...and there is always the possibility it will whet the appetite to come back to EA