I have heard no serious talk about combining shards, unless you count what other players randomly say as "serious."

Ultima Online is a ten year-old MMO property..... and is still wildly profitable - Temporary Stratics Forums

That thread is instructive about the reality of UO's condition, which is actually not bad. Why people keep insisting it is bewilders me.

-Galen's player

Lets do it right

Combining shards may be needed but if we do start moving players, then lets one step more.

Give players a way to transfer to a new shard, with their house as a deed containing items in house.

Keep oldest shards , make some of them normal shards (no Felucca ruleset on any facets) and some PvP shards with Felucca ruleset on all facets.

Siege should be one of the PvP shards.

Now all will get a month to move to their shard of choice.

The accounts who had not moved after a month will be packed and stored on a server and first time a player login, he will get a message, that he can't play before he had choosen a shard.

I am for combining shards.

The biggest strength UO has as a game are the interactions with other people.

"I don't want all my farming locations crowded." <-- then play a single player game.

Time to put the multi-player back into MMO.

Not sure how I feel about it.... Larger populations would be good, but at the same time I don't know if EAM has the manpower for such merges. I mean, if something went wrong would EAM have the man power to fix it in a timely manner? In the age of MMO's even 3-4 hour down times can be very harmful, and expensive for the customer.

******

You hit it on the head there. Wishing for the old days where spawning was somthing you had to fight for tooth and nail against competing guilds. Faction wars, that actually felt something like war.

Would like to add also, when i say combining shards im talking about possibly giving options for the SMALL shards to join specific other SMALL to MID sized shards. And Pre-matching the moves according to shard playstyle and history. The way this works most effectively is over a period of time and only allow the transfer one way, :IE. Baja to Atlantic, but not vise versa. (As an example.)

- The only true talk I've heard of combining shards in the past decade by the Dev team has been that we are all free to transfer characters to whatever shard we please.

Besides, why restrict the realm when there might need be some room for expansion down the line?

Some people like high population density. Some like low.
Maybe latency is a concern - well the more people and the lower the amount of shards (by way of combining shards), it would stand to reason there would be an overall increase in lag.
So give up the real estate if you want a higher population and perhaps sacrifice and have a higher ping.
But the option to goto a more populated shard has always been around & with character transfers you won't even lose your skills or possessions (aside from housing).

So, why talk of combining shards?

Unless you just want to save 20-120 bucks or the timely task of starting anew?

Consolidating shards sounds like a sure-fire way to lose some current subscribers, to me; no matter how it is hypothetically pulled off. That mean less UO income. This is not good because if UO doesn't make enough money EA pulls the plug to appease the stockholders who don't give a rats hiney how much potential future profits UO can still muster. So no, please do not consolidate shards. Rather, why not try to increase the playerbase and fill up what is there and make more. That's how to make more money and keep UO kicking, imo.

Combining shards is impossibe because of player housing, i know i wouldn't want to loose my house + storage or it's location where it is placed.

I'd consider coming back if there were more people around..

I mean cmon.. Trammel cities are now also empty. Cities that were full of life are now DEAD. I dont get any feeling from that. UO was all about feeling, being a working world. That is lost with the people.. and now all hang at certain hotspots. Sure there were hotspots before as well but were still lots and lots running about.

Hell id even give away my current account and get me a new one.

Well the Cities are empty because there are simply too many Cities, with trammel the Cities got doubled, Malas gives you 2 more, while 1 isn't really a Citie, T2A 2 more, Illshenar Gargoyle.

Players are just spreaded out along all the Cities, it's no surprise to me if all of them look empty now.