I have noticed that we tend to reach back to what we thought was comfortable in UO and wish that we could revert to it. I am no different and do not fault anyone for thinking that way, but, I say take what we have and hope they fix the issues that currently exist in game.
What are some of the problems? The gold, underpopulation, issues on Siege (I don't know what they are), and then all kinds of other things we don't like...item based, no skill (new pub fixes this I think).
I think I am going to post my simple solution to fixing some of the bigger problems in game:

Gold:
a) (This was mentioned another post) Wipe out the excess gold but at least leave them 5 mil on their account if they already have over 5 mil. One time event.

b) Kill the scripters and deleted their accounts, gold, house, items and any of their kin...ok, not their kin.

I prefer choice B. This is already something they are doing, and hopefully their diligence in this effort will keep them from scripting. This ensures that folks that have amassed great wealth through honest means are not punished for the actions of those cheats.

Alternative solution: Create a scenario that brings total destruction to the lands. Seriously. Imagine a time in real history where all knowledge and basically civilization was lost. The Greek Dark Ages. Maybe a huge meteor hits WBB and all knowledge and creatures die, leaving only a few to restart civilization. Or a super massive monster war machine comes in and destroys all we know, reclaiming all their rares and gold and taking it all back into the dungeons with them...along with a few elves for entertainment. You can leave the elves ... they are not that bad. With this great catastrophe comes the destruction of all items...gold, rares, houses, pets, skills (hello dark ages, we all become estupid again) and maybe a couple of cities become uninhabited, and others come back to life. Maybe some of them nice looking cities in Ilshenar. Monster relocate to new areas (new locations so it is all an adventure again) and harass the now weak human/elf population. Perhaps in this great upheaval, some of the shards themselves are destroyed (deleted to force populations to merge and thus an underpopulated shard now has life...or disappears and the players go to another shard). Now, UO is entirely different and the economy is fixed, the smith is important again (temporarily) and it is all an adventure.

That is probably too extreme...but, wouldn't it be neat!

Now back to reality...ain't gonna happen. We are going to have to accept what we have and hope we can provide enough constructive criticism to encourage change and fixes. UO is still UO, and if it doesn't change it dies. That is like a language, UO is constantly evolving and constantly getting better and at times worse...but in the end it is fluctuating and if you give it a chance can be a lot of fun. I have tons of complaints, but in the end I still log on and go play, and during that time I forget about the things I was complaining about. In the end it is not that important to me. What matters is that I am escaping reality for a little while and playing a game.

If only..

Armageddon....when was that?

Didn't the spell Aragetton(however you spell it) destroy the Avatar and the guardian in the final Ultima(which btw was a terrible terrible game).

Yup, Armageddon was cast in the end of Ultima 9. It was contained within the Barrier Of Life spell, so it didn't wipe out all of Britannia, but only those within the Barrier, namely the Guardian and the Avatar. Though they weren't completely wiped out, more like their earthly forms were destroyed, thus fusing them back together as one higher being - hence the name Ascension for the game.

I very much enjoyed the game though, the ending twist in the plot just sucked.

yup that was the problem I had with the game, the end it just got worse and worse as the game progressed. AND THEN the bugs and glitches and crashes....urg those were annoying. Every 30-45 minutes a crash.

So.....
what about the ideers in my post eh? Good not so good...how about my conclusion? Trying to hijaczor my post.

Well getting rid of scripters and dupings etc. of course would be grand, and would help fix quite a bit of imbalances and economy warpings from getting worse. Deleting the products of said activities would do some fixing retroactively as well, though it's impossible to be done fairly since the items & gold are now in possession of god knows who...

Simply bringing about an apocalypse that destroys everything is just a temporary solution, like anything that just "resets" our accumulated wealth. It won't remove the problems why we have an inflated economy in the first place, so eventually we'll be in the same situation again. What we need is more lasting changes to the very economical structure. What those would be I can't say, I'm far from a genius when it comes to money matters

But I guess it's fairly clear we do need more gold sinks.