Thanks for the input, guys. Think I might try Catskills out. I puttered around Lake Superior and Atlantic for a while, but it's just crawling with people that've been playing for 9 years. Kind of spoils the wonder of the game for a new(ish) palyer if everyone's got rares, Nightmares, etc. Know what I mean? But I guess that'll be the case everywhere. Heh. Crazy. I can remember when Nightmares were first introduced as mounts and all the hell I went through to be one of the first to have one. And now everyone's got one. They're no more special than a pack horse .

And money, my god... I can remember breaking my back mining and smelting ingots for what amounts to chump change these days. People toss millions around like we did thousands back then.

And have I mentioned how we used to march both ways uphill in blizzards just to reach spawn points?

Siege is a PvP server, right? Is it at all like classic UO? Some good guys just trying to do their thing, meanwhile PKers roam the mines, dungeons etc.? Or is it just solid PvP like say in Felucca? I miss the dynamic of having Pkers PLUS innocent players. Made things that much more interesting.

Siege is an "advanced player shard." You can read about the differences of siege and normal shards at uo.com. I was actually talkin about the money thing with a buddy of mine. We figured it took you about a hour to make around 6000-8000 gold in game back in 99, due to the fact that you had to carry regs, arrows, items, had no bag of sending, and you could only have 225 stats, with 100 stat cap on any of the 3 stats. If you died, you had to go back to your corpse and loot everything individually.

Now you have bags of sending, insurace, fast loot of your corpse, mounts and animals that can carry stuff for you, LRC suits, and skills that don't cost you anything to help you. So I can carry around 20k on me without a problem then send it home with a bag of sending. Can make like 200k a hour if you got a good spawn to yourself. Oh and back then it would take like 5 people just to kill a bone knight, now it's the exact opposite. One person can take on 5 bone knights.

If you're looking for a relatively populated shard, I would first go with location and ping, then pick from that. Do not come to Atlantic. That one is for sure. I would suggest Great Lakes, then maybe Catskills or Chesepeake.

Go for siege then.

On the other shards all you will find (occasionally there will be an exception) are packs of people running around with their guilds, all decked out in the top gear and artifacts looking to pick a fight with an opposing gang of people decked out in the top gear and artifacts.

Siege will have both the pvpers and other characters, because there is no trammel. I wouldn't go as far to say it's the "classic UO." It's far from it now-a-days.

You might also look into "other" shards.

If you ever feel the need to try to RP try Europa out. Otherwise I'm sure the other populated shards are better.

And merc, I couldn't take one bone knight, even if I tried really hard!

LoL, well I was just using it as an example. Cause back then we had something called "The Wall" in deceit level 2, where people would just stack themselves on top of each other to kill bone knights. One would take the damage while the masses would hit the bone knight. It was an effective way to get gold and gain skills plus control the spawn because the bone knights couldn't walk through the wall of people, however, bone knights are a minor annoyance now, haha.

Well I'm not allowed to use magic armour or weapons so it's harder!

oh, why is that? A guild rule?

The role playing community has it as a basic rule that no magical weapons or armour is allowed. So everything has to be GM made. It's a lot of fun when RPVP'ing, makes everything more even. As there is rules to what exact stuff can be used. You can for example look for one community rule set on this forum, Twothumb set up for -V-. If you are to lazy or can't find it I can link you. lol

Not all have the same rules though, but everyone has the same basic rules (like no magical stuff etc)

http://www.uoforums.com/f1099/rules-22208/

That's for CoRE (community of roleplaying europa (or something like it))
There are a lot of independent RP guilds that has their own set of rules though that are accepted and warred to be able to interact. (the two biggest are independent guilds)

Oh wow, that's pretty interesting. It also allows newbs to actually be able to participate to a certain extent. I like that