The idea that UO is slowly wasting away every year due to dropped accounts is horribly depressing to me

But this is good solid logic. It raises my hopes

UO is an emotional rollercoaster.

EA has never been a company to, erm... cut and run. Motor City Online, Majestic, Earth and Beyond, Sims Online.

The fact that they are sinking all this money into Kingdom Reborn shows they do not think UO will share that fate.

That 130k is active accounts which really isnt that big when you think of the multitude of people running multiple accounts.

I think that UO still holds a sloid niche in the MMO market but will never rise to the top again...

It's a shame that UO can't get more subscribers. City of Heroes reportedly has about 300K subscriptions. It ain't WoW's 7 mil but it beat UO pretty quick (now lets see if they can stay around 10 years!)

Every couple months I get the itch to play some warcraft, and Im convinced that at least 50% of the player base consists of whiny immature 12 year olds (thats over 3 million of them! ). UO seems to have a certain... maturity level... most of the time anyway .

Would it not be nice if just spent like 70k for good 3d stuff like wow did and stuff put little out there not just 3d they are using. I would like to see dif shots of where you char is looking and such and real 3d why not?

I also think retard of them to just ban people for saying stuff like oh way you was really raped bud then some dumb steather sees that and you get 106 month account perma banned. There is many other things they do that is really retarded for sure!

And that is only the subscriptions. In addition come the tokens, the expansions etc. UO is still good business, but I doubt it would have lived long without the release of KR which makes promises for the future.

Personally I do not think UO is going anywhere soon because,

Companies the size of EA,

are actually quite averse to taking risks.

Actually the opposite of the "adapt or quit" junkies that post in every thread when people have an issue(legit or not) that they wish to post about the game on its "official forums".

It basically boils down to why try a new game which might totally fail leaving us (EA) with zero or negative cashflow. (have to pay the people who create the new game before one cent is realized in profit)

When we can be safe right now with about 130,000 accounts paying us (EA) each month and twice a year (pixel crack anniversary editions with the bonus items, and a yearly expansion) the generates xxx amount of revenue each month, each quarter, each year minus salaries, overhead(servers/maintence), development of said anniversary editions/expansion.

This amount of positive cashflow is just about guaranteed until one of the following happens:

1. the world comes to an end - who cares about profits then?
2. EA decides to close the servers (like they did with E & B, MC Online and one other mmorpg that escapes me)
3. EA pisses off the playerbase to the extent that the game is not generating positive cashflow then see number 2.

Companies try to spread risk around so that they lower their chance of losing alot of cash on any one project. Look how EA has spread out its risk since they bought out Mythic Entertainment.

1. they have pogo.com - a leisure game/chat room online product cheap $5 a month.

2. they have UO - low requirements to play at this time for 2D, and a fairly steady base of players for the last few years (I did not say rising/falling but steady)

3. they have Dark Age of Camelot - mid range requirements also with a fairly steady base of players.

4. they have Warhammer Online - high range requirements (compared to UO), their pet project which they think might kill WoW, because of the huge following that Warhammer has outside the pc gaming community. You thought UO fanbois were rabid dogs, you should meet some of the warhammer community.

They have tried to cover every type of possible player with these 4 services, from the casual to the hardcore. All with the one goal to maximize profits for EA, while minimizing cost and possible loses to the profit/loss margin.

It really econ 101, with just a twist of marketing, and a drop of finance on top.

forget the dupers forget the speed hackers and macro hackers people they only accoutn for like 1% of the uo population and there in every game what ea needs to do is save uo from itself and bring on a advertising campaign which is somethign they have not done....comon people 90% of the people who know about kr are curent uo players not untapped talent