Greetings from an old ally ...

[Dagashi]

Was looking for some old stuff over on stratics when i came across this link. "Oldest guild on Siege" - truth!

Any of the founding folks still playing UO? In particular, is Ash Skarwyn or Mordred or Grot or Felonious still kicking about?

I keep in touch with Mangar if anyone remembers him. He's doing well and about to become a father for the first time.

Dagashi, Minister of TAX

[Vortex]

Hey Taxman! Good to see you lurking around.

[Bruin]

Hey Dagashi!  How's it going?

Unfortunately neither Ash, Mordred, or Grot play.  Felinious drops by like once a year to say hi.  Say hi and congrats to Mangar for me!  Have you been into any mmorpg/games lately?

Also, FYI, EA is doing one of the return to Britannia campaigns where all of your old accounts are active and you can play for free until around October 13 - so stop by and say 'hi'!

[Dagashi]

I lost contact with all 3 of those guys when i stopped playing siege    Mangar moved to a PRS i was playing after i left Siege and helped me keep TAX alive. Then i had stint playing Shadowbane for a while - being the lead target called in 60 man fights was interesting to say the least - til they pulled that plug. Now i'm on a team developing a new UO PRS from scratch.

My UO is sooooo out of date - i'm sure if i tried to login very little would work for me. I still have my account info and i remember loading up a beetle with as much loot as i could (logged out in ... damn, can't recall the player's name - was in the sammy lands). Soul stones in the bank. Account 90 months+ if i recall. Man, it's crazy the stuff you remember...

I'll keep the free play time offer in mind - but after playing free games for so long, i'm loathe to spend real money on games anymore.

How is siege doing anyway? From the little i saw on the boards, it looks like the game is way different, but the play is the same?

[Bruin]

Which PRS?  I played AI way back when it first came out many years ago for a little while, I'm sure you remember when a few CWS moved there as well as lots of PAG.

Played SB for a while as well, it was fun I just never had the patience to fully level up a character so I'm not sure I ever got past 50.  Pretty good concept and execution of a game - it's just the level griding that got to me (as with many other similar games, WoW comes to mind).

In terms of gameplay, other than Stygian Abyss which was just released last month, not much has really changed in UO.  Between Samurai Empire and Stygian Abyss, the only other xpac they released was Mondain's Legacy, which brought elves to the game, minor crafting changes, and a skill spellweaving which isn't that widely used.  Ohh, they also released faction artifacts which suck on Siege.

In terms of the playerbase, well the unfortunate thing is UO and Siege are slowly dying.  I'd venture to guess the population is 1/3 to a 1/4 of what it was when you last played. 

I've always liked player run shards, I've just always ran into two problems with them.  The ones that are populated are either too 'dudeish' or have some other fatal flaw that ruins gameplay (you can buy gold or buy premade characters) - the ones that have all the right RP/creative elements/playerbase types - the playerbase is way too small.

[Vortex]

Lemme know if you have some development questions Dag. I have helped several freeshards get running. I'm really good with the spawning, especially if you use XMLSpawner (which I highly recommend) and pretty decent with the scripting.

[Dagashi]

I was on staff on AI for a couple of years. Adam finally pulled the plug due to a combination of RL issues for him and a player base that was small and contained a horrible percentage of rotten people.

SB ... if you played on Saedron you likely heard of SMF, Saint Malorn's Fallen. I was Inner Council for them and did a fair bit of calling. Good group of people. Good game. I was really upset that they pulled the plug because there was still a hell of a lot i wanted to accomplish in that game.

*winces at siege's population* SB really spoiled me from a numbers point of view. I would log on for 2 hours a night and be involved in fights that had more players than AI or likely SP had online. From then on i resolved to try my best to avoid playing MMOs as a single player.

As for PRSs ... AI actually had a really good rule set IMO. It's problem was the owner. Adam had no concept how to manage a shard. He created a cesspool that was so caustic, it drove players with the thickest of skins away.  Right before he pulled the plug there were less than 20 people logged in.

I'm helping a guy who owns a software company create a new shard. Another ex-sieger is helping him out (don't know if you remember Erlein and Friends Of Beasts [FOB]) Corwin, Johnathon Blade and a number of ex-Siegers are advising as well. UO is a dying game, but we have some ideas on ways to target people playing other free MMOs that might draw some decent numbers. Ideally, we're expecting about 150-200 unique IPs during prime time to start.

@ Vortex - i'm going to keep your offer in mind. One of the many things we are going to do is re-work the spawners completely. The shard owner is a master of Artificial Intelligence and some of the code he's written for MOBs is ground breaking. Spawners are coming up on the list of projects to tackle.

[Bruin]

Never knew you were on staff at AI.  I was involved with the YEW guild there for about 6 months - year a few years back, good group.  Great vision for the ruleset and great ideas for AI, just the playerbase was never there.

My SB stints were always short lived, probably had 3-4 runs that lasted no more than 4 months each as I got tired of the grind.  Though I always really wanted to give it ago, now obviously too late. 

Same thing with other MMORPGs, I always want to give them a try, i'm just not motivated to build from scratch anymore (just the time investment) or let go of Siege.  To many MMORPGs now follow the mentality - we want you to spend 6 months building your character, we then want you to spend 6 months acquiring the right gear for your character, now after a year and you've done this you can finally go out and play the game.  SB had the same mentality, except every few months they'd release a new patch that would nerf all your skills and force you to start over, got annoying heh.

Totally remember Erlein & Corwin, don't remember Johnathon Blade.  If you can get and maintain those kind of numbers that'd be great.  That's probably double Siege's population in prime time.  Look me up when you get it going.

ICQ - 4842047

Ohh, the one thing I must say about UO.  The simple things that UO has that no other game I've seen has is what keeps me stuck to UO.  No other game that I ever have played, can you simply sit down in a tavern, drink an ale and talk amongst friends.  When you do that in UO, it seems very natural.  When you do that in any other game, it's just not the same.