I'd like to share a few of my memorable moments of my time here. I'm sure I will be back one day in some form or another, but at the present time my real-life commitments of work, a wife, a toddler and evenings spent wrapping up grad school take an understandably strong weighting. I've been rather inactive recently, so I don't know a lot of the new faces, but I think I've been around enough during my time here to have made a few connections to folks that still are active here so I thought it proper to leave a closing statement.
My origins on UO started back when I was probably a sophomore or junior in highschool, 1997 or 1998. This was when UO first came out for retail, and my game copy came with a pewter UO charm and a cloth worldmap, apparently pretty rare or unheard of when I've talked to others on this shard that used to play. As a highschool athlete, online gaming was nerdy and frowned up usually, except that another member on my wrestling team also played (he was later a captain of the team) so during practice we'd talk about dungeon crawling or PKing and that was an OK think because this other guy could kick every else's ass IRL
This was back when we were the cool kids because we had a second phone line, so we could 3-way call our buddies while we played on dialup, and coordinate protection as well as dungeon crawls. Back in those days I would play until 3am, get a wink of sleep, go to school and do 2-a-days for wrestling, get home at 5pm and play until 3am, repeating daily. I was hooked, big time. As I focused more on my sports and academia I weaned off of it though (apparently right at the T2A -> epic fuckup time but I didn't know it at the time) and quit playing regularly.I played free shards off and on for years, nothing much just a couple of days playing to get the old feeling back again before I'd lose interest, but when I started playing UOSA I got that original feeling back again in a weird way. I didn't just jump right in and run through Hythloth and get bored and quit, I started out begging around Brit bank, crawling the Brit sewers for gold off rats to try to afford my first set of leather armor, etc. I remember when someone on UOSA gave me 1k as a newbie gift so I could buy decent armor and I thought that was the greatest thing in the world.
As I progressed on UOSA, I eventually met up with a dude named Haggie (aka Jill, this wasn't his first play-through) and learned a ton. He could tell I was an honest guy, and quickly built a mutual trust, which was unexpected from both of us. He spent oodles of regs in training me and building me up, asking nothing in return, and we rolled through dungeons and fought off PKs like nobody's business. I died a lot, but he was always there to res me and help me recover my loot.
As we progressed, we got more serious about earning cash, and eventually bought a Keep together. We deco'd it out nice and hoarded all the rares and goodies we could find. We were kind of the perfect combination - he wanted to buy everything cool in sight, and I acted as the responsible accountant to wean in his purchases to work on saving instead. We had grand ideas for the macro-economy, none of which I can really repeat because they are still working well today to stabilize markets (I'm kind of an economics nerd) that basically involved injecting tons of gold into the market for the purpose of increasing the savings people had. Haggie ended up quitting UO due to personal reasons, leaving me with the keep and mutual possessions we had worked to acquire over several months of hard work.
Now I find myself in a similar boat, with personal life trumping internet gaming, so I wanted to share my story with you all. Having played the legit UO servers back in the day, as well as other shards through the years (and run my own just for fun), I can honestly say that UOSA is the best out there. Shards like IPY have come and and gone because they cater to the folks that want a quick return on investment, but shards like UOSA that are true to the original intent of the Origin programmers will do well in the long-term because they stick to the rules of a better time, when the rules weren't constantly changing and thus rules of gameplay were consistent for all, and could be relied upon over the long-term.
While I have the monetary buildup for the intention of coming back full-time one day, I know for the near future my real life can't allow for a serious devotion here. I would like to take this time though to briefly recognize some of the folks who have positively impacted my time here at UOSA. I won't say anything here negative about anyone, but to the newbies, beware that there are definitely folks out there on IRC and the boards (mostly IRC) that are more than happy to take advantage of you. Be wary of all dealings, and if the trader isn't ok with doing the deal to your terms that make you comfortable (meeting at the bank of your choosing, paying the agreed upon price that you hopefully researched) that it's ok to just walk away. I'd say in all of my experiences here maybe 5% of the folks here are bad apples, but the vast majority are good honest folk.
I'd like to thank Haggie, for taking me under his wing and teaching me many interesting things. Together we got into Green Acres (and got a unique item for the trouble), got into various interesting places, exercised intelligent interpretation of the shard rules for our best benefits regarding training, set up some awesome anti-PK dungeon crawls, and went in together to buy and deco a friggin' sweet Keep.
I'd like to thank Derrick for being a fair admin, Haggie didn't want to necessary but I advised him to keep the admins in the loop on the goodies we figured out. From what I saw on screencaps and second hand, it seemed Derrick had a good humor about stuff but was fair in working to fix bugs and limit potential exploits.
I'd like to give a shoutout to the random bunch of adventurers (I think 3 friends that knew each other IRL in some European country, judging by their typing probably Dutch) that came into my Keep; one day I saw a bunch of noobs outside my house and they accepted my invitation inside, I outfitted then with top notch gear, regs, and healed them during their travels afterwards. We had great conversations and even though they got PK'd I think they had a good time. I hope they are still playing today, they were good people.
With few exceptions, I'd like to thank the lot of you, past and present, for making UOSA a great server. A lot of you whine and moan about why can't you ride dragons or shoot fireballs from your sword, but the reason the mods aren't ever going to come is because this shard works hard to emulate a specific point in time when this game was magical. There is no other MMO today quite like UO used to be, and you should not try to lobby to turn this shard into just another UO shard - this place is special, it is SUPPOSED to be hard, so please treasure that.
Toodles,
Rick Scarf