Ultima Online - Europa ....anyone still there?

installed it on my netbook as my works pc profile hasn't got room and can't run from usb anymore

found a free t2a shard, joined up, running the tutorial and killed 3 rats. Really loving the game as daft as it sounds, nothing compares. Problem is the netbook screen is tiny and has a track pad, will have to link it to a works monitor and mouse :p
 
I am tempted to return to playing the game I must admit, and this thread isn't helping :)

I am not entirely sure where I would play though. I know nothing about the now warped/borked gameplay/rules of the present OSI shards so I would be lost.

The player run shards are all good and I have been on quite a few, but they are nearly always populated by clowns/griefers. I have lost count the amount of times I have been meteor swarmed by players whilst within my house.
 
Ah, well, this thread has bought back some awesome memories for me! I played UO as a kid through to waning interest in my first year of uni I believe, experiencing the lag and massive phone bills others have already mentioned (I think it was UO that led me to try Freeserve and those other ‘free’ internet connections that were doing the rounds at the time).

The game was immense; I joined shortly after T2A, ignored the 3D client for the main and then let the other xpacs wash over me until I left. I had an axe warrior guy, a mace warrior, a crafter and an intentionally low skilled level thief who was only successful because you could exploit the stupidity of other people WITHOUT having to have in game skills for it. Fantastic stuff – bit of bank robbery, bit of corpse looting, lots of ship robbery. I was always shocked at the number of people who left their ships unlocked, and more so by the number of them who then left the ship key in their hold. Good times! I modded the UO Europa Stratics board for a time (as well as the Off Topic board for a bit) and mainly hung out in game around the Angry Mongbat player run tavern. Player run tavern – where the hell would you get one of those in a modern MMORPG?

I loved the random RP that you would get – the fact that you could just randomly walk into a group of characters all having in game conversations one moment, and then go and eavesdrop on people chatting about rl around the corner. Server wars, the restart race for rare spawns, trying to move fixed fireplaces to get the spawns behind them, all of that fun. I’ve often missed it over the years, and it’s made worse by knowing that I’ll never be able to play a game like it again – I can’t for a second imagine trust based transactions occurring again. I also played before they added quests, which meant the game was all about what you made of it. Nothing to tell you where to go, or who to interact with, no random rewards for walking between towns. All cracking stuff. And I remember the introduction of vet rewards – the ghost mounts were the most amazing things ever, no more having to carry a ton of apples or having to buy a new horse when the old one died.

I also harboured an extreme hatred of bards and tamers; both just seemed like they needed the lowest skill available, and most of them I encountered in dungeons were the worst types of UO player. I understand afterwards that certain items were added to balance some of the ‘classes’, but my time was dominated by the fact that the strongest thing I could kill solo was an Ogre Lord, and only then if I jousted him.

One of the best memories was getting some art work done of my characters by a chap called ‘Gladstone’ who had a Marquee Dragon based website. I think I traded a ton of Christmas bells across several servers for them, and I still use a cut out of my warrior Sturm as my avatar for most forums. I tried to track the guy down a few years later when I had a job and money to buy the originals, but to no avail. Funny to think that at the time a 250kb scan of some artwork was considered amazing quality :D

I’m fairly certain that the Angry Mongbat used to be run by one of the mods here actually. No idea what happened to my account – I gave him the details after I logged off for the last time so that he could pillage anything of use. I’ve been tempted to return many times just to check it out, but never really got round to it. I’d need a fair few guesses of what my username would be too by now!
 
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Accounts is all done with EA Mythic now.

Was gonna reinstall just to see if my characters still existed etc, but no idea how to even go about trying to find my login details as seems you have to link accounts to that one profile...
 
Wow Adahn, all that certainly brings back memories!
I can symphathise with the Lamer Tamer hatred, until I started one with the objective being to farm gold. Instead I ended up with a lot of respect for the class, despite most tamers being poor mannered. As a gift one of my old guildmasters gave me a very rare white wyrm to look after and she was still there when I recently returned for a day.

My main char was a Swordsman turned Paladin (due to AoS) and yep Ogre Lords were a pain, but the best gold was obtained from Ice Fiends in a little room...I can't recall where though.

I think the Angry Mongbat Tavern was owned by a chap called Nilrem, for some reason I strongly associate him with that establishment. I remember Gladstone too well! He did some epic characatures (sp?) of players ingame avatars.
 
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Kainz said:
My main char was a Swordsman turned Paladin (due to AoS) and yep Ogre Lords were a pain, but the best gold was obtained from Ice Fiends in a little room...I can't recall where though.
Click to expand...

Yeah that was the Ice Fiend room in the Ice Dungeon. 2 always spawned at same time. Unless you were a bard which was easy kill mode just getting them to fight each other, then it was a pain in the arse to kill them.

From the early early days always use to hate lich lords.
 
Kainz said:
Wow Adahn, all that certainly brings back memories!
I can symphathise with the Lamer Tamer hatred, until I started one with the objective being to farm gold. Instead I ended up with a lot of respect for the class, despite most tamers being poor mannered. As a gift one of my old guildmasters gave me a very rare white wyrm to look after and she was still there when I recently returned for a day.

My main char was a Swordsman turned Paladin (due to AoS) and yep Ogre Lords were a pain, but the best gold was obtained from Ice Fiends in a little room...I can't recall where though.

I think the Angry Mongbat Tavern was owned by a chap called Nilrem, for some reason I strongly associate him with that establishment. I remember Gladstone too well! He did some epic characatures (sp?) of players ingame avatars.
Click to expand...

AOL Legends! Still remember us playing bard/tamers there! we'd never have done that on Europa though :p
 
Just a quick question, but did you all get a chance to play the Felucca champion spawns and also fight the harrower?

Loved when these were introduced, the fact they were pretty hard plus you had to deal with player killers as well just made it even more epic.
 
I've managed to get Raz working on my desktop :D

Played for about 20 mins earlier on before work :( Need to route out the instruction manual for T2A as that's the shard I am playing on. Prefer a paper manual :p
 
Got linked to this from an old friend who played *waves at the mad axeman*

I used to love UO, I started just after Second Age I think (99 or 00?), and was very lucky in that we got into the AOL 0800 unlimited trial, so never had the huge phone bills:p But did at times have the phone line in use for hours at a time (and then we got NTL in our street - I still remember the calls of "speedhacker" as I abused the 15ms ping to Europa on a blistering fast 512k connection, and racing Carina or Mithrael to see if the faster connection really did make such a huge difference - I vaguely remember that in the most it didn't, at least after the early speed restrictions were put serverside).

Some of my fondest memories of UO come from the Guild I was in Veterans of Finstemoore (VOF) with the Guild Master Mhoram, who took a complete noob and helped me get set up in the game, and organised house placing for pretty much everyone in the guild when housing opened up on Trammel.
Including the placing of a classic L shaped house that was to be the guild taver, the Angry Mongbat Tavern (originally run by Matteo who left to do exams and I sadly never heard of again:( ), and gave me directions on so many occasions.

It used to be great fun running the tavern at times, especially the Saturday Story nights, or doing the "catering" at player weddings, with Sturm, Carina, Thorin, Mithrael and their "families", or the times the IGM popped in :)
Then there were the characters like Oona Moonstone (I've still got some of her GM marked clothes I think), A Poor Girl (great GM mark) who I think left after a GM changed her name :(, Killerspoon, Barian and the Fydes.

I think I started out wanting to be a Mage, but couldn't afford the reagents, so he gradually turned into a mage/warrior (then mage axeman), with other characters including a miner/smith/tinker, a Tamer (who used to run round with a "bonded" mongbat eventually:p), a scribe and a trainee cook.
I made a small fortune at one point buying reagents up in the small hours of the morning to supply alchemists:p

I've never had any of the other MMORPG's catch my interest like UO, I think partly because of how open UO was, you had people playing for the fun of it, for the challenge of doing the really hard monsters (sometimes armed with only a pet mongbat!), the crafters, and the people who decided to GM the skills that were completely worthless for normal gameplay (Spirit Speak etc).

I still have my main account running, although I barely log in now, despite EA's best efforts to get me to close it (changes in account naming systems, changes in account systems without any information upfront on how the heck you now accessed the account, Credit cards not woking and their being no explanation as to why a card that has worked for 10 years is now not, or how to remove it from the account and add it again - the fix to the problem).

I loved UO, but it's completely soured me on ever trusting EA to manage anything - they didn't even have the billing sorted when the made the last change to the UO accounts system.

P.S.
I think I still have some copies of Gladstone's art on my PC somewhere (I've been pretty good at maintaining my "my docs" folder for 10+ years, the problem tends to be finding what I'm after, tens k's of pictures)
 
Ah, the reg respawn run – I remember seeing a fair few faces with packmules gating around the vendors trying to nab them all!

I went and took a quick look at sub costs, presuming that UO would be free to play or dirt cheap by now, and instead found that they are still charging $12.99 a month for it! Almost unbelievable; it seems to me so obvious that anyone left playing and paying is clearly doing so out of love for the community side of the game rather than anything else, and so boosting that side of things with a F2P model could only help. I’ve often thought that UO would be raking in the cash if it was made now with micropayments and so forth – can you imagine the money they would make even now if they started releasing vanity house items for a quid a pop? Or special hues of other items? I’d say that most people would spend more on those than they do on their sub; if TF2 fans can go crazy for hats then the UO fans with all their other potential items would probably follow...

I love that this thread popped up – so many memories still coming back. Like having to run ICQ outside of the UO client to actually talk to people! Or, and this is a favourite now, being able to connect and play the game without having the most up to date client available. Sheer genius. Farming Earth Elementals with a tame mule following you, religiously cutting up any cloth you found to make bandages with, relentlessly hitting F2 and targeting everyone and everything you saw to level up Anatomy (it was a great day when I hit Grandmaster in that!). All the way to finding a rare mining spawn spot in some random out of the way coastal area and logging out with your boat parked there so that you could access it the next day without anyone else pinching ‘your’ spot.

Oh, and *everyone* wearing a robe and a crappy helm, because if you did that then no one would know how expensive your armour was and so they might go and attack someone else. Being able to wear any kind of armour before it started to affect your stats was great too – I seem to remember bone armour essentially disappeared overnight as a ‘look’ when that patch came in. Although, that patch did give you some awesome micromanagement where you could look at each body part, the % chance it had of getting hit, and then prioritise your heavy armour to those areas and wear the lighter stuff elsewhere. Which you then had to stick a robe over as you had made yourself look like a tramp.

The AMT story nights were fantastic; I remember a combination of rapid typing and copy/pasting depending on whether things were working as they should. I remember writing an in game book with one of the tales I used and feeling so proud that that was stuck in the AMT near the bar for all and sundry to flick through; I’m sure if I read it now it would be far more gash than I remember, but the fact I could do that in game was cracking.

It actually took me a while to stop saying ‘Hail’ to people when I met them in game. I think, when I started WoW, I confused the hell out a lot of people on my non-RP server at first.

I have such fond memories of my houses in game too; firstly a crappy cheap house, followed by one of those mini-towers and finally upgraded to Werewolf’s house when he himself received an upgrade (or took over the AMT after the rules were changed to one house per account, I can’t remember which). While each house was the exact same model to begin with the available player customisation was almost endless and each one became so individual that it was fun to run around finding unlocked doors to peek within. Saying that though, the complete lack of any wilderness due to player housing was in many ways upsetting, especially when you visited a place like the ice/snow island to the east, and instead of being pristine it was like a Russian city in winter :D

What’s the housing situation like now? Would you be able to place pretty much any house you wanted up to a castle, or are you still lucky to get any kind of house?

IDOC camping – fantastic stuff. 12hours (or more – stupid notices) of camping for a chance of either the house spot or grabbing random chests with random stuff in. Usually well over-camped to the point where you would get nothing it was a game experience that hasn’t been repeated at all. Not sure now whether I would have the patience let alone the time!

I also had a vendor in Kofu’s (stratics admin guy) Vesper bridge house/shop into which I put various junk to sell. It amuses me to this day that the best selling item by far was my ironic ‘733t’ clothing range where I intentionally made the most vile dyed clothes I could – stuff like luminous yellow and so forth. It was meant to be an ironic commentary on some of the player base, and I never did quite work out if they were buying it or if more normal people were dropping some gold on it for the odd lol.
 
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Simmz said:
Just a quick question, but did you all get a chance to play the Felucca champion spawns and also fight the harrower?

Loved when these were introduced, the fact they were pretty hard plus you had to deal with player killers as well just made it even more epic.
Click to expand...

I did harrowers with 6i6 on Europa during pub16.

Later on in AoS my guild [BC] controlled every champion spawn on Great Lakes. One could no get done without us raiding and taking control of it. Despite AoS ruining the game, I still had a lot of fun with it during those times. I ran a 225 Dex mace/archer and could take on 6v1 with ease, it was ludicrous. Pre-AoS I was just a good PvPer, AoS made me a lame god.

As a side note, USA PvP'ers with a few exceptions absolutely sucked compared to European ones in a 1v1. Americans excelled at running large powerful guilds and cheap tactics, Europe at small scaled highly skilled PvP. On Great Lakes me and a few Europa buddies merged that, and it was great fun.
 
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There is a Return to Britannia promotion on at the mo, just download the client from http://www.uoherald.com/downloads and you can log straight on with your old account info with no messing about. Lasts until sometime in October. Unfortunately though, the game is even more deserted than the last time I did a RtB nostalgia trip. Nice to have a quick run past all the old haunts though and see what junk my chars still have in the bank.
 
THREAD REVIVAL!

:p Just had an old guildy message me after seeing this thread when looking for our old guild! :D

WTB another return to brit promotion! always seem to miss the latest ones xD but yea.... place is pretty empty on europa at least :(

close to a year since the last post in here... anyone been on since? anything crazy/new ingame? :p anyone fancy playing over this coming weekend (22nd-27th Aug) as I'm off work and at the iseries insomnia i49 LAN :D if anyone else is going would be cool to meet up and have some nostalgia moments and even get a cheeky re-sub and have some drunk lan adventuring! :D
 
Pretty sure Kainz was back on it recently, he can never keep off it for 12 months. Last time I was on was about 3 years ago and it was packed with non-english speakers at Vesper so I only lasted an hour before logging. That was part of a 7 day free "return trial" though.

With the number of games out and coming out soon though I can't possibly justify coming back, as much as I loved the game it's in dire need of a serious update, not just client but server side too.

Wish they'd remake it.. never happen though.
 
hehe probably ;) yea that's my past experience when I last went on.... barely anyone about and of those about not many spoke English (or would even talk back :( )

The Shroud of the Avatar looks like it could be decent but that's a while away yet.... think as close to a remake as we're going to get.... (going to have to re-read up on it as I've forgotten all the info on it haha! )

Oh how I wish I could turn back the hands of time and instead of thinking "ahh I'll just un sub now for a bit" and then not returning, thinking "no it may never be this fun and populated... must make most of it!!!!" :p
 
I loved UO, played it early on but I had pretty much everything. Every char was GM'd in all 7? skills (think it was 7, can't remember these days) unless I wanted the split skills.

Used to solo lvl 5 treasure chests, fish for mibs, also had a full lockpick thief char with runebooks for all the dungeon chests, Taming and selling black nightmares, white wyrms and dragons. 3 houses, tons of valorite, silver vanq weapons..

Those were the days!

Best part was that if you died, you still had the skills and just had to grab a crafted weap, a few regs... and back to attacking unsuspecting passers-by :D

The joy of watching someone in full valorite doing something stupid at the bank and getting stripped clean in milliseconds lol

Trying to remember when I stopped playing, but it must have been around 2001.
 
Ah memories.

I can't remember what I did but for some reason I won a boat. I use to go sailing between the islands, not for any great purpose but to just see where I ended up.

I also remember that someone decided to run an academy on the Virtues. About 5 or 6 of us enlisted and attended a short series of workshops that ended in an exam. Everyone passed and we all got an individually crafted certificate.
 
hehe oh lord yea! I lost stuff by accidentally attacking guards and what not xD yea 7xGM with the 700 skill points :D ay I liked that extra danger factor (even though I was on trammel :p shhhhh I sucked at pvp) where you could lose everything* (* unless stuff was blessed) but then half the challenge if you died to monsters would be to try and kill your way back to getting your items back xD
 
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