Knowledge for a UO vet

[ultimaforever]

This shard really has my interest sparked, and there are a ton of people out there looking for a shard like this. The only problem I have and people like me have though, is most "freeshards" you can just donate and buy skills, gold, ect.. which I believe defeats the whole purpose of the game. My question is, is this possible on this server? And if not will it ever be? If not this will be my new home, and I'll do all I can to bring in new people.

[platy]

not available here
not sure if it will be, but i doubt anything special would be obtainable anyways, the GM's are VERY strict on being accurate, hence the reason its so hard to get neon hair, CBD's, or even black sandies..

[Derrick]

Aye. We're not doing this for money. We currently aren't accepting donations at all, and although we may in the future to help cover some costs, we will never accept money for in game rewards of any kind.

[ultimaforever]

Thanks Derrick. It didn't take long for my question to be answered at all. Its great to see the shard leaders involved. I've already started my char and moving right along. If you want any help in advertising this awesome shard, let me know.

[Derrick]

Welcome to Second Age. It's great to have you here.

We need all the publicity we can get, anything you can think of to help is appreciated.

[ultimaforever]

What I know that will work well, is to fill UO forums with advertisements for this shard. Many people on independant forums talk about wishing to play a true old-school uo shard. Also, I know for a fact that many people playing a free shard aren't very happy with it, we could advertise this shard on other shards forums, if people don't think is ethical..

[Shivers]

I dont really think advertising on other free shard would be a good idea anyway , i personally think that i would make us look bad. The best way is still to vote and to talk about the shard to anyone you know that still enjoy uo.

And Advertising on some forums would'nt be bad , but i dont encourage advertising on other shards.

[Onslaught]

Welcome to Second Age. It's great to have you here.

We need all the publicity we can get, anything you can think of to help is appreciated.

Hello ultimaforever,

I just started playing on this shard last week and I can tell you that I was in the same boat you were. I wanted to play UO again but whenever I would look at OSI or most of the "popular" free shards, it just didn't seem like something I wanted to put my time into.

This shard definitely has a 1999 feel to it and with more people joining the shard everyday, I could see it becoming quite fun.

The staff is great, the community is friendly and the thrill of UO is still here with people PK'ing each other and hunting everyday.

I would highly recommend telling your friends about this server though. Personally, I plan on making a post on my guild's public forums in hopes of bringing some Warcraft traffic to the shard.

[Derrick]

What I know that will work well, is to fill UO forums with advertisements for this shard. Many people on independant forums talk about wishing to play a true old-school uo shard. Also, I know for a fact that many people playing a free shard aren't very happy with it, we could advertise this shard on other shards forums, if people don't think is ethical..

Aye. The more links we can get over to our website, the better our rankings bacome in search engine results as well, which is where we get a lot of our website traffic from.

I highly discourage advertising on other shards or shard forums. We've had people from other shards making characters here to advertise their shard and it's a real headache for us to monitor. It hasn't been a huge problem though thankfully. Other shards work as hard as we do for the benefit of their players and we need to maintain a respectful relationship with the rest of the UO community.

Advertising on other gaming forums as permitted would certainly do us a lot of good.

Thanks to everyone for getting the word out!

[Derrick]

No sense in letting a good thread die.

Here's some interesting data on our long term shard population. We opened in December, but we really weren't publicising until much later.

These are daily client averages and do not show our peaks as the shorter term charts do, which is why the numbers are < 40, since we usually have only 20-40 clients on before noontime. The short term graphs are viewable here.

[LargePiece]

Thanks for the graph Derrick, good to see numbers are still climbing. I liked the idea (in the "publicising the shard" post) of adding our own rants on social networking sites.

It would be wicked to get more town based communities going too. I've never been all that keen on Britain and so far on Second Age I've spend most of my time in Vesper. More players would also contribute to good sized guild wars! We've just made our (-) guild order, but I haven't seen any chaos players around yet. More players = more battles = more excitement. Sweeet.

I think my most vivid memories of UO were riding into battle in an order guild posse of fifteen or so players all lined up nicely on their horses. We'd regularly gate ourselves to Moonglow to take on some chaos guilders. Despite the fact that both the visual asthetic and support from mates didn't ever last long as I usually seemed to find myself on my own after a minute or so, it was still pretty exciting!

I'm presently trying to talk the other two guys in our guild to get flippin headsets so we can communicate and coordinate properly. I always found myself wanting to talk to people during guild battles to properly coordinate our movements. Typing during a fight is pretty difficult...

How many players do you think will the server be able to handle Derrick? Like before your bandwidth gets eaten up (although UO seems pretty light on it) and/or the load gets too much for the server hardware?

[alatar]

a bunch

[Derrick]

How many players do you think will the server be able to handle Derrick? Like before your bandwidth gets eaten up (although UO seems pretty light on it) and/or the load gets too much for the server hardware?

Our current configuration will handle many times more that what we have, and we'll upgrade further if need be.

Also, we do have an official Vent server at CharacterPlanet. I don't know if anyone uses it or not.

[LargePiece]

Yeah I remember reading that somewhere. Can we make our own passworded channels on the vent server? Wouldn't want some chaos sucka listening in on our cunning plans....

[Chemistry]

This thread shows very much how this shard IS Epic. Derrick is the man. Secondage for the win. All day.