What made you quit your old free shard?

[Lord Cavewight of GL]

Not everyone hopped directly from OSI to this shard.

So... For the people who have been on other freeshards, What lead to their ultimate failure?


My first shard in 2003 was UOGamers.

I quit gamers because they openly encouraged hacking at the time. (Kirros Client )

Not only did they encourage the use of hacking programs in PvP but the staff actually would edit items like spears to have a minimum damage of 40 or so and set their stat`s and skills above the level of normal players. Players who would actually kill a GM would find themselves auto slayed or balrons happen to spawn in the middle of yew all around them and kill them.

In other words UOG had a massively corrupt staff.



Later in 2004 I started up on Defiance.

This shard started out as a beacon of hope for everyone sick of the corruption on UOGamers.

In the beginning this shard was based on fair play and no neon items.
Sadly DFI slowly devolved over the years leaving it not even as a shell of its former self but an outright pungent corpse.

In the early years donations were not rewards with items in game.

One day they thought it would be a good idea to put hued ethy`s/sandals for a monthly donation. When the player stopped paying his monthly donation they lost their horse/sandals.

To make a long story short this system rapidly turned into ANY ITEM OF USE in the game being a donation item. Because of this the items were devalued to the point where players would have no reason to acquire them ingame.

Here is a list donation items on DFI:

Regs
Kegs
Bottles
Ingots
Iron
SKILLBALLS
Permanent Membership Deeds (This makes your house AGELESS as in it NEVER FALLS )
AOS and Shadow Empire Items
Castles and Keeps PLACED ANYWHERE IN THE GAME (Inside Mountain`s and in Oceans.)
Custom AOS Housing
Evolution Pets and Skillballs to level up these pets (Imagine something more powerful than a ancient wyrm that is tamable and bonded.)
Name change deeds
Murder Count reset deeds
Access to special dungeons non donators cannot enter
Neon Wizard Glasses
NEON "Bundles" (Box with like 34053490 Neon items in colors that would make AOS OSI look tame)
CUSTOM DONATIONS: ANYTHING YOU WANT FOR $$ (Does this even need an explanation of how horrible this is?)
And more that I could keep listing all night.

So what is it that's left on DFI for players to do?

You can.... Train an evo dragon/lichsteed/spider in a custom donation dungeon. Thats it.

No other place in the game has players not one normal dungeon not even one town outside Britain.

Literally there is no purpose to DFI outside being a tamer. Absolutely NOTHING AT ALL TO DO.

Sure they have factions, With a whole 2-5 people playing and no not at one time. 99% of the time there is ZERO faction people to fight.

You can go AFK for hours on faction chars at WBB and not die.

DFI died because it was made so easy that one day there just wasn't any reason to play.

Also any mention on the forums of changing thing to be OSI accurate would lead to a BAN ingame.

Also staff hands out gold and items to their friends... and somehow that's the least thing wrong with that shard.







So everyone, Share your stories.

Why did your old freeshard die?

[Kraarug]

I never really played a player run shard but for a brief time in 2004 when a friend thought about starting a Sphere server.

I've heard a ton of stories about other shards and, even though this gets suggested about twice a week, Derrick and UOSA has resisted many of the downfalls of other shards by not getting into donations for stuff schemes, or drifting away from the goal of era accuracy.

Sure, there are a ton of things that can be done to make this population spike but I believe that Derrick is designing what I had hoped to find. A true, era accurate replicaton of the game that was destroyed by UO:R.

[Lord Cavewight of GL]

T2A will slowly become the most popular freeshard. Derricks professionalism mixed with T2A Era Accuracy will lead to the best freeshard ever made (It already is the best freeshard evermade)

"If you build it they will come"

[Hyder]

T2A will slowly become the most popular freeshard. Derricks professionalism mixed with T2A Era Accuracy will lead to the best freeshard ever made (It already is the best freeshard evermade)

"If you build it they will come"

SO TRUE

[Arkosh Kovasz]

I've played briefly on UO: Rebirth, UO: Divinity, and there was another t2A shard I was on sometime a few years ago, cant seem to remeber the name though. Rebirth was fun, however the PvP scene consisted of all REDS and most of the action revovled around the Vesper strip. So, If you couldnt find anyone there, then that was pretty much it.

Divinity, is a fairly decent shard, but the donations for 7x skillballs and max stat balls made it seem pointless to even play there IMO. When you know that nobody had to actually work for their characters,(besides craft skills) it makes you feel like you've accomplished nothing the other guy hasnt.

I never was around during the actual "demise/downfall" of any of these shards. Real life has always taken over and made me quit. However, I just seem to always find my way back.

[Faust]

RoJ - Closed down. I think the reason that I could deal with this server is because no 3rd party programs were usable for it making pvp pretty skillful.

Blitzkrieg - This shard mechanics were not very fun. This shard pretty much started the whole "t2a" genre that you see today.

Hubris - Beta was fun for about a day. This was another shard that tried being based on t2a created by a Chessy player. It died soon as it went live because no one liked the vision of the shard after beta.

Novus Opiate - Great shard and the first to make an attempt to replicate the t2a era. The only problem with it was a few game mechanics that ruined pvp and the horrible setup they had to connect to the shard since RunUO wasn't popular back then. These were the main flaws that made me turn away from it.

IPY - Great concept in the beginning turned out to be the copy cat t2a wannabe shards that were popping up all over the place at that time. The only thing that this shard had going for it was a huge population but that was about it. The pvp was the same ol' concept in regard to the Divinity t2a genre.

ATC - The first shard to incorporate t2a replication by using the demo. The only problem with this shard was the admin. He ran it mainly for his guild that eventually got turned off with him shutting it down shortly after none of them played.

DFI T2A - This was another great concept that turned out to be another copy cat t2a wannabe shard. Jakob is a good guy and a friend of mine. However, his lack of experience with only being a UOR player clearly showed during the development cycle of this shard. The pvp was very dull and the usual game mechanics that you still see on these fake t2a shards. This shard died only after a short few months when people realized how bad the pvp was.

UO Rebirth - Very cool Pre:t2a shard. It had a few game mechanics that broke pvp that was inaccurate such as running around with archery being able to shoot. That pretty much killed the pvp as a whole. The shard had no population and ended up closing down because of this.

Div - This was a replica of DFI T2A since the same scripts that Jakob took from that shard were incorporated into the Div project soon as he joined their team. Divinity was successful in using the same tactic that IPY and Hybrid used in luring people into the shard. It didn't matter how bad it was but if you got a population you can thrive immenseley until the gas runs out. This has been the case with this shard over the last several years. I never did actually care to play this shard since the same scripts from DFI was used and that was a very terrible t2a shard by far.


That is pretty much my history with all these shards in the last ten years with all the major Pre:UOR shards that have been around...

[poogoblin]

Simply put...there was no point to crafting whatsoever (not counting BoD running).

Here crafting isn't a HUGE way to make a living but at least it is an option.

[Arnie_West]

played on burstfire uo for lots of time. admins got into a fight and the community split. I went to theuoproject, but things got pretty slow after a while. The pvp system on both shards is still the best pvp system i've played to date (despite the lack of rogue love), but the staff team thinks that's enough to hook the playerbase. They fail to realise an active staff team is needed. With the inactive staff team, the 60 regular unique players started to fade away. New players won't show up because the pvp system is completely different from anything out there, so the shard has to grab the old players and hope for the best in the newbie department.

Meanwhile i'd been trying the OSI-style pvp, so i went to divinity, with it's pre trammel stuff, but i ended up fed up with lots of irregularities i saw ingame, like stealthing to a player and a gm showing up yelling THIEF! My mark immediately recalled away and i stood there, staring at the gm. "Oh wait" he said "You're not a thief after all. You're a stealther" and disappeared. then the lack of players made me try something else. If i wanted few players i'd just log bac to the other servers.

In the divinity forums i heard about how spectacular thesecondage was: lots of players and no gm corruption. I felt tempted to try, but didn't quite know how to raise skills/stats here and got even more driven away by how slow the stats/skills raised. Besides, i had irl friends playing on divinity (by my advice), and i wasn't about to ask them to start all over again in another, slower shard right after 5months playing on divinity.

Summer 2008 i buy team fortress 2, and my irl mates do the same. Being the elite player that i am, i can split my pc time between both games while they dedicated 100% to team fortress. With nothing holding me back on divinity, i decided to give this server a second chance, and it might just become one of my fav shards

[069690]

Played Angel Island since it began...it offered a lot of unique things, great staff, along with some pretty good PvP. Then Adam shut it down. Found uosecondage and by golly its pretty fun!

[Baldamier]

Played Angel Island since it began...it offered a lot of unique things, great staff, along with some pretty good PvP. Then Adam shut it down. Found uosecondage and by golly its pretty fun!

This

[Chaos]

Glad to have you guys and gals from AI .. and also glad your enjoying yourselfs .. if there is anything i can help you with in your transition to uosecondage plz let me know

[kill drizitz]

dfi was my first, i had no idea freeshards were out there until i searched for xlx and a couple people i remembered from europa osi. didnt last long there.

necessary evil, was there from start, two months later (maybe less) end. shard shut down. this was my first experience of t2a style pvp.

i hopped onto metro when it was about to die, maybe 30 players on it when i was there. management switched to p-x, changed name to online ultime, quit.


kept my eye out, found this one with avg of 20 people, maybe less. friends of mine told me to check it out. came and have never left.

[Stephen]

Reasons for quitting old shards:
Corrupt Staff
Lack of players
Lack of player interaction
Handouts
Donations for items
People with more time to devote to this game than I could ever fathom
Getting ganked and killed every trip out
People with a total lack of respect for other players
"Lets see how much junk items we can put in this shard"
"Lets see how horribly customized we can make this shard"
Insanely slow skillgain
Insanely fast skillgain
Lack of pvp balance
Programs that give unfair advantages to both pvp and resource collection

And of course, I quit OSI after LBR came out, and won't play a shard that is based on anything implemented after UO:R.

Yeah, I'm a "whiner". I've heard it all before.

[PillPuller]

UOGamers - Inflation. Due to their "totally whack" donation system which permits you to "donate" for mils of gold everything is way overpriced and for people who do not donate tons of money can not achieve a millionaire status by hunting etc (although I managed to other ways). Also their staff is garbage. No different than OSI. They also put in all these little rules and regulations that disallow you to to the simplest task such as piss someone off (which is why I play UO in the first place) yet they encourage the use of "helper" programs such as Krrios client. They pretty much cater to anything that will keep a constant flow of donation money in the shard owner's pocket.

I think Derrick is the best shard owner ever. He actually helps people out as much as he can even if he is busy and doesn't give some lame "I don't know go to hell" response. And although the rules are really laxed here the player-base respects eachother as fellow players for the most part.

-oliVeR

[platypus]

No one here from Obsidian shard? I quit OSI in 2000, started playing on Obsidian in 2003. At first it was pretty good, had about 50-100 players online all the time and didn't allow macroing/hacking/multi-clienting. The mechanics there were mostly UO:R, but the economy was good and all character types/skills were viable. There was a few unique things that were unique to that shard (to get over 100 in a stat you had to fish up a special fish or buy it for 20k+, to lower skills you had to find a "forgetful fish" for that skill and eat it). There was also some awesome items that the admin made himself, such as magic weapons that always DPed and had infinite charges. The housing was pre-custom housing BUT allowed you to lock down items in a certain radius around your house, so you could make fences and decorate your yard. The housing system, like most things on the shard, was custom-scripted and made you pay "taxes" everytime you wanted to refresh your house, which kept the economy in balance, since gold was far too easy to make ingame. Polying into a daemon gave you basically balron strength, so tamers/bards were worthless and all you needed was a tank mage to farm massive gold.

My fun on Obsidian ended in 2008, a few months before I started here. First, a few players found a bottle duping exploit, and NPC vendors that bought bottles had infinite gold and bought bottles endlessly for the same price. So needless to say, within a couple weeks, billions of gold was created with this exploit and ruined the economy. Instead of banning the players, the admin simply deleted ALL of the gold on the server, so all the vets like me lost their millions of gold. Then a new "beta" client was released, which was coded in like a day and wasn't even tested by the admins. This rendered the game unplayable for weeks, since you could only use the non-working beta client. Also, the shard was down for days/weeks at a time on a monthly basis. The last time I logged on there, I was the only player online. So I quit Obsidian, and a few months later my friend told me about UOSA.

When I came here I nearly crapped myself because Derrick actually responded to my messages, helped me with questions I had and actually maintained the server! Although I've seen downtime here, its never been more than a day and is very rare. My poorass still hasn't donated, but Derrick deserves more pay than OSI ever got. He maintains/runs this shard better than hundreds of paid staff members put together ever did on OSI.