UO Second Age

I just saw that the server showed 222 Online and that got me thinking, back when we all played OSI UO, how many people could a typical server handle?


This shard appears to me to be growing so maybe we'll have a population that was close to one of the UO servers back in the day?

Great question. I was on one time during a holiday season during osi second age era and holy hell. Seemed like every bank, dungeon, and graveyard had 40 people rolling thru it.
Maybe one of the gms know the exact highest ip count we hit here. But never did it rival osi in era haydays.

I remember on OSI sharing the minoc mine with at least half a dozen people, the Britain northern mine with the same. The bone mage room having about that many people all shooting corp por the exact moment a skelly mage would spawn. The bone knight room being an awesome skill gain fest. And just going to the Britain crossroads and finding an epic field PVP battle of at least 50 people.

Based on our max characters online being 1000, I would guess an OSI shard had 2500 active players during prime time. Who knows, it was glorious though.

The count shows characters online not actual people online. Most people here have 2 to 3 chars ok at once. On OSI, if I remeber correctly from an article I read long ago, a typical shard had about 30k people on it. Typical peak times were 6-10k people actually online at the same time. Off peak hours had 2-4k people on.

Last free a hard I played averaged about 5k. It's not only OSI that can have that many people.

Eastwood is bang on. Also remember that most people had only 1 account, so 2500 people online was really close to that many actual people playing at any given time. Here on UOSA almost everyone has 3 accounts, except for Vega (lololol sort of joking but probably not).

Robbbb the OSI server definitely did not have 30k people on a single server. I bet all my goldz Kaivan has the correct answer to this.

Oh wow... that's a lot of people.

Back then we didn't have mega servers (as far as i know of..) that could hold thousands and thousands of people at once so I didnt know what a typical server back then could hold.

Robbbb wrote:The count shows characters online not actual people online. Most people here have 2 to 3 chars ok at once. On OSI, if I remeber correctly from an article I read long ago, a typical shard had about 30k people on it. Typical peak times were 6-10k people actually online at the same time. Off peak hours had 2-4k people on.

This is actually rarely the case, if you do an !status check in IRC you'll see that it's never a 1:3 ratio, and rarely a 1:2 ratio and you must keep in mind that some households actually do have multiple people playing here. However, the general idea of the statement is true - the online count VS "real people" is not the same.

OSI's shards were broken into multiple servers ("server lines") to allow them to handle larger loads. I am not sure how the professional UO server's hardware of the late 1990s compares to the cheap of free shard UO of today.

Ahh server lines... I always hated those things (and so did my dial-up connection), especially folks that would run back/forth across server lines during fights.

Ahhh Dial up connestions! The good ole days. Just as you were about to kill someone your connection would flake out on you and you would log back in dead! lol

We pk'd from a comic book/hobby shop that had a bunch of networked pc's set up for LAN gaming and bonded DS-1 circuits for internet. So while you bastages were rocking 56k, we were among the small percentage with 3Mb/s

Elitist scum with their lightning speed 3Mb

Hey, it was 53 times faster than most people had at the time!

I also only ever played UO with 3mb DSL. I was accused of speed hacking many times! Used to love fighting multiple people at once!

The information I posted came from an old interview with a GM. At the peak UO had close to 400,000 members that played. If you spead that evenly around the shards at the time it comes out to 25-30k per shard. But obviously each shard had different levels. It just mentioned averages across the entire game.

If you really think about it, saying they had 2500 people online couldn't possibly be accurate. If you think about UOSA and when we had 800 uniques online it was still not even remotely CLOSE to OSI in terms of how many people you saw running around in the world and in every dungeon and bank. You could probably find 800 people in destard alone at one time with the bone wall and all LOL!

I still remember when one of my best friends got dsl. It changed our game forever. Me and my buddies were over there every weekend. Packed up our whole rigs and set em up at his house. Hell our computers were at his house more often then our own. We could actually ride a f'ing horse!