Azaroth

I’ve been crying since the early 80′s about how little there is built into old time UO to keep players interested in coming back again and again long term. I think we all saw the effect WoW had on IPY when it released. My assumption is that the next big game to come out would do the same thing to IPY2 (or whatever).

The problem is twofold however. One thing I rarely touched on when discussing UO greyshard account churn is the fact that there really isn’t a churn. It’s a little less like a churn and a bit more like a large hole in the bottom of the account database.  There’s just no real fresh blood to be had. Accounts spill out, nothing replaces them. There are plenty of reasons why they spill out, but in the end they just do.

Fans of a certain UO era (that are fans enough to get involved in freeshards) tend to follow the free server scene already. They hop from one shard to another (actually enjoying the process of starting over but never able to admit it to themselves), looking for the next great promise of the one shard that will bring back all of the feelings they had playing UO in the late 90′s.

Soon enough, they get tired of the game. Again. They drift off to play whatever else there is to be played. Problem here is that there’s no one to replace them.

UO servers are a dark corner community of a game that lives in the dark corner of the MMO market. Beyond that, it’s an incredibly nichey experience. Reaching potential new players is difficult. Even if you could, there’s not much chance you’d get them to play.

There’s probably an answer for EA (that they’ll never figure out). For independent servers? I don’t know. I doubt it. You can try a new ruleset that holds on to people longer, but regardless of how many flying unicorn pooping boss houses you add, they’ll still wander off eventually – unlikely to be replaced.