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You can still play classic UO on independent servers. The biggest one is http://www.uogamers.com/

Ultima Online (at least on the free shard UOGamers) doesn't require any kind of interaction with other players on any meaningful level. I quite commonly solo my way through PVM as well as PVP in the dueling system without having to talk to anybody or organize people like other more guild-centric MMORPGs require. The most I ever typically interact with people is the occasional chat with someone I encounter or buying/selling stuff.

Try it out. http://uogamers.com/

Regarding Ultima Online, play on a free server like UOGamers. The reimplemented server software prevents the server-related exploits like speedhacking (attempting it gets you auto-banned) and as for scripting, admins are vigilant about combating it. They have measures that EA didn't implement like in-game captchas and other internal methods of blocking scripting attempts.

I quit UO on EA's servers five years ago (making a hefty sum selling all my stuff on ebay in the process!) for the player run community have haven't looked back. The player run servers are of higher quality, sufficiently large populations, and are overall a superior gaming experience to EA's servers. I love it. :)

Best of all - no monthly fee. I can binge and purge freely and not feel obligated to login for 5 hours every day.

http://uogamers.com/
http://www.shardsofdalaya.com/
And that's just MMOs. Don't get anyone here started on Pools of Radiance. Next question?

it worked for UO, so i'm looking forward to it.

The RunUO Team has been working on RunUO for about two years, you can see the success of our work in one of our game servers over at UO Gamers.com which is free to play and you can even download the EA Games client for free legally from

RunUO itself is available to anyone via the download section and is very easy to install and has a great community to get support from. The main website is located at RunUO.com and the support community forum can be found here. We hope that the users of Slashdot enjoy RunUO if you give it a try and if you need anything please feel free to let myself or any of the developers or community members know on our forum.

First off, lemme make a lil' disclaimer: I'm one of the Core developers at http://www.runuo.com/, the largest Ultima Online emulator around, so I may be a bit biased :)

Anyways, the article seems to have been written by someone who hasn't kept up on the latest UO news. In the past month, EA/OSI released a new expansion with a large landmass, the "samurai empire" expansion. Also, just in the past week infact, They opened up a brand NEW shard, compeltely clean with no players on it. If UO was dying,it wouldn't make economic sense to invest money and time in putting up another server.

In the article, it also lists as a 'reason' for UO's demise as the lack of stores in which to purchase The latest expansions or Gamecodes without the use of a Credit Card. A little searching shows this page listing EB-Games austrailia as a place t' buy 'em.

Another thing that the author didn't take into account is the popularity of free shards. RunUO, in addition to providing highly customizable software, also sponsors 3 shards, all from differing time periods. Combined, they have over 50,000 accounts. And these are active accounts. we purge unused accounts every 90 some days.

Hybrid, Our biggest shard with about 37000 accounts, is based in the Pre-AoS era, with peaks ov over 2000 online at any one time.

Our other shards, Rebirth and Demise, are a super old school shard from the Pre-T2A area, and a Shard from the current era of ultima online, AoS/SE respectively.

Those are just 3 shards. There are MANY more out there which help keep UO alive.

Long live Ultima Online!

UO Rebirth

Play UO as it was in the beginning. As it was before it sucked. And do it all for free.