To pick up on what my clever Canadian friend just said, now that I've recovered from the shudder and the shock of the possibility of losing Lucis to despair, I have my sources that support what Llewen says.
I used to work in this business. Worked at Origin, in fact, in 00 during creation of the Renaissance Edition but was on the team to learn the ways of Origin enroute to work as a designer on another MMO that EA subsequently cancelled. I still know a few folks, some faring very well in the subsequent years.
Before committing my time to playing this game, and knowing EA's penchant for losing interest in still viable properties, I inquired. There may be online properties in jeopardy. On that I will not be specific. UO is not among them. UO is, in their view, stable. If that sounds a bit tepid, well, it is. Yet what it also means is that development will indeed continue albeit, as Llewen says, with a team of developers smaller than we'd prefer.
Its staff is small, under pressure to sacrifice cleaning up what it leaves behind in favor of creating new features, but that's as normal as rain in Seattle in this business. It doesn't mean things won't get done but you have your foreground and your background processes - all active, but some with more CPU applied than others.
It's frustrating, Lucis, I know. However the delight and enjoyment of this game has been enhanced enormously by the work you have done. For many it has become the Sine Qua Non of UO. In the end that means more than "love" from a corporation known for its fickle attention to anything but its top properties.
Before the big MMO hit, there were many smaller ones. Ironically the largest were the size UO is today. Mine was called Air Warrior - a WWII era air combat simulation. Our team was kept small as well by necessity. Open and cheap access to large networks, such as the Internet, didn't exist and we had to pay a huge chunk of our income from customers to the network itself. What made it work was the devotion of players, including and especially those with development talents and abilities like your own.
Difference is, we were able to acknowledge and encourage this openly and work closely with many contributors whose efforts we could not afford conventionally. They did it for the love it the game, and we paid heed. In many cases their features became incorporated in the game itself. Nowadays, for myriad legal reasons, that is not possible.
I will cease this expository digression and get to the point at last. The legacy client is hurting the game. It should not be an option on the 14 day trial page. The longer it exists the more outdated it becomes in look and feel and more images from it continue to propagate across the WWW, unintentionally causing many potential new players do dismiss UO as a relic. It cannot and should not be laid to rest but the EC is critically important to the future of this game. Without it, there is no long term future for UO. The developers know this but dare not express it for obvious reasons. Show clear attention to one client and you risk offending those employing the other.
All change in an MMO carries with it autonomic aversion to change that shouts louder and shriller than any praise. Thus, you are driven to feel like your hard work is being poured down a depth-less pit, even though many people, players and others, are indeed paying attention. We can say so. They, alas, cannot. They cannot say, as I often did in those earlier days, "Thank you for finishing the work that needed to be done on our game."
Jonathan
