Ok...I'll bite...I'm really ancient but somehow I doubt you knew me or my guild or town.
Why don't you give us a few hints on the "contribution" you made that no one remembers. Us old timer's memory sometimes needs a smack with a bat
I knew mostly just average good & bad people, none of which would probably have been noticed by you. I remember many of them fondly. Did I know you?
It would help alot if you could give me names, I knew alot of people on there, but of course in these days we were still out figuring which pieces of the stone of immortality were large enough to host lore and inspire loyalty.
To give you a clue as to my contribution it would be very hard, but lets say that I was one very hopeful kid that thought he would enter a lore rich world with unique characters that were played by the creators of the server, or people with powers and imagination, which created unique quests to keep the world and economy alive.
However, Richard Garriott did not plan his project well obviously, because there were so many bugs that I have seen their first attempts at quests being thwarted by hackers who killed them (they weren't invulnerable to keep things with a certain degree of realism) and made the servers crash etc etc... why they did that noone knew, Mondain's accolytes perhaps ! But they did it over and over... until they abandoned the project to fix the bugs... and they worked HARD on that...
So that was my first contribution, in the beta testing I was reporting at least a bug every day, they incorporated my suggestions and pondered my remarks about balance. We had tournaments to test out the new settings, etc... I am one of the most important bug finders in the history of UO, that means that yes indeed, I could not resist to use some of them for my own purpose, but not at first, not during beta.
When I realised the people I admired were working their ass off so hard to make the game a fair game, I logged on everyday trying out everything in every thinkable combination to find as much bugs as possible to help them.
But at one point we couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel anymore, they more bugs we fixed the more appeared, and obviously they didn't know how to fix this. Heck they didn't have a system to track items, so if someone stole you, your stuff was LOST, not one GM cared that they had cheated to get it, they couldn't know for sure he did.
So little by little, GM'S stopped talking to me, they stopped coming to check on the bugs I found, they even stopped answering me !
Some players were given free months for the same contributions on release... the release was terribly bugged (they weren't ready in my opinion, but obviously needed the money) as well I'm sure all of you remember ! But I received no more replies to my e-mails saying thank you, and no more GM would answer me in game.
Were they busy, were they observing me... thats hard to tell, because it made no sense, some of my friends found bugs too, and they received replies. The only way I can explain this is the strange meeting I had with lord Blackthorne, who told me in a quite mystical way in front of his castle, that I smelled youth and despair. Well he disapeared after telling me just this running away on his fast horse, never to be seen again. Now thats enough to get a little RP spirit animated by the soul behind the heart, wouldn't you say ?
It was since that day that everyone started definitively ignoring me, and it was constant amongst the players and staff. So I started trying to find some bugs that would get me noticed, oh and I found good ones, but mostly to find rares or manage to steal the unstealable at first. This time I thought, I would use them for my own benefit until a GM comes warn me, I had nothing to loose, we had no real game since the only mystery I had was that lord Blackthorne had a particularly good sense of smell.
So I used and abused bugs, but never on a large scale, I never was really rich or you wouldn't see me reskilling people for fun, but I did try to own all dungeons, because they were the only places I tought that my "smell" wouldn't interfere with what I hoped to become, a great warrior of an honorable order or chaos. At first I wanted to defend the ladies who got lost in there, I thought I would use my powers (self-knighted with the power of bugs lol) to impress people. But people ignored me, they weren't impressed I could kill a dragon, or save them in extremis from a certain death. Most people did even completely ignore me, noone thanked me for resing them with full health and their equipment back magically. Was I cursed by lord Blackthorne I thought... and my anger started to build, I was not angry at anyone really, not the staff, nor the players... but time had reason of me and my anger blinded me. I started killing and stealing from people who did not care to answer me. I even tought they weren't human in the heart.
But as time went by my goal was fading, because there was no Lord to knight me, there was no mage to put me into fear, there was no creature beyond my grasp.
I owned the "system" at that point, and many players reported me for being unrealisticly powerful. I could get in a dungeon and tease a hunting party as my murderer, wait until they finished killing their huntee, let them get the first swing at me and sometimes wipe groups of 5-6 people with sometimes powerful tamers. And yes I was abusing bugs during those days, but somehow every bug I found was VERY hard for osi to fix, unrealisticly hard, and some of the rare people that actually talked to me found such bugs as well.
As you can imagine we started hanging together, and we became noticing that what WE found was hard to fix, since we knew the game so well we also realised people reporting us wouldn't receive replies from GMS. But then came the first biggest conflict of interest I have ever witnessed. Some people began being afftected by the dungeons we roamed in a meta-physical way thats hard to fathom. They became greedy, despiseful, and wicked beyond arbitrage. Those are my friends that created such groups like the Skunk works... of course when they did this they started ignoring me as well because I was not interested in using the powers to become rich or purely annoy people which they enjoyed, I suspect they were a little older than me and skunk represented their consuming cannabis.
So I was alone again, abusing my own little bugs, trying to get people to know me, I just wanted to communicate, make a friend that knew what loyalty meant and that cared about the virtues which truely make the game unique in my opinion. There was substance to everything we encountered, the lore was now there, but no spirit to animate the substance, I was lonely, very lonely.
I started stealing rare books, stealing unique items from all across the towns and realised that this game was not built by a man with no clue, there was alot of symbolism in there, and folklore as well, very ancient and often forgotten. We had wisps, we had pirates... everything was in place but I was seemingly the only one who knew what was going on at the "matrix" level. At this time the gamemasters did not readily ban the bug abusers, because they could observe them and let them reveal unknowingly all their tricks, so my perception was pretty ambiguous.
One thing was for certain , and it's that everyone on the server was affected sooner or later by the bug abusers, everyone was griefed, so there was an emotional charge building up on the server, a kind of palpable tension which made everone uneasy (as we should be) to adventure in the wild out of city protection. For those who enjoy the metaphorical aspects of the UO history, and I think everyone had the shivers when listening to the opening video at first
Well let me say that Mondain was no stupid wizard, yes perhaps at the time he was lost because he thought his magic would keep him safe, so he casted more and more spells absorbing his consciousness to the point he never saw the warrior approaching. But he had thought about that eventuality, and that is why he put the gem up in his tower, a tower with geomantic powers, which would channel the liberated energy of the gem in a certain manner.
So in a way we can ponder which did commit the most evil deed of all, Mondain, or the lone stranger by shattering the gem and leaving it on the floor of the tower, now all the people of all sosarias would be affected by the same magic now, the same patterns, the same necromantic matrices. Well he isn't a stranger no more.
Here I stand, 'tis me and I am here to communicate that I have not fallen into forgetfullness. When I got out of mondain's tower, I did not realise the clever charm Mondain had casted on the interior of his doors, as his life essence dropped into the abyss he engaged that time spell with his last breath, which inverted my perception of time, and I was thrown looking towards the west and landed on the Pacific shard, but somehow the more I advanced the more I moved to the east, and I found myself on atlantic unknowingly, walking backwards into the sea only to be pushed back on the shore every night, where I was free to roam the realm in quest for a purpose.
The more I roamed, the more uneasy I was, because everytime I would loose part of my maturity, along with a dream of finding why I was allowed to manipulate the fabric of sosaria from the outside in. Now more and more people would be getting bans, exploiters relied more and more on hacked accounts, they were now very hard to track, Gm's unwanting to ban fair players because they were hacked.
So then began what you knew as the history of the Atlantic shard. You can well see now I hope the outlines of my contribution to the game, and how strangely I realise now who I am in all of this. And how much I care and ask myself, if anyone cares about my identity, lest my avatars be.
I had a dream... (to be continued)
Since I had studied much ultima and general lore I was quick to be admitted in the AMT in the peak of its glory, I was a very good and fair student, also a red robe as you can imagine. Things turned dark for Raistlin when the AMT began receiving attacks from the illegal players, to defend the tower at first, I had to resort to more and more black magic, even killing restlessly all the "not quite innocent players" that were there to spell trouble. I hunted them, I even killed their friends, without them having to do anything but look complicit with them.
plus i am not very good at it heh 
