DUDE YOU NAILED IT! I am not sure what others say but the only time i seriously actually thought quitting UO was upon introduction of AOS and when people figured out after a couple months that FC/FCR was unlimited. To all those newer players here, imagine having to deal with FC 6 mages in Fel 24/7. Hell even some of them had protection on when it was not capped. I remember characters getting ganged by 5-6 players and staying still and just absorbing damage - immortals, they would heal away. Oh, and the worst is that it took them how long (8-12 months) if I recall correctly to fix the FC and protection-on issues?
Are we still talking about cheating here? Because the reason you gave above tends more to game design balance rather than cheating.
I believe at that time the devs didn't consider the uncapped fast cast as a cheat. It was how they intended it to work.
You need to remember that at the beginning before the multitude of arties were available, the only fast cast items were from rings, bracelets and weapons. If using a mage, the fast cast on a weapon was quite useless, leaving 2 sources of FC. So that effectively capped FC at 2 for mages.
Protection reduced FC then too, but you can offset it with fc eqm. It's in the patch notes.
Necros and pallies had FC 3 since their spells do not require spell channelling to work (sc has a -1 fc penalty).
This is still pretty balanced.
When more folks started getting things like ornies and arcane shield, it started to tip the balance in pvp.
It wasn't a cheat by any 3rd party program. It's how they intended it to work. However, they gradually recognized that there was indeed a balance issue and decided to put in caps.
Also, those immortal healing mages you were talking about, do you remember if they were using magery or chivalry to heal? Because that was another game design balance issue and not a cheat.
Cap magery at fc2, done. Cap chiv at fc4, done. There, that should fix the balance issues.
What? What do you mean mages are using chiv to heal themselves!? Damn...those are some sneaky players...
And that's how they also put in an fc 2 cap for chiv if the player has more than 70 magery.
Yes, it took some time to convince the devs that there was a balance issue, but it was by no means cheats or bugs.
2 other invul methods at that time like the 100% block chance via dci+parry and the 100% reflect were also game design balance issues and not cheats/bugs.
Most real cheats like duping, selling things you shouldn't, stealing things you shouldn't, stabling things you sgouldn't, starting out as an npc char etc were stamped out rather quickly once they got wind of it.