Please answer this honestly: If nothing had ever changed with regard to skills and skill caps and no items with properties had been added, would YOU still be playing today characters with the exact same combination of skills as you originally had? Do you think you would have taken any breaks in the interim, and if yes, why? What, if anything, would you be doing differently in UO than you did when you began playing?
It is difficult to answer to hypothetical situations but I think yes, I would still be playing the game because to me Ultima Online is a virtual world in which I have a virtual existance other than my real life to relax.
Problem is, the way the game has gone over the years I feel it has diminished the need of players to interact with each other making players increasingly self-sufficient thus increasingly make that virtual comunity I felt as being part of, fade away.
This, the way I see it, possibly may have happened because more importance has been given to items over real skills.
The introduction of Soulstones also decreased much the need to depend on other players.
While I do not see it possible to revert the effects from the introduction of Soulstones unless players were to be compensated for the loss of money spent on buying the Legacy tokens as well as for the loss of skills (and time spent to train them) that would be consequential, I still have hopes that at least real skills can hopefully be made more important over time and reduce the importance of items over real skills. Not sure whether this alone will reduce self sufficiency, though, to restore much of that virtual comunity I remember.
Perhaps, a way could be doing it slowly with the introduction of new skills made on purpose not soulstonable and made not compatible among each other. That is, release a variety of skills from which players have to pick and can only pick "some" per account, not all of them. Having a set of skills will result in the game engine blocking the ability to learn, for the WHOLE account, the remaining set of skills.
This way, players will once again have to rely on others for their needs and no longer be able to be completely self sufficient.
I can see it is not an easy endeavour, though.
The real problem, though, I think, is that after 12 years the game has become a lot more complex and with an increasing complexity I have a feeling that adjustments from the development team might require a lot more work because they end up affecting more areas of the game.
Honestly, I do not know what to think about what the future holds for Ultima Online.
I still stick with it as in waiting to see what comes next but I never give up my hope to at least see some of the Ultima Online I used to play, make a come back one day.......
