10. Homes refresh automatically and do not decay within 10 days if not refreshed.
Even if they went ahead with a "Classic Shard," this is not something they should ever re-implement. The reason it was put in was for the convenience of their customers, and it has nothing to do with the definition of a "Classic Shard" in any form.
9. There is space for houses but other shard homes would decay.
As they would if you placed a house on Great Lakes while you had one on Atlantic, or on Baja if you were on Wakoku. Again, this shouldn't change, and has nothing to do with the definition of a "Classic Shard." This was implemented so that players would actually, you know, choose a shard and not cause huge chunks of land to be claimed by one player.
8. Leather armor competes with metal armor for protection.
Err... there was never a significant enough difference to care one way or another, though, of course, before Meditation came to game, it didn't matter if you had full metal or not.
7. GM crafted items are not among the very best available in the game.
Nor were they ever. They gave slightly better than level 1 magical gear (I forget the five tiers, but GM was either equivalent to or slightly better than the worst of the magical gear).
6. Skill gain takes forever.
Interesting, if extremely skewed, view of history. Skill gain ALWAYS took forever, and in fact, in the oldest of days, you didn't have the .X to tell you that you were even moving in skill gain. You could look at 87 skill forever before you finally hit 88, and you had absolutely no clue whether you were advancing or not. If anything, skill gain was slower, and perceived to be extremely slower.
Not the biggest of differences.
4. The population is so low that an expansive community of difference cannot emerge.
No difference would emerge on a "Classic Shard" either. You're fooling yourselves if you believe the "victims" of the Classic era would ever sign up to be the cows at the proverbial slaughter.
3. Vendor’s won’t buy anything from you…EVER!
Minor inconvenience. Very few people ever sell things to vendors anyway. Now, if we're talking about Classic era prior to the gold rush of duping, then, yes, selling things is probably necessary, but I suspect in this modern era, the pre-gold rush economy wouldn't last long because people know the game inside out.
2. Attempts to appease too many players instead of simply loading a classic Pre-Trammel version of the game .
Incorrect, but you're welcome to your opinion.
1. You are only allowed one character, in a misguided attempt to create community through limitation vice intriguing game-play.
Which, ironically, is a strength of Siege Perilous, and which was a boon to the early days of Star Wars Galaxies as well. When you have one character, you're responsible for your behavior because people come to know you. It lessens the grief potential because word about you travels quick. If anything, this was one of the wisest decisions when implementing the Siege Perilous ruleset.
However, I agree, this definitely is different in a significant way from a Classic Shard. Of course, the issue then becomes all of the other dynamics of a Classic Shard, which include the number of people playing, learning the game, and getting into niche templates -- where crafters played crafters, not everyone had one on their account, and crafting was viable.
The largest reason that crafting is no longer viable has nothing to do with the era of the game (Classic vs. Modern) but rather the fact that the number of people who have crafters on their accounts is significantly larger than back in the day. Today it wouldn't take long for that to pervade a Classic Shard, thus ruining one of the very strengths that some people perceive would make a Classic Shard "better."
In short, the rose-colored view of UO from that era wouldn't hold up to the ideals that some people believe it would.
