The economy as a whole with its massive inflation is an obvious issue, but at this point addressing that would be akin to closing the barn door after the livestock is already gone. The huge amounts of gold arent going anywhere. The power creep on the items isnt going to ebb back - now that people have had a taste of it, they'll freak at any attempt to scale it back. Cross-shard trading is an issue, it makes things harder to get on lesser populated shards and allows those with shard shields a massive advantage on price setting. Scripters and multiboxers wtih dozens of accounts farming autonomously all day floods the market with illegitimately obtained goods, diluting rarity of existing items - and sadly, we've all come to rely upon these items being readily available. Now that this has been addressed to a point, it's left a bit of a vacuum - its exceedingly difficult to get these items through normal play and much of the gray market sources have dried up.
with everything i've said above being true though, the game is still a lot of fun to play in whichever style you enjoy. I returned to UO six months ago after a decade+ long break, and had no problem getting back up to speed or finding ways to acquire the things i needed to update my characters. I enjoy the game as much as i did then, although a lot has changed. The economy may be "broken" in a technical sense, but its still very workable even to a returning player with very little useful gear remaining. Farming 100k/hour from mobs wont cut it, but it didnt really cut it a decade ago either, so move on to things that will. We all have our things we farm or make to turn a profit, and they arent hard to find.
