The crashes are largely being reported to be DDOS attacks. There is someone in one of the PVP Discord servers who is giving the time they will take down certain servers - then doing it. I didn't believe it at first, but they held to their word in taking down various servers - so this seems to me to be coordinated and deliberate. Hearing lots of rumors of who it could be, but don't want to speculate here.
The developers should really be apart of some of the more important Discord servers. Information moves so much faster there.
UO is a video game, however it is also a business, and
DDOS is a Federal Cybercrime. Whoever is doing it, and doing it to mess up a game in their mind, they may be facing up to
10 years in prison if and when caught. Only a very immature person, and someone with partial knowledge would commit such a thing, to a video game. However what these people or persons do not know may hurt them a lot, and land them in a federal prison. There are special forensic techniques not known to the public, that can unmask fake addresses and VPN's that the highschool-level hacker may be using to commit this. Everything on the web is recorded, all events at all times. If they do not get caught now, they may get caught later. Then it would not be very funny.
The move to a new more hacker resistant environment and with a good DDOS shield is a good one, even though the move of the servers is inconveniencing to players. I think if security then will be better, that it is worth it, and a good investment by the Dev team.
