And how many remaining exactly? What has gone before is a record in time. What is important is how many we have now. I'd estimate circa 5k which would be 0.5% of that one million. A very small fraction and a pitiful number for an MMO in this era.
Rather than celebrating we should be asking why did 99.5% of our playerbase dessert the game.
Oh please. UO hasn't survived couple of Studio hatchet jobs and other turbulence out of kindness in EA's heart or anything. It continues to survive because it is profitable. MMO remaining alive, profitable and in VERY active live development for 20 years is extremely impressive. Certainly so impressive that cramming doom and gloom to every thread appears bit stale and silly.
It is true there isn't a huge amount of players left. It is also true game, without a doubt, comes with INSANE profit margins. You can be sure the average UO player puts much more money into his game than the average WoW player to his.
UO does have a very tragic aura of a dead or quiet game; current playerbase is scattered around Shards build to sustain like 200k people. Even most successful MMOs out there are constantly doing gardening; merging or killing servers as population shifts and shrinks. Most modern MMos are far simpler games than UO in many ways; due to housing alone, UO doesn't have the same freedom for " Shard Gardening" as a realistic option. There is no clear solution for this and the game suffers a great deal because of that. If 1:1 the current playerbase would suddenly get crammed within one shard in Europe, one shard in US, one shard in Japan, UO would suddenly become a very populated and overcrowded game, heh.
My ping to the other side of Australia is slow, I'd have to give up if I had to play an overseas shard.