My two cents...returning to a game with 5 million already in the bank is pretty attractive to me. I know that 5 million is absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of the UO economy these days but to me, that's a lot of gold. I returned to my 12 year old account and found that i had 11 million in the bank. That allowed me to place and build a nice custom house, get it nicely decorated, and I still have quite a bit left to live on. Not everyone in UO needs to live on hundreds of millions or even billions of gold. Coming back to 5 million is much better than coming back to a new account with 1,000 gold on each new character. Also, the templates from 15 years ago might not be great but at least the person is starting off with some skills already GMed. It's definitely better than starting from scratch. There might also be items in the bank that are valuable like old rares or special items, not to mention stacks of reagents, bandages, potions, etc. I'd love to be able to recover my original account from 1998 but I can't seem to find the correct information to recover it. It would be nice to see what my bank balance was when I left, what kind of rares I had, and yeah...some nostalgia from playing my original characters would be nice too.
I think that given the limited resources UO/BS has, there should be a limit to the time spent on recovering old accounts but I don't think it should be discounted completely. In a game like UO, nostalgia is a big reason that people DO return so there is a lot of value in being able to recover old accounts. I don't know that I would have stayed after returning if I had had to start 100% from scratch. Saying that starting with 5 million will keep someone going for an hour tops and is the same as starting from scratch is an incredibly short-sighted statement to make in my opinion. Saying that 5 million is so insignificant is probably why a lot of people don't come back and new players don't stay...they are made to feel like the game is only for those uber rich characters. I had a blast in the old days and never even reached the hundreds of thousands in gold. I returned in 2006 and got up to 20 million selling potion kegs and thought I was a high roller. Now I return and find that UO has had to create currency to recognize the 1 billion gold mark and yet, I'm having a blast with my measly 11 million gold.
This game is supposed to be about doing whatever you want and playing whatever style you enjoy most. It should not be portrayed as a game that you can only enjoy if you have a few hundred million in the bank. Just my opinion of course.