They need to unify UO, not add more separate games that are hard to keep up with. But I know that's not likely at all. Just my thinking.
I feel the same way. I felt Trammel was a mistake.
I don't feel that offering non-PVP options was a mistake mind you - history quickly proved that it's the way to go.
Where the mistake happened was splitting the shards virtually in half. You have a West Brit Bank in Tram and one in Fel. You have a Tram Minoc and a Fel Minoc, and so on.
You are creating twice as many cities, but at that point you've really started to cut down on the number of people who are interacting with one another. We all knew people that once Tram opened up, they moved to Tram and they were there to stay, as well as people who stayed in Fel and refused to budge. Post-UO:R, it wasn't too much of a problem. You were pretty hard pressed to find major cities on the larger shards that weren't busy on either the Tram or Fel side.
Fast forward to now, and we've since added three major landmasses for more housing, and associated cities, and we've still got the Fel/Tram thing, and we've got lower populations. Players are too scattered at this point.
I argued at the time on UO.com or here or somewhere else, that either they should just have a toggle on each character for PVP (similar to what was considered for UO2) and add a dedicated land mass for housing, or they should just open new shards that are non-PVP, and make it easy for players to transfer. When UO:R firmed up, and we saw what was coming, I felt that Tram should not have the cities or the banks. Use Tram for housing, don't have a Tram version of T2A, etc. just have PVP toggles on characters, and keep everybody together.
I thought it would be confusing to later players who came along, and also I thought it was too divisive. I felt in a way that Fel residents were being punished. I didn't want to see dead trees around my house (I know there were hacks to replace the trees within the client). They were basically telling us that PVP was dead, literally, as in the PVP side was dead, with dead trees, etc. around. I know, people said that the dead trees would instantly clue somebody in that they were in Fel, but a simple PVP toggle would have been a more elegant solution. Then again, a simple PVP toggle would have gotten rid of the need to divide players up.
I also felt that if you have a shard with 8,000 players, and 5,000 were in Tram and 3,000 were in Fel, that you wouldn't have much interaction, and you might as well just say that it's not a shard with 8,000 players, it's a PVP shard with 3,000 players, and a non-PVP shard with 5,000 players, and sometimes they interact and sometimes they don't.
I do understand why it was done. It was much cheaper and easier for them than firing up a whole lot of new shards. Servers were a lot more expensive back then, and your support costs rise dramatically the more you start adding in. Would they really be able to keep 40-50 shards going if they had rolled new shards out that were non-PVP, rather than adding Tram? From a cost point of view it's going to be a lot easier to make the case to keep 25-30 shards open than 40-50 shards open. That's all radically changed since then, but at the time, it was a lot more expensive and support-intensive.
From a maintenance and efficiency (cost) point of view, Tram made sense.
From the point of view of a community, it didn't make sense in the long run. To me it would be better to have a PVP toggle on the characters, and have everybody using one West Brit Bank or one Minoc or whatever, or to have PVP or non-PVP shards. It's telling that other successful MMORPGs around that time and that came along later on, made that an easy decision for players.
I'm sure somebody will argue with me that if the active playerbase was 2-3 times as large as it is now, that it wouldn't be an issue, that we'd see a lot more activity, but I still think it was a bad idea to split the cities up into Tram and Fel.
Not necessarly the video but they sure are working on something 8h/day, or else why would ea pay them.
The actual "state of the game" is likely to ONLY be found >in the game< and not here on the forums ...
