People have forgotten that the pre-AOS UO wasn't a PvP game or a PvM game. It was a whole online WORLD to explore and interact with other people in. There was a period of time when Tram and Fel both had thriving populations. And many of them were the same people. They might have a house in tram and mostly hunt in Fel, or vice versa. There were times when you would cooperate with other players, times when you would encounter them in combat situations. People made their own communities. They ran player-run towns, hunted down thieves and murderers, posted bounties, formed hunting parties, ran shops, etc.; you would often see the same player at Khaldun, then at Tram brit selling the goods they had gotten, then at a player-run town in Fel planning a guild war. Only after AOS did Fel become the home of the hardcore PKers and PvPers, and a place to be feared by the rest of the UO community.
A few of the good things to remember about the Pre-AOS world:
1. We were able to post bounties on players' heads who had killed us. We were able to cut up the corpses of players we had killed, and use them as house deco. We were able to turn in the heads of wanted criminals and receive the bounty money. Players would actually form a posse to hunt a murderer with a 100,000 gold piece bounty on his head. You couldn't do any of that in Trammel.
2. Even after Trammel, the best loot was in Felucca. Before AOS changed all the loot tables to the RNG, the very best loot in the game was on the spectral blades and tentacles of the harrowers in Khaldun. Each monster had its own loot table, not a RNG. Efreet were the only place to get daemon bone armor. Spectral blades always dropped force to vanq weapons if they dropped anything. All of the Felucca dungeons had higher-level spawns than Tram, so you always got better loot if you hunted in Fel. Khaldun had the very best loot in the game. It was a matter of risk vs. reward. If you wanted that supremely accurate katana of vanquishing, you HAD to either hunt in felucca or do a ton of treasure chests.
3. Pre-AOS, we could still recall to anyplace in any of the Felucca dungeons that we wanted to, except Khaldun. Even after Pub 16 and the champion spawns, we could still recall in and out except the actual champ spawn areas inside a dungeon. The AOS crew stopped people from recalling into and out of Fel dungeons and everybody except the hardcore PvPers and PKers abandoned them. These days, all the dungeons in Fel are the domain of factions and guilds full of reds; if anybody tries to encroach on their territory, the Fel guilds and factioners kill them instantly. I should know; 2 of my characters are in a guild that raids spawns every day. I just got tired of getting ganked every time I ventured into a Fel dungeon. It's the old "if you can't beat them, join them" philosophy, I guess.
4. Pre-AOS and item insurance, no self-respecting thief would have stooped to going to Trammel to steal the pitiful handouts that the AOS crew condescended to throw their way. They lived by their wits, expecting a NPC or a player to yell "guards" and their world to turn grayscale any second. Thieves were regulars in all of the dungeons of Fel.
5. NPC shopkeepers wandered around, and occasionally even wandered outside of the town's guard zone. And they may have had impossibly large numbers of hit points, but they weren't invulnerable. If you managed the nearly impossible task of killing a NPC shopkeeper, you could get all the gold he had on him, and the items he had purchased from other players. Back then, blacksmith and tailor NPCs were the perfect targets; people would often just sell force, and even power weapons, and good armor to vendors. Tailors wore pure black sandals, which bank sitters used to show off their wealth. I remember spending the better part of a day killing the Vesper town crier when he happened to step out of the guard zone. Lousy loot, but I locked down the uniform in my house for years. People would ask why I had a town crier uniform displayed with all my rares, and I would tell them about the day one wandered out of town.
And item ID was actully useful; players could occasionally buy really great weapons and armor from vendors. Players who didn't have a character with the item ID skill or an item ID wand handy would occasionally even sell a vanq to a vendor.
6. Mages could still meditate while hidden. Mages complained to high heaven when that was nerfed. The AOS crew's opinion was something like "either like it or leave". There was a mass exodus.
7. Mages used their whole spell books, not just a few high-level spells. A skilled mage depended more on level 1 to 5 spells than any of the high-level ones. And all the spells made sense. Magic reflection did just that: It reflected a spell back onto the caster. Great to use against warriors with lightning charges on their swords. Or another mage with a flamestrike precast. If you were fighting a mage, you pretty much had to cast something small and harmless first, because your first spell was guaranteed to hit you instead of your target. Reactive armor would take 75 points of damage before it broke. Protection would work every time against warriors with 25 intelligence, but seldom worked against a mage with as much intelligence as you had. Mages lived by their skill. You still needed to eat, so the level 1 create food was really handy. You needed to see at night, so warriors in the group would ask for night sight every few minutes. If you didn't understand and take advantage of your whole spellbook, you couldn't survive in either pvm or pvp combat.
8. Likewise, warriors' armor and skills made sense. Back then, armor was rated according to the total amount of damage that it absorbed, not a percent.
The old formula for parry was based on the weight of the shield, which determined how often you could parry, and how much damage that it would absorb:
As an example, a fighter with 100 parry using a buckler would successfully parry a physical attack approximately 86% of the time. However, the shield would only absorb 10 points of damage per successful parry. By contrast, a chaos shield used by the same warrior would only allow him/her to successfully parry a physical attack about 36% of time, absorbing approximately 48 points of damage.
Also, a warrior would usually wear full plate armor, which gave 40 protection, 48 if it was all valorite, or 53 it it was all armor of invulnerability. If you were using a chaos shield and successfully parried, only the hardest hitting monster could do much physical damage to you. Meanwhile, a mage could only wear leather with a puny 13 AR. Their clothes would sometimes add a little to that, but not much. On the other hand, the clothes could have some magic charges that would help out a little. And there wasn't any such thing as mage armor; they couldn't hold a weapon or shield and cast at the same time. Mages had to depend on casting reactive armor to supplement their weak physical armor to avoid taking physical damage, while warriors could just walk through massive physical attacks. But mages had quite an arsenal of magic attacks. They could freeze a warrior in his tracks, disarm him with wrestling, cast invisibility and meditate in safety, etc. Plus, they could attack from a distance, while the warrior had to close the gap and get up close and personal to do any damage. Pre-AOS, despite their weak armor, skilled mages were the most powerful template in the game.
9. Most of the player base went to the champion spawns when they were first introduced because they could recall into the dungeon just outside the champion zone, and recall out as soon as they left it, and, if they died within the zone, they would just be transported to a town healer with all of their items intact. They would only lose the stuff they would have looted from the champion. The AOS crew "fixed" the system so that they when they were inevitably murdered at the champ spawn, they had to spend the next 15 minutes running out of the dungeon and finding a healer, and everything on their corpses was lootable. The new power scrolls and stat scrolls made the PKers and faction PvPers much more powerful than the regular player base, so they would die before they could even begin bandaging. And they couldn't just recall back into the dungeon, either; they had to make the whole journey back through all the monsters and PKers. In other words, they could just count everything that they took to a champ spawn a total loss unless they joined a faction and PK guild. After the changes, the AOS crew managed to change Fel from the place that players went to hunt and play, to a place to be avoided by the vast majority of the player base. Before AOS, the Fel dungeons had players in them 24/7. But that changed really fast. 3 months after AOS came out, only the most wealthy, best-equipped PvPers would dare venture into any of the Fel dungeons anymore.
10. House storage. We gave up a LOT! of storage space to allow us to have more secure containers; before AOS, a small house would only have one secure container, which would hold up to 125 items and was thief-proof, but it would have 25 lockdowns; when we locked down a container, it would provide storage for 125 items of unlimited weight. In other words, pre-AOS, a private 7x7 home could hold a total of 25x125=3,125 locked down items, plus 125 secure items, total 3,250 items. That's more than a maximum storage 18x18 today. A castle back then could store an unbelievable 72,125 items in locked down containers, and another 3,625 items in secures. That's over 75,000 items!!!! However, if the house was public, a thief with GM lockpicking could pick the lock and steal items from it.
11. No factions, or the original faction system as it was designed to work, where faction items were made by GM crafters, were blessed for 21 days then lost all enchantments and had to be replaced, and where PvMers would be encouraged to farm silver to sell to the PvPers in the factions.
12. We could own several houses on the same shard. There wasn't a 1-house limit or a 7 day timer to worry about. Of course, there weren't any open spaces big enough to fit even a 7x7, and a house cost more than almost anything else in the game. But, if we had enough gold to buy them, we could have several. One player might own a vendor house next to a gate, a private house way out in the boondocks to store their valuables, and a third house next to a dungeon or mining spot.
13. No power scrolls. If you just worked your skills, anybody could be a GM mage, warrior or tamer in a matter of weeks. Before the power scrolls, nobody with over a few weeks' play time had much greater skill levels than anybody else. You could go to Jhelom and train swords, tactics and anatomy to GM in a couple of days. You could have a mage cast blade spirits and train magic resist in a couple of hours. Mages took more work to get to GM, but they used so many of the lower-level spells that a skilled PvP mage with just the mid-80s in magery and EI would have a good chance of winning a battle against a 7x GM warrior. Tamers were the hardest to get to GM, but a tamer with a stable of white wyrms was something to be feared. Of course, when they died, they were dead for good, and the tamer had to work hard to tame and train new ones, so even the tamer wasn't omnipotent.
14. You could actually gain skills while playing the game. Remember Power Hour? There weren't any 8x8s, there weren't any anti-macro scripts. You could actually gain a skill from 0 to GM without either spending 100 years playing normally, or making a macro to train that skill non-stop for weeks. When they adjusted the skill system to account for power scrolls, they irreparably broke a lot of it. It took years before they fixed a lot of the areas where it was impossible to gain anymore.
Now for the bad parts about a classic shard:
1. Pre-AOS was also pre-custom houses.
2. I like some of the new skills. Chivalry, ninjitsu and imbuing are great.
3. Blessed rune books. I don't know why the Devs originally didn't make rune books blessed. It was several months before they decided to make them blessed.
4. Storage security. Pre-AOS, if we made our houses public, a thief with GM lockpicking could pick the locks on our storage containers and take the items. We could only make anywhere from one secure container in a 7x7 to 29 secures in a castle. All of the rest of our containers were fair game if a thief could reach them. I remember putting a row of locked down tables in front of my locked down containers, and just unlocking the tables when I needed to get into one of them.
5. All of the neat new items. Look at all the new types of swords, axes, armor, home deco, etc.; we've gotten all sorts of new wearables, collectibles and home deco since T2A.
6. All of the neat new dungeons.
That isn't to say that a classic shard couldn't include some, if not all, of the items in the list above. I can't see many players objecting to a classic shard with custom houses, blessed rune books, and all of the current weapon types and new house deco choices. For that matter, most people wouldn't mind leaving some of the new skills like imbuing in, if it was changed to turn GM swords into vanquishing quality. Pre-AOS, crafters had been begging the Devs to allow them to make items as good as indestructible armor and vanq weapons for years.
On another, less optimistic note, I can't see today's official UO Dev crew allowing us to have multiple houses, or a castle to have 75,000 locked down items in it, or allowing thieves to break into houses of unsuspecting victims who leave their houses public and don't take some security precautions, so we would probably be stuck with the current housing and storage systems whether we like them or not.
