I spent most of 2001 and 2002 listening to coworkers discuss the game they were playing, and thought it sounded interesting.
When fall of 2002 rolled around, they had made the move from GL or LS, to the new Lake Austin, and they (and 3 generations of the family) had pooled resources on new accounts to get a head start on the shard. This was followed shortly afterward by AoS, and they created even more new accounts to get the AoS goodies.
After stripping the of the hooded shroud and the like, they gave the accounts to their friends and coworkers, so in March 2003 Count Don and Tonya welcomed me and several other neophyte players into their homes outside Umbra. As we played, these veterans of UO's Beta were having to adjust to AoS just as the new players were, and in a number of cases we learned the new stuff faster, and taught the old dogs new tricks.
I worked in RL with several of our guild, The Black Ring, during the day/afternoon, then played with them for the rest of the night, until we had to sleep for work the next day. However, mishandling of our contract at work eventually led to me, then others, being laid off. We still kept meeting in game, but as Don went to school (then later got stabbed in the back by his employer, who was paying for him to go to get his computer certs, then insisted he quit school a month before graduation to take over a tech job - he quit, since the school was already paid in full), he didn't play as much; then there family issues, etc. and the guild eventually broke up, as most of the guild shifted to Guild Wars. A few, however, stayed behind, but I lost touch with them as my own new job (as a 3rd shift security guard, then as a 12-hours-a-day drive-thru tobacco store clerk) shifted my time to play to not line up with those that remained.
Around late 2004 or early 2005, I saw notices of people getting together for late night hunts. Originally an association of various individuals before we finally took the plunge, the Midnight Hunters Guild eventually grew to be one of the 3 largest non-Fel guilds on Lake Austin. We'd meet between Midnight Eastern and Midnight Central (depending on schedules - by this time I was working 3-4 nights a week, then after the security company down-sized, 8a to 8p 3 days a week on weekends at the tobacco store), and go exploring. We did the Ilshenar spawns regularly. We'd dive deep into Doom, Blood, and Rock dungeons (before several shifts nerfed the spawns at the latter). And, we went crazy compiling piles of Treasures of Tokuno (one departing guild member in 2015 gifted me with a castle that had over a THOUSAND TOTs, including several hundred majors, and a full set of matched honorable swords and urns). When Mondain's Legacy came along, we were soon doing a dozen Melisandes a week, and numerous Dreadhorns and Grizzles (those being much harder to get keys for). We helped each other get better housing, and most of the guild started moving together to a spot north of the mountains east of Luna.
After a first failed attempt at an alliance (we visually caught the alliance head stealing from party loot, and he was trying to force us to be a PVP protector guild when most of us had little taste for PvP, and were on Dial-up still), we aligned with others that were more like minded. However, after a series of miscommunications, where the new alliance people didn't seem to respond (we didn't know there were real life issues at the time), we broke off again to reform an alliance that remained active until about 2014 - the Legion of Sosaria.
The years of the Legion at its height were good times. We had an entire guild of miners who specialized in group ILSHENAR mining trips, using both prospector tools and garg picks to DELIBERATELY try to get paragon ore elementals - your rank/title was determined by the highest regular or paragon ore ele you conquered, I was the first or second to get the title for soloing a paragon valorite). Another group of our characters continued the nightly hunts, still open to all (and we even got some of the PVP guild members to join us outside Fel, when they needed a break from the chaos). My oldest character became a very unconventional head of the local THB chapter (a melee TH doing level 6s solo). THB, UBB, and others joined our alliance. We even allied DJ Sandman at one point, and a guild of Christian gamers that had their own online church meetings on Sunday nights, and occasionally adventured with us the rest of the week. And, together, the crafters in the alliance help me test out many long-held assumptions about crafting, finding many of them no longer true (if they ever were), and leading to my position rewriting the Crafting guides and FAQs on Stratics - just in time for the "Great OOPS of 2008" (I was literally making the final edit and attempt to save on the Tailoring Essay when Stratics went down).
And, at our height, we eventually set up our own auction house as the ones that had existed from the shard's founding had slowly drifted away
The auction house was one of the closest houses to Luna moongate. In fact, it was the most incredible fortune that we landed it. For, its spot had been one of the masses of burning wreckage that had been left when EA had banned one of the most outrageous dupers in the history of the game (he had no less than 4 houses filled with duped stuff on LA alone). It had burned for over a year, and we had began to wonder if EA had forgotten us, and was going to let it burn forever (after all, we still had leftover EM spawn from 2005 outside the walls of Luna in 2012, and the structures from that event still burn today!). Then, suddenly we heard shouts in Alliance Chat from our youngest member, the pre-teen son of our alliance chief. He had been walking into Luna from doing stuff around town, and noticed the rubble being taken down. He was met by two people (one of which might have been Mesanna), who told him if he wanted to place, to go get a placement tool. He ran back, and as he watched, every time a script kiddy appeared and tried to place on their programmed routine (the devs had been watching the pattern of names and times the characters showed up for a week), they'd banish them to UO Jail (which was quickly filling up from the popularity of the location). Once they got all the ones that would be popping in unattended for a while, they cleared the site for placement, and only a couple real characters were even there - and our Pandarus got the plot! He got the keep the lower floors for his home, while the alliance formed the Legion of Sosaria Traders (LOST), and set up the LOST auction house on the roof. The Auction ran for about 4 years, until tragedy struck.
We knew that with an alliance with several 50-100 character guilds, we were bound to eventually lose people to more than simply loss of interest. First, we lost an entire guild or two that were players from one family, because the head of the family had gotten too sick to play, and without him, the others were not all that interested (indeed, he was the only one we saw playing most of the time). When his last house fell, we gathered what we could to memorialize him. Others had health issues, or other real life issues, and soon there were only a dozen or so players left across a dozen guilds and 60 or so characters. Then, we had the alliance leadership move to an area without internet service (and I've heard recently that when they got it back, years later, they went on to other games). I had to deal with my namesake uncle, then my father, then my brother's fiancee, all die within a year, but I persevered. We continued on, then Shard Shields came about, and we lost more people to the allure of Atlantic, and the auction failed because everyone was buying stuff on Atlantic, and no one wanted to sell anything on LA anymore. My health started failing (undiagnosed Hypertension and Type 2), one guild leader left, and another became scarce for a while, only to come back on one day and say she was dealing with stage 4 skin cancer. I never heard her fate, only that eventually, her house fell too, taking our fishing cooperative supplies (quest fish and baits). In that dark time, my grandmother passed, and my brother's mind began to go. One of my last hurrahs in that period was being the sole representative of LA at the 15th anniversary and coronation of King Blackthorn.
By mid-2013, I had dwindled down to where I was logging in a few hours a month, once every week or two. My brother went mad in his drug use, and started attacking us, landing in jail. When he got out, he was in bad shape - we found out 3 weeks after Christmas that he was terminally ill (and had stolen my mom's identity to purchase a $4,000 car with a $30,000 loan with the help of a felonious buddy that had somehow got a dealership job). I had to help my mom deal with these issues, and almost stopped playing there. But, I still would get back into the game, but I saw so few people I knew anymore. At that time, I had a much more active friend base in a Facebook game, and it ended up taking 8 hours a day of my near-retired life, now barely fit for work as I struggled to get my conditions controlled with meds (it worked, but along the way started getting arthritic).
After my brother died, we moved to my grandmother's place (the rest of the family knew that's what my grandmother wanted, but wouldn't allow while my brother was living). The FB game began to die, and I started to venture more and more back into UO. Eventually, when the FB game completely passed, I regrouped, and began actively searching for old friends. Eventually, I found them - the guilds that we'd previously been allied to, before the Legion of Sosaria, were still active, and I began hunting again with friends from a decade before, and for the last 3 years, have been playing for hours nearly every day. Even some of the original Black Ring are still around, and it turned out that at least one of them worked with my mother until my mother had to retire at age 75 due to health issues - and they ask about her when we meet in Luna.
Each of the LoS guilds only have 1-2 human players left, and I have ended up as guildmaster of at least 3 guilds in the process of being the last survivor. But I won't let them die, even if I'm not quite ready to start recruiting just yet. For I still hope that, like many others over the years, that my lost family will someday back to their home in Sosaria, and we can go hunting in all the lands that have opened since they departed. UO has become my way to release tensions, to escape from the tedium of being a caretaker while barely able to take care myself some days when the joints act up. And, I will probably stay with it to the end.
To quote one of my favorite movies' end,
"Time counts and keeps countin', and we knows now finding the trick of what's been and lost ain't no easy ride. But that's our trek, we gotta' travel it. And there ain't nobody knows where it's gonna' lead. Still in all, every night we does the tell, so that we 'member who we was and where we came from... but most of all we 'members the man that finded us, him that came the salvage. And we lights the city, not just for him, but for all of them that are still out there. 'Cause we knows there come a night, when they sees the distant light, and they'll be comin' home.
