I hate to say this again and again but there was NO risk vs reward... it's only imagined.
If you lost "everything" you could just go back home and bang out a new suit in under 5 min and be right back in...
Where exactly is the "risk"? And what exactly was the "reward" in taking someone else's garbage exceptional valorite heavy archer suit?? Dime a dozen junk? Not like anyone was carrying anything around that was really super cool or rare...
Truth is you all want stuff to be the same as that back then because now people actually wear stuff worth taking... But it's all insured.
So now your all frustrated...
Sure there isn't much risk vs reward but there never really was... it's all in your head.
What there was was more players... and therefore more action.
Now there are less players and vastly more land making the game look very empty.
I have seen you post this before, and I'd like to attempt to explain it to you...although I am 99.9999% certain I am wasting my time.
Back in the old days, people didn't have billions of gold in their banks. Everyone didn't have GM smiths, and GM tailors, because you couldn't just buy all the ingots and cloth from scripters using the billions of gold you had in your bank.
Back then, a GM smith really meant something, because that person had gone out and mined and mined and mined...manually...and crafted and crafted and crafted...also manually, to make it to GM. It took a long time, instead of the week or so it takes now. So just "banging out" 5 new suits was not quite as easy as you make it out to be.
Most players back then generally had only enough money in their banks to replace their entire "suit" (funny, I don't recall anyone ever calling it that until after AoS...but anyway...) maybe 3 or 4 times. And unlike UO today, when you died...you generally were not getting anything you were carrying back.
The risk was in going out, and losing your stuff...because the stuff you were wearing made up a MUCH larger percentage of your overall wealth than it does today.
Think about it like this...
A long time ago, people didn't have Blu-Ray players, or even DVD players. They had VCRs. Those VCRs, in the early days, were extremely expensive. Not millions of dollars expensive...but several hundred dollars. If someone had broken into your house, and had stolen your VCR, you would have been very upset...because at
that time it was worth a lot more than it is now. Now, if someone broke into your house and stole your VCR, you'd likely laugh about it...because they are more or less worthless.
The point here is that when someone killed you, and took your armor and your weapons and your regs (yep, we actually had to carry regs back then), it was not so easy to just go out a replace the stuff...especially if you had any magic items in the mix. Just
finding a Silver Vanquishing weapon back then was difficult, much less being able to afford it (remember, we didn't have Luna and search engine sites, etc.)
The risk of dying to another player was always far more thrilling than the risk of dying to a monster because you could always lure a monster away from your corpse...but players don't fall for that.
I guess it was something you had to have been a part of to really understand...but let me tell you, the original poster is spot on in his assesment of the state UO today.
