First of all to say this is not about pre-Trammel is disingenuous. That's all these posts are ever about.
Here is my many times posted debunking of the "tram sux" posts. The numbers are a little out of date but the idea is the same.
If the premise of this idea, that Fel is more popular than Tram and players would return upon the introduction of a "classic" shard, then the following things would also be true, and they aren't. Here we go. This is tiresome because I have to keep posting it.
Publish 16 never would have happened. Posts from the dev team at the time said that Publish happened because most people had left Felucca for Trammel and there was a need to balance out server loads for a greater degree. If Trammel hadn't been a success, most people never would've left, and Publish 16 never would have happened.
But it did happen.
Trammel never would have been created, because the discontent created by Fel never would have existed and thus there never would have been a need for it.
But it was. (Then see also above.)
Richard Garriott's Memorable Moment from UO would not have consisted of a realization, caused by an incident of one player harming another, that he had to think hard about the rules of the world he'd created.
But it was.
Link:
Memorable Moment – Ultima Online
Starr Long would not have indicated that the creation of Trammel was necessary when he spoke at the UO anniversary party.
But he did. (There used to be a paraphrase up someplace of the talk he gave; others will remember it though not all will remember it.)
Siege and Mugen would be the most-populated shards in UO because people would like to play that way.
But they are not.
There never would have been a need to have the Siege housing gimmick as people would have played there without it, because they liked to play that way.
But there was.
The Fel Abyss spawns would be crowded with folks doing them. (The undead one in particular has a lot of cool content and good rewards.)
But they're not.
There wouldn't be posts on Stratics complaining that VvV was dead, because people would jump at the chance to PvP.
But there are those posts.
Games that came out post-UO that had more of a Fel type environment would be prospering, whereas games that came out post-UO that had more of a Tram type environment would be failing.
But that's not the case. Shadowbane is dead. Darkfall has 3,344 likes on facebook;
Darkfall Online
Everquest has 66,431;
EverQuest
UO has 27,757.
Ultima Online
(Facebook likes aren't a perfect indicator of a game's popularity but it's a much better metric than individual posters.)
No likes for Shadowbane because it died.
I found a Facebook page for a free shard! Number or likes: 3,773.
I found a Facebook page for another free shard, specifically dedicated to the Second Age era. Number of likes: 1,680.
Finally, Fel would be so popular on its own that threads like these wouldn't exist.
I could go on and on but that's enough for now. Ultimately the argument of these types of threads is "Trammel failed, because failure is defined by the original poster not liking it."
There was a time when most players would see posts like these and just let them pass by, but I'm glad that time is gone. In not responding to posts like these we run significant risks of letting intense opinion be mistaken for popular opinion.
Now as to the rest of your post you seem largely ignorant of computer things and seem to suggest that the old code is just sitting around waiting to be reactivated.
Have you noticed that we don't have the same physical servers that we used to? If nothing else it's pretty unlikely that the code that exchanges information between the server and the client is the same as it was. (I mean how could it be. From EA servers to Amazon "cloud" servers, much more up to date. How much can really be the same? Have you tried playing with your network/Oracle settings, or altering your tnsnames.ora file, or anything like that lately?)
And that's to say nothing of the fact that the way computer programs are built, even the best ones, resembles a house of cards on a house of cards, and errors can creep in really easy -- especially when you start ignorantly adding code that worked (sort of -- remember all the bugs we used to complain about?) 15 or 20 years ago and assuming it'll still work now. Let's say that a Halberd was, say, item code #5556 in the old system. Let's say I want to resurrect the old random special move system for the halberd and toss out the new AoS special move system. So I bring back the old code for the old system, comment out everything related to halberd in the AoS code (never mind that we're talking about hundreds of lines or more), then paste in the old code, and click run.
Yay I've restored the old system for halberds! Unless of course halberds no longer are item ##5556, but, say, a spellbook is. I've now given the old halberd specials to a spellbook. Well drat, now i Have to change the item numbers too.....Oh and wait, the damage system is different too. Oh you didn't remember that? You didn't remember how they told us about how in the old days player damage to players and player damage to monsters were on different systems? That's why the HP for monsters used to be higher and one of many reasons why AoS screwed up our PvM timing until we got used to it. That was why the zero damage spell bug (you didn't remember that either did you) wouldn't be a concern after AoS because they were scrapping and replacing the damage system.
Of course given unlimited times and resources, they could code in anything but that's sort of dumb to say. No game has unlimited time and resources. How can wow do it? different game, budget, manufacturer, business model, approach to saving old code and old documentations. why are documentations important? Because that's how coders know what to code.
Which brings me to, what's classic anyway? Ultimately it's just a code for "stuff u like better than what we have now." that ain't classic. that's poster's preference.
So, yeah. I miss the old days when Stratics was smart enough to realize that the mere mention of this idea was dumb and not conducive to a positive community on stratics.
