I apologize for not reading the rest of your post; I will try and read it later.
I stopped here for now, however.
No, I couldn't say that. Or, rather, I couldn't say that and still be within the bounds of reality.
"Winning" in Trammel means attaining certain specific goals. Killing a monster, finding an artifact, etc.
Only rarely is one in competition against other players in any meaningful sense. I'm pretty sure I can count the exceptions on one hand.
Felucca, by contrast, is competition against players. That's just true by definition. Whether it's scrolls, pride, "rights" over some monster spawn," or Sigils....Whatever the
MacGuffin is, and regardless of how much the actual MacGuffin does or does not mean to any given player or character. For most Felucca players, the competition is the point, not the goal.
How do I know this? They've said so, time and time again. When they haven't said so, their behavior and statements have implied it.
And they take it out-of-game routinely.
Ever been in UO Global Chat?
"Message board PvP," their term not mine, is also quite prevalent, and it gets pretty far, to the point of driving other players from the boards. My favorite was a thread where people posted RL pictures of themselves going to one of the UO town hall meetings. Fellies posted a litany of horrendous insults directed at the appearance of these players and the UO team members. The moderators did nothing for a couple of days, finally deleting the offending posts. And that was small-time compared to what they've said about me, with hardly any moderation whatsoever.
There was no good reason to do any of this....Except that Fellies felt the need to "compete" over nothing.
So when you say:
No, I could not say this and remain within the bounds of reality. It is demonstrably false.
Also, be aware that if you judge Trammie by the percentage of time a player spends in each rules set, then I am certainly a Trammie now, but I wasn't always. I used to have a lot of nice screencaps of my enemies' corpses to prove it, but then I deleted them all. Too much space on my hard drive to prove something that no one would ever believe, no matter how much evidence could be presented.
-Galen's player