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"Kill stealing is also rampant."
Hate to argue this point, but there is no such thing as kill stealing in UO. Anyone can attack anything, and at an event like this, it's 100% certain that everyone will attack everything. If it moves, it dies.
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As Mr. Skwigelf says, "Permits mes to disagrees...!"
Well, perhaps the terminology is a bit obsolete, but it has always been a bit of UO etiquitte -- don't just jump into a battle that someone else obviously has under control. I believe that's still the prevalent thinking. If you have any doubts, try it. In no time at all you'll have people making rather candid suggestions on what you can do with yourself and the horse you rode in on.
It would be great if we could say the primary player base motivation is that we are banding together to throw back yet another invasion, boldly linking arms against the latest threat.
But let's cut the Nightmarecrap here, the bottom line is 99% of us are there to harvest the latest arties. And when you solo a monster, you get a crack at the artie. When someone else helps himself, your odds just get halved. And so on and so on. So when you "help" me in a battle that I have well in hand, you are just diminishing the loot I'm fighting for.
Also, to fight a Fallen Warrior, I have to do all kinds of stick-and-move and healing (Im an archer), and it takes me up to 3-4 minutes to drop one, often precariously close to death (yeah, I know Mr. Baggins. I suck. Please refer to the bit about the horse you rode in on 3 paragraphs up). Its more than a little annoying to me for me to whittle him down to 1/3 life and then some tamer just waltz onto the scene, sicc Big Bad Leroy Brown on my quarry, and snuff it out in seconds doing nothing but spamming a vet macro.