Hail friends & travelers of Europa,
On one hand, I don't want to start this thread because I normally don't like starting them at all - especially one about myself. (I speak on the forums so infrequently I'm sure many will wonder, "who the hell is this guy?" anyway, heh)
So please pardon me, but I'm compelled to write this as I feel I should explain what I've been doing - and not been doing - and why.
I've played UO since late 2000, always on Europa, 99% of the time with the same character Izzy, my mage and provocateur. In 2008 I started a YouTube channel - jumping on the "Let's Play" bandwagon that was coming into full swing. Not really noticing any UO gameplay+live narration vids at the time, I thought I'd try filling the gap.
It was never a raging success and it was never great quality content/production values, but over the years I kept putting stuff out and I picked up a few subscribers that loved Ultima, who were also apparently not deterred by my mediocre narration, heh. In the end I had over 400 videos (largely because back in the day videos were capped at 11 minutes), around 175k video views and 299 subscribers.
A good number of years ago though, I stopped uploading. It was just dead silence on my channel for at least… 5 years I guess? One of my favourite Let's Players from way back in the day actually speculated "I might have died", until I caught up with him much later.
The reason I naturally slowed and stopped producing videos, was simply my imagination/passion/interest waned. I felt like I had sufficiently covered the ground I was interested in covering.
So the purpose of this thread; to anyone who cares, I'm sorry to say my channel is now closed (by my own volition) thus the content is no longer accessible. (I meticulously archived locally all the finished production versions of my videos, so it’s not truly “lost”)
The reason why is several fold, but predominantly: I’ve lost a lot of trust in YouTube and what they've been doing recently with their platform (same with Facebook and Twitter), so my personal accounts with all these platforms are gone.
So I want to apologise to my subscribers/fans who followed my channel, and anyone who watched/liked/commented on my videos. I realise my followers/viewership was incredibly small compared to most, but I ended up abandoning it all without ever actually declaring a hiatus/permanent departure. For those that didn’t PM me for the past 5-6 years, you probably had no idea where I went (assuming you realised or cared! Hehe).
To those same people I’m apologising to, I also want to say thank you greatly for your support over the years, and I appreciate the few requests I received over the past few years to return with another new video. As you’d imagine it's unlikely I'll make another at this point (I'll be avoiding YouTube anyway), but at least there are some other people carrying the UO torch on YouTube still. (You could argue this torch doesn’t need to be carried at all, but it can be a nice modern approach to create exposure for an old game.)
To finish; I still subscribe to UO, I still occasionally play, I just decorated my house on Moonglow with a bit of Xmas fluff. This is a sad way to also share an Xmas greeting, but Merry Christmas to all, and I hope to keep bumping into all you wonderful folks around Luna and all that jazz, on our beloved Europa.
All the best,
Izzy, Citizen of Moonglow
On one hand, I don't want to start this thread because I normally don't like starting them at all - especially one about myself. (I speak on the forums so infrequently I'm sure many will wonder, "who the hell is this guy?" anyway, heh)
So please pardon me, but I'm compelled to write this as I feel I should explain what I've been doing - and not been doing - and why.
I've played UO since late 2000, always on Europa, 99% of the time with the same character Izzy, my mage and provocateur. In 2008 I started a YouTube channel - jumping on the "Let's Play" bandwagon that was coming into full swing. Not really noticing any UO gameplay+live narration vids at the time, I thought I'd try filling the gap.
It was never a raging success and it was never great quality content/production values, but over the years I kept putting stuff out and I picked up a few subscribers that loved Ultima, who were also apparently not deterred by my mediocre narration, heh. In the end I had over 400 videos (largely because back in the day videos were capped at 11 minutes), around 175k video views and 299 subscribers.
A good number of years ago though, I stopped uploading. It was just dead silence on my channel for at least… 5 years I guess? One of my favourite Let's Players from way back in the day actually speculated "I might have died", until I caught up with him much later.
The reason I naturally slowed and stopped producing videos, was simply my imagination/passion/interest waned. I felt like I had sufficiently covered the ground I was interested in covering.
So the purpose of this thread; to anyone who cares, I'm sorry to say my channel is now closed (by my own volition) thus the content is no longer accessible. (I meticulously archived locally all the finished production versions of my videos, so it’s not truly “lost”)
The reason why is several fold, but predominantly: I’ve lost a lot of trust in YouTube and what they've been doing recently with their platform (same with Facebook and Twitter), so my personal accounts with all these platforms are gone.
So I want to apologise to my subscribers/fans who followed my channel, and anyone who watched/liked/commented on my videos. I realise my followers/viewership was incredibly small compared to most, but I ended up abandoning it all without ever actually declaring a hiatus/permanent departure. For those that didn’t PM me for the past 5-6 years, you probably had no idea where I went (assuming you realised or cared! Hehe).
To those same people I’m apologising to, I also want to say thank you greatly for your support over the years, and I appreciate the few requests I received over the past few years to return with another new video. As you’d imagine it's unlikely I'll make another at this point (I'll be avoiding YouTube anyway), but at least there are some other people carrying the UO torch on YouTube still. (You could argue this torch doesn’t need to be carried at all, but it can be a nice modern approach to create exposure for an old game.)
To finish; I still subscribe to UO, I still occasionally play, I just decorated my house on Moonglow with a bit of Xmas fluff. This is a sad way to also share an Xmas greeting, but Merry Christmas to all, and I hope to keep bumping into all you wonderful folks around Luna and all that jazz, on our beloved Europa.
All the best,
Izzy, Citizen of Moonglow