I hope this is the right place for suggestions. 
I began playing Ultima Online in the beginning and "Ultima" since the 80s. After a break of more than 10 years I returned to find a much better game full of wonderful improvements and additions. After more than a year back, I have a suggestion.
The greatest problem is the lack of players on most servers and too many servers. Combining servers would obviously create a ton of problems and would hurt those players on the servers eliminated and those players are your most loyal of all. The simple answer seems to be not to combine servers, but to allow for more convenient travel between servers. Make all the servers one large UO community.
This would allow the disillusioned players on underpopulated servers to pop over to Atlantic for some random pvp and still keep their castles.
This would allow the disillusioned players to game with friends on other servers and still keep their castles.
As new players enter the game and gravitate to a populated server like Atlantic they would inevitably want their own castle, which would encourage them to take up residence on the underpopulated servers helping them to thrive. More house space is obviously not needed when servers have plenty of empty land waiting for new players to occupy, but they don't want to play totally alone.
I don't know how hard this would be to do, but since visiting servers is possible my idea seems possible. Thanks for a great game and many years of fun and hopefully many more.
I began playing Ultima Online in the beginning and "Ultima" since the 80s. After a break of more than 10 years I returned to find a much better game full of wonderful improvements and additions. After more than a year back, I have a suggestion.
The greatest problem is the lack of players on most servers and too many servers. Combining servers would obviously create a ton of problems and would hurt those players on the servers eliminated and those players are your most loyal of all. The simple answer seems to be not to combine servers, but to allow for more convenient travel between servers. Make all the servers one large UO community.
This would allow the disillusioned players on underpopulated servers to pop over to Atlantic for some random pvp and still keep their castles.
This would allow the disillusioned players to game with friends on other servers and still keep their castles.
As new players enter the game and gravitate to a populated server like Atlantic they would inevitably want their own castle, which would encourage them to take up residence on the underpopulated servers helping them to thrive. More house space is obviously not needed when servers have plenty of empty land waiting for new players to occupy, but they don't want to play totally alone.
I don't know how hard this would be to do, but since visiting servers is possible my idea seems possible. Thanks for a great game and many years of fun and hopefully many more.