I heard a neat discussion of UO real estate.I haven't minded the chat yet, but haven't spent much time on a busier shard like GL or Atlantic since it was implemented. When you're playing on a fairly quiet shard and no guildmates are also on, it's actually kind of nice to see a message flit by every few minutes so you know you're not completely alone! I've also seen it help make some sales of items that I doubt would have happened otherwise. Oftentimes on the small shards it's hard to find "basic" items for sale. I think the chat system will be helpful for people who are new to such a shard and have characters still in training make the connections needed to buy some of those items.
What I haven't seen so far on the couple of shards where I've played are people being obnoxious with spamming. On Formosa, I think someone was repeating a message periodically (hard to tell when it's in Chinese) last night, but he was spacing his messages about 3-5 minutes apart.
Seems that in UO, as in real life, waterfront properties are considered more valuable.
-Galen's player