R
Ryan
Guest
The server, its point and tonights patch...
Well I was already in bed tonight, and I woke up with some pain so I thought I would take the time to shed some light on some things. I think we all forget from time to time what UO Gamers really is, and what its about.
UO Gamers started a long time ago, even before RunUO. We were one of the first UO "free servers" around. It wasn’t near the success it is now but it was just a place for players who loved UO to get together, hence the fitting name, UO Gamers. We were all just players no one cared about who was best and what rewards we were going to be given, we all just chipped in to pay the bills and had some fun playing UO for free. Back in those days we had and this is not a joke 10 - 15 crashes an hour, but we still had fun.
After Krrios and I founded RunUO UO Gamers really took off. It showcased the power of RunUO and we quickly used it as the RunUO Development shard. It was without a doubt the first "hit" RunUO shard. During my stint in Iraq however the shard took a really hard hit and we lost hosting, it had to get moved over to a cable modem and eventually most people gave up (I don’t blame them).
Upon my return from the war I got settled in (within 12 hours) and re-launched UO Gamers. Immediately we were seeing some of the old names and the shard was doing well. UO Gamers has always been my "baby" so to speak. I have always held it above everything else, other than RunUO. See this, is where I made my mistake in the beginning.
RunUO was an amazing success, because well... it's an amazing piece of software. We put an amount of hours into it that few could even comprehend and we made it work, and not only did it work, it was a solid piece of software. We set goals, we stuck to them and we squashed bug after bug while slamming out feature after feature. Within a few beta versions we were competing with the "seasoned" emulators and we were just eating the competition alive.... Thus we lost our focus on UO Gamers.
UO Gamers directly suffered due to RunUO's success. We watched other shards grow past UO Gamers and kept plugging away at RunUO saying look at these shards people are building with our software, this is great! Then we came to realize we were selling our players short by not allowing them to benefit from our dedication and we felt that was wrong.
As you can see the last few months we have shifted our attention to providing a top notch place for our players to play and we have found it to be a success. The player base of this shard has exploded and I am extremely happy about that... but I do believe the new players that have joined us that don’t know how we began just don’t understand what this shard is about, and I do believe that some who did have forgotten it.
Please keep in mind that this shard is free, you don’t pay anything to play here and those of you that do donate to us are rewarded quite well for doing so. We used to go by the whole "donate because we provide this" theme but you know it’s just not necessary. If you are going to donate the cash you work for to us so that we can provide you a good server, you deserve a little thank you in return. Its just common courtesy. We just want everyone that plays here to be able to have a good time.
I myself do not play any more. When I do take the time to play a character its pretty much me helping some new guy I see and teaching him how to play this game. I must say I do watch for these kinds of things on the shard and I do see a lot of players helping players but not at the level I want to see. Sure I see some things I don’t like (GoD guild scripting combat) and what have you, but hey you know we're all here to play UO and there has to be some sort of fear in the game or you loose the edge the game has.
Recently some of the players have been concerned as to the tactics that some of our known admin's are using on player accounts in factions. Tonight I assure you I have implemented a patch that will end those concerns. Staff members who have player characters have been moved to "admin" access level (they used to be owner). This access level not only takes away their ability to set skill levels but if someone should interfere with their character and set skills they cannot set over 700 skills and 225 stats. Not even I can do it to myself.
I assure you that in the future you will not have a leg to stand on if you accuse staff of cheating because... well, it just isn’t possible. This patch was designed, coded and implemented by myself. Everyone knows I do not have a player character, and very few people here would have audacity to even accuse me of cheating because the one time I did *cheat* by accidentally setting my pets skills to high, I not only fixed the problem but I overly compensated the players who got screwed.
Also tonight I have adopted a zero tolerance policy for pages that are not necessary. Our staff reports are showing the staff spending more time doing non-necessary pages than necessary pages and that has to stop, so tonight that ends. If you page a staff member for something that is not necessary your entire account will loose its ability to page. If you page from a different account, we will page block the ISP you come from. From this point forward staff will not be harassed by players through the paging system.
I wanted to also take this chance to let you know how I am doing. I recently participated in an FDA trial for an experimental spinal surgery called the "Bryant Disc". I have a crushed disc between vertebrae 5 and 6 in my neck (cervical injury) and had surgery on it Thursday. I am doing quite well and am on a lot of pain medication but recovering quickly. I wanted to take the time to say thank you to those of you who sent cards, emails, e-cards and the many other forms of well wishes.
As far as the server goes, I know a lot of you are seeing the growing pains we are experiencing by being the largest shard in existence. Periods of lag spikes and things that are on some levels beyond our control. As you know we run top notch hardware (Quad CPU with 2 gigs of RAM per CPU), we wanted to let you know that we have found the bottleneck that is killing us (as well as the only other shard as large as us (UO Dreams in Italy), in the .NET framework. Please note this is NOT a RunUO problem this is a Microsoft .NET Framework limitation that we are hitting. Microsoft probably never anticipated someone pushing these limits however we are working around them and hope to have a solution in the near future.
So tonight, as I go to bed I wish all of the UO Gamers players a good night, and I hope that after reading this some of you (yes only some because the majority are on the right track) get the idea of what we are here for.
Thanks guys and good luck with your gaming experience.
P.S. - I am not responsible for spelling and or grammar errors tonight, I am on a lot of pain medication and its very late so I am sure I have made more than my share
P.S.S. - If after tonights patch meaning after wars and on you feel that you are treated unfairly by a staff member who is on a staff character or on a player character please feel free to email me at ryan at uogamers dot com.
P.S.S.S. - I also wanted to add that this site is for UO Gamers: Hybrid, please do not bring other shard discussions here, they are not welcome. Our forum moderation team will be dealing with these things appropriately but please do not post anything here regarding other shards. If you do and it keeps up you will be banned.
Well I was already in bed tonight, and I woke up with some pain so I thought I would take the time to shed some light on some things. I think we all forget from time to time what UO Gamers really is, and what its about.
UO Gamers started a long time ago, even before RunUO. We were one of the first UO "free servers" around. It wasn’t near the success it is now but it was just a place for players who loved UO to get together, hence the fitting name, UO Gamers. We were all just players no one cared about who was best and what rewards we were going to be given, we all just chipped in to pay the bills and had some fun playing UO for free. Back in those days we had and this is not a joke 10 - 15 crashes an hour, but we still had fun.
After Krrios and I founded RunUO UO Gamers really took off. It showcased the power of RunUO and we quickly used it as the RunUO Development shard. It was without a doubt the first "hit" RunUO shard. During my stint in Iraq however the shard took a really hard hit and we lost hosting, it had to get moved over to a cable modem and eventually most people gave up (I don’t blame them).
Upon my return from the war I got settled in (within 12 hours) and re-launched UO Gamers. Immediately we were seeing some of the old names and the shard was doing well. UO Gamers has always been my "baby" so to speak. I have always held it above everything else, other than RunUO. See this, is where I made my mistake in the beginning.
RunUO was an amazing success, because well... it's an amazing piece of software. We put an amount of hours into it that few could even comprehend and we made it work, and not only did it work, it was a solid piece of software. We set goals, we stuck to them and we squashed bug after bug while slamming out feature after feature. Within a few beta versions we were competing with the "seasoned" emulators and we were just eating the competition alive.... Thus we lost our focus on UO Gamers.
UO Gamers directly suffered due to RunUO's success. We watched other shards grow past UO Gamers and kept plugging away at RunUO saying look at these shards people are building with our software, this is great! Then we came to realize we were selling our players short by not allowing them to benefit from our dedication and we felt that was wrong.
As you can see the last few months we have shifted our attention to providing a top notch place for our players to play and we have found it to be a success. The player base of this shard has exploded and I am extremely happy about that... but I do believe the new players that have joined us that don’t know how we began just don’t understand what this shard is about, and I do believe that some who did have forgotten it.
Please keep in mind that this shard is free, you don’t pay anything to play here and those of you that do donate to us are rewarded quite well for doing so. We used to go by the whole "donate because we provide this" theme but you know it’s just not necessary. If you are going to donate the cash you work for to us so that we can provide you a good server, you deserve a little thank you in return. Its just common courtesy. We just want everyone that plays here to be able to have a good time.
I myself do not play any more. When I do take the time to play a character its pretty much me helping some new guy I see and teaching him how to play this game. I must say I do watch for these kinds of things on the shard and I do see a lot of players helping players but not at the level I want to see. Sure I see some things I don’t like (GoD guild scripting combat) and what have you, but hey you know we're all here to play UO and there has to be some sort of fear in the game or you loose the edge the game has.
Recently some of the players have been concerned as to the tactics that some of our known admin's are using on player accounts in factions. Tonight I assure you I have implemented a patch that will end those concerns. Staff members who have player characters have been moved to "admin" access level (they used to be owner). This access level not only takes away their ability to set skill levels but if someone should interfere with their character and set skills they cannot set over 700 skills and 225 stats. Not even I can do it to myself.
I assure you that in the future you will not have a leg to stand on if you accuse staff of cheating because... well, it just isn’t possible. This patch was designed, coded and implemented by myself. Everyone knows I do not have a player character, and very few people here would have audacity to even accuse me of cheating because the one time I did *cheat* by accidentally setting my pets skills to high, I not only fixed the problem but I overly compensated the players who got screwed.
Also tonight I have adopted a zero tolerance policy for pages that are not necessary. Our staff reports are showing the staff spending more time doing non-necessary pages than necessary pages and that has to stop, so tonight that ends. If you page a staff member for something that is not necessary your entire account will loose its ability to page. If you page from a different account, we will page block the ISP you come from. From this point forward staff will not be harassed by players through the paging system.
I wanted to also take this chance to let you know how I am doing. I recently participated in an FDA trial for an experimental spinal surgery called the "Bryant Disc". I have a crushed disc between vertebrae 5 and 6 in my neck (cervical injury) and had surgery on it Thursday. I am doing quite well and am on a lot of pain medication but recovering quickly. I wanted to take the time to say thank you to those of you who sent cards, emails, e-cards and the many other forms of well wishes.
As far as the server goes, I know a lot of you are seeing the growing pains we are experiencing by being the largest shard in existence. Periods of lag spikes and things that are on some levels beyond our control. As you know we run top notch hardware (Quad CPU with 2 gigs of RAM per CPU), we wanted to let you know that we have found the bottleneck that is killing us (as well as the only other shard as large as us (UO Dreams in Italy), in the .NET framework. Please note this is NOT a RunUO problem this is a Microsoft .NET Framework limitation that we are hitting. Microsoft probably never anticipated someone pushing these limits however we are working around them and hope to have a solution in the near future.
So tonight, as I go to bed I wish all of the UO Gamers players a good night, and I hope that after reading this some of you (yes only some because the majority are on the right track) get the idea of what we are here for.
Thanks guys and good luck with your gaming experience.
P.S. - I am not responsible for spelling and or grammar errors tonight, I am on a lot of pain medication and its very late so I am sure I have made more than my share
P.S.S. - If after tonights patch meaning after wars and on you feel that you are treated unfairly by a staff member who is on a staff character or on a player character please feel free to email me at ryan at uogamers dot com.
P.S.S.S. - I also wanted to add that this site is for UO Gamers: Hybrid, please do not bring other shard discussions here, they are not welcome. Our forum moderation team will be dealing with these things appropriately but please do not post anything here regarding other shards. If you do and it keeps up you will be banned.
but all in all.. thanks.. and a good night to you 
I hope UOGamers goes on forever