The recent Ultima Online: Lost and Found thread got me thinking of old war stories from the early days. I've seen a few here and there, but I couldn't find a thread dedicated to tales from OSI UO. So here goes. For instance, there was a time when the guards were literally retarded on Atlantic. I had just gotten my thief to 98.something when the guards decided to stop working so hard. If called, they would go into war mode, but would then take short, furtive steps in the offender's generally direction. I remember running circles around them on horseback at one point. I did that to a few others who were unfortunately still using dialup. West Britain was a ghost town. Happened either late 1999 or earlier 2000.
Cool thread idea. One of my favorite Pacific moments was when I was sitting at Brit bank very late at night/early morning. The bank was nearly empty at that time. This guy came out with a large tamed blue frog named A. But when it hopped, you could see a rainbow of frogS hopping in unison...it was a bit like Nyan Frog or something. Then the guy would walk two steps, say a letter and "stay," for example "G stay" and it turned that when he was done, he had a total of eight different colored frogs, A B C D E F G. I'm thinking to myself, no one is going to buy tamed frogs...people want mounts or monsters that eat meat and kill stuff. Then... He began issuing commands to the frogs and not only did each frog have a different color, each had a different timbre...a different pitch based on the frog name! So as each frog croaked, it made a croak based a note. As he gave commands in sequence, his frog piano chirped to make a melody! After about an hour of this, he then set all of the frogs loose in town.
Hah, I remember the brief era of the slow guards! Pretty nice for thieves back then since you could outrun the guards! That period of time didn't last very long unfortunately. I had a thief on Atlantic too around that time (along with a lot of other chars). Catskills and Atlantic were my main servers with a little of Siege and Sonoma in there too, but mostly Cats & Atlantic. I think the slow guard thing was around the same period of time when you could loot blue corpses in town too while hidden & you were only in danger of being guard whacked for 15 seconds after you looted the first item. Once that time passed you were free to loot everything else while staying hidden and not being in danger of the guards killing you. You just needed to hide immediately after looting the first piece then you could loot the rest of someone's stuff without being revealed. So it was... open corpse....loot item + hide immediately. Chill there for 15 seconds then loot everything else while hidden. Have to admit I abused the hell out of that on Catskills and/or Atlantic with all the faction people killing each other after factions came out Then there was this little bug with the guards related to the reprieve that reds got for joining factions around the same time. One of my reds at the time joined factions (to get the one time reprieve from being red and get to play around in factions a bit). Unfortunately the guards still recognized characters as murderers after the reprieve so you'd get guard whacked the first time you went into town even though you weren't actually red anymore. So after joining a faction I recalled in to the divider (between the walls) between north and south Brit. A guard showed up outside the walls and attacked me. Since I was blue though the guard went grey and was now a criminal. It couldn't reach me since it was outside the divider though. Hmm..... So, with a guard trying to murder me now and it being a criminal I naturally decided to call the guards. A guard showed up to kill the guard and another one showed up to try to kill me around the same time. Interesting.... Called guards again. This led to more guards appearing to kill the now-criminal guards and more guards appearing to kill me. You can see where this is going I'm sure... After a little bit of yelling guards and laughing my ass off (a couple friends were there too and joined in the fun) things started to get pretty damn laggy with a sea of guards beating the shit out of each other. Then Catskills crashed and I felt bad I wish my friends and I took some screenshots. It really wasn't our thing to be snapping screenshots back then though. Had I known it would have crashed Catskills I wouldn't have done it. Still it was pretty damn funny at the time with all the guards killing each other in Brit outside that divider. Looking forward to hearing some of the other war stories from people who played UO way back in the day!
Thinking back some more, I remember when OSI started allowing guild warring on Trammel. I was eating dinner and started getting a bunch of rapid ICQ messages. I finished up and went back to the computer, and a guildmate (I was running a Chaos guild) said that they had just opened up Trammel to guild pvp. So he and my righthand man head to West Brit and sure enough found a couple enemy guildmembers right away. So we go up and start casting, and they're laughing at us, and then "UUHHHHHHHH!!! UUUHHHHHHH!!!" Within a few seconds, we had two of them on the ground and two others running away with like 20 hp left. Totally blindsided them despite the fact they saw it coming. We went from bank to bank that night killing and chasing everyone we could. A few hours later, Trammel's banks were looking more like Felucca's with hardly anyone but noobs and non-warring guilds. For a short while that night, we restruck fear into the hearts of our foes, the fear that Trammel had previously cured them of. Good times...
