The Death of "MyUO"

[Steel DarKnight]

The Online Community Relations (OCR) team here at Origin feels strongly that communication is crucial when running an online game. When we first opened the MyUO forums in the year 2000, our goal was to provide players with a central place to gather and exchange feedback with each other and with developers. Over the last three years, though, we’ve learned that it takes a lot more time to moderate boards than to simply post on them! In an effort to spend less time as “the police” (locking and deleting threads, sending warnings, finding lost passwords, etc.) and more time on effective communication, we’re going to allow one of our oldest and most dedicated fansites, UO Stratics, to handle message board moderation and administration for the Ultima Online forum community on the currently established forums at uo.stratics.com.

So why choose UO Stratics? Well, not only are they part of one of the largest massively multiplayer gaming networks on the web, but they have the most active and established UO community outside of MyUO and a vast set of forums spanning every play style. Some of the benefits of the Stratics forums include:

* a more upgraded version of the same software used for the MyUO forums, with all the features MyUO users are accustomed to

* the ability to bookmark certain threads and posters

* thirty different board color schemes to choose from

* a fully functioning “Who’s Online” page

* a “Dev Post” page showing all posts made by OSI team members

* forums for each profession and each shard

* seventeen general forums, including an ideas forum, an off-topic forum, and yes -- even a rants forum!

In case you’re wondering if this change means that UO or the UO.com website is being scaled back, the answer is a resounding no! Not only has Ultima Online only now reached its all-time high in subscribers, but we have great plans for the future of the Ultima franchise. We are not short on web bandwidth or hardware; this change is specifically geared to free up the Community Team’s time for things that will improve communication, such as reading and responding to players' posts, researching game issues, and writing important news updates. Our time spent on the boards won’t change much – we’ll just be reading the Stratics forums instead of MyUO, and we won’t be spending any time on moderation or administration tasks.

The MyUO Forums will remain open until 2:00 PM Wednesday, March 19th CST to allow players to share their Stratics board names with other posters or make plans to meet friends from MyUO in specific Stratics forums. Anyone who doesn’t already have a Stratics username will need to sign up on the Stratics forums themselves here; we will not be providing players’ UO or MyUO login information to Stratics.

I know this is a lot of information to digest; so we invite you to discuss this move here in this thread. We have also started a thread here for the sole purpose of exchanging Stratics usernames.

__________________

Cynthe

Community Manager

ORIGIN Systems

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Dont know about you guys but Stratics for me is almost unbearable slow.

[Winter Wind]

[sarcasm] Well this is just great [sarcasm]

I liked the UO boards. Not to mention the fact that for the last few weeks the stratics site has been as unstable as AoS.

Oh well.

[Elathiel]

Same here Steel. Even on cable, its just so slow. With this change, its going to get even slower unless they do some serious overhauling for much more bandwidth.

[Lord Ser Brightblade]

Stratics is sooooooo slow. I can usually bake a loaf of bread faster than I can get a page to load, and I don't know how to bake bread! If I'm on cable I can only imagine how horrible it is for dial-up. I am ashamed of the complete and utter disregard for players from OSI. Their CS stinks plain and simple.

[kodoz]

Does this explain why the character search on myuo hasnt been updated since before AoS?`

[Winter Wind]

Just my two cents worth that I added to Cynthe's post at the boards

This may sound humorus but I am quite serious.

I want the montly fees lowered by at least 50 cents. These boards were a great service that I used to benefit myself and hopefully help others.

Why should I pay full price when services are being taken away?

I think it's actually quite ironic that EA/OSI says we are not to use the client to play on player ran shards or to use emulators, but yet our support forum is being handed over to a player run site. A board "emulator" if you will.

It just seems like they don't really care any more.

[Ange Sans Ailes]

....I can usually bake a loaf of bread faster than I can get a page to load, and I don't know how to bake bread!....

Geezus... LOL.. thanks for that laugh at work =)

Stratics' forums are a joke. Plain and simple. And the joke ain't funny. =\

[kodoz]

The forums part really shouldnt affect me, i never made the time to make a MyUO account anyways. But being unable to contact the game developers, have the live help chat, lose the ability to search characters, become 1000x harder to find info on guilds, and having the site support team stuck into the role of an ingame GM, will likely result in a catastrophe. And i agree, we shouldnt pay the full $10.00 when they think they shouldnt perform the full 100% on customer support. I hope that the massive outcry will change their minds.

[Lord Ser Brightblade]

Well you must first have a mind to change it *sneers* and those making the decision here are most likey void of all grey matter. I believe some necromancer cast animate dead on jwilsons and created the suits at OSI.

[kodoz]

You know, I think this 'gamer' language may be harder to learn than orcish...;-)