How Many People Are Still Playing Ultima Online?
Deckard at UOJournal asks: so just how many players are there in UO?
Of course, the official (and maybe best) answer is that nobody outside of Electronic Arts really knows. Still, as Deckard points out, we were recently told by the head of EA Games that Ultima Online remains profitable; this suggests that a fair number of players are still active in the game, or at least are active enough to be bothered paying their ongoing subscription fees.
But how many?
Deckard’s findings are not exactly scienfitic, as the method of data gathering is rather imperfect:
There is a thread on Stratics about the status of MyUO, the utility that a lot of us use to look up characters, skills, guilds, etc. Itís a very useful tool. Towards the end of the thread, it was explained how the Japanese UO website still has the MyUO functionality, and ìNimuaqî gave a brief explanation of how to use it, as well as some interesting information:
I didnít share this before since there were a lot of speculation regarding the UO population and it would certainly be used for quite inaccurate population estimates, but hereís an interesting guild page:
The player characters that are not part of any guild is considered as a guild too. The guild id for the ìnoî guild is ì737c77c87e177a5dî. Inserting the shard id after this will give you all the player characters that were active in the last 30 days and are not member of any guild.
…
Iím missing a shard because some of the shard IDs were timing out, but I doubt the numbers are that much higher.
And his findings?
There are nearly 100,000 characters that are not in guilds and that have been logged in within the past 30 days. Thatís very interesting to me. Had you asked me to pick a number of characters that are not in guilds and that had logged in within the past 30 days, I would have picked lower than 100,000. In fact, I might have guessed that in total, there were around 100,000 active characters including guild and non-guild characters.
The problem is, of course, that we have no way of matching those to actual accounts, and that they do not represent many house-holding accounts that donít feel the need to login all that often. That and it does not show guild members of which there are many.
What to take away from this: Ultima Online still has a goodly number of players, likely quite far in excess of 100,000. Granted, that doesn’t come anywhere close to matching the 12 million (or somesuch) subscribers that World of Warcraft enjoys…but it’s not at all a bad number for as ancient an MMO as Ultima Online is.
Impressive numbers. I played In Por Ylem for a week, and I was really having a great time, but the realities of my busy personal and professional life soon set in, and I stopped playing again. Still, Ultima Online is a lot of fun even today!
Actually I doubt it’s 100,000 players since characters are different than players/accounts, and I really worded that poorly – you can have up to 7 characters per account per shard. So one account could easily have 100+ characters scattered across the shards.
However, those 100,000 non-guilded characters are characters that were logged in at some point in the past 30 days and so that does represent a lot of activity, and not everybody has the maximum amount of characters per shard, per account, far from it. In fact, there are probably quite a few accounts that only have a few characters and they are simply holding houses.
I couldn’t begin to guess. In the “widely profitable” article I posted a while back, the head of EA Games said UO had “tens of thousands” of subscribers.
If I had to guess, I’d say anywhere from 30,000 – 50,000.
I have played UO off and on on OSI the better part of the last decade, after taking about a years break I am resubbed currently for a month.
The population on OSI shards seems to be ok, Atlantic and Europa seem to be fine – though they are the most populated US/EU shards. However overall I would say there has been a decline, especially since 2006. Post Stygian Abyss/High Seas I’d say there was a fair amount of drop off due to the fact that while interesting the content was overall disappointing for waiting 5, almost six years for them.
As well I would say the drop of a second client, forcing the overall graphical quality of the game down dramatically. In 2007 they discontinued the Third Dawn client which was true 3D, somewhat and in 2010 they dropped the Kingdom Reborn client which was on the Gamebryo engine and extremely high resolution. They have been replaced with either the original client or the ‘enhanced client’ which is the Kingdom Reborn client with upscaled (terribly) legacy client artwork. I’d say that this decision has thrown a fair amount of paying subscribers off as well.
But the most telling example that there has been a decline in the games population is UHall, which is UO Stratics forum. For more than the last decade that forum would move even at the most non peak times like crazy – a page would be fully new topics within minutes. Now you can wait hours to have anything happen, its disturbing.
I think if we still have a more centralized way to see populations on freeshards I would say there has been a large spike over the last couple moving to them since OSI hasn’t been delivering in client technology, new content or live events all that well. Thats where the former subscribers have been going.
But, overall I’d say that OSI is doing fine – people don’t like losing their pixel crack. However I do feel that there is ad ifferent between ‘active’ players and people who don’t want their houses to fall.
Yep.
I guess if anything’s a sign of stagnation, the loss of love for gaming and the rush of new AAA games it’s the loss of players of Ultima Online. Good news is that other games are embracing UO and preparing for the future. No AAA games I can think of though, not even Skyrim.
I’ve often thought about going back to UO. I have a lot of happy memories of the early days just after launch. Unfortunately I don’t think nostalgia would be enough to get me back into a 14 year old game. Even excusing the graphics (which I don’t care much about anyway) and the bizarre isometric view, I’m often struck when going back to older games by the advances the industry has made in simpler things like friendly UI, and access features that none of us had even dreamed of back then. The fact is newer games aren’t just shinier, they’re easier to use, even describable as less painful in some cases. Even so, it’s somehow good to know that the old stomping grounds haven’t become a completely barren wasteland.
I quit playing UO last year after 12 years. Basically I found the game was being tailored for hardcore players and was hard for casual players to compete. One example is pvp, most good pvpers have hundreds of millions in items on. A player that isnt rich is hard to pvp with, not to mention the EXTREME increase in speed hacking and the lack of hack enforcement. Also, if you werent in one of the top 10 guilds, its just hard to do multiplayer encounters/bosses. I just couldnt pay 13$ a month for a game that seemed so hard to make progress in. I went to WoW, and its soooo much better for people that domt have 4+ hours a day to play video games. Some items in UO cost BILLIONS of gold. I know a lot of people that have left because of this. If they made changes to fix these things Id go back, but im not holding my breath.