It’s been a few years, but the Return to Britannia program is back and active for many players. I know that Publish 78 and the UO Producer’s Letter both indicated it was for the month of September, implying it would start on September 1, 2012. Many people believed that to be true, especially after reading about it on other websites, or seeing the note that was posted last week.

That would have been nice, since it was a 3-day weekend or holiday for many former players, but it turns out that at the last minute they changed it to September 5. Well it may not have been changed at the last minute, but they didn’t post notice about the change until August 31. With that said, it started this morning, September 5th, and please note that it will run through October 5 so you will get a full month.

Now if you are asking why I’m only posting now, the evening of the 5th, it’s for a simple reason. I did not want to post until I knew it was working. While I saw it in action this morning, there were still many people who were unable to re-active their accounts and login. There was a note on Stratics indicating that some accounts were still having problems, but the vast majority of former players are going to get try to login, go through the steps mentioned on the UO Herald and EA support and who knows what else, long before they decide to look at Stratics, assuming they even remember Stratics.

A few hours ago, a note was finally posted on the UO Herald:

We have discovered an issue that is causing some accounts not able to log in with the Return to Britannia. We are working to resolve this issue and should have a fix by tomorrow. We will update you as soon as we have additional information.

Those of you who are familiar with EA and UO are probably agreeing with those on Stratics who said it wouldn’t be UO or EA if something didn’t go wrong. Chuckles aside, they are working to get these accounts straightened out.

Some important links:
– Account Help/FAQ/Support
– EA Account Management

Additional Notes
Housing and Gifts – Anniversary Items or Halloween
RTB accounts cannot place houses or receive anniversary or Halloween gifts – you have to be a paying subscriber for that. If you are thinking about re-activating some accounts for some quick gold or another RTB house that will stay up for years, it’s not going to happen.

UO Website
UO.com. If you loaded up UO.com and were re-directed to UOHerald.com, and asked yourself “WHAT THE F***?”, you’re not alone, and you also haven’t been around in the past 5-6 years. It’s been 5-6 years since Mythic and the Warhammer Online people destroyed the old UO.com website and UO’s online identity and gave us the craptacular UOHerald.com. If you have ever looked at the current UO website and thought that the person(s) responsible for its design hated UO, you would probably be right.

Thankfully that nightmare may almost be over. We have been told that if everything goes well, they will have a new UO.com website deployed by the end of September that highlights UO instead of looking like some bastard sibling of a crappy Warhammer fansite.

If you are still here and still ready to login, well go have fun, you may have a lot of catching up to. If you were ever in the Society of Archers guild, check out an S|A Guild Page. If you are confused by the changes, head over to the UO Guide.

And don’t forget that Stephen Emond, CmdrFalcon, is putting together a really cool Collector’s Guide for Ultima Online, a follow-up to his Ultima guide.