Dear MMOs, stop trying to push away old temporarily inactive players

[SataiRolePlayingGuy]

Okay, I share a lot of fault in this but this still annoys me vastly and the game set up shares part of the blame.

I still have an Ultima Online account, the first big MMO.  Still running after over 20 years though a shadow of what it was early on and plays considerably different than it used to (better in some ways, worse in others).  I started when it was brand new, played a few years, stopped, then came back with a new account a few years back. One of its early features was a player being able to buy there own house.  I had one of those, the only down side is, due to limited space it goes away if you do not keep logging in.  There is the problem, I got a little lazy about that more recently and went a while without doing so.  I should have thought of this, but I did not.  Also old as the game and with its shrinking player base, they should be a lot more lenient about this.  The rules were set when it was drastically more active.

An intelligent game company might give you back the resources again to be able to put it back and put back everything you had in there.  Not this game though, outside of a small number of account bound stuff, its all gone.  Guess what guys, as a life long fan of the series, you just kicked me in the balls and made me very reluctant to ever play again.

[zephysempai]

I feel this on so many levels. Its never a good feeling to lose things you've worked so hard for.

 

I'm surprised Ultima hasn't amended this. Even RuneScape has a system where, if you drop from premium to freemium, you still maintain all your premium gear and assets. They've done a massive update some years ago, to which I was unaware of. Some items were altered. Others were completely removed. However, even as a now freemium member, those items were replaced with vouchers that could be redeemed for comparable items.

 

Though I've never played Ultima myself, as a fan of MMOs I have to pay respect to the OG title. I'm sorry to hear that you've lost so much. Hopefully the developers work on better solutions.