Hail and well met!

[Erich Grailmoore]

I don't even know where to start. I could go on about my experiences with this game over the past seventeen years, most of them on an official shard. I know it's against the rules to name other freeshards, but even if it wasn't... the two that have been very special to me in years past, closed long ago.

After EA's account billing nightmare inadvertently resulted in (another) one of my houses falling, I decided to have a more open mind about freeshards. It helps that Richard Garriott and other UO alumni have publicly sung their praises in recent years.

After much research, Whispering Pines made a very short list of freeshards (a list I definitely wouldn't share!). WP was the first shard I visited on my new search. After taking the tour last night, meeting some players, and being totally surprised by many of WP's features, I don't think I'll need to explore the rest of that list.

To the staff here---we all know the game's seen its heyday, maybe freeshards have too; but a few of us will always hang on to our good taste in entertainment, and I'm grateful to see a shard like this exists still.

[Falkor]

Welcome to the shard!

We try to provide a place where you can adventure any way you wish. I'm sure that having no PvP keeps some people from giving us a try but we've got so much else to offer! And, there's always more on the way

Be sure to visit the New WP Content section of the forums. Most of the shard's biggest (and most recent) changes are documented there.

You're welcome to mention closed shards you were on. You may just find others here that once played them as well!

[Erich Grailmoore]

Welcome to the shard!You're welcome to mention closed shards you were on. You may just find others here that once played them as well!

My production shard "home" was Great Lakes. My name there was Hannes-Erich Geldrecht. Back in the old days, I was in a guild named The Nobility.

Neither of my freeshards were bursting with population, which was the reason given for their closure. I feel this was a mistake on their part, but that's coming from a guy who eschewed Atlantic for Great Lake's smaller, personable community. I have a very real and busy life outside of games, and UO hasn't been my "hobby" in years, but it's still A Thing I Like. Many players will succumb to that---but we're still players.

Before it closed, I enjoyed Player-Realms: Shadowcove, also a family-friendly freeshard, sharing some features with WP, and some different ones too: Vendors who could be set to buy certain items as well as sell for you; regional maps on the website showing friends locations; Powerful NPC hirelings who could be ordered to guard towns against monsters, spilling out of dungeons if they weren't kept in check! Like WP, they did it all for a smaller, but ever-grateful playerbase.

Before it closed, In Mani Ylem, my other home away from home, was I guess, a secret getaway among the least-known shards. Not many of my friends would have gone for it. But as grateful as I am for skill gates and co-op play, I still remember the old days fondly. The reason why I think no one has successfully recreated the old days is because, before being forced to prey on themselves, hardcore PvPers chased off 70 percent of the playerbase. You can't have the old days back without those people. In Mani Ylem gave it a stab, bless that guy's heart. (Here's Archive.org's link to the shard's philosophy.)

[Yordor]

Before I found WP over 5 years ago, I played only one other free shard: In Mani Ylem!

I must have arrived near the end of the shard's life because there were never more than 2-3 people online at one time. I played Chesapeake from 1998-2002, beginning when T2A was new in stores, so I was comfortable with Fel-only living. The only mechanic I didn't like was house security. I think the days of having a house key and needing a maze of locked-down tables for security are long gone.

I don't remember anyone's name from the shard. In fact, I'm not even sure which name I went by! I do remember that a vet held a contest where he put a locked chest of goodies on his porch. Then he had another unlocked chest next to it with hundreds of keys inside it. Anyone who found the right key won the contents of the locked case. I went through those keys as quickly as I could, all the while worrying that he'd log in and PK me in his house just because he could.

I never got PKed on the shard, though it was probably because I was a poor newbie miner and not due to anything special I did.

[Erich Grailmoore]

Hail and well met! It's surprising to meet another former IMY-ite (heck, it was surprising to meet other IMY-ites on IMY).

You may not have played toward the shard's end. IMY did enjoy some high concurrent user counts early on---for an obscurer shard I mean (I don't know if there were ever more than 35 players on simultaneously, which was not much in those days)---but it didn't last very long. Almost as soon as they arrived, I'm guessing many players bolted after realizing the shard's classic philosophy included early UO skill gain progress. I never had a problem with it. If Whispering Pines featured slow skill gains, I wouldn't be any less excited to be here (I acknowledge most people don't share my reserves of patience).

When hardcore PvP shards advertise themselves by reducing the spirit of classic UO mostly to PvP, that actually sounds very boring to me. 1997-1999 will never pick up the phone and give those shards a call, because they have nothing to offer most of the game's original fan base. I had fun in UO's toughest era, but these days, there are a helluva lot more things to actually do on a shard like Whispering Pines.