WP

Players Online. For a great many UO servers, that number is used as the measuring stick for success. The way it usually works is that everyone looks at the most heavily populated server as the benchmark and then shoots to approach, match, or top that. That's not only how shard owners view it but also very often how players see it as well. When I first migrated to Whispering Pines, I was coming from servers where having less than 200 players online was considered a sign the place was dying.

Now personally, these days I feel like the measure of a server's success is a combination of its content, events, and the atmosphere created by the staff and players. By that set of standards WP has proven over the course of nearly a year to be the best UO server I've ever played on. WP tops other servers in so many ways - none of the other low population servers out there have the stable %uptime that WP does. We are not plagued with daily crashes and persistent bugs like them. The higher population servers tend to have weary, unfriendly folk or petty tyrants playing at being GMS - here we have a pair of engaged, helpful, and friendly leaders in Ghost and Falkor. However, at the time I started writing this post, the Shard status bar at the top of the page showed Players Online: 4. At four players online, how many potential players will skip right over us and never know what they missed?

It's not that having a high server population is all the rage... without the other key components that make a server great, it certainly isn't. But Whispering Pines is already a great server and adding more players to it would not diminish it. What it might do is create some more economy. We all know that the buying/selling here could use a boost. We need more players in need of merchandise to sell it. I'm not saying to shoot for the stars here but let's try to get a consistent 20 players online throughout the day, and I believe that will naturally turn itself into 30, and so on and who knows where we'll end up?

The first thing nearly everyone can do to help bring players to WP is stay logged in. This is a long-standing method used on high-population servers to draw new players in. The higher the number people see in "Players Online", the more likely they are to try the server out. It doesn't have to make sense; that just is how it is. If you're playing UO on a home computer, plugged into the wall, and you're not using it for any other processor-intensive work, please just leave your character logged in when you're not playing, hidden in town somewhere. Turn off the sound and minimize the game window; you won't even notice it's running until you start playing again. if you're interested in knowing, the [status command will show your total number of hours logged into WP. So far me and my dusty seven year old notebook have managed 2617 hours online. This will keep the "Players Online" number in the status bar above higher, which encourages people to stay and create an account.

The second thing everyone can do is utilize the voting stones at the Travel Center. If you don't already know how to vote, you go through a public moongate and select "Custom Destinations", and then choose "Travel Center" from the following menu. You might recognize this place as the former Moonglow Lycaeum. Run a short distance to the southwest and you'll see a row of multicolored guildstones. The bright blue stone is a bank stone which you can double-click to deposit the gold you get from voting. Double-clicking the other stones opens a window to the voting site and rewards you with either gold or a great magic item (rarely). Only about half of the voting stones require any captcha solving, so the whole process takes only slightly longer than the time it takes to login and collect BODs. If you can play for 10 or more minutes a day, you can certainly take a few minutes to vote. This moves our server name higher up on the topsite lists, which is what brings people here in the first place.

Thanks for reading. Do what you can to help out and get a few more players on the server so you'll have someone to sell all those organics to.

The tl;dr version

Use the voting stones at the Travel Center, please. They move WP's name higher up the list on the topsites and draw more people here. If you can play for 10 minutes a day, you can find the time to vote.

Stay logged in even when you're AFK. When people come here because they saw WP on a topsite, they want to see that there are a decent number of people playing on the server. Everyone's idea of a decent number is different, but it would be great to have 20 people logged in round the clock instead of only during peak hours. You never know when a potential player will pass through.

Thanks for reading. Let's get some more players signing up here so you have someone to sell all those organics to.

I've always thought that if we had enough new players try us at once, they would become the main playerbase and our numbers would quickly grow after that. With only 1-2 at a time, nobody gets to really know the shard before giving up and trying something with a higher online count.

We could make it 100 online in a few weeks by adding PvP but we're just not that shard. Besides, all of our gear is made for PvM and players could kill each other in 1-2 moves.

WP has passed its 7th anniversary and there are more changes on the way to keep things fresh and unpredictable. I stay up to date with what other shards are doing, and many have yet to add some of the systems and items we've had for years, or they do so without the stability we have. Then there are the things we have that nobody else does. It's a good time to enter the Pines!