[Eighty Swords]

Skillgain doesn't make people leave They just won't join a server with hard skillgain when theres noone around, thats the point. And I dunno who likes building chars, that's something new for me. I'd understand if you was talking about WoW or D2 any game with levels, where you actually need to play to build your character, there you can build different classes of same character and on any level you have lots of same levels around, so you still playing, in diablo2 you could even make low-lvl dueler and so on...
But UO, where to make your character you always AFK macroing, where you can't start PvPing some of your skills aren't GMed - how could it be funny?

Agree 100% that's why games like D2 continue to do great even 10 years after it came out. Because you can play while you train your character. There's some fun to that. Unlike with UO where you leave the PC on for X hours or X days to train skills. When someone wants to play a game they want to play it right away, not in 1 week. That's like going shopping with your parents for your birthday gift, you know what it is but you can't have it for another month cause it's not your birthday yet!!