[Loki]

This is not customer service. It's just normal interaction between people. If someone is rude they should expect the same in return.

Darken tends to crop up in threads where people are expressing concerns and start putting the boot in, he doesn't even play here so I don't see the need to be nice to him or put up with it. Eru's reply to him is a lot more eloquent but I just didn't have the patience, I was not intending to offend anyone else though (sorry Avatar).

As for the issue of staff/events, it's really down to Taran but let me explain what I've been trying to say:

1) We have some staff, but we can't make them work if they have other things they need/want to do.

2) In order to get new staff we need appropriate people to recruit and this is difficult for us because there aren't a lot of people around and our requirements are very stringent. Letting the wrong person loose with GM powers would be really bad, we've worked very hard to prevent cheating or corruption.

So, I'm sorry if I sound like I keep repeating the same point but there isn't much else I can do at this stage, the current staff are either working on non-player interacting things, or they are busy/not playing UO at this time. As for new staff, cannot be done without Taran and even when he was around and tried to vet a few candidates there were problems since they had a history of breaking the server rules or they weren't active enough.

Anyway, all I am saying is we're not totally ignoring the problem but I hope you guys can see it isn't as easy as all that to fix... I also still feel that constant staff-provided entertainment isn't a workable long term model either, but if we could do some thing to get the playerbase up I wouldn't object of course.