Even though skill gain isn't THAT hard, it is hard enough. I didn't feel like spending 120+ days in game time macroing and building up skills. To me it's just not worth it anymore. I don't have time to mine hundreds of thousands of pieces of ore just to GM blacksmithy. I spent my time on vanilla IN raising skills. In fact, I started over three times on vanilla IN. I've started over on several shards in my time. I want to play UO and have fun and quite frankly, macroing isn't fun at all.
However, the UO community as whole is dying. It's even apparent on a lot of the larger shards.
The only reason I visit this forum is for the nostalgic feeling I get when I read about UO. I also visit another shard forum. A part of me wants to play UO and a part of me doesn't and to satisfy that urge I visit UO forums.
Most likely I'll never play UO again. I installed and uninstalled UO at least five times over the lifetime of IN:X. I probably had UO installed for a week at a time. Each time I went in thinking that I was just going to have fun and hunt a little at a time and interact with what's left of the player base. But when I saw how much work I had left on building up my character I just got frustrated and left.
If I do decide to play UO again I am going to play on the largest private server. I'm sure you all know what shard I'm typing about. I can have a 7x tamer in less than a weeks time. To me it's worth it just to interact with 800+ other players. I have so much fun playing as a thief and stealing at the moongates. Stealing is fun there because there are actually players to steal from.
People keep saying skill gain has nothing to do with the decline in population. To be honest, I believe it has does. I know staffers keep saying that skill gain is never going to change. Guess what, have fun staffing a shard with an average of 15 players. That number will probably be lower with time. :
hrugs::