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[FingersMcSteal]

Opening up Haven Reborn soon, something which I thought I'd never do again but it seems UO is still in my blood.

Anyhooow... Since it's generally online 24/7 again I'm finding the urge to make one of those shard checking sites again so people can hopefully find live shards.
A lot of the other sites seem to have a lot of older dead shards around, maybe time to dust off the shard polling software and launcher code maybes ???

What do you guys think... good idea or not ??

 

[Neshoba]

sweet is a lot of dead shards out there Mine included for now and it seems You cant delete it from any of the listings so this would be a fresh pl;ace to add a shard that's active and be able to edit information or delete the listing once its inactive

 

[Djeryv]

I think "top sites" or uo gateway type stuff is a waste of effort to assemble and publish. It is 2019 and shards that want to try and have huge populations need to market themselves. That, along with Google, it takes a few minutes to find a shard to play on. They should have their own websites and forums, along with information on why they think their shard is special than others and why people should want to perhaps play there. They should have their discord channels and friendface pages. Here are two examples of shards that do it well...

https://uooutlands.com/

http://www.uorenaissance.com/

Shard owners need to take the shard promotions into their own hands. Top sites are just a lazy way to get the word out that someone loaded up ServUO with default settings, added custom content from the "custom releases" section, tweaked the skills and stat caps, and that is about the extent of that custom shard. There are a ton of those out there and they have populations between 0 and 1. Some of these servers still have a ping to them because the owner forgot that they left the thing on.

 

[TheDoc]

It's a waste because 1 person owns the majority of the better ones now,fakes connections, and is monopolizing the idea of free shards by pushing his. As I pointed out in my other post. It's exactly why I'm using forums, discord and social media once it is live. I already keep an updated facebook page since I'm friends with many players ( I know, hard to believe I have friends to some). It shows development progress and keeps them interested. Properly done SEO is the best tool in my own opinion, but my opinions is just that.