People wanted an unlimited supply of animals to hunt. So, that meant we had to turn off the artificial life system and provide players with a simpler ecology system. We also found that more anti-social behavior cropped up in the game than we anticipated. This caused us to develop better notoriety systems to handle it. We feel that UO has really evolved in the past year.
Evolution is what a persistent world is all about.
It takes time to balance the game and deal with the many issues of having thousands of players in one world. No one has ever done this type of game on this scale, and it was a challenge to be the first. We have a lot of very cool plans for next year. Our game is going to grow and evolve to the next level of game play. Look for player races, a party system, an enhanced reputation system, and a quest system to name a few.