My Story

The Begginings

I first stumbled into Ultima Online in my freshman dorms when one of my floor-mates was beta-testing the game. I remember being intrigued by how his avatar would walk around talking with other real people. Over the next few months I watched few of my other friends play the game as a thief, tamer, smith, etc. It would be not for another couple of years before I actually plunged into it myself. The name of my first character was Calliane and my friend who started with me was Warbringer. Over the next few months Calliane and Warbringer became mages. No, not grandmaster mages - that would take much longer.


Early merchant

Eventually a time came when I needed to make gold. Like everyone else I started a Reg vendor. I would go to all the mage shops in the land when they were refreshed and try to buy as many regs as possible. Luckily for me, I was able to get a vendor at one of the best spots in the game then: A small house right outside of Skara Brae bank. I soon expanded into reselling silver weapons by scouring the lands looking for cheap vendors; the outskirts of Occlo were a gold mine. Business was going good. I had close to five million gold when 100K was considered enough to retire on. I decided to invest my wealth into the early rares competing with people like Xanthar and Gawin. That is when I ran into a lousy person who exploited my naivety to hack me. That was quite an experience watching your mouse pointer move around by itself. I was not so bothered though. Maybe because I had no idea that my gold was worth enough to buy me a car.

But I was also not about to start up again and I decided to quit UO at this point. It was very unfortunate as I missed out on the best of the factions and seers. When I came back again, AoS was in full swing and UO was bombarded with complicated item properties. I was using a friends account which had a red named Street Fighter and a blue named Angel Athena - those would end up becoming my main characters over the next few years. It took me few months to figure out how things worked. I decided to reopen my business and again lady luck was smiling on me. I found a cheap doom (thief) artifacts vendor behind minoc stables. The owner would stock them once a week and I would be waiting with all my gold in the bank. After doing this for few months with my friend Porter, I decided to give PvP a chance. I had only recently gotten a very nice connection and figured it was time to experience this part of UO. What happened next probably redefined how I would play Ultima Online forever.

Becoming a PvPer

I joined up with a small guild named KoL. What can I say but that we sucked. We would go do champion spawns and almost always get crashed by HOT or PvP. But we did not give up and we got some spawns done which got us the much needed scrolls. Our GM was a stubborn bastard and was not the kind to suck up to bigger guilds. This taught us to be defiant, a very important quality in PvP. Eventually we merged with a like-minded guild named Skulls [-S-] and now we were a bigger group of mostly sucky players with couple of quality players on the top. Again we did not give up and now we had the numbers at least. This is when I met the one person who probably touched me the most in Ultima Online: Columbus, GM of [-S-]. What can I say but that some people are born leaders. I fought side by side with him over the next couple of years through thick and thin. We went from the largest guild to less than a dozen players back up to largest guild and so on. We spawned and crashed literally hundreds of champion and harrower spawns. I evolved from a useless meat-shield into someone who would crash a 10 person spawn by himself and manage to kill half the people + get scrolls. It was the most fun I ever had. But all good things must come to an end.


Becoming a rare collector

Columbus was called to serve in Afghanistan which led to disbandment of the guild. Still there was hope that once he comes back things would go back to the way they were. I even came back to UO on a new character named Tomas Bryce to prepare the foundations of the big comeback. That is when tragedy struck; Columbus was killed when his helicopter fell in the ravines in a far away land. I have experienced death before but this one hurt the most. I was faced with a choice: to quit UO for good or to continue playing. It was too hard to let go of UO in the face of what had just happened so I joined up with Wynn of [Mall]. I became a merchant PvPer. It was fun for while but pvp'ing alone got old after some time and I could not really picture myself joining any other guild. There would be no attempt to replace what I had lost.

This is when I experienced the world of rares again via Wynn. Lot of new rares had came into existence since the pre-trammel days. I became a full-fledged xshard trader of PvP items to support my rather expensive hobby of buying rares. Eventually Wynn quit and I was alone again. The vendor scene outside Occlo vanished years ago, all of my friends are long gone, and I am well past my teenage years; seems like there is very little left but ghosts of the past still connecting me with Sosaria.

But there are still more rares left to collect. That is if they are not all duped already.