Post: #8

Not sure toplists 'really killed uo' thats probably more down to the fact everyone who played it in its prime is now 30+ years old and got a family and job that is more important than macroing your arms lore.

I do agree the ones out there are cash cows though, we used a lot of them, and you DO get people coming to your server - so they actually are benefitting servers, but when I paid for an Ad at the top of the list, we got 20x more people coming than being ranked in the top 5 in the list.

Your experience with them is likely that you couldn't get players to vote or they left to move to other servers in the lists, because they didn't want to help, our players did vote and we were constantly in the top of the lists and regularly getting new players from more dead servers.

Players are not viewing toplists and then quitting UO because of it. they are just moving to other servers or they are new UO players. Wjhat you mean is that toplists killed the really low player count servers, since they couldn't possibly rank high enough due to it being based on pure numbers (it would be like Google ranking websites based on purely number of visits - no new sites would ever rank high). So it did kill a lot of servers, but it did not kill UO overall, like I say, we thrived thanks to those lists.

So having a list which is ordered randomly, showing a wide range of stats like uptime, max players, number of accounts, average online per hour, last down time, server type, maps in use, start date of server, any ini settings which may be relevent etc. may bring it to a more fair ball game, so players can easily find the 'style' of server they want, rather than just the busiest ones