| Subject: Xanthor, Mayor of Wintermoor speaks out.... |
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Darkstone News
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Date Posted: Sun, May 11 2003, 08:15pm
In reply to:
Darkstone News
's message, "Wintermoor is for sale, 52 Houses, 100 m of rares, a bonus keep all for 5000$US" on Sun, May 11 2003, 08:11pm
The Atlantic community was deeply distressed over the proposed sale of Wintermoor.
Many posts were made on forums pleading with OSI to prevent the sale of this "blessed" town.
Now, Xanthor, Mayor of Wintermoor speaks out...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dear Fellow Citizens of Atlantic,
First, forgive me for not posting before but due to recent time constraints I do not keep track of the boards as prompt as I would like to. I recently received a strange email from OSI, as well as a few odd icq's, and a very disturbing email from Kirah of Wintermoor (and old friend I respect very much) that upset me greatly so I had to look into this and make a post. This post is a little long, but please take the time to review this - it's basically the summation of all of Wintermoor and the Museums and what just recently happened.
Let me first say that I am not selling the City of Wintermoor, nor will I be selling the museums. I know a lot of people in the community as well as have been in this game a very long time and the amount of time and effort it took to build such an establishment makes it nearly impossible to ever let it go. I will go more into this later in the post....
Now, I will say this, in addition to running the City of Wintermoor I was heavily into factions. When AOS came out (and due to many of the changes it brought) factions almost completely came to a halt so I decided to scale down my UO playing and refocus myself. It is well known that I had 38 accounts ($380 a month for almost 60 months on all accounts) which is far more money than I would like to calculate but you get the idea....I downgraded to 10 accounts (the Key Wintermoor housing accounts 10 accounts with 5 houses grandfathered each) 10 x 5 = 50 houses (Wintermoor plus a few spares I owned)
For those who do not know me, I work for the Department of Health and Human Services as the IT Director for the State of New Jersey. I also own a consulting company called Camelot Computers (http://www.CamelotComputers.com). My wife is a Doctor of Neurology. What you have to understand is that people have many hobbies....some people like a fancy cars, some people like to travel, some people collect comics, or coins. We liked UO and that was our hobby. We poured money into UO, and we were lucky enough to start collecting rares when rares were not really 'rare' and there was no 'ebay' world of UO - those evils came much much later. We gathed 75% of the museum items via the game and through playing UO. Only after ebay came out did The Museums had cost me countless thousands of dollars to continue to expand with the accounts thousands more to maintain...some people will call us crazy but it simply was our hobby and we loved OSI and the game of Ultima online. We don't regret this at all and had lots of good times with Ultima Online and continue to do so.
Thus, because I recently downgraded many of my accounts (because I no longer play factions) and began to redecorate and clean (because many of my friends left) I can only assume that lots of rumors have begun about me quitting UO and leaving. I have also noticed posts that 'Wintermoor is for sale', and I have noticed people using my name and email and everything else. I honestly didn't really bother about this because it has been happening for almost 4 years. Many times Vix of Tradespot (and old friend) had to be contacted to delete another user posting on the boards claiming to be me. I don't think a month goes by when some player tries to scam someone at the museum or claims to know me, or claims to be having something for sale of Wintermoor. It's a sad fact but people often try to pretend to be me. The people who know me close know that I like to talk over the phone irl to make sure people know it's me and have no problems commicating that way or even explaining rares or history to them...
Now, let me go over what has been happening for the last few months. With my game-time and life in factions dead I have had time to focus on other things. I played a necromancer a little bit and even explored malas some, but I found myself viewing my website as needing some updating.
Again, forgive me for assuming anything, incase anyone does not know, I am the owner and designer of the UO Rares website. www.UORares.com It has always been my donation to the UO community and I have paid for it out of pocket from day one. We have been a large part of the UO community and even to this day we receive between 20,000 and 35,000 HITS a day from over 20 different countries. You can visit my Server distribution for this month at http://www.uorares.com/usage/usage_200305.html (we are even happy to say that we have a usage base of 8% japanese!)
Well....during my faction fighting (a never ending battle for almost a year) I really neglected the UO Rares website. Then, I got an email from a friend called JC the builder. He's one of those old time players who really respected the rares community and wanted to lend a hand. It was him that renewed my interest in getting the site up and running full time again. So, he started to work on the facts that have changed or were now incorrect, and I began to get all the graphics, fonts and history updated. I broke out my old email machine (5743 UO related emails over 4 years) and began to compile all the old information that was still not posted. With JC's help and determination the UO Rares site has been updated greatly over the past two months and we have even gotten all dead and broken links corrected. Is this the work of someone who is leaving the community or who sells things on ebay to make some kind of illegal profit???
Also, I have been cleaning house of some of the non-rare rares. What I mean is that AOS also upset me with all this spawning rares stuff. I find it really annoying being a rare collector that 'true rares start spawning'. I started to review the rares that are no longer rare and was working on making some changes. We were planning to have a redecoration of the museum with some new rares I had collected. I still have a few quest items and some neat stuff the community has never seen. In order to get a few other rare items, I sold off some of the early common rare stuff like Coal, Fireworks wands, extra pots, kettles and things I had numerous things of...
Now, I come to the boards here and I have to say I was very very saddened by what I read. There was one member of the community (I believe Lilliana) who bashed me, and attacked me and didn't even know me.
First, I want to explain this as this is VERY VERY VERY important. There are very few people left in UO from the original days but those who were around back then will remember that the City of Wintermoor was NEVER blessed. Yes, it is 100% true. As a matter of fact, I sigh heavily when I read that Lilliana wrote, 'Xanthar never lifted a finger to do a thing and gets blessed items'. You have no idea what kind of frustrating world I have lived with Wintermoor. During the 1998/1999 era, lots of lots of establishments were getting blessed. It was a different era back then and Seers were much a part of the UO community. Anyway, for almost 2 years I tried everything to get blessed. I had only wanted and asked for one thing - a stablemaster. We wrote letters, we had guild members write letters, we formed websites, we had meetings, I pleaded until I was blue in the face. Nothing ever became of it....
Finally, the Museum had a 2 year anniversary and lot of the community came out to visit. It was ran and headed by Seer Nickademus who ran a lot of the festivities. Unknown to myself, the Seer (with the help of an IGM) placed wooden walls and a large bartop table in the southern museum, and placed a table only in the northern museum). In addition, the Seer and the IGM did assist with 'removing' items from various locations. For example, Braziers and statues used to spawn on the Earth Elementals at the bottom of Shame (level 4), we kept those few braziers that we had in bags in the museum. The Seer (in a roleplaying fashion) 'tore' open those bags reveiling the braziers for all to see. Thus, that is how things like Braziers and Statues were gotten in the museum. We had supplied the item (the Seers and IGM's were forbidden to create new items) but they had assisted us with displaying it.
Let me rephrase that again to make it clear. The only thing that was EVER done to wintermoor (and it happened when I wasn't even there after the festival - I wasn't allowed inside) was the placing of Wooden Walls as well as two bartops. Never ever ever ever ever was a single rare EVER given to me by OSI, never did they create any rares for me, and never was I given free gifts, housing or any special treatment. I have the same problems, and have to go through the same emails and problems that everyone else in UO has. I have never gotten special treatment and have even had accounts blocked or banned that needed to be cleared up. My favorite incident occurred about 1 year ago when a newer GM came to the Museum and banned my account because 'I used a bug to make wooden walls and needed to be banned'. It took me almost 4 days to get my housing on my account unbanned. I have spent hundreds of hours trying to enhance the Wintermoor community, and we spent almost 2 years trying to get just one thing for Wintermoor (a stablemaster) and completely failed. I get very hurt when I hear people tell me I never lifted a finger and received everything in the world....I spent 2 years of my time trying SO hard to simply get a stablemaster, I got nothing. I spent tons of time trying to get blessed, I never did. The only thing that happened was when the Seer came and they decided what to place in the museum. The walls and the tabletops. That really is important to know because I fear that time has replaced the truth with all these vicious rumors on the stratics and tradespot boards. I have not gotten special treatment from OSI.
** The above image is one of the mini-events the Seers had created **
One of the VERY positive things however, was that with all our festivals and events we did gain the attention of various members of the UO community. Probably the height of our enjoyment was when Seer Narcissus (who we later found out was Claudia Raym of the Atlantic Quests) had visited us and made mini quests and spawns on Ice Isle. There was nothing more fun in my eyes than the old Seer quests in UO. He raised our spirits almost more than anyone in the game.
Now, the next thing I hear people tell me is 'BUT OSI GAVE YOU BLESSED TREES'. Well, again, this was not a blessing and had nothing to do with me. The truth was that when Trammel was born there was a problem with the spawns on ice isle. There were more orcs around than a Lord of the Rings Movie. Things would spawn like mad and for months and months the GM's couldn't stop it. We complained and complained and apparently this problem was on all the shards. OSI then decided to find some of the problem spots (the southern tip of ice isle) and put a GM blocking item such as a rock to lower the spawn. They did this on ALL shards. On many of the shards they placed rocks, some they placed trees (like Atlantic). About a year later the spawn had been fixed and although many shards removed the GM block rocks or trees on their southern tips they apparently thought it looked good near the musuems and decided to leave it. Please don't think OSI was bestowing favoritism to the museum or me personally, they were simply using what they had in their power to fix a spawning problem on all shards. These facts are very important to know and understand.
In the early days of UO, rare items were not 'rare'. No one really collected items, and it was easy to amass true rares. Also, you could find things (my 'golden belt' actually came from the jewerly store just east of West Brit bank, it was on the ground discarded as an item that couldn't be sold). We used to gate npc's for money day and night, and I was a GM tailor for the first year. Xanthar the mighty tailor!!!! hehe.
Later, as the museum became known, people would come to us with rare items and make offers or donations to us because we were the museum. We spent a lot of money and time gathering rares - it was what we did. We never used bugs or exploits, and even promoted AGAINST the use of such things on the UO Rares website.
I also want to point out that collecting rares was a FULL time job. This was no easy task and we had to develop strong business skills as well as contacts. Probably one of the craziest stories we have is how we gained the Marble Collumns, Torn Painting, and Deamon Heads and a 'rose' (the heads that OSI now uses on the Champion Spawn shrines). If I remember correctly is was near the end of 1999 and OSI was having a lot of problems with their servers going down. They were getting hacked and people were very upset (It's funny to see how people get upset when a server goes down for a few minutes now - sometimes we used to see Atlantic go down for days). Anyway, one of my guild members, his name was Mitragorn was from Russia and worked with a team of computer programmers who did 'anti-hacking'. He emailed OSI and to his surprise, Lord British himself contacted him back. He called him on the phone in Russia and Mitragorn explained to Lord British that him and his friends could try to 'hack' into the system and assist in helping on how to block such hack attempts. Lord British agreed and thanked him for the assistance and they hit it off very well. Being a guild member, he had told us this story and we listened in earnist. Anyway, apparently the information really did help and Lord British (Richard Garriot) was very happy. Although Mitragorn did not ask for anything, Lord British asked to meet Mitragorn ingame and offered a few tokens of thanks. He had a GM create for him two roses, a torn painting, 2 deamon heads and the marble collumns in the museum. My guild mate then showed me the items and of course I immediately wanted them for the museum. Being my guild mate, he was reasonable but he also did know the value of such things as they were rare so we made a deal. In Russia, he had a very tough time getting ciggarrettes, especially Marlboro at the time. So, I agreed to get a special order of 10 cartons of cigarrattes (and get them through customs in Russia) in exchange for all the rare items. The entire process took about three months but in the end he got his ciggarettes and I got the rares for the museum.
Another story was about a getting a small house in Wintermoor. It took months to gain houses and sometimes a year just to make contact. We had gotten almost all the houses in wintermoor but one...it was a small but it was tough to get. It was owned by a very young girl from China who could not speak english very well at all. It was the last house we did not own and we wanted it greatly. We had finally gotten someone to talk to her and tell her we would offer $100 USD for the house. She agreed but had no idea how to get the money (she was only like 14 years old and paypal etc wasn't even around then). I had to talk to my bank, who got a Chinese translator for me, who called the mother of the child in china to do a wire transfer into the Hong Kong account of the mother for the mother to give the money to the child to get the house. Thus, after a $100 wire transfer, $40 translation fees, and $20 wire transfer and phone charge, Wintermoor had it's last small it needed. The point of all this was that everything had a story, and none of this was a 'walk in the park'. It took many people helping to get everything accomplished and countless hours of time of mine and my wife's.
So, to sum up everything very quickly. I am not leaving UO, and I am NOT selling the museums. The rumors are incorrect, and I believe the person who is even claiming to be selling Wintermoor is named like 'Marie' or something??? I love this game, and continue to put forth effort into the UO Community Websites such as www.UORares.com I have a lot of great memories of this game, and I'm not sure I can put a price tag on that or ever let it go.
Sincerely,
Xanthar of the Museum
Mayor of Wintermoor
UO Rares Designer
Camelot Computers, Inc - President
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