Not the OP and I didn't play UO, but I did play a peer game out at the same time, Asheron's Call. AC, UO, and of course EQ were the big 3 early MMOs. Anyway, t

Not the OP and I didn't play UO, but I did play a peer game out at the same time, Asheron's Call. AC, UO, and of course EQ were the big 3 early MMOs. Anyway, there was definitely more community back then, if only due to how there were basically no modern quality-of-life considerations. No auto-group finder, minimal instancing (no instancing?), loss of items on death... you had to lean on others to help you out and they would, because eventually they'd need your help. A classic example is doing a corpse run to recover your items. In a modern MMO, you die and can rez at some convenient spot with all your items. No real loss or penalty for tough fights, no risk. In AC, you lost xp on death, lost items on your corpse, and had to make your way back to your body to erase the xp penalty and get your stuff back. I think the timer was something like 3 hours before your corpse would decay and either anybody could loot your body or time items disappeared. I think UO and EQ were the same. Some of the most memorable corpse runs where when you lost your armor and had to get some friends to come with you since you were now half naked and perhaps weaponless.