Marshalt
Administrator
Published:
04.01.2006 02:11
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No, they will not. OSI/EA has been aware of Emulator shards for a long time now. OSI/EA employees have been known to lurk and post on the web sites of Emulator software developers. While certainly, they do not outright condone the playing of Emulators (and technically, it *IS* against the Ultima Online Terms of Service), the truth of the situation is more complicated than that.
Representatives of OSI have stated that they don't have any broad concerns with emulators, in general. Certainly, if you are paying OSI your $12.95/mo to play their game, and you are in good standing with them, they are not going to tell you they do not want your money any longer.
We have seen instances where OSI probably did have some trouble with specific situations, however. In all these cases, though, the problem was with the people running the emulator; not with the players. Problems such as people trying to post advertisements for their Emulator on UO's official site, or the well-known UO fansites (such as Stratics or Vault). Or extremely large, U.S. shards that go out of their way to make a big 'stink' about how much 'better' they are than OSI. One OSI representative recently put it like this: They don't care about emulators, unless they lose sales because of them.
This is, however, a fairly complex issue. We are careful that we do -not- illegally distribute OSI's copyrighted software. We encourage players to get the software by the officially sanctioned means; at a store, buy it online, or download it from an authorized download source. Barring all of that, we offer the service of downloading it on your behalf (and we do not charge for this service - not even to offset our costs). We are careful that your ability to play on the official servers is not broken. And we maintain - because we believe it - that in many ways, Ultima Online is still the best MMORPG out there. The burden here is on us; OSI would never ban paying, good-standing customers.
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