If you trekked back into Ultima Online earlier this month when it converted into a free-to-play game, maybe to check out your old account, you were probably startled to realize that your entire bank was frozen by the gods. Welcome back; oh and by the way, you can’t access any of your stuff! What, you didn’t need any of your gold, runes, gear, or reagents, did you? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Needless to say, it annoyed even me when I was swapping between my subbed account and my husband’s freebie account.
Broadsword had said it was still working on the situation, and as of Monday night, a partial fix was on the test server and has since rolled out to the live servers as of today, though it won’t please everyone:
“All Endless Journey accounts will receive a base amount of 20 items (bank expansions can increase the max item count to 28). Any account over the max limit will be able to view their full banks but will not be able to remove any items at this time. In the near future we will be adding the ability to remove items from the bank that are over the set max limit. Please check it out and give us your feedback, if all goes well we will be putting this out to Origin tomorrow and WW by Wednesday.”
In other words, if you’re a free-to-play newbie on a fresh account, you now have a tiny bank box to work from (20 items is enough to get by). But returning accounts still can’t get anything out of their vaults (unless they happened to have fewer than 20 items, which is incredibly unlikely) without subscribing. For now. As players have theorized, this probably isn’t just a trick to get you to sub; Broadsword is just trying to eliminate all potential for resource scripting and hoarding on F2P account. But still.
As for housing on F2P accounts? Not gonna happen, though the apartments thing the official forums are debating would be a fun pipe dream.
Incidentally, the team also says it’s banned a total of 83 players since the conversion, for a range of offenses from multiboxing to macroing. Make sure you refresh on the rules!
