Yeah, I was going to say publicity, but also it makes me scratch my head when I see something like this on Greenlight. The same thing with Kickstarters, I thought it was a means for small start-ups without capital to find a means to fund their ideas.
I'm also bitter my poor, 10 year old self, couldn't afford to play this game back in the day.
It was amazing but kept getting watered down year after year, and when WoW came out, it tried to emulate it and went to complete shit (it was getting pretty bad up to that point). Too many kids with A.D.D. raging about dying and losing pixel crack. WoW's popularity signaled the end of any good rulesets for future MMORPGS (i.e. instances, shit pvp, no loot, etc).
Still the best rule set I've ever played on for an MMORPG. No instances (have to fight over resources). Player housing (and player vendors/economy). Criminal system (You can do pretty much whatever you want, but there are consequences for actions). Almost full loot on both npc's (i.e. you can rob someone else's kill) and player characters (making it important to decide if you really want to go out of town with your fancy gear). My favorite part though, there were thieves...it was hard as fuck to train a proficient thief, but it was worth it when you did. I'd supply all my characters with the loot I gained as a thief. You could disarm people, and then do a "last target, steal" and take their fancy ass weapon. I'd run around PVP areas pretending to be a mage and then "yoink" and run for minutes or hours while people chased you down.
If they made UO "buy to play" instead of a subscription system, they'd probably still have a lot of players. They kept changing the rules and all the die hard people who loved the game, were like "if you're trying to emulate all the new MMORPG rulesets, we'll just go play a game that is 10 years newer than yours". Would be awesome if they had some old school shards on the official UO servers, like Pre-Publish 16 or even earlier.