I started playing Lord of Ultima in late March.  I’m still playing it, though I’m probably on the way out.
 
As others have said before, but it’s worth repeating, there is nothing Ultima about this game; it uses a few names to remind you of what franchise you’re supposedly playing (as mentioned in one of the links, you get Moonglow Towers and Trinsic Temples), but for the most part it’s a clone of all those browser-based games you’ve ever played (Tribal Wars, Travian, etc.).
 
I’m not saying there isn’t something there worth mentioning; a few of their ideas are interesting, but I’m afraid the developers don’t quite understand how to make such a game work (except how to make money off it), and the three months I’ve been there (open beta and “release”) have been marked by features I can’t imagine anyone really caring for, such as directly updating your Lord of Ultima rank on Facebook, and by haphazard updates.  As recently as June 1, they were tweaking building properties.  Before May 5, the towns of inactive players stuck on the map until forever, so you had to build around them; on the older continents, every spot was quickly occupied, and those who had no water access and did not want to invade someone else’s town with a harbour could not expand on other continents.
 
But if they’ve ruined anything in this type of game, it’s the basic mechanics.  In your typical browser conquest game (I’m thinking Tribal Wars), every city is fair game, latecomers don’t have a chance, and soon there’s one large guild (or one alliance of large guilds) that dominates the server, crushes everything in its sight, and ends up with a dead server in which it gets bored as everything becomes too easy. I can’t say I like this sort of scenario, but by this time I’ve grown to expect it.  In Lord of Ultima, not so. You can only open up a city for conquest (and for conquering others) if you build a castle in that specific city; any city in which a castle has not been built is safe from conquest, and you can build as many hideouts as you want to prevent pillaging.  In other words, you can theoretically play the game without ever running the risk of losing your cities.
 
I’m sure that’s fine if you’re the terminal carebear (not that I’m expecting a carebear to find this game fun), but what happens when you’re involved in the power struggle?  To give you my example: I’m in a relatively small alliance, but one that is the largest on my continent.  We are at war with a major alliance, so large that it had to start four branches to fit all its members, but which never had much of a presence on our continent. So what do they do?  They settle new towns, but don’t put castles in them. Instead, they amass their troops in a few castled villages, making them impregnable.  What strategy can you make in response to that?  Prior to the May patch, we hoped to fill in the rest of the continent before they got here; but now, with inactives’ villages up for grabs after a while, it’s quite impossible to do that.  There’s plenty of space all around, and since they must have 8 times our numbers (if not more), they’re quick to fill it.  And since we can’t play whack-a-mole with them as soon as they show up, we can only watch as they build more and more cities, until when they get a definite advantage here.  Then they’ll start building castles like crazy, and we’ll be dead.  And what’s worse, we all know it.  At least in the traditional TribalWars design, it still was possible to try to repel them as soon as they settled in your area.

Then, in keeping with this sort of game, they gave a tremendous advantage to those people who used RMT: building boosts for the most part, but the most useful item from the shop seems to be the War Minister, which allows everyone in your guild to know, in real time, when and where you’re being attacked. Otherwise, you’re forced to stick a note on the forum, and hope someone notices.

I have this vague sense that I could make a browser game based on the Eight Virtues. Does anyone even still remember those other than me?

Lets see which I can recall without cheating… Honor, Sacrifice, Compassion, Valor, Honesty, Justice, Spirituality… damn, I forgot the last one, Humility. Little wonder, I find myself using the method of loci with the related cities, and New Magincia is sort of hard to remember.

If I were given a time machine and a license to remake Ultima Online, I’d probably make obtaining and maintaining aptitude in the 8 virtues unlock some sort of quasi-Avatar state. Who knows? That might just be incentive enough to cut down on griefing. (Then again, I seem to recall certain players who kept their characters very high in karma while still engaging in griefing by pulling strange shit like trapping players with their horses so they can’t escape enemies they were fighting.)

Why you rememebr a Penny Arcade comic of 7 years ago?

What an interview:

“What do you think of Lord of Ultima overall?

Bazer/Gaomon: Eh its ok, not what I really hoped for, but does fill in the dead time while I’m waiting for something fun to happen on Ultima [Online].”

geldonyetich: A pity.  Earlier I was thinking that they could have maintained much of the spirit of Ultima in a browser strategy game, but from the sounds of what Vetarnias describes that’s definitely not the route they’ve opted for.   Granted, it’s more or less thoroughly out of my domain considering I snub these kinds of social games as being generally untenable for a good core gamer experience.

Actually, you were informed of this 6 months ago:

http://brokentoys.org/2010/01/27/exploit-that-ip-my-lord-discreetly/#comments

and after making a fool of yourself in the comments section (repeatedly), promptly forgot all about it until today.
Tell me, what is it like to be a know-it-all on every subject while at the same time knowing absolutely nothing? Keep up the diarrhea posting. Every site needs its Cliff Clavin.

There is nothing “Ultima” about this game more than the title. That being said, it is fun for what it is.

They need to release a real sequel to Ultima. Maybe that’s what Netdragon is working on: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=24552

Hope I don’t have to connect to China to play a real sequel to UO. My ping times are bound to suck.