I’d like to outline exactly why I left Evolution today in order to help the staff learn from their mistakes and in order to help future players avoid the same fate. Your good leader Dante sent me a [pm a while back asking me to move a house which he said was in a no-housing zone. Thing is, I actually didn’t have any houses in a no-housing zone. The house or houses in question seem to have been in Serpent’s Hold. I had a small house inside the stable fence, as some of you know since I showed it off to a few people, and another in the guard tower on the south island, which many of you know because I not only showed it off but had public runes there to my Provocation training boats for about six months.
The area inside the stable fence is outside of guard zone. Always has been. This isn’t my first rodeo – I’ve been playing UO since 1999 and more than anything, my fetish in the game has been tricky house placements. I’ve had houses in that exact same spot on probably half a dozen other servers. So it’s not inherently illegal, but is it illegal according to Evo’s housing rules? Well, the wiki here: http://uoevolution.com/wiki/index.php/Housing_Info

forbids the following:

(DO NOT block entry/exits, caves, dungeons, valley, champs etc)

It’s not.

(Make sure you are at least 2 screens away from champs, event areas, custom building and dungeon entryways.)

It’s not near any of those things.
(Do not build in the courtyards or areas in from of the main dungeon caves!)

Nope, none of those either.
(Do not build next to other player homes with the intent to grief them or crowd their yard.)

And… nope. So the house isn’t breaking any in-game rule or even wiki stated rule. So exactly what was the issue, Dante? Is the rule that you’ll ask a player to move a house if you just don’t like where it is, legal or not? Or do you ask players to move houses when you don’t like them personally? I don’t give a damn anymore but other players might like some clarification.

The house inside the guard tower also does not break any of the aforementioned wiki rules, is well outside of guard zone, and was also legally placed according to game mechanics. You see, house placement in the game only requires that the wall perimeter is all on legal, level ground. So you can place a house on Bald Island beach over top of a sand dune as long as your walls are surrounding it without touching it. And I could place a house inside that guard tower over top of a table because all the outside walls were on legal house-placeable tiles. You can say that you didn’t care for it, Dante, but you can’t say that it was improperly placed according to any rules.

So I got the [pm about moving a house, which one I wasn’t sure, and I wrote back. I said “Hey, all my houses are legally placed. I’d be happy to prove that to you if you like. Could you also let me know which house you’re talking about?” and I went on to explain that there are plenty of other houses in the game that have been around longer than mine that DO break the rules in the wiki. I explained that when Dante first sent out the global message to everyone about moving houses months ago, I conscientiously paged and had them move my house next to an orc camp – and not one day later, another player dropped a house in the exact same spot. Ann I paged about it – I said “Hey, I gave up that spot for the rules, not so that another player could take it” – and the page was ignored. And the house is STILL there, months later. I explained that was more than a little upsetting. And here it is, right on top of the Desert Orc Camp in Malas:


I said all that in several [pms and waited for a response. I came home tonight, after a long hard day at work, ready to relax, sat down to my computer and the message I got addressed not a thing I said, not even the question of which house he was talking about. It just said “This is your final warning to move your house in the city.”]You staffers must really think all of your players have no lives or pride to come at them like that. No one sits down and logs in to have everything they say or ask ignored and be talked to like that.
I’ll be honest, when I first started playing here I dropped a rent check on Evo and I made several more large donations afterwards also. But I stopped for the past few months after I mulled over Kane’s angry post where he was calling out players for being “pricks”. When it finally hit me that not on any other server I’ve ever played on, not even the really bad Felucca ones, had I ever seen a staffer call players pricks on an open forum, I figured it was time to cool it. The weird thing about online gaming is that players spend tons of money and then gush endlessly thanking GMs for taking it. What other business does that happen in? Do you go into Walmart or Sears and write long, maudlin letters about how thankful you are that they carried products you want and sold them to you? No, not hardly. Players in these games lose sight of the fact that they’re customers, and apparently so do staffers. Hell, at least in real life stores it COSTS them something to make your product. Evo is selling pixels – and they could whammy up a set of Legs of the Royal Guard for every player on the server in under 60 seconds if they wanted – for free.
So maybe that’s what this is about. I haven’t dropped any Benjamins in a while, so I was on the outs. I don’t know, since Dante didn’t see fit to explain it to me. I responded tonight and asked him again to tell me which house he was talking about and he responded “I asked you to read the housing rules! Did you read them? Your house is in a no-housing zone.”And I thought for a quick second about re-writing everything I’d said the first time all over again, and decided against it. This is not why I came home and sat down to my computer. Not for aggravation, not for harassment, not for you to act as though you didn’t read anything I said or refuse to answer me. I’m a customer and your service sucks. Here are some more houses, for the record, that predate my account start date and are in clear violation of your stated housing rules, unlike my houses.



I know that no one who understands or agrees with anything I wrote would say shit if they had a mouthful but you read it, and that’s enough. Call it a public service message. I also know that the brown-nosers who live for moments like this will post to try and earn more brownie points. Fire away. Dante – you can take the big business view that as long as you’re making money you must be doing something right but running people off isn’t good business. With all the crazy custom garbage you have on this server – docks and houses on the water off every town, a chair for Candy Apple at Britain Bank, some weird thing for Leo in Shame dungeon, the weird huge castles that server no purpose, and the list goes on and on – you couldn’t stand my small house in Serpent’s Hold. K.