"the runuo forum admins do more harm to the community than good?" In some regards yes though I don't know if it's the runuo admins or forum admins fault. I blame the community itself more for being too accepting at times. I relevance to pre expansion UO the community as a whole has been to subordinate in my personal belief. I hold that era as the benchmark of what a UO emulator should have first gotten correct. It's been years and hasn't happened and might not likely ever actually happen unless the developers take a stance to work towards the goal which I'm uncertain the proper capable talent with the know how is on board to do so accordingly.

The weaken, clumsy, feeble mind spell interrupt combo is the single most detrimental aspect to that era's accuracy. While technically feasible to do so in that time frame and I'm entirely fine with that it didn't actually take place in a 1 on 1 situation and wasn't even feasible without the use of last target, arm, and disarm which was considered a 3rd party exploit during the time and even the ones using it wouldn't have risked being that obvious on any kind of consistency basis due to how obvious it would have made it that they were cheating not that it wasn't a little obvious regardless, but that would have been glaringly so the case much like attacking a hidden player with UO Extreme which most of the UOE user's were smart enough not to be so stupid to do.

Try arming and disarming a weapon 3 times manually without a macro and targeting a player manually 3 times who's trying to avoid you from doing so easily to interrupt them from casting a spell. In fact try just manually disarming your weapon casting a spell and manually casting one of those debuffs to interrupt a players greater heal, energy bolt, or explosion spell starting with greater heal since that's what that gay little trick is most widely used to accomplish and try doing it against a player using a macro to automatically disarm his weapon when he casts and also has a target self macro. See how successful you can be on a regular basis in a duel against a player using arm disarm last target macro's without you using them and you'll get the picture.

This why in early UO era prior to expansion players used the spell curse not only was it more mana efficient and meditation wasn't always a in game skill, but more important it combined all 3 debuffs at once so they didn't have to cast each individually which is a BIG deal when you have to manually arm/disarm/target when you have to cast a spell and re-equip your your weapon after while also simultaneously having to deal with playing against other players that used 3rd party tools cheats which enabled them to use last target, arm, and disarm which btw arm/disarm was superior with UOE it didn't have a 1 second per item equip/unequip delay like the OSI version it was like instant hit for arm/disarm essentially.

I'd love to see the pre expansion UO game play feel recreated without the stupidly abusive debuff interrupt abusing, but can it happen and can they get a lot of the other equally fun and awesome essential aspects that made it great. Stealing is just a outright joke post hiding nerf stealth implementation which also made alchemy a lot less cool and relevant because purple potions no longer had the same high demand and really neither did heal potions to some extent those were sometimes life savers if you had your garlic jacked by a thief and they were fiddling everywhere both in town and out of town you were never safe from that.

UOE made stealing a lot more cool and useful too it kept containers open no matter how far away a player went until you closed it yourself very handy it also let you use a axe inventory macro that would on client side remove the graphic for a item to get around players hiding small pouches behind mage books and drobes usually multiples of them making it nearly impossible to snoop those pouches from them in the first place without it and additional would snoop again on failure another essential and great thief tool.

There was never a dull moment back then in UO because anything could and would happen on a whim so you always had to be on your guard and it didn't matter if it was in or out of town. Players could gate mobs back then a poison elemental to town on a afk player could kill them in no time and if you weren't a friend of that player and maybe even if you were depending on the level of the friendship would you have called the guards or would you have let them die and looted their body and banked that poo. UO is so pussy amounts of timid compared to retro UO during it's infancy stages of the game. Too many issues kill the game play I recall loved and enjoy about my UO youth primary the early era inaccuracy that don't no private server has managed to correct and address not a damn one of them it pains me to see how bad the private servers are like in comparison to the game during it's infancy due to the game play inaccuracy in regards to the way the game was like and was played like back then.