UO pvp was the best. The original rule amongst dread lords was that we didn’t kill people who were lower than expert (70 out of 100 points in a skill) unless they were magicians. Back then if you displayed the title mage and it was journeyman or higher, it meant you knew you could chain cast fireballs as fast as you could hold down your fireball macro.
Tradeskill characters didn’t get killed unless you were killing all the miners north of Britain to illustrate a point. (Don’t get caught mining when school gets out for the day.)
Characters below Expert in combat skills usually didn’t have the means to defend themselves, the means to replace their equipment, or any good equipment to take. We were of the opinion that we would let them be until they learned the game, had loot, and were more fun to kill.
After the notoriety system changed the first time, we couldn’t see the job skill levels of players who were less than, I think, Noble Lords, so we took to killing people based on the way they dressed for a week or so, until killing in a deathrobe became en vogue, at which point everyone but other dread lords were killed on sight. This allowed us to sort through everyone’s equipment to determine who was in fact a neophyte tailor and who was a cowardly rich player in disguise. The players we felt were too weak and poor to have been killed got ressurrected and or gated to safety.
It was ok to sweep through a dungeon with your playerkilling characters, but it was not ok to stay there and kill people who arrived later. Mass gankage was par for the course, and it was understood that if you were not prepared to fight, you had better be prepared to flee. UO had a recall spell, which was an extremely quick way of extracting yourself from a dangerous situation that was open to anyone who wanted to spend around 50 of 700 possible points in the magery skill. Because of this, a good part of the playerkilling base sacrificed raw killing power for skills like snooping, stealing, and hiding, so that they could remove other players’ ability to flee at a moments notice by stealing the reagents used to cast recall from another player’s backpack.
As a defense mechanism to that, many players devised a series of nested and obscured packs in their inventory, as well as multiple smaller stacks of each reagent, so that not all of a player’s black pearl (Used for recall and energy bolt, the offensive magic spell of choice after the damage to fireball was reduced and casting time introduced.) could be taken in one fell swoop.