From UO.com, good news (especially in light of the fact we are probably picking up new users, what with the release of the 9th Anniversary Collection and everything):

More Than 400 Dupers Banned, Tens of Thousands of Items Deleted

After a month-long investigation and a thorough review of all involved, we:

• banned more than 400 accounts,
• deleted more than 100,000 illegally duplicated items, and
• deleted more than one trillion in gold.

More importantly, the bugs that allowed this particular kind of illegal duplication have been fixed. Also, duping and exploit prevention/detection systems have been in place for some time now - systems that help us to identify and eliminate cheaters.

We take all forms of cheating extremely seriously, especially cheats that affect the in game economy and devalue the hard work of honest players. We will never stop investigating and solving these issues, and appreciate very much those of you who contribute to the fight against cheating. We’ve had to keep these developments quiet until we completed our investigations, but we are very proud to be able to make this announcement today.

PunkBuster On Hold

After a lot of research and development, we’ve come to the conclusion that for now, it would be better for us to focus on internal fixes and security improvements instead of trying to install PunkBuster. The integration of PunkBuster into the Ultima Online client is being indefinitely postponed, until we can do justice to the marriage of the two products.

We enjoyed working with the team from Even Balance, and hope to do so in the future. We do have the same goals, after all: Ensuring fair play is one of our highest priorities.

Please know that we are working to make systems within the Kingdom Reborn client extremely tough on cheaters. We’ve made cheat prevention, and other in-game measures, a top (and ongoing) priority for our coding team.

It’s nice that they are working hard on the Kingdom Reborn client, as far as security, from the very beginning. It helps that UO is one of the oldest MMORPGs around and so they’ve probably seen a little bit of everything.