[Alneyan]

I find those numbers to be quite high too, but I guess it might be the case, if older players stay on the shards because of their friends/guilds... I have found UO to be amazingly boring with the setup of the official shards, much more so than the other MMORPGs (and when you think about it, spending a lot of time raising stats is not exactly fun to begin with).

I do not see how they could count the free shards though. There are plenty of those, and very likely shards in other languages, and those would be harder to check out (do you speak Russian?). And since the free shards do not have paying customers, it would not be possible to have an accurate figure. Speaking of them, I believe the free shards are on the wane, at least in France: we have gone from ten shards or so with a strong community (and quite a few of smaller shards) to just a handful of shards, most of them with fewer players now.