Most people who participated were part of the Evil Pink Monkey's guild on the UO Demise server. Everyone was given admin access and started to build worlds on Green Acres, and overall just messed around with customized pets, weapons etc.
At the time, the shard was hosted on a server in Red Squirrel’s basement on a 5mbps down 512kbps up connection. Only a few people could connect at a time before it got too laggy, but it was just a shard to mess around on, nothing serious.
One day, Red Squirrel and Brunus Arkazza were messing around in Buccaneer's Den making a bunch of custom weapons, armor and other items by editing properties off their raw forms, without realizing these would some day become artifacts on a production shard. Artifacts of Assimilation were born. At the time, they were actually called Treasures of Felucca, to mimic Treasures of Tokuno.
As Red started experimenting more with the code side of things, he ended up coding these artifacts as actual items that can drop, and created the drop system. Other misc changes were also made to the code. At this point, things became a bit more serious and Death also got involved on the development side and all sorts of other content was added/fixed.
It was decided to launch this as a real shard and start attracting players. Everything was wiped so it could start over fresh, and Age of Valor was officially born. Proper development debuted on a lot of other systems, while also trying out new things.
The exact official launch date of Age of Valor is unknown, but it is estimated to be around December 12, 2006. On January 22, 2007, the shard was moved to its first dedicated server in a data center. More bandwidth meant more people could play at once. This was a peak period for Age of Valor. It was common to see 30+ users online, and development was progressing rapidly over the next years.
As things progressed, things were starting to be taken even more seriously as far as what kind of content was released, to ensure a balanced, but yet fun shard.
As we celebrate our fifth year, we would like to thank all players who have shown their interest and support for the shard. For a short period of time, we have placed a gold crystalline statue in Luna. Double click this statue to receive a token to commemorate AOV's 5th anniversary and history.
Note: Statue color is random from bronze, silver and gold.
Here’s to another 5 years, and beyond!
Red Squirrel and Death
Archived topic from AOV, old topic ID:6396, old post ID:37593