Notoriety and Dread
Pkilling began to get out of hand in UO. There was no penalty for it and if you set foot outside the guardzones you could expect to fight. Heck, you didnt even have to leave town to die. In the early days you could teleport onto the roof of nearly any building (banks being the most favorite) and ebolt people in town and the guards couldnt reach you. You could earthquake people in town (2 EQs killed people) and mass kill the whole bank area. You could cast EV into a crowded shop and walk around looting the dozen dead smiths (there were no private forges in the early days).

Something had to be done so OSI took steps to introduce Notoriety (reds and blues) and to restrict reds abilities to get into town or use their bank boxes (which were implemented by this time). Of course vendors also came into existance about now and they were simply used as alternate banks.

Notoriety took on MANY forms with many small changes. For example, in the early days if you even attacked (not necesarily killed or even hit) another player you lost noto. It was based on a scale from -125 to 125 and each kill or attack was -26 points. you could get to -26 (Dread Lord) very easily. A misclick in the heat of battle was a big mistake to make.

Getting positive notoriety wasnt too hard though. You could give gold to beggars and they would give you a point of noto. Do it all night and you had Great Lord. There were bugs too used by many of the reds where you could "roll" the counter going from negative to positive by going too negative.

In those days, if you got to Great Lord, you could also get a virtue shield and chose order or Choas (depending whos castle you went to). In addition, OSI revised the noto system several times. Each time they did they pardoned all the pks resetting them to neutral. This allowed many to kill again with more freedom than they should have had.

Overtime the Noto system developed into what it is today. Some thought the current system is good. Some hate it and wish for the days of the Dread Lord, fights at the Chaos Shrine (only shrine they could res at) and red NPC healers wandering the woods with blue ones.