Yup SOA is Shadows of Angmar, usually used to refer to the pre-expansion LotRo, commonly known as the good old days, when the old forest was scary, and the barrow downs were actually dangerous!!
In the beginning LotRo was very strict with character naming, not only did your character name have to be non-copyright infringing, it had to be lore appropriate, though they relaxed that sometime after lake Everswim was added to the game, and pretty much dropped it entirely about the time of Moria dropping, it's pretty much only enforced now on reports (they actually used to check on their own at first, but I think that sort of died out once sub numbers got higher)
Yeah, I didn't quite phrase that how I meant it, I was more thinking of places like Northern Bree fields where you can run through an open field and there are orcs neatly standing around in a grid pattern (parts of Dunland seem to be the worst for that), and thats one of my favorite things in TESO, that there isnt a critter every 3.7m in a neat grid pattern!
Ultima Online at the beginning (I don't know whats happened to it since about 2000) didn't actually have instances, even the Dungeons were open world, so if there was a party in front of you bad luck! but UO had so many much more major issues (almost all caused by players being well, sociopathic) that it wasnt a show stopper.
Phasing is a really cool thing (I believe LotRo was the first to use it, starting with Isengard) though they've really only started using it properly from Rohan. pretty much the best thing about TESO for me though has been that the quests arent all "Go here, and kill X of Y" theres actually some variety in the quests, refreshing!
Matt