I remember putting a battery on the F4 key and going to sleep, and waking up with max strength.  I also remember not being able to leave my starting city without being insta-killed.  After trying a lot of ways to make it out of the starting city alive and failing every time, I gave up and stopped playing UO. 

 I played it just now and indeed didn't look interesting.

Maybe I was either different back then or the game was better, or all games were bad so UO looked good