More or less. The way it was before the Trammel-Felucca split in UO was that, unless you were inside a city's guard boundaries, you were free game for anyone with a weapon or spellbook (with requisite mana and reagents) and the intent to rob you...or just kill you for shits and giggles, carve up your corpse, and decorate their house with your head.
Of course, they were free game for bigger fish, too, and if you killed too many people and they reported you, your bounty would be high enough, and all bounties are posted publicly on an in-game bulletin board outside every bank, that you'd have standing armies of people coming after you to cut you down and take your head to the guards for a fat wad of gold.
This was also before the concept of "item insurance," where you could pay 100 gold (per item) to keep your shit safe should you die, meaning it can't be pillaged off your corpse, and should it decay, you'll not lose 'em. The pre-Renniasance era of UO fucking sucked, and anyone who bitches against it is just butthurt they can't commit their banditry anywhere, and if they've killed so much their names go red, they can't even enter Trammel, and the Trammel ruleset is the default for all other worlds that aren't Felucca.
[ETA]
Yes, I've played pretty much since the beginning. Once I get enough steady money, I'll see about getting a UO subscription again, too. The free shards are great, but there's no community, and in a game like that, that is fucking boring.
