To add my voice to the many expressed here; this event design was so bad, I actually stopped playing Ultima Online for fun, logging in now only for plant watering and the EM events. Even during such events though, the civil war story line is changing the nature of the game. The EMs on Europa are roleplaying city allegiances too, which has meant for a good number of them I've ended up refusing to fight the Bandit spawn we've been led into. Why? Because it would have further wrecked the "progress" of my own character because the game mechanics would have counted that as working against my "own" city, which as we've been warned time and time again will destroy the overall arc for us. Which is quite, quite ridiculous. And roleplaying resistance to the entire arc because my character in game, and my personality out of game refuses to bow before the petty appeals to the greed of those who cannot conceive of anything higher than the self, which means that all I'm doing is logging on to seem difficult and arrogant for getting in the way of the opportunities of others to gain Phat L3wt.
And that loot? What joy is there in material rewards which are themselves a grind to achieve, and a shameless money grabbing one at that? Because no one can own all 8 banners on a single account, because you can only get 7 characters to place? And the Meer/Juka rewards aren't even visually attractive, and in turn treat decency and support for their race as a simple currency to buy ugly vanity items, an incredible oxymoron.
But then, there was loyalty decay on top of this. Which having popped by Stratics today I now discover was originally 5 percent. 5 PERCENT. What the hell were you thinking? Do you believe all of us value our personal lives so, so very little that we'd not mind that you sliced away 5 percent of the time we'd sacrificed in the hopes this soulless grind had a point?
Oh, I know in the reality of your own day to day professional lives you have to work with limited budgets, tiny programming teams, and pressures from suited corporate drones who demand server usage figures and revenue streams... that you need to generate hours of addictive content for very little design work and as cheaply as possible... but we don't live in that world in Brittania. It's our escape from it, we come home for escapism and aspire to better or just more exciting things with our spare time. And saving your job means understanding that. This isn't just rhetoric; look at the practical consequences. If you'd have been working on the Diablo series, Age of Shadows would have been a success. But instead it's itemization marked the first real collapse in subscriptions, because you're not working on Diablo. You're working on Ultima Online. And we the community as a whole didn't want grind for item stats here.
"But why do people play the grinds we patch in then?" you may ask. Because affection is something people don't let go very easily, and they want to remain in love with Ultima Online. And if that's the only content you give them...
"It's a viable model though" you could claim; "World of Warcraft proves it". Yes, but the thing is, the people who want to play that model have largely left and gone to World of Warcraft. And back in the mists of time, if they were in the mood for that too, they were playing Everquest Online 1 instead. Ultima Online is in the same overall genre of game, but it doesn't have the same design ethos or audience. You may want to try and lure some of WoWs audience here; but they aren't going to go back to a graphical style from the 1990s with a majority of code and design from a different perspective entirely.
Simply believing you are celebrating Ultima Online's history doesn't mean that you actually are. Not if you aren't celebrating the true Spirit of it all. In fact, let me explain with a contrast. THERE WILL BE EVENT ARC SPOILERS NOW. Be warned.
I've hinted before I suspected what we were seeing was the rise of a Fellowship kind of movement. And with the death of Queen Dawn, I think I can see where the parallel you are trying to draw is. Ultima 7 is the first of the third of 3 cycles in Ultima History, the so-called Guardian Trilogy. It's been interpreted as a reversed mirror image of the first Trilogy (Ultima 1-3) which shows the unification of Britannia and the rise of the Avatar, the embodiment of virtue; where as the final trilogy leads to the splintering of Britannia, the rise of anti-virtue as symbolised by the Guardian, and the end of the Avatar's involvement in Britannia.
I doubt you are planning for the end of the game though. No, what I suspect is someone was inspired and thought "Hey, we can use that mirror-trilogy concept though; We can't use British or associated characters, but we do have the coincidence of the 15th year anniversary, and being roughly around Ultima 7 in the Prime lore we've used, so we can tie the two together and have a rebirth. Let's kill off Dawn, have a period of instability, the beginnings perhaps of the rise of the Guardian equivalent... but see a new Britannia and new leader emerge from the chaos"
Who it will be, I have no idea. Or even what style of Government, beyond "fresh start at 15!" Perhaps this time around the Guardian is going to be Virtue-Bane, which is basically the Guardian's character as his name... Anyway, it's an interesting take on the Prime lore if this what the design really is; but remember I said it doesn't count at all if you don't remember the Spirit?
You see, in Ultima Prime, we not only explored the entire world, lolly-gagging in fields with cows if we wanted, but largely helped shape that world, being the main narrative focus.
In Ultima Online, what we're doing is grinding one small part of the world over and over again. Not because we're heroes or villains, but because we dare not miss out on potentially time sensitive pixel crack. Being cynical, I suspect for a good reason, because there's not enough dev time to do more than plot what ever the Big Event will be. so we've been given something to do to fill out the hours until then. I just hope it's not as half-assed as throwing pies at Virtue-Bane, because someone didn't understand the difference between humiliation and humility.
And as a consequence, what I'm actually doing in real life instead is, having just chased an enormous bumble bee out of my flat, I'm now grabbing a book and catching the last of the evening sun, in a park here in real life Britain. Another extremely early heat wave again... but still, despite what it hints towards, sunshine and a book is so much more refreshing to the soul than worrying about hours of dull gameplay to prove my virtual house more pimpin' than my neighbours.