Vice and Virtue plays into two fundamentally important concepts that will form the basis of the fictional construct for this, and other events moving forward. We chose Vice to juxtapose against virtue because it has not been fully explored within UO and allows us a lot of freedom to do with it what we can. I've mentioned in other threads that early feedback about forcing players onto a side was met with a lot of outcry. People did not want to be forced to ally with people they did not choose to ally with. This is the primary reason why we opted to organize teams based on guilds, as they can police themselves. We also left it open opened so that players could have the freedom to roleplay, if they chose to, their participation as Vice or Virtue. Moving forward one of the goals is to make the choices made for supporting Vice or Virtue in a battle more impactful, while still allowing players the freedom to play as they want. We also understand that at it's heart, Vice vs Virtue is a PvP experience, and some people are not interested in roleplaying at all - they just want to fight.
I've seen a couple times where you call out the focus group for not being "real PvPers" or people who "don't PvP." We had an open invitation for anyone to apply. We invited those to join that could coherently share constructive ideas as well as had some background in participating in PvP, whether it be open world, factions, or guild wars - yourself included. The choice to join the focus group was yours alone, and although we couldn't get you in the group at the onset, I'm happy to see you providing feedback on VvV at this stage so we can make it the best it can be. Belittling the efforts of a group of people who volunteered their time to do exactly that, however, is uncalled for.