Missives like this obviate the need for experienced community professionals. I'm not entirely clear you (Cal Crowner) understand the desires and nuances of this particular ragtag bunch of community.
Let me politely eviscerate your letter in as constructive a means as I can.
You should perhaps be made aware that factions has been broken for 10 years. The system itself was constructed by Adrick and Evocare, designers that later went on to other MMOs (SWG and WoW respectively). Mesanna, who is still with you, and Brak, were at the forefront of testing this mess, and the entire development process strategy seemed to be release it and forget about it. More than just that, it seemed as though the clarion calls from the community calling out the massive issues and recommending simple stopgaps and fixes were almost intentionally ignored. 10 years later, factions remains broken in its most integral parts - no more than a tertiary system for procuring mildly improved artifacts.
I acknowledge my share in the blame for the failure of factions, at least as far as the Council of Mages is concerned. It was my eagerness to participate in what I thought was going to be a magnificent addition to Ultima that caused me to rally most of the population on Test Factions to the Council of Mages - maligning a previous perception on the part of those two original factions designers that the CoM could not be competitive due to its awful Stronghold and other major factors. Tom Chilton admitted to me at one point that the CoM almost didn't make it to the light of day.
My bad. Not that this excuses ten solid years on the UO development team's part of treating factions like the vaunted Virtue System. (Still nothing for Honesty? The system pre-dates Calandryll for god's sake.)
Regarding a classic shard - I am confident that you aren't that stupid. You are already maintaining two code branches, one for Classic and one for Enhanced. If you actually had a community manager, he or she would sit you down in a quiet room and tell you gently that the strength of player nostalgia in UO is the most powerful force veterans have, and they wield it like a cudgel. They would tell you that retrospection of the "golden age" of Ultima is a grand pastime, and that people, while claiming to have loved it, in fact thoroughly hated it but put up with it because WoW wasn't even a twinkle in Blizzard's eye and there simply were no other choices. They would go on to tell you that 90% of the population claims to be hardcore, and would naturally benefit from a return to the "lord of the flies" style early UO, but that only 10% or less actually is. This community person would also pull out a laptop with Shadowbane installed on it, show you that it is impossible to log in to a game that no longer exists due to the core system being to grief every other player into quitting, boot up Darkfall and demonstrate the same thing.
As for the live story arc, I am perhaps the only person who is glad that this is no longer in the hands of Draconi. UO players on average don't have the backstory on Draconi, so they were never quite made aware of how incredibly poorly he managed the storyline and prime fiction arc of UO. Big reveal here - the length of time in between poorly executed storyline sequences was inexcusable, and largely due in part to Draconi's flaw of epic tunnel-vision. To spend literally six months working on a single, microscopic aspect of an event that lasted no more than 6 minutes in-game, which didn't even add that much or seem required is the height of bad development. And by the way, a six paragraph story update every three months doesn't count as episodic content, friend. UOers deserved far more than they got with regards to fiction and content, even from the most skeletal of live teams.
As for you, Cal. You've been on the UO team since September of 2007. Is three years not enough time to have picked up the lingo? "The team has been playing in Baja." You mean "on" Baja. As for those folks who used to take you aside and tell you how to play? Yeah, we called those Companions. As far as mages and LRC go, welcome to our hell. You will notice that mages in UO wear leather armor. Full leather armor, with mismatched pieces here and there, whatever we can find. This is as opposed to wearing robes, as in every other game where you play a mage. Reagents are required because Magery itself hasn't been updated since 1998, and the development team has been busy creating and recreating and re-recreating UO clients that no one will adopt for the better part of a decade.
I'm happy you and the execs enjoy the McDonalds on Baja, but this is not what UO is about. Ultima Online is about an epic struggle between good and evil played out in a diverse community of wizards and warriors. It is about the experience of a vibrant, living world that can tell the deepest stories and present the most compelling history - a rich tapestry of Virtue, darkness, life, loss and love. Ultima is about the characters that inhabit this world, their contributions and their meaningful impact. It is about merchants, dragon tamers, elves with gardens, mounted samurai archers and gourmet gargoyle cooks. It is about the relationships that Sosarians build, friendships, loyalties, nemesis and ally alike - the guilds and empires they watch rise and fall with the march of time. Ultima is all of this.
It is not about the McDonalds on Baja.
