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A replacement for factions?

Hoffs

Gilfane Keeper of the Hall
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
A few days ago, Mesanna visited Siege to solicit opinions on the possible replacement of the faction system with something else. These are the salient points of what she had to say:

a) She/The Devs view the whole faction system as being too broken to fix. They are in favour of going back to something like the Chaos/Order system.

b) This is not Siege-specific. She is visiting various shards and any changes would be across UO.

c) She is in favour of a system that would not be guild-specific along the current lines; each person could opt-in as they wish so that some members of a guild may be in the system and others not.

d) They can't use the old Chaos/Order name for the new system. They are looking for alternative names.

e) She would like to get feedback from people about this whole issue and what should be in the new system.

In response to what was probably the proverbial angry mob with pitchforks filling her mailbox, she came on the next day to emphasis that nothing is set in stone at this point; she is just trying to gather feedback from players.

So there you have it. If you have any points of view or suggestions, please discuss here and/or email barmstrong at ea.com with them. But keep in mind that she will likely be receiving many emails on this so try and keep your ideas succinct and clearly presented. Try and leave out the emotive rants and superfluous stuff and just present fairly concise and well-reasoned arguments or opinions. And let me repeat that nothing is set in stone, or probably even C++, at this point.
 

Cadderly

Journeyman
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
I've been pancakes for years that the faction system is fundamentally solid and that it just needs a **** load of updates. It is rather discouraging to here that fixing factions is no longer even feasible. There are only a hand full of players left that truly understood how factions used to work and understand what needs to be done to make a faction type system work today. Order vs Chaos was nothing compared with factions in-game structure and player activity, bringing back that dead system isn't going to last. The dev team might as well try something completely out of the box and then attempt to appease players later. Taking current suggestions off of uo hall is like trying to hand feed goldfish to sharks. Spending time researching old posts here atleast would give them a better idea of why players quit playing a structured pvp design then trying to figure out what players think they want today. I really don't care what they do as long as they stick with it. A once and done scenario isn't going to work. The dev's gotta stick it out this time for the long run.
 

Hattori Hanzo

Lore Keeper
Alumni
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Before scrapping it, they could simply revert Factions back to what it was before arties. There would be no harm in that and it could do wonders.
 

Viquire

Crazed Zealot
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
And this is the problem of the item based game.

Once there were whole guilds of PKs and Antis and we battled, made up games around battling, grew extended communities just because it was fun to do. Factions is the coolest most labor intensive game of capture the flag ever invented. I'll be sad to see it replaced with, "which team can kill the other the fastest, or the most in 45 minutes".
If people get burnt out on a sigil cycle that lasts a week, how long are we going to stay excited about a system that is constantly throwing us at each other with little or no downtime for the character that is entered? I like the combat, and the intense challenge of defending against other players, but I don't want that to be the only thing I do.

There is a warring system for guilds built into this game, why are they not promoting that? Why are we not asking how to get that up and running in an interesting way? Or maybe when she says guild based, that is what she means, but I have a hard time following if that is the case.
 
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