As we have mentioned several times across a variety of media, our goal is to focus on permanent content additions that foster continual play rather than one-off events that are limited in time. In holiday specific situations, like Halloween for example, our goal is to jump off previous year's content and create scenarios that can be built upon in successive years. With the release of Time of Legends and the Valley of Eodon we did not want to simply abandon that content in lieu of something new, leaving it unfinished, as has happened in the past. From a design perspective, I am committed to fleshing out the remainder of the Valley of Eodon as well as bringing players on the journey through the history of its native peoples and creatures using The Savage Empire as inspiration.
When it makes sense, we can pull in elements of RL holidays - the underlying theme of "Love" in the Valley of One quest, for example. As far as what happens between UO & DAoC, one cannot simply hop on the UO Team and start implementing content. The development process between DAoC and UO is like comparing apples to oranges, and while we do share resources between all our products these resources are exclusively on the backend, the content creators are individual to each game. The idea that somehow we were unable to "scrape up enough resources" to put together some kind of global event for Valentine's Day & St. Patrick's Day makes it sound like accomplishing that task is simple and unimaginative - I can assure you it is neither.
Thank you for your candid answer, Kyronix. I guess I'm still hung up on on the idea that when Broadsword took over managing UO, it sure seemed like a lot of people were working hard to convince UO players that things were going to improve for the UO dev team, but the reality after two years is that the team doesn't seem to have grown at all and they desperately need to clone you for design work plus add a community manager and maybe even another GM, if some of the rumors that you moonlight as a GM (and maybe also for the EM team) are true!
In any event, I have been wondering why doesn't the dev team use the EM's to design globally-available content? We were told that the EM team helped design "The Awakening" story arc in 2012, but since then I can't recall ever hearing that they have been used again for that purpose and always wonder why that is so. It seems to me that the money spent on paying the EMs could be far better spent using them to produce global-event type content that the majority of players could access, rather than just producing content for the relatively fewer players who can log in at specific times to participate in their events.
Also, I remember Draconi saying after a town hall meeting in May 2008 that the live design team (versus the design development team) was responsible for content, bug fixes and tracking down cheaters, and live events and that they were working on trying to bring the UO timeline in line with the Ultima timeline so all the content from the Ultima series would eventually have a place in UO. Is that still a goal for UO and if yes, is there anything you can tell us about what comes next after you're finished with pulling in content from Savage Empire? If there are additional big chunks of content still to be added to UO and that is one of the priorities for our current small team, where does that leave doing things like improving the existing "new player experience" built around New Haven? Is that whole area and everything it encompasses ever going to get any love? Mesanna told us early last year that the Steam rollout was being delayed until the new player experience was revamped and that we wouldn't see anything relative to the new player experience until later in the year (i.e., late 2015). She also talked about changes happening to the account management system. Well, now we're almost four months into 2016 and Steam and new player experience revamp seem to have fallen on the wayside.
It sure would be nice to get some clarity around what's really going on with UO in terms of whether Broadsword and EA are just aiming to somehow hang on to existing players or if they have any plans at all to try to convince old players to come back and perhaps to also try to attract completely new players. It just doesn't seem like we're hearing a very consistent message from one year to the next these last two years since Broadsword took over. And when we don't see the UO team actually get any bigger and you confirm that any extra help you get is pretty limited, then it really is hard to believe that Broadsword has real plans to try to grow UO. Seems like they're giving you guys just enough resources to let the EM program continue so the rares collectors keep their accounts going all the time and everyone else sees just enough new content every three months or so to keep their accounts paid up every couple of months and take off in-between times.
Sorry for the rant. I appreciate that you take the time so often to actually read the forums and respond to us, in addition to everything else you do. Thank you.
