Seriously?
Why do I feel like this entire bs bragging rights/favoritism City Elections system was jammed into place as a smoke screen?
Maybe I am being a bit too Oliver Stone here but it sure feels to me like someone in charge said "everyone hates the idea of messing with dci/hci and Refinements but since we are determined to push them through anyway we better create a diversion fast!"
95% of the Fellucca playerbase is only there for pvp. Does anyone think this new election system is going to be good for pvp in any way, shape or form?
Do we need to create a bizarre election/trade deal system that will encourage more rigged nonsense and favoritism?
And we should be introducing this huge pile of fluff instead of working on fixing the 412 exisitng pvp bugs why?
Can't wait for all the upcoming resource consuming updates and bug fixes to this nonsense!
Mesanna's been hinting about the player-run council for about a year now and finally provided some more concrete details at the 15th Anniversary Party in September at the Fairfax office. If you go to this page and scroll down to about the 0:35 mark, you'll be able to read a copy of the slide and a trancript of what she said:
http://uo.ultimacodex.com/2012/10/uo-15th-anniversary-transcript-presentation/ .
Unfortunately, if she or Kyronix expanded on the topic later in the meeting, the only people who really know what she said were the people at the meeting and anyone who had the luxury of staying glued to their computer on a busy Saturday watching the live feed (assuming it was even working at that point). The rest of us never got much out of that party because of the live feed problems and the fact that Kai Schober apparently wasn't permitted to post the video from the meeting, as he promised to do in the second sentence of this announcement:
http://www.uo.com/article/Ask-Answer-No-4 .
I think the player-run councils are probably a huge reason for bringing back a "good" Blackthorn and giving him a huge castle with the council room and then making the whole area spell-proof and inaccessible to pets. In other words, I think we're well past the point that the team is going to back away from the idea, Goldberg. We're stuck with it now and just have to hope that it doesn't end up being abused by players and EMs and something most of us end up hating.
For all we know, based on Cetric and Kyronix's brief exchange above, the town council system might be the basis for a new Order and Chaos system.
I just hope that in the future, the team tries harder to include MORE of the player base on the few occasions when they take the time to set up some type of an event to discuss their plans. It still sticks in my craw that the vast majority of UO's active players were so casually dismissed as far as passing along valuable information about the game's future that was dispersed at the 15th anniversary party. If there was a problem with something that was said at the meeting, EA could have blanked the audio, as was done in two places in one of the two videos that a player did post from the party...there's one 10-second video blank in the discussion of plans for changing champ spawns and another when they were talking about Pinco's UI. Instead, they just didn't bother with doing anything. So most of us are still sitting here getting hit by this stuff and wondering what the justification for it is, when Mesanna probably feels like she already explained it at the party and we should know about it.
Oh well. We're stuck with it, whether we want it or not. And as everyone likes to say, if you don't enjoy it, don't participate in it. Just know that you're paying for the development of it in lieu of something else. So maybe it makes sense to sit back and watch and try to provide helpful feedback if you can so there's some chance the whole concept doesn't completely skid off the road.
Maybe sometime Kyronix, Mesanna, Jeff, Kate Flack, etc. will actually take some time to TALK TO US about why they think this idea is worth spending time and money on it, beyond just saying it's our chance to participate in politics. Politics isn't necessarily something a lot of people want to be involved with, especially inside of a game that they may be using as a temporary escape from reality. So there really does need to be something beyonds pretty banners and temporary buffs to make the system appeal to the 99% of players who won't be elected as Governors and who won't be allowed to have meaningful participation in the council's meetings with the King/Viceroy/EMs-in-disguise.
I guess time will tell. I'm very skeptical about the whole idea at this point and have a lot of concerns about how it's going to turn out. But I think it's going to go in whether we want it or not. It might only end up appealing to 5% of the population, but I guess that won't be a first in UO either, will it?
And yet again you fail to get your facts straight. I said COPY YOUR CHAR OVER TO TC WITH YOUR SUIT andf test it to see what has changed.
