Gimme 5 from 2004-01

Gimme 5 from 2004-01

This Q&A session was originally posted at the now-defunct IanStorm.com .

IanStorm	With the current resistances for armor, can we bring back the Magic Reflect spell the way it was? Where it actually reflected the spell back at the caster?
Evocare	I honestly can't say there are any plans to do this right now.
IanStorm	What are OSI's thoughts on player run towns and what suggestions do you have to the players to make them progress as focal points of the community?
Sannio	Player-run towns have long been central to the virtual lives of many players within Ultima Online. Over the years, we've given player houses--the cornerstone of most player communities--more things that can often help promote town & group activities. Player towns have taken great advantage of the occasional increase in housing locations, improved security, increase in decorations, and full house customization to promote their themes and events.
Sannio	Increasing your town's "visibility" can go a long way in helping it grow. Creating a web site that describes your town can help, especially if the citizens of your town include the URL in their message board signatures. Reoccurring events--weekly, bi-weekly, or even monthly--help visitors predict when your town is most active and plan ahead for when they should come around. UO.com also provides an event calendar (at http://my.uo.com/cgi-bin/uo_events.pl) that many players utilize to help advertise activities occurring within their towns. And don't forget to maintain strong diplomatic relations with other player towns--sharing runestones and event timetables between one another can help drive cross-community traffic.]
IanStorm	If the events program is continued, will the existing Event Moderators be used or an entire new staff hired?
Sannio	As it stands right now, there's a very high probability that the Event Program will return in 2004. In the event of the program's return, right now it seems likely that the Event Moderators would be asked to return to their previous roles.
IanStorm	Are there any plans for the Event Moderators to use monster spawns in specific towns over a period of time (continually), instead of just one town during peak times?
Sannio	Continuous spawn situations can have a lot of appeal, giving our team more time to work on other, non-spawning elements of the event as well as extending the event beyond one or two hours. It's possible that we'll look into refining and utilizing this sort of technique for future events.
IanStorm	There are some instances of skill interdependency. A mage with poison skill casts stronger poison spells more often than mages without the poison skill. Would it be possible to change blacksmithing to allow arms lore to affect the results of either crafting or enhancing items?
Evocare	We've considered such ideas and while they often have merit, they do tend to imply causing players to change their templates again to adapt. Even though this is something that has happened historically, it's something we *try* to avoid unless we really feel the game will get much better as a result. However, if we get a chance to implement something like the "soulstone" design (although, I can't commit to that right now), I believe these types of changes will become much less painful to the playerbase, as it will help them save a lot of time that would otherwise have been lost.