Ultima Online Five on Friday Q&A

This week's "Five on Friday" Q&A feature on the official Ultima Online website covers questions about character and guild searches, bow degradation, and more.
Is the faction system going to be repaired,remolded or replaced? Will the Order/Chaos....Good V evil be returning?

Our design team is currently taking a good, hard look at Factions and we are currently making plans for a series of updates culminating in a significantly revamped system. Right now in this early phase, we have a lot of ideas on the table. Amongst those are:

1.A complete overhaul of the scoring and ranking system, with an eye towards rewarding healing, stealth, crafting, and other types of participation in addition to racking up kill counts 2.Possibly reducing the number of factions to 3 3.Rebuilding the bases to make them more balanced, including removing bases from areas within guard zones 4.Revamping town capture with an eye towards focusing the fighting, creating more intense battles 5.Adding more ways to use Silver, as well as working to fix various economic issues surrounding Factions 6.Adding more benefits to controlling towns, with an eye towards allowing Factions to have greater influence on the game world

In addition to the above, we have a list of miscellaneous bugs we want to fix.

Please note that we are very early in the design stages on this, and as we delve more deeply into this project our final feature change list will evolve. The above list is the pie in the sky and now we're seeing how much of it we can (and should) bring down to Earth. We are interested in seeing some more of your Factions-related ideas and requests on the forums.
-Phoenix