Community volunteers a la UO's Seer program

For those who don't know, the Seer program in UO recruited community volunteers to flutter about in their iconic green robes, orchestrating and facilitating in-game events. For a time, the Seer program brought some genius creativity to the UO world, and some of my best gaming memories are from events orchestrated by Seers, like the Great Chicken Invasion, when mysteriously powerful, talking chickens invaded the cities of Brittania, and the Mystery of the Missing Truffles, when a Seer controlled a pig that solicited adventurers for help tracking down its missing truffles. There was a lumbering competition in Yew at a point, a teatime in Moonglow, a rise of Necromancers (in a time when Necromancy wasn't a player skill in the game) in the city graveyards, and many other events.

I think it would be brilliant for the developers of SotA to leverage the creativity of the player base in this way, if it's feasible to develop a toolkit for such volunteers to use. A pool of volunteers could be chosen on an application basis, and members of that pool could submit ideas. If an idea is approved, a toolbox of precreated tools could be put together to give that volunteer relevant capabilities during the event period. Give the player those tools, post the event on a calendar, and let the fun ensue. UO vets, you know what I mean. How cool would it be to see a Seer style program brought back?

 

I'd love to see something like this, and I'd be glad to volunteer.

 

Good to meet you here mixels and very happy you joined us here

I was a member of the first Ultima Online "Player Seer Troubadours" that were formed by EA Games and though I always loved the idea of such, it took many development seasons for UO to have wanted to create such player involved positions.
I think this may be something that SotA could look at in the far distant future, but at this time, that may be a pipe dream that's a long way down a very long pipe

What we will be seeing here, is a very deep quest involved game with many much deeper quests than we could have ever experienced or invented with the UO game format.

"The Seer Troubadours of UO" were formed from the wish for such a game as our SotA will be. So I'm very excited to see how better questing and ideas of questing will turn themselves out to be here
~Time Lord~

 

Greetings Time Lord! Thank you for the welcome!

I understand what you mean about the development that went into UO's program, but our developers now have access to far more powerful tools and precedents, as well as the advantage of hindsight. Still, I'd completely understand if this were impossible for release. I'd still love to see such a program, even if it's a year or two post-release.