RP Tag
I read Dante's Guild wars every sunday and factions post blah blah blah. TBH, I'm not remotely interested in a Human, Elf, Orc, Gargoyle faction system. Its silly, limiting, and racist, imo. Skills and etc shouldn't be limited to OSI standards. 700 skill cap, 225 stat cap. If we are playing in a world that is already built with no skill cap in mind, then we shouldn't limit anyone to any certain skill cap.
That being said... Evo is not OSI, and it wouldn't be a bad idea for us players who actually want to RP to write some consistent lore and rules for RP. Also, I'm DYING to have player/guild run towns.
For example, Below is a custom town I ran on the last server I played on. Then again almost the entire world was custom. We called it Varstaad, and even had a good legal system, governing system, etc in place. Lots of ideas.
While I'm not nescessarily asking Dante and gang to go that far (a whole custom world, even though it would be AMAZING). It would be massively awesome to be able to build some Guild/Player towns in the world that already exsists. Unfortunately space is a little limited on some of these maps, and then there is the costs ED wise having GMs place and deco. I dream of it all the time though. Custom towns.
If you are interested Thorgal in helping me try to kick start some RP again on this server, maybe we can hammer some stuff, lore, etc out.
I have looked into this quite a bit and discussed it with other shard owners. I like custom maps and am a big supporter of them. That being said, they are generally not very popular. Don't get me wrong, there are some great custom cities out there that rival anything EA has done. It's just 90% of the population doesn't care for them. They are playing Ultima Online for nostalgic reasons and though they like change in the way of content, they typically don't follow full blown world rebuilding. Evo is great in that it boasts such a high population for a custom server. Usually these population numbers are limited only to time period accurate servers. The fact that Evo has consistently shown growth in such an environment is a testament to Dante's (and the rest of staff) abilities.
As for what goes into a custom map, the best way to do it is to replace one of the existing maps in game. Any map can be deleted and replaced with a custom one easily enough. I have tons of them in my collection and its a fairly painless process. It does involve patching the original client and the current runuo system, so in order to make it happen everyone would need to download a new custom client. There is a way to add more maps to the existing client but the method, frankly, is dirty and unstable. Anyone who's made custom clients can attest to the instability of too much customization.
That being said, you can build within the confines of an existing map. One of the biggest mistakes I see shard owners make is building huge custom cities and then not freezing them to the map. There is nothing more jarring nor unprofessional as seeing a giant city 'build' around you as you run through a massive collection of statics that aren't frozen. Freezing anything to the map makes it a permanent fixture and cuts back on server resources greatly, once again forcing a client update. Rumor has it, that eventually Kane will be cleaning up the Evo client so that we have an updated model. There are some custom pieces, particularly in Felucca that need to be cleaned up. There are a good number of statics in game that appear to have been accidentally frozen as well. The task of cleaning those up will be monumental. All of this would need to happen around the same time that a new custom area was introduced, in order to limit the number of client updates players would have to receive.
Considering how big Evolution is getting to be and the consistent numbers for which it has shown, I would think adding an updating service would be one of the more important systems to consider first. That way changes to the map could be done in publishes, similar to Kane's current content publishes. Map files, by far, are not the biggest files in the ultima client. So once all that is taken care of, new custom areas or even full blown cities would be easy to accomplish. You can even download pre-built ones and place them as a single item with uoarchitect. Some of them are mind boggling in how well they are built. Which is funny, considering how poorly most 'custom' servers are built.
We have some significant milestones to overcome, but your idea of guild towns and player towns has been explored on this server before. It was well received but with some technical issues (search town houses on the forums to see the complaints and bugs). I see what you're getting at but I guess to sum up my answer best would be a single word.
Eventually.
Then again, I could be wrong. 
Wel Vol, like I said I'm not asking them to build an custom maps or even custom, at least not for roleplay purposes. Not at this point when there is literally no RP presence on the server. I just think it would be awesome. I do know what you mean about them not being as successful because of nostalgia, etc etc etc. I dunno if it completely contributes to people being less active. The problem ive always saw was the fact that a lot of these more custom area just weren't spawned properly. I was playing around trying to figure out how to make a custom map by hand, still haven't quite figured it out (Tried Map Gen, Dragon, can't get centerED to even initialize). I know 0 about custom maps, but I read on run uo forums that they will break if updated to the new format (Which I think Dante and crew are considering trying to figure out because that means more room for custom art. Not really sure). Regardless its a fun idea, but is not actually what I am suggesting in this thread.
All I really would like to suggest in this thread is the RP tag. I think any further RP discussions should take place elsewhere. 
It is GOOD to see some people say they are willing to RP. Thats more people than I was expecting given how I've advertised in game for the last several days and gotten very little response.
