Q&A Hobbits to Isengard - Maiar
Q&A Hobbits to Isengard - Maiar
Please note: I am paraphrasing here. Anything said here is coming through my interpretation of what was said, and is subject to being corrected, so don't take all this as the final word.
If anyone who was present has any additions or corrections, feel free to post.
Q&A Hobbits to Isengard - Maiar
Video available here.
Guest for this run - EP Aaron "Rowan" Campbell
Update 13.1 will be out on Monday May 5, with lots of things coming in that, including a fix for the quieting quests bug. There are also tweaks for expanding the cosmetic pets system, a sort feature for inventory, updates to mail so you can drag and drop attachments into a message without having to hit the slots. So some good stuff coming up on Monday.
- If 13.1 is coming out on Monday, does that mean we get Spring festival next week
No, Spring festival will be coming toward the end of May. He doesn’t have a date, but when he does he will let us know.
They may have something else for us next week, but he won’t say what right now. - Question about cosmetic pets
He can’t really get too detailed in discussing the thought process moving forward with cosmetic pets, or go to deep into the feedback they ‘ve had so far, mainly because the team is still distilling it all, and actively considering how much of it they can implement. - Will there be an update 13.2, or is the next update 14
Right now that’s hard to say. It’s not set in stone whether there will be other updates before 14. Generally speaking, point releases tend to be small, so if you’re expecting anything big in terms of content between now and 14, not likely. Point releases tend to contain bug fixes and that sort of thing. - Will U13.1 have a fix for the French and German maps
Yes, it will. He checked on it and they will definitely be in for 13.1 on Monday. - Question about the 2 level increases for this year
He knows there’s been some discussion among the players about the increases, but the team has not reconsidered them. They are still planned. - Question about the new lottery system
There has only been very high level discussion about it so far, no concrete plans yet. He will keep us updated when he has more info on it. - Question about gear and LIs for level cap increase
He doesn’t know any specifics on that, about how many armour sets are planned, how gear will be handled, etc. with the level cap increase. He thinks there’s probably still some discussion happening over it. - What time is the update on Monday
Updates tend to be done in the morning, and up into lunchtime EST. About 4 hours of downtime is what they expect. - Is it difficult to get into game companies as a creative or screenwriter
If you are talking about an actual screenwriter, probably. He knows that game companies are always looking for good writers to write storyline, to write quests, etc. They have a couple of really great writers who are published authors who write all the storyline and a fair amount of the quest text, and are very deep in the lore. He won’t say if it’s any more difficult than any other job. It’s just as competitive. - Any plans to turn on the treasure hunt anytime soon
Every time he looks around to ask the person who’s in charge of that stuff, he’s not around. Not that he’s aware of. He knows they’ve got other stuff planned. So it probably won’t be any time this month. But he’ll double-check and make sure he gets it posted up. - Can you turn your camera around so we can get a view of what you see from your desk
He thinks people will be disappointed because mostly it’s just a bunch of stuff on his desk. He turns the camera around, shows that on his desk he has the award they won awhile back for Most Passionate Fan Base, some aviation stuff some Lord of the Rings figures, some Lord of the Rings Pez, a Rohan banner in the rafters. - What animal are you most hoping to see as a cosmetic pet
He plays a LM so he has the pet he really likes – the small turtle. To comment on what people are saying in the chat, he wouldn’t say no to a penguin, but he doesn’t think they’re terribly lore-appropriate. - Have you thought about a name for your new Beorning character when you make it
Not yet, but all his characters tend to follow a theme. He’s not going to tell us what that is because then we’d be able to figure out what his personal characters are. - What do you think about balance – do you think some characters are more powerful in PvP and PvE, and do you think that some classes need a revamp
He thinks balance is a tricky thing. He knows the team is aware that there are still some balance issues, they did make a pretty heavy pass at difficulty, which is going to necessitate a couple of passes at balance afterward. As far as classes being better or worse at PvMP, that’s something that is sort of by design. PvMP is not balanced for 1v1, it’s balanced for group vs group action. So anytime you get a 1v1 there’s a decent chance that one of them is going to be more powerful than the other. The Ettenmoors is designed as a group environment. - Has anyone gotten a huorn pet in-game
A lot have. He’s seen them on runs, he’s got one on his play character and he’s seen a number of them in-game as well. They are meant to be rare and tough to get. - Bitburger or Fürstenberg
He’s going to have to claim ignorance, he doesn’t know what the comparison is. Someone in the chat mentions that it’s beer, but he has never tried either of them. He has a few places nearby where they bring in some great imports, not just big-name imports but one in particular he’s thinking of is run by two women from Hamburg, who bring in pretty much anything you could want. He’s tried some good stuff there but can’t remember the name of it. Someone in the chat mentions Kölsch, and he admits he’s quite fond of it. - What is the likelihood we will ever see different types of mounts besides horses and goats
He would be very surprised if there ever were any others added. It’s not like they can spontaneously invent animals and have them make sense. If the question is a lead-up to flying mounts, he says he doesn’t see it ever happening. It’s not something they are even considering. Everyone gets the shudders anytime it gets mentioned. - Will the new dye colors walnut brown or steel blue ever get added to war-steed equipment dye packs
He checks with the ecommerce manager who sits next to him, who says he has no update on that but he will pass the suggestion along. - German translated question – how is it looking for the fine tuning regarding back to the roots
He assumes they mean getting to a place where the classes are more balanced and everyone is feeling more comfortable with their class. That’s an ongoing process, to get everything balanced and get a bit more difficulty in the game. U13 had a pretty big difficulty change to it. He knows some people thought it was a bit too far in one direction, but he’s also heard people say that now that they’ve figured it out and know how to gear themselves a bit differently, they’ve worked it out and now it’s not as bad as they thought it was. But it is something the team is working on and it is an ongoing process. - Will LotRO become a role-playing game again
He’s not sure he understands the question. They do have role-playing servers, there is a French RP server, a German RP server and an English RP server, which are listed in the launcher as RP servers. There is also an English RP encouraged server which doesn’t have role-playing rules, but a lot of role-play does go on there. He’s talking about Landroval, the RP encouraged server. - What is the difference between RP and RP encouraged
With RP they actually enforce a set of role-playing policies. You are expected to at least try to stay in character, not have outlandish names that can’t be reasonably expected to fit within the lore. A RP encouraged server is one that doesn’t have any of those rules enforced. Think of it as a RP light kind of server. Somewhere you can go to RP if you want, but you aren’t expected to. If you want to pick a name that’s not 100% within the lore, no one’s going to hassle you about it. - Question about the new auto-fellow feature
Basically if you mark someone as auto-fellow, and if they mark you as auto-fellow, when you login, if your friend is also logged in and eligible to join a fellowship (not in a solo instance, not doing a solo skirmish or something like that, and one of you are not already in a fellowship) it will automatically put you in a fellowship. - A couple of in-game events are mentioned. Weatherstock is on Saturday June 14th on Landroval, and on Saturday, May 17th is the Spring Racing Carnival on Landroval.
- Have you seen an explosion in store sales now that players can mail some store items to other accounts
He doesn’t have the numbers. No one has come to him and said, wow the sales are way up. That wasn’t really the point of the feature. It was to address a request that was already there. People who have two accounts and want to buy something on one and move it to another. Players who want to gift something to each other, that kind of thing. It was something that players had asked for and since they were already working on the mail system for the “open-anywhere” feature for VIPS, so they decided to add that feature in. - EP Aaron “Rowan” Campbell joins the chat.
- Can you give us any further information beyond what’s already known in the 13.1 notes, about cosmetic pets and their future
Rowan – Right now they have in development a system that will enable us to collect groups of pets, collections of pets, and get rewards for those. He doesn’t know exactly what they have in mind for that yet. Obviously if they’re going to be doing that, they’re going to be adding more of them to the game. So it’s really about how much people enjoy them, how excited they are, and how much we want to see and what kind of things we want to see.
Sapience – There’s been a side conversation in the chat about what players would like to see, and he thinks penguin was high on the list, along with racoon. Maybe not too lore-appropriate though.
Rowan– While there’s ways they can stretch the lore, he’s not too sure how much Tolkien talked about penguins.
Sapience – Seems to recall Forochel having a pretty severe penguin shortage. - What about a raccoon – could a raccoon be made appropriate
Rowan – He’d have to go to the lore masters on this one and find out. They had such issues with simple things like squirrels that he’s hesitant to just say yes. - What if multiple people from your auto-fellow list show up around the same time, do you end up in a raid, and who ends up being the leader
Rowan – This was a side project for one the engineers, who thought it would be great playing with close friends actively and commonly. What it will do is choose a pair of players who want to be fellowed, and put them into a group. But it’s not going to do that multiple times. So if one member is already in a group, it’s not going to add someone to that group. The maximum that auto-fellow is going to give is a group of two, because both were online and said they want to fellow with each other. - HoarseDev mentioned kinships awhile back, and some things he was thinking of doing. Anything new, anything you can share on that front
Rowan – The kinship element that he’s aware of, that they are putting in the next phase, HoarseDev has talked a bit about bringing out new types of items, and they’ve talked about the kinship crafting thing – they’ve come at this in various ways. Being able to bring in new items that have options for players to customize them – much much simpler than the LI system – and once they get that rolled out in U14, the next step they are looking at taking is one that also adds a grouping element to it, a kinship element to it, and lets you create better items because you’ve played with your friends, played with your kinship, completed certain deeds or accomplishments as a group, and have continuously been involved with the game and been a part of the game.
Sapience – That gives a little bit of insight into where they are going on the kinship front, and maybe some other areas as they move forward through the year. - People in chat lobbying for ferret pets
Rowan – Somehow ferret sounds much more reasonable. Asks if they got that far north.
Sapience – Says players are pointing out that in the films the trolls called Bilbo a ferret, and one of the guys in the Prancing Pony in Fellowship of the Ring has a ferret.
Rowan – Says if we can find references in the books, he will take them.
Sapience – States a challenge to players, if we can find references to ferrets in the written lore – meaning the books – they will take it under advisement as a cosmetic pet.
Rowan – Specifically the trilogy.
Sapience – Specifically the trilogy, as in Fellowship, Towers or Return of the King. Start hitting the appendices at the back of Return of the King. - What about kinship management tools coming along with the crafting thing – is anything like that a possibility
Rowan – Says that’s fully within the space of discussion, and not of limitation. There are a lot of great ideas around kinships, a lot of great ideas about how to update and improve them. For example they’ve had ranks for kinships for a long time and haven’t really done much with them, the tools to update and manage and update those groups are pretty thin right now, so there’s a lot of room there to expand and grow it. But it’s very much in the realm of “Here’s a list of really cool things we’d like to do” and not yet with a timeline or people to do them. - Even though you know you’re not going to be doing the big housing update, what are the odds that we will get some new housing items to place in the existing housing system
Rowan – The odds that they will be doing some new housing items are pretty reasonable. He thinks they’ll continue to build more decorative items and that’s a nice way to add flavour to festivals, events, new adventuring spaces and quests. They’ve already said they won’t be doing a full system overhaul, but he’s totally open to making small changes anywhere they can find them. Basically the “quality of life” type of things. We’ve seen them do similar things in mail recently, or with inventory. Can they improve things in small ways that have a dramatic impact on how we play with it. - Sapience brings up a discussion happening in the chat about the famed kinship revamp proposal.
Sapience – It’s been in the forums for a long time now, and they’re all really aware of it and think it’s a great proposal, but there are some realities around implementing player suggestions, and sometimes maybe players have awesome suggestions that don’t really fit within the architecture of the game, and within their tools and within the game engine. Asks Rowan to address some of those challenges to help players make better suggestions in the future.
Rowan – The first thing they consider is a back end thing – how does the game architecture support it, how do the systems that are already there support it, do they have code that already helps to drive this. That’s not something that is going to be easily or readily available to players, we’re not going to be able to see that directly. Beyond that, he thinks the best guidance he can give on that topic would be to think about things in terms of incremental changes, or additional changes to what’s existing now, and not redevelopment of what’s existing. For example, if they know they have a system of kinships and that system of kinships already has ranks, what is one feature they could add to make ranks better? What’s one feature they can add to make managing our kinships or our list of people there better? Those are ways they can kind of hook in and address things in a really targeted way, and build out and grow something. If it’s causing them to develop entirely new panels, entirely new UI, entirely new advancement systems, that’s a whole different scale of project, and that’s a whole different scale of discussion.
Sapience – He’ll sometimes have members from the team come to him and say, “This is a really great suggestion but it’s not within the scope of what we can realistically do.” It can be hard to explain to folks. They sound awesome and it sounds so simple, but when they start digging around in the nuts and bolts, it’s usually not. - What about furniture hooks, can we get more hooks, can we get to hooks we have right now reallocated to accept more types of items
Rowan – Lucky for him he was actually there when they built the housing system, and one of the biggest class of bugs that was part of that was “things don’t fit in hooks, and sink into wall.” So basically they’d attach something to a hook and that particular item wouldn’t match up against the wall properly. It would be sunk in too far, extended out too far, or was not appearing in a way that was pleasing and made sense. So adjusting different sizes of items to fit in different hooks presents that scale of problem on a much larger path, because there are hundreds and hundreds of housing items now. So that’s not a place he’d initially go. In terms of delivering more hooks, or changing how houses are laid out – that kind of thing, that’s definitely an area he’d like to explore, and would like to mess around with a bit. - Are the U13.1 update changes based on Players Council suggestions – last year’s or this year’s
Sapience – Not really. It’s a little too early for this year’s Players Council, although they are already working on some questions, and from his conversations with Rowan a bit earlier, they’re about to give them a lot more to work on. It’s kind of one of those in-between things. There was something that they touched on briefly in a meeting this morning that he doesn’t know if Rowan wants to share it with us regarding something that the Players Council – both last year’s and this year’s – have already brought to their attention as a nice quality of life change the players have asked for. Asks Rowan if they can talk about that, if he remembers what he’s referring to.
Rowan – Asks Sapience to tell him what it is.
Sapience – Says, “Global chat channels – Yay, Nay?”
Rowan – Says yes, they’re doing it, he believes for U14.
Sapience – Says that it came up in a meeting this morning, for those who don’t’ know, every Friday they have what’s called a franchise meeting, where they sit down together and talk about things that are going on, and things that the Players Council has requested, things they’re working on, is a brief portion of the meeting. Global chat channels came up this morning, and that was the first time he’d heard a yes, and now we all know it as well. So global chat channels are officially a Thing. - What about adding additional user channels? Right now it’s limited to 4
Rowan – Certainly something they can talk about. It hadn’t come up on his radar yet.
Sapience – He’s seen a couple of mentions about it but there isn’t a big critical mass out there asking for more channels. Really the focus has been on global chat channels, or converting existing channels into global channels. So he thinks that was the larger focus they were looking at. So they’ll poke that next. - What about making friends lists and ignore lists larger
Rowan – He suspects that is part of the same conversation about chat channels in terms of memory and how chat functions, so they can bring those up together.
Sapience – Says he will put those on his list and maybe go hassle Ransroth about it as well. Commits to speaking to him before he leaves for the day. - With the recent VIP perk to open mail from anywhere, has there been any consideration for similar perks, such as being able to open your vault in the wild
Rowan – They’re definitely looking at options like that. There’s always questions around where does it start to create gameplay issues or bugs or problems. For example he knows there’s a functionality that can be purchased to be able to access the vault, but he’s not sure if that’s restricted in that you can’t access it from instances or inside raids and such. The bottom line is that they’re still looking at ways that they can enhance VIP, but obviously building new content that VIPs get to play is the #1 way. - Could you please encourage more LUA API updates
Rowan – After the dev in charge of that gets back to the office, he will. - What about having /ignore by player, instead of just by character
Sapience – It was his understanding that the game has a hard time going outside of itself to see a full account worth of information.
Rowan – Says that’s pretty accurate. A lot of the chat is based on the world you’re on, based on that local information. That’s also a gameplay kind of question. Currently our characters have a certain degree of anonymity. We can be 3 or 4 characters and not have people know they’re all from the same account. If they allow us to identify who those 3 or 4 characters are associated with, that changes the dynamic of the game a bit. - Question about the roundtable dev chat that has been talked about in past runs
Sapience – He’s not forgotten it, it’s still on his list of things to do, it’s just that things have been a bit crazy for him this week inside and outside of work. The only real question is going to be, once 13.1 is out the door, finding time when everyone can get together in one place at the same time and schedule a meeting room so they can physically be in the same place and on camera at the same time. It’s a logistical thing more than a “I forgot” thing. They will get there.
Rowan – Says Sapience needs some cool backdrops for them as well, they can’t just sit in an empty room.
Sapience – Agrees. Says they need something really epic. They need to find a giant version of the Balrog or something. He’ll find something. There’s enough stuff floating around the office that he can probably make it happen. He can think of a couple of banners that he could probably pinch for an afternoon. - Any chance to revive or create something similar to data.lotro.com so that players can export character information or item information for use on third party sites or in mobile apps
Rowan – Says he and Sapience have had this conversation. Their starting point is in building up lotteries and getting that system up and running. In terms of the data API from the game, it’s certainly possible, but it’s a few projects down the line. It’s in the pipeline, but not quite at the top. - What’s the answer to life the universe and everything
Rowan – 42 is too easy.
Sapience – Says he’s given this answer before, and he actually gave the person who got the reference 500 TP and he will do it again if anyone gets it now. The answer to the question is Dale Beaverman. - The new cities introduced things like children and a more busy feel. Are there any plans of going back to the older towns that feel a bit empty and sprucing them up a bit
Rowan – His initial answer to that would be only forward. They’re looking to dig deeper into the world and build out brand new spaces that feel alive and active, and their next opportunity to do that is in Dol Amroth, and building out their first living Gondorian city. So he’s not necessarily as interested in going back to Dunland or some of the other places. They were just recently talking about the Shire, because they’re looking at what’s next year, and the year after that, and when does the Scouring of the Shire come into play, and at that point the Shire may be due for some additions and updates. - Rowan mentions a recent meet and greet where someone referred to him as “Rowan the White” reborn from “Rowan the Grey” and says it still hasn’t granted him enlightenment.
Sapience – Tells him to keep working on it. Says it’s like a deed you have to grind out. - When are we going to have LotRO trivia on Twitter
Sapience – Says he’ll get that going next week for during the downtime on Monday. - Are you satisfied by the changes that have been made since you rejoined the LotRO team, and thanks for making those changes
Rowan – He’s going to assume the question is about communication, because there have been a lot of changes. He says there are some changes they don’t want to make in terms of building out the story and building out the world – those are changes they are very committed to and very comfortable with. On the other hand, in terms of trying to get a future view of what they’re doing and sharing that with players, and letting us know where they’re going, that’s something he’s very pleased with. Being able to update their communication, update their style, and just get more out here consistently and give us more of a window into what they’re doing. - Question about the new installer for Bullroarer
Sapience – It is up, it is available for download. It went up earlier this week. There will be a new installer for the game sometime next week.
Rowan – Says yes, that’s their plan. They should have a new installer for live up next week. For the most part it’s going to be at the same places we’ve expected it, it’s just going to have slightly different messaging, and it should be a bit faster.
Sapience – Wanted to clarify a question about Bullroarer. If you currently have it installed you can just patch up – you don’t need to reinstall. Once it’s installed it will just patch up next time you start it if there’s something new. SO if it’s there, you don’t need the new installer, but if you don’t have it then by all means go grab it. - Recently it was mentioned that you were excited about the tech to change character names in a quest, will that be used to go back and change the names of characters in Moria session play, or in the instance where we first meet Gollum, or are you more focused on moving forward with that tech
Rowan – It’s similar to the question about hubs in the world. As they choose to go back and do a polish like with the North Downs recently, some of those things might get pulled in, but more likely we will see it applied moving forward with the epic and future stories.
Sapience – Thinks a broader answer is that when they go back to an area for something, they’ll then look at any new tech they’ve added to the area since building the area, and see if it makes sense to tweak the revamp along those same lines, rather than going back specifically to make one small change.
Rowan – He thinks it’s even broader than that in the sense that when they go back to do something, they take a wholistic view to it. They have new standards on how they write quests now, and new standards for how they direct us places, and new technologies that allow us to go to from place A to place B, and phasing technology to allow them to shape the phase and shape the story. So there are a lot of things that weren’t there 7 years ago that are in place now to take advantage of. - Suggestion about BR – you’ve said that you’re not going to be doing character wipes there with the smaller updates like 13.1, just big updates. If there are character bugs like the character quests it would probably be a good idea to amend that since we wouldn’t be able to put our bugged characters on BR to test the fixes.
Sapience – Thinks that actually it would because with the quieting quests, when we login with our characters on Monday, it will fix us if we currently have the bug, is his understanding of the fix. So technically moving our character would probably help in terms of testing out whether it does fix us.
Rowan – Thinks the question they are asking is more around the versions. So if you have a character you moved over and it didn’t have the bug, and you know you have one on Bullroarer who does, how can you get it over there to test it to help make sure they got it right. And he thinks that’s a valid point, and that it’s definitely something they should pay attention to with specific bugs as they are going from item to item. He doesn’t know that the policy on that is going to be 100% “they won’t do this thing.” They will do it as they need specific tests. - Sapience thanks Rowan for joining the chat, says he’s going to go play some freeze tag with some of the players.
Rowan – Says, “Come in next week, Hobnanigans, come on!”
Sapience – “Now we’re committed! And you did that while Jacob wasn’t here!”
Rowan – Says, “Well, after 13.1. Very soon!”
Sapience – *phew* “There we go. I quickly turned around to see if Jacob was there and if he’d suddenly fallen down with a heart attack, but he’s not at his desk.” Says that was the thing he’d hinted at earlier, that we may get to play Hobnanigans next week, if not, within the next few weeks most definitely. - Rowan thanks everyone and says goodbye.
- Many players have a lot of gold and nothing much to spend it on. Is there anything planned to stop the deflation
Not at this time, nothing he’s aware of in terms of changing the value of currency in the game. - Question about the outfits he wears for the hobbit runs
He always just grabs something off the mannequins that he likes. This outfit for this run was the Mathom Seeker’s set he got from the mannequins in Archet when he was leveling up. - Sapience mentions that now we’ve named two things. “The Bridge of Hobbit Doom” which is the bridge in the Trollshaws where he often dies, and the “Dead Hobbits Society” which are the hobbits that are often lying on the ground around the milestone when he ports back to Bree after a hobbit run.
- Kickman77 points out that the Players Council does lurk in the suggestions forum, so if you do have suggestions, post them there because the council will often pull those into the council area for discussion.
- Question about Extra Life 2014
He says that he made a post in the forums about it because last run people wanted to know if players could join Team Turbine. Reminds people that anyone can join Team Turbine, even if they’re fundraising for a different hospital. Their efforts go toward their hospital of choice, and to Team Turbine’s totals. But he wants to clarify that if people are doing their own thing and raising their own funds that’s awesome, but it’s separate from participating in his fundraising with the incentives and the codes and the prizing and stuff. But we can always do both. We can do our own fundraising and throw a couple bucks toward Sapience’s page to qualify for his incentives and whatever he has going on, and have the best of both worlds. - Question about how many words for upcoming updates in terms of translating text
He doesn’t know. Because there’s no full expansion this year he expects that we’d see smaller word counts over more updates. As far as a total word count across all the updates this year, he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t know that the team does until they’re done with them. It takes as many words as it takes.
