A letter from Executive Producer Kate Paiz - Looking Ahead to 2014

Thank you for the letter. It's nice to get an idea of what's coming up for the next year. I'm looking forward to it.

I personally don't spend my time worrying about whether the game will still be here next month, next year or the year after. I'd be sad and disappointed if it weren't, but as with all things in life I would move on from it. I am enjoying the game now. Any money I spend on the game is for what I am enjoying now in the game. Nothing in life is guaranteed. The only thing for sure in life is that if your time is spent worrying about things and finding all things negative about a situation, your result is more than likely going to be negative. Nothing wrong with voicing thoughts and opinions about any changes (or non-changes), but sometimes the message gets lost in all the noise. It's fine to have expectations from a product, but there may come a time when you have to accept that perhaps you aren't going to get what you want out of it.

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Originally Posted by Jillymala

I apologise, I see where my sentence could have been confusing.

I was asking if you were suggesting that had they not made the class changes then it would have taken them 13 months to develop an expansion like this one?

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Well, some of that time would have been spent into making other changes to classes (e.g. new skills). So they might have saved a month or two, but most likely they would have come up with some other selling point instead requiring time.

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Providing financial backing would/could have brought in help for overworked individuals who were so taxed and at the limits that they couldn't make crafting pears look like pears instead of cherries, as just one example of many. Surely they could have hired someone to make even the simplest of changes like this, don't you agree?

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Creating the icons, sure. Actually adding those icons into the game, not so sure.

OMG looking back to the older areas, new bags and revamping older areas and stuff sounds amazing :) thanks for all that, looking forawrds to 2014!

cheers for listening to all the palyers :))

That letter was plain awsome thanks turbine :cool: i am looking forward to 2014 :)
Happy holidays !!!

i just hope that this new content won't be too expensive.

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Originally Posted by Sapience

We are working on one more secret surprise, but I won’t do more than tease its existence now, other than to say that the class changes have made it possible for us to consider making a new addition to the game… which we will talk about later in the year.

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I had a thought today while at work about what this may be... and I decided, possibly, the ability to mentor down to a lower level. The changes to classes means that scaling down would be easier as you'd modify the points available to spend on class traits, then just adjust the stats accordingly. We can already scale up to 95 as demonstrated in the Helms Deep Big Battles, so scaling down may be a possibility.

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Originally Posted by Jillymala

Also, as an aside.. what will be happening to DDO and AC2?
Will they also not be getting updates?

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Last update I saw from Sev said AC2 would be updated in Feb. I don't follow the AC schedule any more, but as far as I know, their updates will continue. You can find the DDO producer's letter here.

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Originally Posted by Roberto_the_First

Last update I saw from Sev said AC2 would be updated in Feb. I don't follow the AC schedule any more, but as far as I know, their updates will continue. You can find the DDO producer's letter here.

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"Epic Reincarnation. Extending reincarnation creates new opportunities for you to customize and advance your characters. We view this as only one step along the path to create a stable and substantial endgame along with adding new level cap content, settling on a persistent level cap (30), and making endgame systems like items and advancement more robust."

So like, their level cap over there is 30 and it's going to stay that way? Lucky dogs!

The surprise on the classes that are prepared can it be the end of the restriction of class for race or not? This option is less costly than a new class and does not do lacking expansion for her and I could create mas addiction to the game of all the players who want a race in a class prohibited for this race

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Originally Posted by Sapience

Hello!

One thing I had hoped, when penning this letter last year, was that at the end of 2013 I would be able to write about the great changes we’d made to housing. But, as you are aware, we had to delay the bigger housing changes we have been working on to 2014. We had some very good discussions with the Player’s Council about what we should include in the housing revamp and there are a lot of excellent ideas out there. It takes time to develop those ideas into good, fun housing features, and while we could have rushed something out just to say we’d done it, instead we decided to take more time and make more meaningful changes. We will continue our conversation around housing with the Player’s Council, and I look forward to giving you an update later in 2014.

Housing
As I said earlier, Housing is still high on our list of objectives for the year, and the conversation thread can be found here. We’ll be talking more about this throughout the year.

We are working on one more secret surprise, but I won’t do more than tease its existence now, other than to say that the class changes have made it possible for us to consider making a new addition to the game… which we will talk about later in the year.

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Thinking about it, a huge concern I have is that two different things seem to be being implied.

On the one hand a week or so before Christmas we are told (initially by a 3rd party gaming site) that the housing update has been delayed until next year.

This implies they've been working hard at it, but i's not quite ready yet.

However, the Official feedback Housing thread that was started by Turbine on 17 Dec (3 days ago) implies they haven't even started on it yet. If that is the case and they are still deciding what to put in this update, then it's not likely to materialise until very late next year.

As they say they will be talking about it throughout the year, again it looks like we have no hope of it materialising until about this time next year. Could it be that they are not putting any resources into it at present, to wait and see how other things I shall not mention pan out? It certainly gives the impression they aren't starting work on it any time soon

Also IF this is the case, it's a typical example of Turbine not communicating with the player base properly, letting them get their hopes up for no reason when Turbine is well aware its not going to happen this year, they could easily have told us 6 months ago, 3 months ago etc that due to HD etc, the housing update has been postponed. I don't buy that at the beginning of say October or November they still expected to be able to do it this year, they haven't even finished collecting ideas yet.

I'm also a little concerned about the constant mention of the Players Council in every Turbine post, implying that they are responsible for major game decisions.

The players council is not needed, you have feedback threads like the housing one, and I don't want anything done based on a handful of players opinions. The cynic in me also wonders whether the constant mention of them is building them up to be the scapegoat if things don't go as planned.

nice letter 2 HUGE concerns.

1. no mention of any Classic raids even on the road map. pretty much time for me to go elsewhere if there are no raids for 2014 so i would really like an answer to this

2. no new expansion the very year their supposed contract for lotro will need to be renewed...... is HD our last Xpack?

Thank you for your letter.
After years of working with management in software development I recognize marketing talk.
You promise nothing, explain nothing - instead give a fuzzy glint of what might happen (or not - nothing promised).
Perfect kind of speach you present clueless clients who like to be fooled by nice words.

As you may have already recognized, I am very very sceptical.

As nice as no new expansion announcement for 2014 is, and instead focusing on polishing existing stuff + releasing far more smaller content parts over the year, what exactly are you going to do?
This thread already contains a whole long list of guesses what these fuzzy intentions could be.
New classes?
New instances + raids?
New areas?

Instead you talk about stuff that - even if requested for years such as housing - is not that important for the game itself to remain interesting and addictive. Also festivals and inventory revamps... yeah, some things are really annoying, but are these really your top priorities for 2014?

What about:
- the horrible class revamp? Some balancing on dps at least?
- the whole lot of bugs still existing and making some raids/instances (e.g. Draigoch) barely playable? Or bugs in quests or session plays?
- horrible scaling of instances?
- grinding for ever boring and IMO useless LI system?
- often broken and unbalanced mounted combat?
- fixing bugs and solving lag issues?
- horrible + often incomplete translations in other languages (a player in france playing lotro in french is still a paying customer!)?
- broken PvM balance causing the game to be a faceroll?
- random loot leaving everything to luck instead of providing a way for hard work + achievement?
- broken economy?
etc.

Well, at least some fluff comes up that might sugarcoat (again) the whole mess for a brief period. Will old time players stay? Not so sure...

Sorry, for being so cynical, but I don't read anything that makes me look forward to playing lotro in 2014. At least not without some solid plaing what really is in shedule (I would bet, you have the whole planing done for at least first quarter 2014 ^^) and what excatly is coming - and a lot of communication for why + how things happen (hopefully listening to player base feedback instead of PC only).

At least I can wish you all here a merry christmas + happy new year ;)

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Originally Posted by Kyaha

Thank you for your letter.
After years of working with management in software development I recognize marketing talk.
You promise nothing, explain nothing - instead give a fuzzy glint of what might happen (or not - nothing promised).
Perfect kind of speach you present clueless clients who like to be fooled by nice words.

As you may have already recognized, I am very very sceptical.

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This and everything else you said is exactly how I feel. Nice words, but they say nothing. After the HD debacle I'd really like a little more substance - both in commitment and in the game itself.

I rarely read entire threads before I respond, but I wanted to see what trends were most prominent in peoples responses.

The most requested update to this game, from the player base in this thread, is new raids and instances. You guys have made some great ones, I love playing them and figuring them out, as do many many others.

I understand the need to make money, what I don't understand is how not making great new instances is somehow losing you money, as has been implied by a few people involved with the game.

Read these replies and the many many others about making new instances. Then look at how many of those people are leaving the game. I love lotro, I want to play it for years to come, but as someone who has ran a raiding kin for close to 4 years I can very easily tell you, I have seen too many people leave for a lack of end game content. Which for me and people like me includes NEW raids and instances.

Tell us what your plans on making new ones are, we want to know, and while you don't owe us anything it would certainly be the right thing to do for those of us that like NEW end game instances.

It's simple. Yes or No?

Like many have posted before, I appreciate the communication. But how is upgrading housing going to help you guys make money and keep people interested all year? Housing is like a side salad in a main meal. BB's is like a appetizer (I don't hate them like some, but they fall short in providing an end game experience that I love), I want the main course now please. Give me Dinner, give me new instances.

Problem with all of it is to try and find the right balance of content that will suit the majority of the player base. Not everyone is an endgamer or raider and many don't even bother with the Instances we have now because their focus is on getting to level cap and nothing more. Many players have no idea what it's like to be in a fellowship or how to contribute to a FM.

I am perfectly happy to see no new expansion this coming year, preferring to have smaller content releases and a revamping of long neglected areas of the game. Developers need to concentrate on fixing all the bugs we currently have before releasing anything major and they need to listen to and acknowledge the people who help them out in Beta testing. Continual information should be provided to the community about bug reports and how they are going to be handled (if at all) instead of no feedback until we (maybe) see a hotfix announced.

Please, please Turbine, please make sure that you have covered all the possibilities of errors in the way something implemented now might affect an earlier or different part of the game before you go to press. Prime example...Eglain rep earned from crafting...ok it has been addressed, but should never have happened in the first place. Why was Draigoch released with bugs and never fixed? A great raid for those that could complete, but for others a complete disappointment. Why are the new gemstones red? Last I checked, emeralds are green and we currently have no distinction between Riddermark and Eorlingas hide icons. Small things perhaps, but details are important.

I am not a fan of the LoTRO store being pushed in my face every two minutes. If I want to buy something I am quite capable of doing so without being reminded. I am not a fan of buying Mithril coins either and absolutely refuse to get suckered in. I do understand you need to make money, but the more you push, the more some will push back.

Don't like to have festivals in my face every time I log in or level up either. If we decline to participate, please let it remain that way.

Please allow VIP/Lifetime/Premium members the ability to send more than one item to players via mailboxes. You can limit it to 5 if necessary, but that would at least cut down on the # of mails you might have to open.

Housing changes would be great, but I find I am extremely cynical about seeing them anytime soon, at least, not until Turbine finds a way to make us buy them for MC's.

Allow all races to play all classes, after all, you take a lot of license with Lore as it is, so why not? And puhlease do not give an Elven RK a sword damage bonus trait or a Dwarven RK an axe damage bonus trait...give us something we can use.

Get rid of LI's. Instead, give us a weapon that will grow in attributes/stats as we level up. "excuse me Orc Army, could you give us 30 minutes to reforge our LI's and spend our points please." "Oh, it might take longer, I am nowhere near a Forge master and I need to get a cuppa and use the loo, drat it." "Helm's Deep on hold until we get back chappies." *groan*

:)

This letter confirms what I've been thinking all over the last year. No expansion in 2014 is a quite logical step.

The dev team has been reduced in size, we have one dev responsible for 3 classes, and one of them is doing the PvMP stuff as well. We have one for the epics, one for the landscape stuff, one for items. A few for the artworks. Maybe one or two more for other stuff, but that's it (source: class threads and discussions with Turbine staff during the development of HD). With a team of this size, you can not produce an expac AND in parallel do quarterly updates and bugfixes in between. Options are: dump the regular updates and put all efford into an expac. Or do quarterly updates, with small content additions, but no expac.

The wording (marketing speech of course) in this letter tries to suggest that we might get some huge additions / revamps now on a quarterly schedule. That's not what will happen, I fear. We will get small increases, step by step. Instance clusters aren't small, I don't expect something like that anymore.

The game isn't focused around the fellowship and their progress anymore, that is just a story happening far away. The game is more and more about living in the world of middleearth, having festivals and fun. Making progress with your chars gets less important.

This isn't the end of Lotro, of course. This way the game can go on for years. But it is a different game than the original Lotro SoA / Moria game.

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Originally Posted by whheydt

I've been saying for quite some time that stretching the schedule to make the expansion releases on 15 to 18 month cycle would probably help. Skipping an expansion and doing smaller addons plus fixes and clean up is a good first step. I'd still recommend *not* going back to the expansion every 12 months model.

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Okay, so this particular part of the thread is focused on the Too Much problem Turbine has had for, well, forever. The "we bit off too much again this expansion cycle but by gosh we're going to release it on time even if the Devs/QC gang still have a backlog of testing and bugs, and the artists are nowhere near caught up" habit. I think you are right that taking a break in the annual cycle, or even permanently slowing the cycle from 12 to 15 or 18 months COULD lead to improvements...or it could just result in the development decision-makers stuffing even more workload into a longer cycle. Like a person in the habit of stuffing 15 pounds of junk into a 10 pound bag; if you give them a 15 pound bag, they'll just try to stuff 20 pounds of junk into it. Hard to change habits.

To truly solve the problem, the decision-makers have to change how they decide what to allow into an expansion, OR management need to hire to rebalance assets, or both. In the past, the deciders have seemed driven by the world builders and landscape quest makers, while the instance/raid builders, artists, and QC team have constantly played catch-up. Which leads to expacs (and other releases) coming out buggy and unfinished-feeling.

So it's possible Turbine team leadership could retool how they manage effort. It's also possible they could simply see a bigger bag and start stuffing it. Or, most ominous possibility...

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Originally Posted by Amberjack

That is absolutely the BEST spin I have ever seen on a decision to let something die.

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This guy could be right, and we've seen LOTRO's last expansion (barring some surprising uptick in sales/revenue stream).

I've always believed that a Nov-Dec paid expac release was a central component of Turbine's business model. Steady stream of subscriptions and micro-purchases throughout the year, with a heavy 'bump' in income just before year-end (good for employee bonuses, and for year-end reports to WB and share-holders). For Turbine to give up their Big Bump ... this guy could be right, that might (might) mean a decision has been made to scale back dramatically on operating expenses. Only way I know of for us outsiders to gauge that is to see if Turbine hiring announcements slow to a trickle or Boston papers report a partial layoff. Hope it's not that, but it COULD be.

As someone said that letter is nothing more then nice words to try to calm down the community with actual no promises for what they doing, and even if they plan to do that in 2014 following their "major problems in game" their bad orientated.
In that letter says they talk with the Player Council, but i wonder they listen to them? Answer is partialy they do only on the themes like realese the automatic lvl up to lvl 50 store product, and things that means inmidiate money for them, but about the rest of the concerns NO they dont, and even they say something to them and end doing something else. I know the Player Council as many of the replys on this thread (not counting the large amount on rest of the forums) are woried about aspects of the game that are way more important then:

Festivals => WHO CARES!!!, Boring content and in my 3 years playing the game NEVER been in those beacuse getting cosmetics and completing deeds that give nothing is non sense, my time its more worthy then waste it on that...

Housing => Must be a joke... same answer, who cares? the actual housing system works fine.. and even if people want a revemp its not somethig that will change the game.

Revamp kinships=> ??, Kinship's mechanic works perfectly, and if theres people asking to revamp this its beacuse they havent see that the main problem its not kinship's mechanic, problem is that theres absolutly no game challenge or end game content there for players stop playing game = under populated servers!, So a solution might be Fusion servers with low population and work with the end game so people stop leaving the game.

No expansion for 2014 => Maybe a good thing if they actually focus on whats important to fix...

New areas => were do i start... As game is now, with actual no challenge were i can go with any of my toons grab everything and survive easily lvling has become the most boring thing i can do, lvl up from 85 to 95 its way to boring, and creating a new toon OMG...
Whats the point of making new areas that are going to be faceroll, whats the point of continue questing if theres no challenge at the end of it..
The CORE of this kind of game is the end game! Were after people hit cap lvl they have a Instance cluster were they can gear up with the loot that drops there ACCORDING to difficulty. Now there are no end game content (scaled raids are faceroll anyway beacuse everyone know the mechanics and even if they were challenger would take 1/3 the time till people running them get bored compared with a new raid ; Skirms existed on the last expansion to fill the period between the expansion was realease and the raid was realese, now EPIC BATTLE's (lets say Deeping wall, since only 1 12 man...) are covering that period were classes dont even play their classes, everyone is a Enginner or officer, dosent matter if your burg, ministrel, Rk, etc..

In the end, game missing:
- Revamps the difficulty of the game (Everything is faceroll..)

- Create a new instance cluster with a CLASSIC MULTIPLE boss RAID, like BG, OD, Orthanc...

- End game top gear MUST drop only on the hardest content as a reward, stop with free gear policie (kills the desire of people trying hard content if exist like did with Erebor raids, why run Erebor T2C if running 20 sambrogs will asure me more seals and a FA...),lest say couple more things : If you dont run that challenge content then you DONT have a need for that gear, Nothing in life is free of effort if you dont want to spent time in order to get that content done then dont expect to have the gear. period.

- Stop with the luck and random based loot system... Do i need 10 times the same item?? NOOO!, Get a Barter loot system like OD had it, or partialy Orthanc had it, were players can actually choose what they want and choose if want new piece or upgrade it to Gold (legendary item)..

- About Ettenmoors, still Angmar vs Rangers??...Come ON!!, Took you guys a MONTH to realese the new Freep armour and its same #### then 85 with +1 audacity.. Macro usage players, if you cant simple play your toon by your own then dont play it this is a game for human players not a PC player, i consider that cheating... Instead of making every single skill available on the LOTRO store for creeps, were a rank 0 can have up to rank 15 skills, why you dont revamp creep class trait trees/corruptions like you did with freeps...

And after that is solve (all that is End game), you can expand for new content, and fix minor useless things like festivals and housing...

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Originally Posted by Angadan

I've always believed that a Nov-Dec paid expac release was a central component of Turbine's business model. Steady stream of subscriptions and micro-purchases throughout the year, with a heavy 'bump' in income just before year-end (good for employee bonuses, and for year-end reports to WB and share-holders). For Turbine to give up their Big Bump ... this guy could be right, that might (might) mean a decision has been made to scale back dramatically on operating expenses.

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Thought about this a bit, adding a couple of follow-on suppositions.

Only reason I can see that Turbine (a firm in the business of making a profit) would abandon a profit-making activity like annual Expansion Packs, would be...if it were no longer profitable. Even if there were, as Kate's letter noted, good reason to take time to clean things up a bit, well-managed companies don't give up on a profit-maker, ever. Therefore, one can only conclude that the costs of building an Expac must now exceed the benefits of selling said Expac. And Turbine, being managed by professionals, would never make such a significant decision based on one-off data. Which means the profitability of Expacs must have been trending lower at least the past two years, perhaps longer.

That would seem to match the gut feeling (instinct) of some players/observers in this thread, myself included, that fewer players bought HD than bought Eastemnet the year before. I am imagining a chart illustrating the economics of Expacs over time, costs and gross sales as two separate lines with sales above costs but curving down closer and closer as the years go on until they cross or come close to crossing in 2013. Which means the Expac profit model is bust and it's time to do something different.

Kate's letter does not HAVE to be interpreted this way...but it seems the best fit reading, at least to me. Time will tell. However it's playing out inside Turbine HQ, I hope for the best for them...because I like their game and want it to keep going. :)

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Originally Posted by Kyaha

What about:
- the horrible class revamp? Some balancing on dps at least?
- the whole lot of bugs still existing and making some raids/instances (e.g. Draigoch) barely playable? Or bugs in quests or session plays?
- horrible scaling of instances?
- grinding for ever boring and IMO useless LI system?
- often broken and unbalanced mounted combat?
- fixing bugs and solving lag issues?
- horrible + often incomplete translations in other languages (a player in france playing lotro in french is still a paying customer!)?
- broken PvM balance causing the game to be a faceroll?
- random loot leaving everything to luck instead of providing a way for hard work + achievement?
- broken economy?
etc.

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AMEN. I agree with each of those points.

Maybe not new expansions is not an terrible idea. Money spend, rush for next 10 lvl, new LI, new gear. I barely had time to level all my 6 alts and raid a little and gear them up for T2 challenges that all the stuff was gone when HD doubled everything mostly. Unchecked content, bugs, lot of bugs, and what is more important, breaking the older content when launching the new one. I still don't understand how they managed to break Draigoch for example, when, since launch, I did 3 - 5 raids per week for over 9 months. Only 2 times was broken.

As an sugestion for Turbine. Maybe you are not aware. But is clearly the lack of money. And that is because destroying the game, ppl did not wanted to pay any more. Cause and effect. As solution, make the VIP to have some EXCELENT advantages. VIP need to worth something. So you can receive new subscriptions. New subscriptions = more money, more time, more personal, more content, more happy customers. Issue solved. Oh, and give us something to play. Atm we dont have much left.

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Originally Posted by devilhand

Festivals => WHO CARES!!!, Boring content and in my 3 years playing the game NEVER been in those beacuse getting cosmetics and completing deeds that give nothing is non sense, my time its more worthy then waste it on that...

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hmm. it cares me?

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Originally Posted by devilhand

Housing => Must be a joke... same answer, who cares? the actual housing system works fine.. and even if people want a revemp its not somethig that will change the game.

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Oh, this cares me too. Many People want a complete revamp of the housing. And yes , it will Change the game for many roleplayer ( and there are not less of them.)

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Originally Posted by devilhand

Revamp kinships=> ??, Kinship's mechanic works perfectly, and if theres people asking to revamp this its beacuse they havent see that the main problem its not kinship's mechanic, problem is that theres absolutly no game challenge or end game content there for players stop playing game = under populated servers!, So a solution might be Fusion servers with low population and work with the end game so people stop leaving the game.

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Cares me too. I will explain later why.

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Originally Posted by devilhand

In the end, game missing:
- Revamps the difficulty of the game (Everything is faceroll..)

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True.. Making Thorog with 7 People, without a Guardian but a tank-cap is tooooooo easy. ( and my gear is not very good)

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Originally Posted by devilhand

- Create a new instance cluster with a CLASSIC MULTIPLE boss RAID, like BG, OD, Orthanc...

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If the look for the "old" non-scaleble Ini we would have a pretty nice selection.

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Originally Posted by devilhand

- End game top gear MUST drop only on the hardest content as a reward, stop with free gear policie (kills the desire of people trying hard content if exist like did with Erebor raids, why run Erebor T2C if running 20 sambrogs will asure me more seals and a FA...),lest say couple more things : If you dont run that challenge content then you DONT have a need for that gear, Nothing in life is free of effort if you dont want to spent time in order to get that content done then dont expect to have the gear. period.
- Stop with the luck and random based loot system... Do i need 10 times the same item?? NOOO!, Get a Barter loot system like OD had it, or partialy Orthanc had it, were players can actually choose what they want and choose if want new piece or upgrade it to Gold (legendary item)..

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i totally disagree with you. I like raiding and i know many people who likes raiding to. But many have a Family and so they only can raid one-time a week or one-times for 14-days. If you stop reward them the wll stop raiding.

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Originally Posted by devilhand

- About Ettenmoors, still Angmar vs Rangers??...Come ON!!, Took you guys a MONTH to realese the new Freep armour and its same #### then 85 with +1 audacity.. Macro usage players, if you cant simple play your toon by your own then dont play it this is a game for human players not a PC player, i consider that cheating... Instead of making every single skill available on the LOTRO store for creeps, were a rank 0 can have up to rank 15 skills, why you dont revamp creep class trait trees/corruptions like you did with freeps...

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In your words : who cares about moor? Lotro is NOT a PVP-game.

Inventory and Bag Space

This excites me as the inventory issues I encounter are annoying at best. It is the reason that ppl make kins with 8 toons and buy up kin houses ...just so they can have the extra storage space.
I would absolutely love to see an improvement here. The overflow bag was an incredible and vital improvement (kudos to whoever put that one into action) hopefully we can see more improvements like this one.


Festivals and Events

I do not attend festivals, so the constant pop ups of the quest actions buttons are extremely annoying. Please add a feature that will allow us to put a quest on ignore similar to the ignore for the friends list. This way I do not have to continuously decline or drop the quest just to get it to go away. Worse is that it pops back up everytime I log in or switch characters, or gain a level. I know that you are proud of your festivals and it may be rightly so, but please stop spamming me with the festival quests...its beginning to feel like you are cramming it down my throat.



Housing

I am super excited about this and I have an idea that may or may not be on the table already. If (either by expending Turbine Points or in Game resources of some type) crafting facilities can be purchased for the homes it would make the homes much more vital. You could purchase, from the appropriate guild vendors; a crafting center (forge, scholars niche, workbench etc...) for your home. You would not be able to get the guild vendors or suppliers etc... to be hanging around in your home and you wouldn't have vault access although you could have a "crafting chest" which could be made to only accept ingredients, resources and crit items(the same way the ah categorizes them) This could be purchased once you have attained a crafting upgrade to your home(which would have to be purchased before you could actually get any type of facility). You could of course upgrade to the superior version as time goes on. You could craft everything you needed in your home. You would still have to visit the suppliers and guild vendors from time to time to stock up on needed items. The Idea is of course just a rough draft of what could be done. I am sure that you have probably reviewed this and it is my hope that this is something that we might see someday soon.


Raids

It is my Fervent desire that raids (and in particular the Rift which is my favorite raid in the game) are scaled to allow those who have attained level cap to enjoy them all over again. You have some outstanding Raids already created, so before adding new ones please consider revamping the old to scale. I think you will find many players expressing delight at the thought of facing a scaled balrog or a level 95 Vile Maw

I thank you for your consideration and wish My Fellow Gamers, The staff at Turbine and those GM's and Devs who are working so hard to make this game great, a Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukkah!

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Originally Posted by Ilaadrien

Raids

It is my Fervent desire that raids (and in particular the Rift which is my favorite raid in the game) are scaled to allow those who have attained level cap to enjoy them all over again. You have some outstanding Raids already created, so before adding new ones please consider revamping the old to scale. I think you will find many players expressing delight at the thought of facing a scaled balrog or a level 95 Vile Maw

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Actually I think you'll find many players expressing horror at the idea because the scaled instances we already have aren't working well and don't get run. There's a "petition" thread asking for scaled Rift and older content and it's garnered little attention other than by the OP. And the other replies go at least 50/50 against. Do you really want to see Rift broken into 3-6 wings and the mechanics no longer needed? Nobody runs BG or OD anymore except on rare occasions. Very few people run even the Erebor scaled raids unless they need to finish an old deed. Lack of successful scaling coupled with lack of reward for the space equals wasted effort. Give us something new. I'd also appreciate some balance back in the classes as well.

Nobody runs BG or OD anymore except on rare occasions. Very few people run even the Erebor scaled raids unless they need to finish an old deed.

Im not sure what server you are on but BG OD Erebor raids and many more are run on an almost constant basis on the Brandywine server...just look to GLFF to find those recruiting for the runs...My kin regularly schedules runs that include these. There is great interest in running A scaled up Rift among the people I associate with. I cannot tell you about the ppl you deal with but I will say that It is still and will continue to be my hope that the Rift, Carn Dum and others be scaled. :)

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Originally Posted by Rasimir

The game isn't focused around the fellowship and their progress anymore, that is just a story happening far away. The game is more and more about living in the world of middleearth, having festivals and fun. Making progress with your chars gets less important.

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And yet they keep removing the fun from festivals and replacing it with Turbine Store popups. They really aren't doing *anything* right at the moment.