LOTRO Livestreams - Notes on what was said
I just watched the inventory Q&A with Chris Martin and there was some great info in there, so I'm going to extend my transcripting to these types of events too. I'm creating a separate thread because this could potentially continue past the hobbit runs.
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 this as the final word.
If anyone who was present has any additions or corrections, feel free to post.
Hobbits to Isengard Q&A - Notes on What Was Said
Q&A With Chris Martin - Inventory Revamp 17/03/14
U13 Preview Tour 03/04/14
SHIELD Dwarf Runs through Moria Q&A - Notes on What Was Said
For a helpful look at how Sapience gets his hobbits to level 10 so fast, view the Twitch video here.
Q&A With EP Aaron "Rowan" Campbell 16/07/14
Frelorn Test Stream 14/08/14
Frelorn Regular Livestream Events Q&A
U14.2 Preview Tour 11/09/2014
U15 Preview Tour 30/10/2014
Q&A With Chris Martin - Inventory Revamp 17/03/14
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 this as the final word.
If anyone who was present has any additions or corrections, feel free to post.
Q&A With Chris Martin - Inventory Revamp 17/03/14
Video available here.
Senior Game Systems Engineer Chris Martin discusses changes to the Inventory/Bag system coming with Update 13
Chris – People may know him as Norell (sp?) on the boards. He’s been with Turbine for a little over 8 years, he’s on the Game Systems Engineering team. He does a lot of work on the UI. He also worked on the LUA a lot. They’ve been getting a lot of feedback that people want to customize their bags more. The idea behind this revamp is for those who like their bags the way they are, to be able to keep them as they are, and for those who want to be able to customize them, to be able to do that too.
Chris demos the new system. Here are my notes on that:
Players can now scale the width of their bags at will, so that the inventory slots move around to fill the expanded width or height. They can also access a new inventory edit mode and move their inventory slots from bag to bag, in groups of 5. So for example, if people want all one bag, they can move all their slots into bag 1. Bags that are emptied of inventory slots by this activity will no longer show when not in inventory edit mode. So when they show or hide their inventory, only the bags with slots in them will appear. When the player accesses inventory edit mode again, the empty bags will reappear and players can drag inventory slots back into them to make them reappear.
Bag 1 is given a special role in that it houses advanced interface options such as a search bar that highlights items in the inventory as you type into it (i.e. if you type “Hide”, all the hides of all types that are in your inventory will be highlighted. If you type “Light Hide” only the light hides will be highlighted). Bag 1 also has a lock icon that, when clicked, changes your mouse cursor into a lock that enables you to toggle item sell locking off and on with a click. To exit lock mode, right click anywhere, or click the lock icon again. Bag 1 also has a gear icon for toggling inventory edit mode, and a LotRO store icon that gives players instant access to the store page where extra inventory slots will be sold. Because bag 1 now houses these special controls, it can never be fully emptied of inventory slots (or it would disappear). The bag will always have at least 5 slots.
Q&A following the demo
- Vraethir has a question about a bug with stacks of items. If you intentionally or unintentionally drag a stack of items out of your bags, you get the split verification window, and then the items go immediately into deletion without a verification prompt. Is this intentional, or is it something that Nathan was working on in removing some of the verifications
Chris – It was not intentional for this inventory revamp. One of the QA testers told him about it this morning and it looks like it’s a bug. They were also working on changes to some of the confirmations, so it looks like this might have gotten messed up along the way. They are working on fixing it
Sapience – Just got confirmation from QA while Chris was talking, that it was in fact by design but they are taking another look at it because deleting items without confirmation is not a good thing. - If you get the extra bag space but you want to keep the traditional view, what do you need to do
Sapience – Just leave everything alone
Chris – If you leave everything alone without ever going into inventory edit mode, bag 1 will just keep growing as you buy more slots. - Question about the cost of extra bag space.
Sapience – Says his understanding is that they will no longer be selling “bags” per se, rather they will be selling inventory slots in groups of 5. A bag is essentially 3 groups of 5, and the current plan is to keep the price of inventory slots such that 3 groups of 5 will cost roughly the same as an extra bag currently costs. You can buy just 5 slots, or 15, or 10 or whatever you want, and the price will work out to be in line with current prices in the store.
Chris – Agrees that is the case. Everything will be sold in groupings of 5, and the cost will be set to match or be cheaper than the existing price points. - Can you organize stuff so one bag has food, one bag has potions, so each bag automatically organizes by category, or is that something that’s outside the scope of this revamp
Chris – Sorting like that is something they’ve been talking about, but in this iteration that functionality is not part of it, so you will have to do your sorting manually. But it’s something they’ve been talking about so it might be something they do in a future revision. - Currently 5 slots are 333TP on Bullroarer, will that change
Sapience – Everything on Bullroarer is subject to change. That price will either stay the same or be slightly adjusted down. The end goal is to allow players to buy inventory in smaller chunks but end up costing roughly the same amount as if you had bought a full bag. Because some people don’t like paying the full nearly 1,000TP at one time when they just want a few extra slots. Pricing should end up being comparable to live, just with being able to buy it in smaller chunks.
Chris – Says the pricing on Bullroarer is currently still a bit placeholdery. You definitely shouldn’t see it cost more than it does now, you’ll just be able to get it in smaller chunks. - What about changing the labeling of bags, will we be able to rename them
Chris – That is another thing they’ve been talking about. He’s been talking to one of the designers about what approach they should take on that. Yes, bag renaming is in the plan right now. They are still trying to finalize how they’ll implement it. - Is there a possibility of doing a sort function that would rearrange items by type, so that all the crafting items are together, all the armour is together, etc.
Chris – That’s one of the things they’ve been talking about doing, maybe having a dropdown or something that enables people to choose how they want to sort things. That’s not going to be in the scope of this release, but that is something they’d like to get in a future revision. - Can we grow only bag 1, or can we adjust the size of any bag
Chris – Yes, you can basically put any slots anywhere you want. You can set it up your bags to be any organization you want. Everything in bag 1, everything in bag 6 if you want. The only exception is that once you get down to one grouping in bag 1, you can’t go below that. Otherwise bag 1 would disappear and you wouldn’t be able to get back into edit mode, use the search, use the lock mode or purchase more slots from the interface. So that is a special case for bag 1.
Sapience – Says it looks like there’s a lot of flexibility in organizing things however you want. Mentions a comment in the chat about leaving a bag up, with 10 slots or so in a line and using it as another toolbar.
Chris – That’s definitely something they were keeping in mind with this design. - Question about how the slots will be filled once they are purchased
Chris – They did get a couple questions about this with beta. Originally when it first came out people may have noticed that the items would fill into the bags in an order that used a numbering you really couldn’t see anymore. That has been fixed, and now when you acquire a new item it will go into the first visibly empty slot. The only exception to that is when you are in inventory edit mode. When you are dragging things around, the update doesn’t get sent to the server until you exit inventory edit mode. So if you acquired a new item while in edit mode ordering might not be what you expected. Once you exit inventory edit mode, things will behave normally. - Will we be able to make a bag location static, so that when we hit show/hide, it will stay open, and so that we can’t accidentally drag the bag around the screen
Chris – That is something they can try to do for a future update. Right now the only way you can have only one bag open is to close all the other ones, but when you show/hide again, they will all open and close again. - Question about whether this changes which bags VIPs get, how many slots they get
Sapience – As far as the amount of slots you will be getting with your account status as free, premium or VIP, that is not changing. Bag 6 and future inventory expansions will still cost extra.
Chris – Everything will still stay the same with how you are getting the slots/bags you would normally get. But if you are in an account situation where you have to buy bag 4, 5 and 6, you will just be getting the individual slot groups of 5 offered in the store. But if you already have those bags, none of that will change or go away with this new system. - Question about when U13 is going live
Sapience – No exact date has been set yet. There are still additional builds that need to make it onto Bullroarer before things go live. They will be announcing a date Soon™. - Question about a bug with the position of the bag affecting the ability to buy space
Chris – Right now if you resize a bag off the bottom of the screen, it can get cut off and those slots disappear. For those who run into this problem, resizing the bag again will fix it. But the bug is being looked at. When you buy the slots you do get them, you just might not be able to visually see them until you resize your bag if you are in that bug state. There are a few other things they are fixing with resizing as well, with the way titles and graphics display at different bag sizes, and they will be setting a minimum width for bag 1. - Currently the plan seems to be to enable us to move things in blocks of 5. Any consideration being given to letting us move slots individually
Chris – It’s not in the current functionality, but it’s something they can change down the road if player feedback shows it’s something people want. The tech behind the system is very flexible in that regard, and it’s something they will be able to adjust as needed. - Is there a scrollbar functionality so that if I wanted everything in one bag, but the bag smaller, I could just scroll
Chris – No. They decided to avoid scrollbars with this design, so that no matter how they have the space organized they can always see all their items onscreen. - Question about how this works with the mail system
Sapience – This is a completely separate system and the two are not related.
Chris – The mail revamp was done separately from this. They may interact from time to time, but they are considered separate systems. - Can you tell us your computer specs
Sapience – Chris is currently on Sapience’s work system, the one he always uses for streaming. That is a core I7 with 16GB RAM, a pair of SSDs and a GTX 650 video card.
Chris – His personal machine is one he built himself. He can’t remember the exact details on the spot, but he has 2 SSDs, an Nvidia card (which number he can’t remember). He tends to like beefy systems. He enjoys building machines. - Question about a bug on Bullroarer where items will go into overflow and disappear
Chris – When you buy new space, currently there is a bug where unless you log out and back in, the system doesn’t see the new space and doesn’t try to put things into it. That’s something they are investigating and should have fixed very soon. - Will any of these changes impact the system requirements or have a performance impact
Chris – There is a small performance hit when you are in edit mode, but it will not affect your system performance at all as soon as you leave edit mode, even if you have all your bags open. You will not see any client performance difference vs what you had before in the old system. - Did Raina give you any ribbing over Friday’s death toll
Sapience – If you watched the stream you heard her cackling. He didn’t need any extra. - HoarseDev stops by Sapience’s desk where Chris is sitting and gives a big thumbs up for the camera.
Chris – Says apparently somebody approved of the demo. He got a thumbs up.
Sapience – Aaron just came by to where he is sitting and says they have to get Aaron and HoarseDev together on a livestream sometime, because at that point everyone is going to need stereoscopic glasses because they’re going to think they are seeing double. The running office joke is that EP Aaron and HoarseDev once went dressed as each other for Halloween, because they look so much alike. - Will there be any features for people who like to skin their UIs. Will they be able to skin this system the same way they do the current one
Chris – Yes. The UI will have the same function that it always had, so plugins and skins should work the same. There will be a couple new elements that people can skin, and it will still be fully override-able with a plugin. The slot numbers shouldn’t affect plugins with this new UI. If anyone encounters bugs with Bullroarer, please file a bug, but they haven’t seen any issues with it so far. - Question about Sapience dyeing his beard pink and green
Sapience – The plan was to do it today, but something personal came up that precluded his being able to do it, so if not this week, he will do it next week sometime. At the very least we will be getting a picture of all the pink and green glory soon. HoarseDev has forbidden him to shave, even if the dye doesn’t wash out, so it should be interesting. - What about scalability – can we change the size of individual items so they can look larger or smaller than they are
Chris – Thinks it’s a good suggestion. It might be something they look into in the future. For now, the size is fixed at what it’s always been. - Will these changes have any impact on what we do or don’t have to keep in our bags (i.e. LIs, crafting, etc), or is this just about how it’s displayed, not how it’s handled
Chris – This pass was completely on how things are displayed and organized. Moving things away from the inventory was not in the scope of this, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be investigating that in the future. - Question about Bullroarer download
Sapience – There is not currently a Bullroarer install available for download. That is why they decided to do this livestream, to give those who don’t currently have Bullroarer installed a chance to take a look at the new inventory system. - Question about plugins
Sapience – This is going to work with plugins. If someone has The One Bag installed, they can go ahead and keep using it after U13. This will not break that.
Chris – Yes, players can keep using The One Bag or any other inventory plugin they want to use. - What is your favourite class
Chris – Rune-keeper is his favourite. - Will there be another livestream about changes in U13 before it is released
Sapience – Yes there will be. They are working on at least one more, and he may try to sneak in a third one as well. He won’t say when the next one will be, but closer to U13’s launch. - You mentioned that bags 4 through 6 are being removed from store purchase. If you don’t have all 6 bags, how will that work when people buy extra slots – will they just be added to the bags they do have
Chris – He’s glad someone asked this question. No matter how much space you have, you will always have access to all 6 bags. So even if you don’t have the space associated with bags 4, 5 and 6, when you go into edit mode you will be able to move some of the slots you have into those bags if you wish. Even though when you buy new slots they will go into bag 1, you can move them wherever you want. There’s not really a concept of buying the bags anymore. They are just always available at all times. - When will LotRO have a Linux client
Sapience – He’s sorry, but there are absolutely no plans on the table to create a Linux client.
U13 Preview Tour 03/04/14
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 this as the final word.
If anyone who was present has any additions or corrections, feel free to post.
U13 Preview Tour 03/04/14
Video available here.
On this stream – Sapience, EP Aaron “Rowan” Campbell, MadeOfLions, jwbarry, HoarseDev, Leo from the engineering team in the driver’s seat
Brief tour of Flooded Isengard.
MadeOfLions – We’ve been in Vol 3 for around 4 years, where the main threat has been Saruman the White Wizard. In this update we’re going to see an end to his villainy for the most part *winks*. This is where he bred the armies of uruk-hai that recently assaulted the Hornburg at Helm’s Deep. Now, in U13, Isengard looks a little different. Something terrible happened here, or something great, depending on your perspective. Much of the epic story in U13 will recount how it came to look like this, and what was going on in Isengard at the time that the Battle of the Hornburg was taking place.
Questions about session play and access to the new content
MadeOfLions – Wanted to address a concern that was posted on the forums, where a player asked, “What if I haven’t seen Isengard yet – does all that content just go away?” No, that content does not go away. He would be very sad if some of the work they did just vanished. Flooded Isengard is contiguous with Western Rohan, and the previous version of Isengard is adjacent to Dunland. So you can still access both in-game, you can still do all the quests and content for both after U13.
What’s it going to take to access this new content – is it just for people who own Helm’s Deep, is it free for VIP, is it free for everyone – how do you access the content for U13
Rowan – Anyone can travel there. As always, it’s an open world you can travel across. In terms of the content and the quests, this is an extension and in many ways a completion of the Helm’s Deep story, so you will need to own the Helm’s Deep expansion to play through the quests in this area and in the new Fangorn area.
MadeOfLions – Because there are now two different versions of Isengard in the game, he created a waypoint to teleport between the two regions, and he very intentionally did not gate it behind any quests or anything. You should be able to use it, a chicken would be able to use it if she wanted to. So there isn’t any gating on physically getting to the new version of Isengard or getting back and forth.
Rumour is there’s a lot of session play, but you can skip it. How does skipping session play impact the questing or the epic story, does it make it so you can’t do parts of the quests or epic story, or is it completely optional
MadeOfLions – It is completely optional. As you are playing through the quests and epic story you will encounter characters who witnessed very interesting things, and they will offer to tell you about these interesting things if you want. If you don’t want to play the session play experiences you can just proceed onto the next quest giver and you would never know it. But he thinks these stories are interesting enough that you would want to play through them, but you can skip them if you want. He likes the “Interlude” idea of keeping session play optional. They are great storytelling devices that he enjoys making and playing, but they are truly optional.
Sapience – Just to clarify the larger answer about U13 and how to get it, no it is not buyable via the LotRO store. If you have Helm’s Deep you will get it, if you don’t, get HD and you will have access to all the quests and everything else.
Discussion in the chat about adding more chicken stones
MadeOfLions – There was a request to add a chicken stone to Amon Hen, he remembers, and he resisted the urge.
Sapience – Thinks that sounds wholly appropriate.
Rowan – Thinks he shouldn’t have resisted.
MadeOfLions – Maybe one day.
Sapience – Well now they would like to go to Helm’s Deep. The Chickens have spoken.
Rowan – Thinks Sapience can get a whole other series of streams out of that idea
Sapience – Jokes that will be next summer’s event, thinks that would be entertaining
Previewing of session play as Treebeard, otherwise known as “Ent Play” :)
MadeOfLions – This is wholly optional, but there is something to be said for playing as an ent and experiencing one of the scenes from the books.
Since we can only get U13 via purchasing HD, can we expect a sale on HD soon?
Rowan – They are conscious of people’s desire to play this content, but he won’t comment on pricing for it just yet.
If we opt out of a session play, can we come back and play it later?
MadeOfLions – Yes, you will be able to go back. The characters who offered the sessions will remain where they are, forever. They will be there all the time and you will be able to go back and talk to them. They don’t disappear after you do the session play, or not.
Sapience – Knows how proud MadeOfLions is of the tech that changes the names in the session from Small Creature to the real names, and points out that there is a lot of love for it in the chat.
MadeOfLions – Vindication and joy is had. He liked that script that he made for that so much that he uses it all the time in this book. He says he thinks there are 5 different occasions in this book where somebody’s name changes, because he figured out how to do that. He probably could have asked jwbarry and he would have helped him set it up long ago, but he figured it out himself this time.
View of the hobbits drinking the ent draught. MadeOfLions talks about how they will grow and appear larger from this point forward.
Discussion about the next Producer’s Letter
What’s the new class and when will it be in
Rowan – If it was April first he could say the new class was Ent Play, but that’s being added with U13. The new class will be described in his next producer’s letter, which will come out with the launch of U13 (April 14). He thinks that letter has only had 8 or 9 revisions now, which has to be a record.
Sapience – Thinks it seems like more than that. There have been very many emails about it.
Rowan – We keep adding to it. There is a lot to say.
Sapience – Agrees. There is a lot coming up, and a lot to look forward to.
MadeOfLions talks about the clever way they created a sense of ents being slow, by making time appear to pass very quickly, making the hobbits scurry around really quickly and having the shadows pass by really quickly. The team admires the effect.
MadeofLions – There are a few instances and a few sessions in Book 14, which is the final book of Volume 3, and they will be starting a new volume. It will be very exciting, it will have a new story and a new direction, and will hopefully be distinct from Volume 3 and exciting in new and different ways he’s not allowed to talk about right now.
Rowan – Says he just read through MadeOfLions’ pitch on the opening of Volume 4 today, and he thinks it’s going to be really grand and exciting, with a lot of new ideas and he’s very happy with it. We’ll be able to go to cool places, like Gondor.
Leo takes us on a tour through Fangorn
Discussion about quests and types of content
jwbarry – Once we’ve gotten the epic wrapped up, we start to deal with the after effects of the ents getting a little too riled up and partying a little too late into the evening. We meet Quickbeam and once he determines that we are not an agent of Saruman, he will ask us to meet him back in Fangorn. He’s come back and realized there are problems with awakening the forest and getting it angry and ready to march to war. The ents did a really good job, and Quickbeam somewhat regrets how great of a job they did. The other ents are gone, he’s the only one who’s back, and he wants to quiet the forest back down and get things calm, relaxed and put things back to sleep. And deal with a lot of the stuff that has sprung up during the ents absence. We will be working with Quickbeam to do this.
They’ve done this in a few different ways. Some of them may feel familiar from Hytbold dailies, where they’ve tried to iterate and take some noticeable steps forward from that design and structure, to give more variety and options in the questpacks.
In the first part he will send us to different parts of the forest depending on when we talk to him, and ask us to help him calm things down, and there’s either stuff to collect and destroy or kill – different things at all the different spots. The forest itself will change day to day what the problem is depending on location, but Quickbeam doesn’t know yet what the problem is so he just asks us to go and quiet things, which should help preserve some of the immersion that was lost in the way that the Hytbold dailies were structured, where it was the quests that were randomized, not the world. So they’re turning that around a little bit.
The second part is that we’ll get a Huorn pet bestower on the way through Isengard, and he will come back to the forest with Quickbeam. He’ll follow us around and bestow quests at different spots in the forest as he discovers things that need doing, so there is a big exploration aspect that is introduced there.
The third chunk is 3 new resource instances. It’s been awhile since we’ve had a new set of these. So for the tier 9 crafting resources, wood, ore and scholar jars of dead people bits and notes
MadeOfLions – History
Sapience – Old stuff
jwbarry – So those each have a standard kill the boss at the end, with a kill and collect quest inside of those, and we can do each of those every day.
The fourth type is a new type and style of questing that they are calling “Incrementals.” Incrementals will have anywhere between 4 and 6 objectives to them, and we can only do one objective per day. We are doing some work for Quickbeam and he needs time to ponder what the next action is. So once we finish it, he needs about 18 hours, and we’ll have a buff icon that counts down until he’s had time to reconsider. They joked that it was good we got Quickbeam because Treebeard would have needed a week. That is going to drag things out a bit. It’s not purely an attempt to make things longer. It allows them to tell a different type of story, it allows them a different type of daily that changes each day and interlays with the other dailies in interesting manner to create a different pattern and experience every day that we login. It also allows them to readjust the type of rewards they can give us for something like that because it is a larger time commitment. And the incrementals, when we finish them, and they are repeatable, we have a chance of getting the first cosmetic pets. There are 3 of them, 3 different huorns with different appearances.
Questions about group content and scaling of instances
You mentioned resource instances, what about other types of instances will we see any scaling of instances like the Rise of Isengard instances, or maybe a new big battle, what can we look forward to from a group content standpoint
jwbarry – Cue disappointing music; there is no group content in U13.
Rowan – There are active plans for a new epic battle, coming out with U14, so that’s one thing they are digging into pretty deeply right now, and he feels good about. He’s not committing to it but he feels good about it right now. He doesn’t know about how jwbarry feels about scaling other stuff, he knows they haven’t committed to anything just yet.
jwbarry – There are a couple of things that are candidates that they could do, the Isengard cluster is the closest one. However, there is significant work in scaling a space. The Isengard cluster has a pair of instances, particularly the Dargnakh instance with the troll, where if we could see behind the scenes we would be ashamed of them if we were to see how it was built. It needs a fair bit of work, and he knows the Foundry instance needs a lot of difficulty balance work. Scaling something isn’t free. They like to go back and make sure that they look at the polish, make sure they look at modern standards, the bugs, the things that didn’t quite live up to their expectations when they launched it, they redo all the loot for the space and incorporate it into the marks, medallions, seals system, so it’s not by any means something that is inexpensive or free.
There’s also definitely a feeling out there, that they understand very much, that scaling a space, no matter how many bosses it has or how interesting it is, is not the same as a new space. So they need to balance those things together and try to figure out where to lay out their resources and what they can support, to ensure they are doing the most that will scratch the largest itch.
Rowan – The short answer is the Isengard instances might be the best candidate for scaling. No definite plans on that yet.
Questions about cosmetic pets
Will cosmetic pets be usable in raids and instanced spaces, or will that be disallowed
jwbarry – They can be used anywhere. They are working on iterating the tech. This is the initial version where the pets mirror the tech of LM pets, where they are actual server entities. The implementation for a future update, which they are currently working on, switches them over to be purely client-side, so they aren’t real, you can’t even click them and the server has no knowledge that they exist. That is changing some of their behaviors, and what they can and cannot do with them. They disappear when you mount up, but they may not disappear when you get into combat because the server doesn’t even know that they exist so there’s no need to. They won’t be targeted, they won’t have health or any of that other kind of stuff. They’re looking into a client option to disable them, so in raids if you are worried about performance. They will likely not be allowed in the Ettenmoors. Entertainingly they are currently dealing with an issue where they don’t swim. The notion of a water volume is a server type thing, so the pet doesn’t know about it, so they try to make the pets float, and the engineer who was working on it was showing it to him and he’d get about halfway into a pond and follow him about halfway and then beeline for the shoreline. And the pet is only aware of the movement path the character is taking, so the engineer has no idea how the pet is moving autonomously and knows where the shoreline is.
Rowan – They don’t like to get wet
MadeOfLions – Thinks that sounds amazing and he loves it.
jwbarry – It’s a system that they’re excited about. There’s a lot of potential for rewards, for collection, for some fun bits. He says we shouldn’t expect anything sentient, they’re trying to pay attention to what makes sense to follow us around, to try not to step on the toes of captains and LMs, and what makes sense with the lore, and occasionally nudging against it if something looks and seems cool enough.
Sapience – Just wants to clarify, these are purely cosmetic pets, they’re not combat pets, they don’t replace any classes existing pets, they are just purely cosmetic.
jwbarry – That’s correct. In fact, Lore-masters who have existing cosmetic pets will find that they can have both their pet and this pet out at the same time.
Rowan – Not with this update, but with the following update?
jwbarry – Clarifies that right now the pets are in separate channels, so if a LM had their bear out, they could have the bear and the huorn out. If they had their squirrel out, they could have the squirrel and the huorn out. And with the future limitations they are not looking to change that. They are looking to preserve that behaviour. So one of the cool things about being a LM is that you get two guys to follow you around, not just one.
Sapience – Assumes the same would be true for captains, if they had their heralds out.
jwbarry – Confirms that is correct.
Sapience – Asks about after U13 when these change over to client-side, will that mean other people won’t be able to see our cosmetic pets, or is that just a way of handling the load on the server?
jwbarry – That’s really just a way of handling the load on the server. There is a little bit of server information, but rather than the server tracking basically a monster that is following you around and doing all this stuff, instead it just tracks the property of what the pet is that all the clients should use to create for you, and then all the clients do their own simulation of that pet. Everybody will see yours and you will see theirs.
Sapience – On creep-side, can they look forward to cosmetic pets in the future, say a baby warg for war-leaders?
jwbarry – That’s currently undecided. They want to get the system rolled out first for freeps where they understand the technology a bit better, because creeps are basically session players and they behave in a slightly different manner. A lot of it will be how the pets are perceived by the player base, how that works out, and how strong the demand and interest for it is.
Sapience – But wouldn’t having a bunch of cosmetic pets in the Ettenmoors create a bunch of extra problems with rendering speed and lag issues in addition to the lore master pets and all the other pets that are already out there?
jwbarry – There will be a client-side option to disable them so you won’t see anybody’s, and depending on where they go with the creep ones, up until the point where they do potentially release creep cosmetic pets, he would expect that freep cosmetic pets will be disabled in the Ettenmoors period.
Questions about epic battles, instances/raids, and rewards
Regarding epic battles, is that replacing the classic raids going forward, or is there some point in the future where we can expect other classic type instances
jwbarry – Any single type of instance content does not replace or obviate the need or ability for any others. When they made skirmishes, they still made other instances after that. It all depends on where they are at in the story, what they are trying to present and represent, and what is the best suitable mechanism to do so. He would expect that when they get to Pellenor and Minas Tirith that those would be epic battle style instances and structure because that is what it was built to support and built to do. When they get down into Mordor, if there is a point in time where we get to Shelob’s lair and engage with her, he’d expect that to be an instance dealing with a boss in a cave with a standard structure. It depends on where they are. Epic battles are not the new definition of instance. They are another tool in the toolbox for them to tell story and create gameplay.
Leo – And that’s definitely the priority, to tell the story.
Sapience – Says now we’re getting into the meat of the story, and things are really happening.
MadeOfLions – Thinks things have been happening all along. Everyone laughs.
Sapience – Says now it’s serious, there’s a war going on.
MadeOfLions – Agrees that this is certainly a very interesting stretch of the story. And he thinks the section of the story we’re about to get into is under-represented in Lord of The Rings media in some form, so he’s really excited to get to this new stretch.
HoarseDev – Says we’ve got a really interesting mix of very intimate moments with really singular characters, and then these huger moments where armies are lined up, and that’s where they are at with big battles. They’ve had, and there are a few moments coming up where the only way to do it is have a bunch of people fighting it out.
Regarding epic battle rewards, is new jewelry coming anytime soon, or will that come later
jwbarry – With U13 there are two changes to epic battle rewards, both relating to the platinum bar. As of right now when we fill the platinum bar, there are 10 different teal items we can get that belong to sets. There is also a chance that we may get one of 4 orange items. The orange items are upgraded versions of the 10 teal items. For update 13, the other 6 orange items will be swapped into the loot list for platinum. So the 6 orange items that we weren’t able to earn will now be the rare drops for filling the platinum bar. The 4 that we could earn beforehand will be disappearing from the list for awhile and may potentially come back in at a later point in time.
The other update for the platinum bar is that there is now a rare chance upon finishing a platinum bar, of receiving a level 95 First Age symbol.
Questions about PvMP
What about PvMP, what can we look forward to in U13 for the Ettenmoors, and can we look forward to new challenges, different challenges in the future? And what about beyond U13, where are we going with PvMP
HoarseDev – He sits right next to Jinjaah and he gets to listen to a lot of the things he’s working on and hopefully put his thumbs up on it. Right now there’s a lot of changes to how mitigations work in general, a lot of systemic stuff, and he knows Jinjaah’s been working on a lot of “oldie but goodie” bug fixes for U13. So it’s kind of a mix of both right now. In terms of long term, HoarseDev loves PvMP and would like to see it get shaken up a little bit. He knows they’ve said in the past that they’ve messed around with the idea of taking things from big battles, like siege weapons, and putting them in there, they’ve joked around about that and every once in awhile they’ll prototype stuff. But right now, mainly for U13 they’re doing a bunch of balance and a bunch of fixes so they can get things a little bit better on track. Long term they are thoroughly willing to explore new stuff.
Sapience – Asks if ‘new stuff’ potentially includes a new map.
HoarseDev – Says ‘potentially’ is a great word. He would love to have a new map but they’d need to see where something like that might fit in. He and Rowan joke around about places in the story where we’re at right now where that might make sense, but he doesn’t make maps so he can’t write that up for someone else. Says “We’ll see.” He’d love to have one but it is a lot of work. He’ll see what he can do, but he doesn’t actually do that work.
Leo – Jokes that there are at least 2 days each week, that HoarseDev is not working that he could free up, Saturdays and Sundays, just to build these things.
HoarseDev – Thinks that’s a bit presumptuous. :)
Sapience – Clarifies that that means, maps sound like a cool thing but that’s a long term and potentially longer than long term hope.
Rowan – Says that when they have that conversation they’re really talking about Osgiliath, that’s the area where that most obviously fits right now. But that is a ways out.
HoarseDev – Says that would be the earliest they would consider it, but he thinks it would be a pretty sweet spot to have some of that go down.
Sapience – Has a related question, what about PvMP instances, maybe creep on freep action in an instance space, not necessarily a new map?
HoarseDev – That is essentially the same question. For them it would probably have to be something that is smaller, more contained, stricter rules, stricter objectives, which tends to lend itself off into an instance, but they’re going to wait until they are staring down the barrel of places like Osgiliath before really splitting hairs on it.
Sapience – Says the general consensus in the chat seems to be that Leo is right, they don’t need time off and should get to work right now. Says Rick as he is sitting on vacation in Florida. Also Leo’s doing, he would point out, so be careful. He’s crafty.
Leo – Says they’ve shown us everything they’re capable of showing us in the update, except the elusive, camera-shy huorn pet that he’s struggled to capture on camera for us.
Rowan – Knows they have other changes coming up such as inventory changes, a lot of systemic stuff and under the covers things that have been covered in past streams, but is open for more questions.
Discussion about Players Council
Sapience – Says Yicky made a good point in the chat that PvMP Players Council members are our friends with ideas. So if we do have ideas for PvMP in the future, Players Council members are really good, and Yicky in particular has been REALLY good, about voicing those interests and concerns from the PvMP community.
HoarseDev – Says they have a really close relationship with the PvMP Council folks.
Sapience – Reminds everyone that applications are still open until April 14th for the 2014 Council. Encourages people who are interested to fire off an application and maybe they too could help direct Jinjaah or other members of the team a little bit. :) There are a lot of crazy ideas that come out of those conversations, but some of them are pretty interesting.
Question about First Ages
How can we get a First Age weapons with U13
HoarseDev – In big battles there is a small chance to get them from filling the platinum bar. And they threw a small chance to get them into some T3 skirms he believes.
jwbarry – Says probably the challenges. He believes they added them as a very low chance to wherever you could get second ages. He believes that was what the plan was.
HoarseDev – Doesn’t have the exact list in front of him but says there is definitely content to go out and do to try to earn First Ages.
Sapience – Clarifies that it’s not just T3 skirm raids, there are other ways to get First Ages.
Questions about deeds and lootboxes
Sapience – With the deed changes players are getting an awful lot of lootboxes, and he knows that Leo has been working on resolving the bug with people getting flooded with lootboxes that fall out of their inventory, so he knows that is being addressed, but with all of the new lootboxes coming out, is there any chance that a] the loot will be slightly different and improved and b] and are keys going to be a little bit easier to find or are players going to be stuck with a ton of lootboxes and then have to go find a bunch of keys
HoarseDev – Says there haven’t been too many changes to lootbox rewards lately, but he thinks people will have a lot of lootboxes, and can’t speak to the key drop rate, but he can talk to the people who set it. There are plenty of people who love lootboxes, plenty who hate them, but the wanted to get them out there for the players who may not have gotten one before. They will probably be looking at U14 to maybe changing what’s in there, but he doesn’t want to spoil anything.
jwbarry – One of the updates they did with U13 is a deed revamp, which is where a lot of players are getting a bunch of lootboxes on logging in. They looked at all the deeds, made sure all the regions had a suitable mix of slayer deeds and meta deeds that wrapped up the different categories, and then a meta that wrapped up each of the regions. There are about 70 new deeds in the game. They also looked at how well those deeds are rewarded. All of the region meta deeds reward a lootbox that is appropriate to the level range for that region. As part of an update and looking at feedback about how that goes, all of those lootboxes also now come with a key. He thinks there’s up to 17 that players can get for the new meta deeds for the regions and all of them will come with a key so players can open them immediately if we’d like to, or we can parcel them and sell them off, it’s our choice. But we’re not left with an inventory full of lootboxes as rewards that we can’t do anything with.
Speaking of lootboxes and First Ages, in the past, First Ages have shown up in lootboxes – will we have First Ages in lootboxes with U13
HoarseDev – Says as far as he knows, not with U13. A lot of what they try to do with First Ages is get them out first to the folks who are doing the most challenging content, so for U13, not in the lootboxes.
Question about storage and wardrobe space
What about storage in U13, are new purchasable cosmetic and shared storage slots being added with U13
HoarseDev – Believes there are extra slots for wardrobe space being added – that’s on his calendar – but he’s not sure about the other storage space. He believes there will be extra bag slots available with the changes to how bags work, but he doesn’t know about shared storage, it might not be the right time for that.
Final thoughts
Sapience – Wraps up the preview, reminds everyone that U13 is coming in a couple of weeks and reminds everyone to keep their eyes out for Aaron’s new producer’s letter, as it sounds like there is going to be quite a bit of information in there. Thanks all of the players on behalf of the team. Asks the team if there’s anything they’d like to share that wasn’t covered in the chat so far, that they think is a big deal that players will want to hear.
Rowan – It’s a very big year, he’s happy to be shifting to a model that gets them out more often, with new story updates throughout the year, and advances the story and advances the world, and gives MadeOfLions a lot of new work to do in terms of building out Volume 4. He thinks the arc of the year looks great, and they’re very excited about it.
HoarseDev – A lot of what they’ve been doing lately is looking at the long term roadmap of the game and really starting to put the pieces together. Obviously they’re discussing U13 right now, but as soon as they leave the room they’ll be talking about things like 2015 as well, and how to get there. For him it makes things really exciting because having a clear path and a lot of cool things they can do makes for a nice, long view in terms of the kind of cool stuff they’ll be coming up with.
Question about the revamped areas
Sapience – Has one more question that got in at the end. The updated regions that were part of the update, are they still planned, are any getting trimmed off, which regions are actually getting the once over for U13
jwbarry – They went through the Misty Mountains, the Trollshaws, and the North Downs. All three were on the initial list, all three did happen. A lot of the work has been looking at quest flow. North Downs covered 38 levels before, it was unwieldy and the flow wasn’t great, the vectoring wasn’t good, the distribution of quests needed work. They have a lot more tools with remote bestows, and a lot of stuff like that they can look at to really tighten up the regions and bring them up to as close to modern standards as they’ve been able to.
Discussion about future livestreams
Leo – Says he would like to do a lot more of these livestream chat sessions on Twitch, so asks us to please give feedback on the forums about things we’d like to have seen that they didn’t do, or anything we have at all on this session. They would like to make them better and more frequent, and more useful for us.
Sapience – Says absolutely, that goes directly with a question in the chat about wanting more transparency, more interaction, more information earlier, and he thinks that’s a pretty big yes, that they are definitely going to be doing these more frequently, different formats, they’ll try out different things so he asks us to please do provide feedback in the forums about the livestreams, what we’d like to see more of, what we’d like to see less of (jokes that it’s probably him). Feedback is really appreciated.
Sapience thanks everyone once again, and says they look forward to doing it again.
Rowan, HoarseDev, Leo, MadeOfLions and jwbarry give their thanks too.
Message from Sapience regarding face-to-face events
Sapience posted a couple of reminders into chat, for those interested in face-to-face events:
If you're in Florida, don't forget this Saturday there's a player meet and greet in Orlando! Full details on the forums.
If you're headed to Boston for PAX East, we're having a player meet and greet on Friday April 11 at 7:30PM at the Bell in Hand! Please RSVP for that on the forums as well, there is a thread in the forums.
Q&A With EP Aaron “Rowan” Campbell
Q&A With EP Aaron “Rowan” Campbell
In this stream - Community Manager Rick “Sapience” Heaton and Executive Producer Aaron “Rowan” Campbell
Sapience opens the stream by saying they’re here to discuss U14, Rowan’s producer’s letter and, hopefully, a bit of what’s coming in the future. He asks the first few questions to get things started.
Producer's Letter
Sapience – How do we feel about U14 right now?
Rowan – U14 has just been fantastic in terms of player response, in terms of meeting their goals, and in terms of introducing new story and a new part of the world, and getting out there with some great gameplay.
Sapience – Says Rowan gave some hints as to what was coming later on in the year in U14, and some of the things that are changing based on player feedback. The team’s been really hard at work compiling feedback on some of the things he announced in his last producer’s letter, and they’ve changed between then and now. So for those who haven’t read the letter yet, what is changing going forward?
Rowan – This is all part of the process, getting things out there, talking through them with the player community, with the Players Council and then ultimately making decisions around it. The big things that are changing, upcoming for U15 – first off, there will not be a second level cap raise. Which he thinks is huge. They’re going to take that energy and reinvest it in updating and – daresay – fixing the LI system.
Sapience – Asks Rowan what he means by fixing and updating.
Rowan – What they found when they were looking at the level cap is that a lot of players were saying they’d love a level cap raise, but they don’t want to do it with LI as it is right now. So what they’re going to do instead is focus on fixing that pain point of “I have this item, I put all this time and energy into it, and when I come to the next level cap I want to build the exact same item and I have to destroy my old one, put all the pieces together and build a new one.” Instead they’re going to say that if we love our items so much and we want to lock in its abilities, we can imbue the item, lock it in and then it will just start to earn experience and level up, and each of the attributes, each of the legacies will level up and develop as well. So they’re going to change that system at cap, which is 100 right now.
Sapience – So basically that’s going to become an advancement and progression method in and of itself.
Rowan – It will be an advancement method all in itself, and it will give them opportunities later to do new things with it, like introduce new legacies that are only available to imbued items. Introduce new content or aspects of content where we can go back and use these imbued items and gain new abilities or new effects for them – advance them – by completing content. Really change up the game dramatically in terms of what we can do so that when we’re at cap we’re still advancing, we’re still developing a character but we’re doing it in different directions and in different ways.
So legendary items are truly going to be “legendary” now?
Rowan – That is the goal. Yes.
Sapience – Outstanding.
Sapience thanks everyone for stopping in to hang out and ask questions, and reminds everyone that Rowan doesn’t work on classes, or on PvMP or other specifics, but he has the high level goals and plans of the game in mind, so players should try not to get too deep in the weeds with the types of questions. He says that’s the only real restriction they have except that they’re not going to tell us when we’re going to get to Mordor (laughs). Rowan says he can talk a bit about next year, so he can give us part of the route there. Sapience points out that Rowan said “part of the route,” not that we’re getting there next year (they both laugh).
Could we decide on making our Beorning level 50 or level 1?
Rowan – Says their answer around Beornings is, they found for a number of reasons – including player feedback on the leveling experience and how much we enjoy the earlier Eriador zones – but also simply watching MadeOfLions trying to find reasons that Gandalf would accept us, that Frodo would want to talk to us, that all of these characters would want to interact with us when we are a level 50 Beorning who’d never talked to any of them before, that was painful. So they decided not to put MadeOfLions through that process of pain, and instead let us start at level one. We still can buy a Gift of the Valar and attach that to our Beorning and jump right to 50 and get going further if we want to, in fact they’ll probably offer a bundle around that to make it easier for us. But this gives us the choice.
Sapience – Actually now that’s kind of true of any class.
Rowan – Sure.
Sapience – If players want they can roll up a warden and start at level 50 right outside Moria, or a hunter – it doesn’t have to be one of the ‘additional’ classes.
Question about glitches with certain quests
Rowan – There are a couple of quests they were able to put in short term fixes for, and when those short term fixes don’t work there is customer service support to help us to resolve those and fix those issues. They’ll be doing a patch in the next couple of weeks to get those all cleaned up. They want to make sure they have sufficient information and compile all of the bugs so that they can really nail them down rather than trying to put out a patch a day and bring the game down.
Group Content
Why is there no new group content with U14?
Sapience and Rowan – But there is.
Rowan – There is an entirely new area, and all the feedback he’s been getting about that is that the quests are actually challenging, and for the most part require a balanced group. He recommends we gird up our grouping skills and make sure we have a healer and a tank and have a good time.
Sapience – There are lots of questions about group content.
Rowan – Says he’s not going to try to sidestep the base question that comes up, which is, “When are we getting new small group, large group content, when are we getting new raids, etc.?” He just wants to reemphasize that their primary focus is to build and deliver a story. So they’re putting a lot of energy into delivering that story. They do it in many ways (he assures the audience that he’s not sidestepping, and will get there). One of those ways is by delivering epic battles. He knows people have criticisms about epic battles, they have a lot of changes going in for their next epic battle for U15. This is an offensive battle. It’s a battle where we are at Pelargir and we take the role of being Aragorn’s special operations crew. We’re the “Delta Force” that opens the gate and allows Aragorn and the Army of the Dead to get in and take on this Corsair army that’s occupied the city. We’re going to be retaking the city in stages and having those roles of being the center of attention and the center of focus while having this great cinematic experience. Because epic battles are about having a cinematic experience. About being able to have this wide view and see the army of Oathbreakers sweep out over the sea and wash Corsairs into the ocean.
Sapience – Says they actually do have an outline for this, and they’ve given it to the Players Council.
Rowan – The Players Council is working through it right now.
Sapience – It’s the overall vision of what they imagine the next epic battle is going to look like, how it’s going to progress, changes to the system, changes in how we play through it. So the Players Council is already providing feedback on it. He thinks they got it yesterday.
Rowan – Yep.
Sapience – So he just wanted to point out that development doesn’t stand still. They launched a major update – he read somewhere in the press they were calling it a “pocket expansion” because there really is that much stuff in it – and then they immediately went into “here’s what we’re working on next.”
Rowan – And they have another one of those planned before the end of the year. So they’re going to be delivering U15 – Central Gondor, 3 new areas much like we have here, a lot of new quest content, epic book, epic battle at Pelargir, Haradrim, half-trolls, mounted reavers, all kinds of things. And they will continue to support landscape group content, they’re going to build out a 6-man version of this epic battle, and they hear the call for traditional instance spaces. They will continue to keep that in mind. They’re listening to player feedback and he thinks they’re showing that right now.
The Dead Marshes
Question about the update coming between U14 and U15
Rowan – The Dead Marshes are well in progress right now as a space that we can go and explore. It’s not connected to the rest of the world, not contiguous, because it’s a bit off the beaten track and it’s pretty barren and nobody really goes there, except for Frodo and Sam. So they’re putting in some storyline there and they’re looking at it basically as an interlude. A storyline that’s short and sweet. He thinks MadeOfLions is only putting four or five quests in there. But they want to have a surrounding environment to it and make it a way that they can continue to tell the story of the fellowship and give us a view of what’s going on with Frodo and Sam.
Sapience – Because at this point in the story there are really two stories, and they’re kind of diverging more and more. So to catch us up on what’s going on over there.
Rowan – Even more than two if you start following all the (unintelligible).
Sapience – If you follow everybody, now you’ve got a lot going on. But two main arcs with Aragorn and Frodo’s journeys and how they eventually circle right around. So the interlude is to check in on Frodo.
Rowan – And a stretch goal they’re working on is – one of their goals of Dead Marshes is to give us a first view of the Dawnless Day. Of a mass of darkness coming out of Mordor and streaming out across Middle Earth. Something that will play out much more heavily in Central Gondor, but they want to give us that first tease and get us excited about it.
Sapience – There was a lot of talk about something that Rowan said in his producer’s letter about something that he said was not going to be in Central Gondor, and that was oliphaunts. Why are we not getting oliphaunts?
Rowan – Because they really don’t fit on the ships. That’s all. That’s the whole reason. They definitely have mounted outriders, but the Haradrim that came up here very specifically did not have their oliphaunts. They’ll deal with those later on. They have to be true to the books and true to the story.
U15
Are Beornings a U15 thing?
Rowan – They are a U15 thing. Yes.
Sapience – So update 15 will have Beornings in it.
When is U15?
Rowan – All he’s going to say is, before the end of the year.
Should you have a best dwarf beard contest?
Sapience – Thinks Rowan would win.
Rowan – Says there are people in the building who far exceed his beard.
Sapience – Agrees. There are some people who are truly epic, and anyone who was at GamesCon a few years ago has met The Beard.
Rowan – Yes.
Sapience – “The Beard.” It is its own thing. Actually, if you watch Infinite Crisis you can see the beard. He’s on their streams.
Scaling Older Instances
Question about scaling some of the older instances and raids and making them more accessible to people at cap
Rowan – They would love to do it, not planning on that for U15.
Sapience – Not on the map for this year.
Rowan – No, not for this year. “Let’s start there.”
Hobnanigans
Question about smoothing out Hobnanigans
Rowan – They’ll keep bug fixing. They had an initial version that launched – he can’t remember if it was 2007 or 2008…
Sapience – It launched at launch.
Rowan – That’s right. And he can remember that version of it. And they have more tools now to make that experience better, which is why they rebuilt it and relaunched it. But they’ll keep smoothing it out. It’s not so much fun when your chicken goes flying way outside of bounds and won’t come back.
Female Dwarves
Will we see female dwarves added to the game?
Rowan – Female dwarves are already in the game. As far as he can tell (laughs).
Sapience – The expanded answer to that question is that Tolkien was very clear that when dwarves ventured out, it was pretty much impossible for anyone, including other dwarves, to distinguish a male from a female, because of their mode of dress, and their beards were so similar. So when you go into the character creation window, you will notice there is no gender selection for dwarves. It’s whatever you imagine it to be. If you want to put your dwarf into a dress he’ll assume you’re playing a female dwarf. And that was actually brought to their attention by players pre-launch – that there shouldn’t be a gender selection for dwarves, because you shouldn’t be able to tell just by looking, who they are.
Dead Marshes and Monster Play
Question about Dead Marshes and monster players
Rowan – They’ve had a lot of discussions about where to open up the world to monster players, primarily because we’re getting so close to Mordor and there is so much opportunity for expanding that type of play, contextually. The Dawnless Day, endless night, trolls are on the loose. This is a really frightening time in Middle Earth and war is heating up. The place that their conversations about this has almost always centered around is Osgiliath. So they’ll continue talking about that and seeing where it fits.
Beornings
Will Beornings be free or will they be purchasable?
Rowan – Nobody gets them free. It’s a brand new class, so please go out and buy it.
Sapience – So it’s a lot like wardens and rune-keepers.
Rowan – Exactly. If U15 was an expansion pack, Beornings would probably be part of the expansion, because it’s not an expansion pack, they’re going to make it an offer in the store.
Are you allowed to disclose the price of the Beorning?
Rowan – That’s not decided yet. They’ve had ideas of range but they don’t know the number yet.
Any idea of when we can expect the Dead Marshes?
Rowan – Between updates 14 and 15 (they laugh).
Sapience – Was afraid he was going to say Soon™.
Rowan – Doesn’t know which version of Soon™ to use.
Sapience – And it’s very hard to speak the many different versions of Soon™.
Rowan – Exactly.
U15 Epic and Epic Battle
Is the next epic locked behind epic battles?
Rowan – The epic story in U15 is free, the new epic battle in U15 is free, and the epic battle within the epic story will be part of that storyline. They’re focusing on ways to make this a fun experience, something we will want to be playing, something we’re going to enjoy. And they’ve taken a ton of feedback on that from inside the team, because they play too, from the Players Council, and from what they’ve seen in play behaviour and feedback that’s come from the players.
Gift of the Valar lets us level to 50. Have you given any thought to having a Super Gift of the Valar that lets us level to 75, or end game?
Rowan – They’ve thought about it, but people like to play the game too, so they’re balancing that.
War Steeds and U15
Could you talk about war-steeds for U15?
Rowan – They’re not looking at a systemic revamp or anything like that. They’re pretty happy with where that’s gone. But there is the idea of telling a story, and different tools for different parts of the story. Epic battles are their tool for telling cinematic parts of the story, with these massive encounters. If they’re going to have a siege at Minas Tirith, they need to represent thousands and thousands of soldiers. It’s just necessary. Similarly, when you have mounted raiders pillaging the landscape outside of Pelargir, that’s a good place to use mounted combat, and give us that feeling of momentum and power and impact. So each of these have their own space.
Beorning Starter Area
You mentioned starting experience for Beornings – does that mean a whole new area for them to start in, or will there be storyline that takes them into one of the existing starter zones?
Rowan – This means one of the introductory instances that will give us a storyline and give us context as to where we are and why. MadeOfLions is heading this up. They’re hoping to introduce some new cultural dynamics and relevance for us as Beornings so we understand where we come from, but they’re not introducing those parts of the world as an open landscape or anything.
Class Balance
When will the classes be balanced again?
Sapience – It’s kind of an evolving thing.
Rowan – Always and never. That really is one of those things that almost comes down to, when half the players are saying they’re overpowered and the other half are saying they’re underpowered, they know they’ve gotten it right. It’s a target that they play with, and there are points as well where balance has to take a backseat to fun. So where are they going to find the fun in the aspects of what they’re doing, and make sure that we enjoy playing the class.
Chance Thomas
Any chance of bringing Chance Thomas back in the future?
Rowan – He talked to him recently.
Sapience – Actually got an email from him today.
Rowan – It looks like there may be some of his music going out in traveling orchestra form, which is very exciting. They haven’t come to any conclusions around including Chance for future updates. He’d love to do that if it comes up.
Sapience – If you’re in the Salt Lake City area, Chance will be conducting the Salt Lake City Symphony Orchestra for Video Games Live concert which is part of the Salt Lake City ComicCon. It’s September 6th and there are two shows, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, and he’s doing Theme for Rohan, so you should check it out if you can because it’s even better live.
Minstrel Changes and Bullroarer Notes
Questions about Minstrel changes and lack of Bullroarer notes, changes going up untested etc.
Rowan – He would contest the ‘untested’ part. He’s guessing that they probably put a lot of those changes in but they didn’t do a good job of documenting them out in the patch notes. They had some issues getting those patch notes out and validated this time around. So that’s a process thing they can improve on. In terms of the actual changes to minstrel, that’s a conversation he had with HoarseDev today, and he’s going to go back, as lead systems guy, and take a look at this and make sure they’re making the right choices. They’ll take the feedback.
Purchasing LotRO Music
How about the ability to purchase Rohan, Gondor or Edoras music?
Sapience – He knows that the Rohan soundtrack is available on iTunes, he knows there were some conversations around SoundCloud and possibly putting more music up there.
Rowan – They were looking at potentially doing that with some of the Gondor music, actually.
Sapience – So if they get it up on SoundCloud they’ll let us know and we’ll be able to get it there. He’s almost positive the Rohan soundtrack is still available on iTunes, at about $10 for the entire soundtrack.
Monster Classes
Will you be creating monster classes to match the new Beorning class?
Rowan – Wonders what they would shapechange into.
Sapience – Says now the chat is going to explode into 10,000 things they could change into.
Rowan – Doesn’t know what a monster skinchanger would be.
Will there be any instances related to Paths of the Dead?
Rowan – Paths of the Dead has already been launched. What they tried to do with Paths of the Dead is try to focus on the capstone quests – some of the repeatables there. So he’s pretty sure there are some story experiences in there connected to the epic book, and as well they’re sending us back into that space as a part of the ongoing capstone repeatables.
Question wanting to clarify that the new epic battle is going to be free
Rowan – That is correct, it will be free. As is the epic book.
Sapience – So whether you’re a free player, premium or VIP – free.
Rowan – Yes.
Suggestion for creating flashcards for various Soon™ definitions to be used in livestreams
Sapience – That is a genius idea. He’d have to put up whole screens because there are lengthy definitions for each one.
Someone suggests that creep skinchangers should turn into werewolves
Rowan – He’ll take that back to the team.
Sapience – Tolkien mentioned werewolves. So there is maybe a possibility..
Rowan – Doesn’t know if they actually have access to that source material. If that’s in the Silmarillion, they probably don’t.
Minas Tirith
It’s a little ways down the road, but what can we expect from Minas Tirith?
Rowan – Says he’ll map out the arc for us. We’re headed right now for Central Gondor and Pelargir. From there Aragorn sweeps away the Corsairs with his army of the living and the dead, takes their ships, and travels upriver, coming to the aid of Eastern Gondor – Minas Tirith and Osgiliath. With the story line, they plan to go to Osgiliath next year, probably around the time of the LotRO anniversary. That’s their hope right now. And by the end of next year move to the siege of Minas Tirith, which would be the army that advances upon the walls of Minas Tirith, and that story would end with the breaking of the gates and Gandalf kind of holding off the armies there. He’s very specific about that because they’d want to follow that with another storyline, which is the battle of Pelennor Fields, which would be much more out on the fields themselves, on the open landscape. And by that point, now that would be 2016 – the end of the following year.
Sapience – Now you’re going way outside the question of 2015, we’re two years down the road.
Rowan – Just wants to be specific about that because Minas Tirith is such a huge story that they’re breaking it into pieces. And then again this is all about the tools they’re using. So he could see an epic battle there, he could see landscape quests there, he could see epic story instances. When he starts thinking about large-scale instances and raids he almost always goes to Shelob’s lair, but they continue find the right tools for the right job.
Race Restrictions on Classes
What about loosening the race restrictions for certain classes?
Sapience – Obviously Beornings are going to be restricted to Race of Man because Beorn was a man.
Sapience and Rowan – Tolkien was extremely clear about this.
Sapience – Tolkien said he was a bit magician, he may be many things, but he’s most assuredly Man.
Rowan – He was related to the men of the North, he’s related to the men of Dale, he was related to the men of Rohan, etc.
Sapience – But what about other classes? Currently we have restrictions where certain races can’t be Rune-keepers, and other races can’t be wardens, what about dropping those kinds of restrictions?
Rowan – He would be happy to. He thinks they have work to do to make that happen, though.
Sapience – So file that one under “maybe later.” Not a U15 thing, definitely.
Rowan – Is sure they’d discover new work they’d need to do as they were doing it.
Sapience – We always seem to find more work.
Question about getting a naming guide for Beornings so that people could start thinking about names for their characters
Rowan – They’ll talk to the lore guys about that. They’re going to have to build a name generator anyway.
Druidsfire makes a comment about Sapience and Rowan rapping
Sapience – Thinks we do NOT want to see them rapping. Ever. No. Bad bad bad.
Rowan – Is just enjoying Weird Al this week, he doesn’t need to rap.
Sapience – Says for those who don’t know, Rowan is a very big Weird Al fan, and the new album has him very very happy right now. Admits he likes Weird Al too.
Extra Life
Request for Extra Life updates
Sapience – So far going very well. We’re almost at $23k, a couple thousand more toward the $25k goal, which is still $75k away from forcing him to get pins and needles shoved into his arm, but it’s obvious we are working hard at that goal. So he’s getting a bit nervous – still quite a bit of time left in the year. He has every confidence we’ll get there.
Is class balancing a constantly evolving thing, or is it something where when it’s done it’s done? And how does it relate to group and solo play? How hard is that?
Rowan – Very hard. Part of the goal of the class revamp – whether you agree with the changes or not – was to help specialize the classes and give them more distinct roles. So we have our baseline roles, where we do damage or crowd control or healing and so on. Having those individual specialized roles that only they can do. They haven’t achieve that yet, it’s still something they are working towards – making sure that we feel that need, and making sure that each class is going to bring something different.
What about other soundtracks?
Sapience – Those are a little harder to get ahold of because they were never released outside of special collector’s editions. Some of the most common ways you can come across those is at meet and greets, or through contests and competitions. What few they have left they sometimes give out. But other than that, there’s really no mechanism for getting them. And he thinks there’s potentially a licensing problem there as well, with making them generally public.
Rowan – So find Sapience when he’s carrying a duffel bag.
Sapience – Says every time we see him carrying stuff, he’s probably got one or two or more.
Are there any plans to change the crafting system so that we automatically use ingredients in bank or shared storage?
Rowan – Great idea, he’s seen that in other games.
Suggestion to make a drinking game out of Soon™
Sapience – Supports this idea.
Requests for more info on what else is coming
Rowan – Obviously he’s not going to be sharing every piece of content in every update moving forward – he’s just giving us some highlights (chuckles).
Hytbold and Gondor Housing Items
Question about Hytbold and Gondor housing items that are flagged to slot into the wrong housing slots
Rowan – He knows that HoarseDev is going back and working on that.
“Side” Regions
Question about sidetracking into side areas such as Grey Havens and Tower Hills
Rowan – Right now they’re not measuring time even by the day, they’re measuring it by the hour as we ramp up toward these incredibly important events in Middle Earth. So not right now, we’re kind of busy. Grey Havens and places like that are fantastic candidates following the destruction of the ring. There are a lot of places we could go. Aragorn has vast expeditions into neighbouring Harad, there’s Minas Morgul and places like that which deal with “after the fact.” Right now, they’ve referenced the Havens with Edhellond, but they’re really focusing on that path into Mordor itself.
Sapience – Says Rowan just answered the next question which was, “What happens after Mordor?”
Rowan – Scouring of the Shire is an obvious thing.
Epic Battles
Is there a plan for offensive big battles?
Rowan – The next battle is an offensive big battle, in the sense that we are retaking a city. Now what timer mechanism that uses – they might use that for sort of “raiding,” they want to be sure there’s difficulty levels so that iron is a completion, and platinum is “wow, you destroyed that thing – you really rocked it!” But ultimately for the most part we’ll be setting our own pace and taking back the city. And they want us to have the opportunity to take a moment to look down and see Aragorn and the Army of the Dead passing through the gates that we’ve just opened, and kind of giving us a thumbs up and saying, “Way to go.”
LI Revamp
One the LI revamp is worked out, is there any possibility of extending it below 100, to other levels (level 50)?
Rowan – They’ve talked about other levels and changing where that is available in the system. As always, they’re taking a starting point that they know is achievable and they know they can deliver with quality.
Hairstyles and Cosmetics
Any possibilities for new hairstyles and cosmetic appearances in the future – near or far?
Rowan – He’s not going to say for this year. The art budget right now is really focused on Gondor. But he hears the need. Maybe there’s a Gondorian hairstyle they can pull together.
Difficulty Level in Tarlang’s Crown
What was the purpose of having high spawn rates in Tarlang’s Crown?
Sapience – It’s supposed to be challenging, it’s supposed to be difficult. You’re not supposed to waltz through it.
Rowan – They want to make sure that when they put something out that’s labeled as a group space, that it is challenging and requires a group. He thinks they dialed back too far to the point where people were able to take some spaces that were labeled as group and solo through them, and that’s not really the intention, so they want to make sure that the challenge is there, the fun is there, and also that the reward is there.
Have you ever considered having a playable monster class in the regular PvE area instead of the PvP area with maybe a starter area for orcs in Goblin Town?
Rowan – He thinks the challenge there is that they’ve never invested in monster players as that full experience. So they’ve never established an evil side of the game. And it’s always been about the hero and we can sort of have this glimpse into the world of evil. The other thing he thinks would be challenging about that is that it’s pretty clear in Tolkien that the forces of evil don’t really make choices. They get orders and complete orders. So it would just be a variety of cruel and horrific things that Saruman or your Lieutenants tell you to do.
Would it be possible in the future to be able to auto-combine a lot of relics at once?
Rowan – That’s a UI thing, a quality of life thing that they can do to make the game better. Asks Sapience if he’s taking notes.
Sapience – Next time we’re bringing a pen because there are some really great ideas coming out.
PvMP
Why are you killing off PvMP?
Sapience – They’re not. They actually just got done making some changes out in the Ettenmoors because they just changed the level cap. There’s new gear out there, too. He knows he sees Jinjaah slaving away in the corners on secret things. Asks Rowan if there’s any tiny bit of a hint that he might be able to share on what’s to come.
Rowan – He would have to go to Jinjaah to see what kind of evil schemes are lurking deep within his brain right now. But they continue to invest in it. In one of his earlier producer’s letters he introduced the idea of maybe putting catapults in the Moors. They tried that and experimented with it a bit. They didn’t really like the results. They want a better solution. So they are continuing to look at ways to play with this, invest in it. One direction he can see them going in, is giving monster players a place to play around Osgiliath. So they’ll see what happens.
Sapience – There is definitely a very engaged discussion between Jinjaah and Yicky and other members of the Players Council around PvMP and what it could be in the future, and what can be done to improve and enhance it, and he knows Yicky in particular has made some really fantastic suggestions that he thinks, generally speaking, Jinjaah is pretty excited with. If time and opportunity allow he thinks we’ll probably end up seeing some of those.
Rowan – And to give context to that, they’d want to do something that was available but not mandatory. Something that made sense within the context of the space, but if you were questing through and you didn’t want to get involved with that area of content you wouldn’t need to. The city that the orcs have overrun seems to be an appropriate place for it.
What’s after SHIELD?
Sapience – Somebody come up with an acronym for SWORD and they’ll go there. We’ve had TTHTI, we have SHIELD, he thinks we should do SWORD and figure it out from there.
Rowan – Next it will be the elite version of this, a level 1 chicken without dying.
Sapience – Witchypoo always shows up with a chicken at every run, so Sapience thinks Rowan has just made her day.
Rowan – Maybe run a level 1 chicken through the Ettenmoors.
Sapience – “Oh god, didn’t we do that once before, to resoundingly poor results?”
Rowan – Too many chickens. Too many chickens.
Sapience – It was basically a mass chicken slaughter. It was very bad.
What about catapults in the Moors?
Rowan – Just mentioned that. They had performance issues with it. It wasn’t functioning the way they wanted it to, and it wasn’t as useful and interesting and, frankly, as fun as they wanted it to be. So they’ll keep playing with it.
With essences, why not give the ability to overwrite essences that are already in place on a socketed item?
Rowan – They’re going with the simplest implementation of essences right now, and then looking at options for it as they go forward.
What kind of ideas do you have for Shelob’s lair and Minas Morgul?
Sapience – Ideas, not locked in stone.
Rowan – They have a lot of very specific places that are already laid out. The settings are all very clear. So Osgiliath is a very clear setting. Ithilien is a very clear setting. The Black Gate is a very clear setting. But what they do in those content spaces, he doesn’t want to prescribe to the designers to go in there and build something (unintelligible). So he’s not going to share too much around that.
What do the grey numbers in the corner of the essences mean?
Sapience – This is a question for HoarseDev, but he’ll make sure he gets that question.
Rowan – He thinks it’s a tier thing based on the level.
Sapience – He will verify that and respond here in the transcript thread when he has the answer.
Someone talks about how they wish they could get a longer timer on horse session play so we can wander around more, and Sapience asks Rowan about the possibility of getting more types of session play, or additional horse sessions
Rowan – Tool for the objective, what are they trying to achieve? He’s thought it would be cool to have more, longer chicken play sessions, and heading down into the Gondor area, but they need to think about what kind of fun they’re trying to make. The horse session was a very specific thing related to Rohan.
Have you considered taking the essences/slotted armour to PvMP armour?
Sapience – It’s a hot topic right now.
Rowan – It’s a hot topic for good reason, which would be affecting the balance for creeps, and wow – that’s a firestorm.
More Character Slots
With the new class coming, can we get more character slots?
Rowan – The brief answer is, they want to do more character slots. Yes.
Sapience – Picking a number is apparently the challenge. How many more? There’s technical, engineery stuff in the background that needs to be answered. So the answer is yes, but in terms of a number, not yet.
What about adding new homesteads, just like the currently existing ones, in Rohan or Gondor?
Rowan – They’re focused on building the world, so that’s where they’re going to put the effort first.
Could the essences system be added to jewelry or weapons?
Rowan – He thinks if it works and players enjoy it then they can potentially expand it.
Can we eventually buy more than one house per character?
Sapience – There are some really wealthy players who’d like to own 3 or 4 houses, maybe a whole neighbourhood.
Rowan – He doesn’t see any reason not to have the conversation. He’s open to trying to figure it out.
Question about DX11.1 update
Sapience – Isn’t all that sure about what’s in DX11.1 that’s all that different from DX11. DX11 is in the game. Maybe if it was 12 they’d have that conversation, but .1 seems to be kind of a small bump.
Rowan – He knows they did pretty major jumps for 10 and 11.
Question about adding stables to housing?
Rowan – There is no intention of a housing update right now.
Unique or Custom Ruleset Servers
What about unique or custom ruleset servers, such as a PvMP only server, or a frozen in time server where the level cap is only 50 – what are the thoughts about that?
Rowan – LotRO is not a young, spry chicken anymore. The game is 7 years old. It has a really established set of rules and communities and gameplay and so on, so right now he’d focus on those players that are out there, those worlds that are out there, and not so interested in trying to set up a custom ruleset or a PvMP world or something.
As players yourselves, what’s the one thing that you want in the game?
Rowan – He wants to stand on the top of Mount Doom, and look over it and hear a screaming Sméagol inside.
Sapience – He just wants to be at the gate with Aragorn, and the whole Mouth of Sauron experience, and go through that entire event in the story, he thinks that would be pretty amazing. To be at the Black Gate when the ring is destroyed and chaos ensues.
Sapience thanks the players and Rowan for joining the livestream.
Frelorn Test Stream 14/08/14
Frelorn Test Stream 14/08/14
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 this as the final word.
If anyone who was present has any additions or corrections, feel free to post.
Frelorn Test Stream 14/08/14
Video here and here.
- Frelorn explains he’s doing an impromptu stream to test the sound and video so that future streams will be as error free as possible.
- Players mention they can’t hear him so well.
He says he’s going to get a better headset. - Someone asks about the Ice Bucket Challenge Turbine did this week for ALS (otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease).
The water was really, really cold. They actually had the ice sitting in the water for about 15 minutes before they did it, while they were waiting for their cameraman, so the water had time to get really really cold. - Someone asks about Frelorn’s plans for the stream
He’s going to roll up a new character and play through from start to finish, he’s also going to try to do some monster play stuff as well, and when we get closer to the Beorning launch, he’ll do a bit of that as well. He has a few other things they’re going to try to stream, based on suggestions from players in the forums. There is some really cool stuff they’ll be doing not from his desk. They have a recording studio there in the building that they will use to make it look more professional and cool and exciting, and hopefully we’ll be seeing some more of him and Rowan and a few other people from the team. - Someone mentions they’d love to see a fellowship of devs running an instance
That’s very much within the realm of possibility. - Someone asks who is behind Frelorn
Frelorn asks Jacob his forum name. It’s QuartermasterU, who is the brand manager and ecommerce manager. - Someone asks which server QuartermasterU is on
He doesn’t need to share that info. Team members like to keep their anonymity when playing the game. - Frelorn says he’s really looking forward to streaming. He’ll put up a schedule and let everyone know via Twitter, Facebook, the forums, etc. ahead of time. He’s still finding stuff that Sapience left behind which they may use for giveaways. Toys and goodies and games and swag. He did a bit of streaming when he was at Infinite Crisis, so once he gets all the technical stuff worked out it should go pretty smoothly. He has some really good ideas that hopefully he can incorporate in to do some cool stuff.
- Did Sapience leave any candy behind?
No he didn’t. Thankfully, because it probably would be pretty gross by now. He does have some Neapolitan astronaut ice cream. He’s been told it’s pretty good but he’s almost afraid to open it because then he won’t have any more astronaut ice cream. He’s going to keep that for now and save it for an emergency. Maybe put it in his escape bag at home. - Frelorn gives a bit of background about himself. He has been at Turbine for over 10 years now. He started out in customer service and then worked into community management. He started out at Asheron’s Call and then a bit at Asheron’s Call 2. He focused as the PvMP community manager for a time, and then he went to work as North American community manager on Batman: Arkham City. He worked on Gotham City Imposters, he did some global organization stuff for awhile, and for the last couple of years he was working on Infinite Crisis, and now he’s back at LotRO.
He did learn a lot from working on all those other titles, so hopefully he can bring some fresh ideas and some fresh blood to LotRO. They’re going to start doing some contests, so if you aren’t following LotRO on Facebook and Twitter – some of you may not like it, but he recommends doing it because it’s going to be a good chance to win some great prizes. He is also going to encourage players to stream as well. They’re going to start up a stream program where players can get stuff for streaming. Maybe some T-shirts or other things that they can dig out of the abyss. So lots of good fun stuff happening as he gets his head wrapped around what’s happening with the game and what’s happening with the community. He says the players have been really warm and welcoming, and great. He thinks it’s a great game. He loved it back when he worked on it before, and he’s really excited to be back working on it again. So it should be a lot of fun.
He’s also working on unifying LotRO on Twitch because right now there is an account for Moria, one for Helm’s Deep, a whole bunch of them so he’s going to unify them into just being one LotRO account so it’s easier to find. But he is going to work on getting players streaming because the more people that stream the game, the more people that see how awesome and fun it is, and then they’ll get in and play. He reminds players that he is open to suggestions and ideas. - Question about his beard
He usually has a beard, but there was a freak shaving accident and it will be coming back in. - Someone asks if Frelorn is Sapience’s permanent replacement
Yes, he is the permanent replacement. - Can you show us what QuartermasterU is working on?
No, he cannot. He will hurt Frelorn – we will see him get bludgeoned and that wouldn’t be good. - A player asks if he will sneak up on someone in the office
No, he will not. That’s how people get hurt. :) - Is Infinite Crisis coming soon?
Yes it is. The team is working very hard on it. There will be a pretty big update to the game soon and it’s going to be awesome. If you are a DC fan you want to play it. It’s fun, it’s great, he loves everybody there. - Someone asks him to play as a Beorning
Once the Beorning are ready he will definitely be playing one. - When will we next hear about the Beorning?
When they have more information to give us. It’s not easy creating a whole new class out of the blue, so as soon as they’ve got more to share with us, they will. - Which server are you going to be playing on?
He hasn’t said yet which server it will be. He hasn’t decided yet. He may make it a coin flip, or he may take a recommendation from the team, he hasn’t figured that out yet. He thinks he’s going to start the steady streaming next week. He knows DDO does streaming on Wednesdays, so maybe he’ll do Thursdays, or Mondays and Fridays, or Tuesdays, he doesn’t know yet. He’s still nailing all that down. - Did Sapience give you his copyright to Soon?
No. No no no no no. - Someone suggests Landroval
Landroval was actually the first server he played on when he started playing way back in the day. He still has several characters there. Once he started doing monster play stuff he was pretty much on every server. - Frelorn says he’s going to start repopulating the YouTube page and get more videos archived there. He also says we are welcome to tell him if he’s bad at streaming. He’ll still do it, but he’ll take constructive criticism.
- Someone reminds him to set the Twitch videos to save so that people can watch them later on
That’s what he’s going to do. He’s going to archive them all on YouTube as well, because he knows sometimes Twitch doesn’t replay very well, it’s a little slow sometimes. - Someone mentions his voice isn’t very loud
He says that’s partly because he has a really loud voice that projects all over the building and annoys people (QuartermasterU nods enthusiastically in the background). He’s going to get a new headset for streaming, something with a better microphone. He will talk a bit louder, but he doesn’t want to get too loud because people are trying to work around him. - Is that an Orc behind you?
That’s an Uruk-Hai called Lurtz. He has a bow as well. He has Gandalf as well. And the very best on is Peter Jackson as a corsair. [ PETER JACKSON AS A CORSAIR!! – Frick ] All of them were gifts from a friend of his who loves LoTR. - Any giveaways with all expansion packs and quest packs?
Never say never. He will give away whatever they will let him give away, and even some of the stuff they won’t let him give away. Part of the streams, part of following on Facebook, following on Twitter should be getting stuff. People love free stuff, and they have lots of stuff. He goes around the office a bit showing off the various things he’s found so far. LotRO sweaters, a Riders of Rohan T-shirt, old game guides, etc. He holds up a flyer for “free gift” and says we’ll be finding out more about that soon. - Does LotRO have a Google+ page?
He will look into that. - Someone asks if QuartermasterU is being punished because he doesn’t have a chair
Actually he uses a stand-up desk. He actually chooses to work standing up. Crazy. - Frelorn shows of his Nerf gun and says some of the wars there have been pretty epic.
- Someone asks about more T-shirts
They’re actually looking into getting more done. They’ll have some cool stuff this year. - Will you ever make another game guide?
He doubts it. They didn’t even do that well when they first came out, and most people just use online guides now. There’s not a lot of sense to making a book version of a guide. - Can you tell your boss I want an option in the LotRO store where I can get a figurine made of my character? I want a male elf minstrel beside my computer screen.
Preaching to the choir. He can certainly tell them. He doesn’t know if it will do anything but he can tell them. - Someone asks if Sapience shaved off his beard
No, he did not. He’s not Sapience, he’s Frelorn, the new community manager. Sapience left LotRO for Extra Life, and last he heard, is currently in Las Vegas. - Do you have a mini-fridge at your desk?
Yes, he does have a fridge. He inherited it. - Do you really have an ice cream vending machines in the office?
Yes, and they have several other vending machines, a ping-pong table and an arcade. They also get to play video games a lot so it’s great. They do work, but they get to play video games a lot. - Which games are in the arcade?
Too many to name. Tons. Lots of classic games. - Do you need a bachelor’s degree to work at Turbine?
He doesn’t know. He doesn’t have one. He started out with just a high school diploma and worked his way up over the years. He started as a customer service rep and worked his way up. - I could work for Turbine, but I’m from Romania
That would be a tough commute. - Is it hard to get hired there?
Yes. It’s as difficult as with any job. Unless you’re taking an entry level position you need experience and all that stuff. But he’s not HR and it’s been 10 years since was hired and gone through the process.
Frelorn closes the stream by saying he may be doing another unannounced test stream tomorrow, but once they get into the regular stream cadence he will put up a schedule and he’ll try to bring in some special guests, Rowan and other team members. They’ll do some Q&As, some gameplay, all sorts of things. He looks forward to it, but for now, everyone have an amazing day and he will see us next time.
LotRO Update 14.2 Preview Tour 11/09/2014
LotRO Update 14.2 Preview Tour 11/09/2014
The team starts out by introducing themselves. Present today are Community Manager Andy “Frelorn” Cataldo, Executive Producer Aaron “Rowan” Campbell, Senior Content Designer Jeff “MadeOfLions” Libby, Lead Systems Designer Matt “HoarseDev” Zimmitti, Game Systems Engineer Leo "Ransroth" Zelevinsky at the computer driving things and taking questions from players.
Frelorn asks the dev team what they'd like to show off first.
Rowan – It’s a small update, but they’ve managed to sneak a few features in. The two things they’d like to highlight are the new collections system, which rewards people for mounts and pets they’ve collected in the game, and the other will be a preview of the Dead Marshes. He wants to start out with collections.
The New Collections System
Frelorn brings up the collections panel. He says he doesn’t have anything collected yet.
The panel has a list of deeds and progress bars for those deeds. When a deed is selected, the section of the panel expands to show the title available, along with the items required to earn that deed. Clicking on an individual item – a mount or a pet – will bring up a preview of that pet.
HoarseDev – There are all these great rewards for playing the game, but no means for players to show them off, so they wanted to create a system where you can check and see which rewards you have, how to properly go out and find some of them, so if there was a specific mount that you really liked but didn’t know how to get, or if you wanted to know how to get this version of this chicken. They’ve also worked in a reward for collecting a bunch of different thematic rewards.
For a start they’re really only working with pets and mounts, but they’ve got a lot of fancy features to add more. So right now if you were to collect four mounts that were seasonal festival mounts, the system would give you a title that was thematically appropriate to that. They’re also looking into more rewards for getting the collections together. One thing they really like is that the system allows them to show us what the rewards look like before we even get them. So we can browse through now and check out mounts we’ve never had and decide if we want to go out and quest for it.
They’re really excited about this system and they’ve had a lot of feedback that people want to see them expand on it. This release is their opening salvo on the system, but they’re looking at adding to it in the very near future.
Rowan – The important thing for him is, they actually tell you where to find these things. Which quest to do, which festival to go to, so we’ll know where in the world to go get them.
Frelorn is notified that the sound is poor due to in-game sounds obscuring what’s being said, so the adjustments are made and they decide to go over it all again.
HoarseDev – They built this new system, both for elder players and for new players, where they have all these rewards in-game, they have mounts, they have pets, they have festival content, they have rep rewards, and they’ve never really had a consolidated place where we could see not only what we have but what we could earn, and on top of that reward us for collecting thematic groups of items. They want to stress that this is their initial foray into having this kind of collection system, so this is not the end of the road. They’re going to add a ton more to it, but as an example we could go get four different mounts from four different seasonal festivals, and as you acquire them, it’s going to show you in the UI, which ones you have, which ones you don’t have and how to get them. And you might get a cool title for getting four seasonal mounts, or for getting three difficult rep mounts.
This is their springboard into the new system and they’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback. They’re definitely going to be adding a lot more collections to it. One of the things he likes best about the system is that, regardless of which items you have or don’t have, it will show you what they look like, so you can actually see a specific mount and how it’s adorned, and so you can decide, “Well I am going to be around for the winter festival so I’m definitely going to stop by and get that one.”
It’s a really big step for them, it gives players a lot of feedback in terms of a lot of things they’ve accomplished over the years. LotRO has been around for quite awhile and a lot of folks have gone and quested for things like mounts and pets, and now we can take a look at our entire collection. So they’re very excited about it.
Rowan – Knows they’ve started out with titles as a reward, do they have any ideas for other rewards in the future?
HoarseDev – The first time out they’ve kept it kind of simple, but they can attach all sorts of rewards through the system so in the future they may do something where they look at a group of rep mounts and add an additional mount for a reward, or practically anything that drops in the game could be dropped through this system. They went with titles to start, but they’re definitely planning on taking the opportunity of blowing this up and giving players all kinds of things to collect and quest for.
Ransroth – He changed the collections window to demonstrate that it can be resized if a player wishes to expand it, in response to a player question, and was wondering if it’s possible to expand the preview of the mount/pet at this point.
HoarseDev – Not right now, but some of the feedback that they’ve gotten has been about the UI and layout and things like that, so they’re still looking into things like that.
Frelorn asks if there are any more questions from the players regarding the collections system.
Why this new system instead of using the deed system?
HoarseDev – They looked at the deed system, and there are definitely similarities there, but in a nutshell, under the hood, piping strictly through the old deed system was going to add a lot of extra overload to characters and things, and wasn’t going to give them things like the viewport, so this actually doesn’t have a lot of the extra weight that the deed system does and allows them to go in a different direction in terms of, it’s always going to be collecting things for a reward. It just turned out to be a win-win both technically and in terms of the load put on characters.
Is there a search box?
HoarseDev – He doesn’t know if there actually is right now. That’s something they have gotten feedback on and so it’s on a roadmap. Right now they don’t have too many collections in there, but he can definitely see as they expand down the road they’re going to want people to be able to search.
Is it possible to rewrite the deed system to have a similar window? This window is awesome.
HoarseDev – One of the things they like to do is propose something new like this and then see what about it is backwards compatible, so there is a bit of experimentation going there. The deed system is much more broad, so a lot of the things that we would do or find aren’t as concise as, say, a horse. Like visiting Weathertop, now they’d have to go and get a camera shot of Weathertop and add it in there. They are definitely looking at ways that they can potentially cannibalize this and back-fill something, but each one of those is kind of its own separate question. He thinks it would be very challenging to just take this and transpose it onto the deed system.
Rowan – There are a LOT of deeds (Everyone laughs and nods).
Ransroth – So that answers the other question. Someone was asking if this would replace the deeds system.
HoarseDev – No.
Rowan – This would not replace the deed system.
The Dead Marshes
MadeOfLions – The Dead Marshes! First some history of how we even got to the Dead Marshes. It seems that every one of these streams that they do, he’s always astounded at the places they’re talking about. Like West Gondor. Games never go to West Gondor. The Dead Marshes? He’s played the Dead Marshes in one single other game. Almost no games get to go to the Dead Marshes so that’s one of the reasons that – he thinks it was during development of Flooded Isengard when they started talking about the Dead Marshes – and then certainly in Western Gondor. They were trying to come up with a way to touch in with Frodo and Sam on their journey, because it’s been a long time since we’ve seen those hobbits and the story of The Lord of the Rings is in large part, the story of those guys.
It seems like a really good idea to check in with them occasionally, and one of the difficulties is that they’re on a secret mission. It has to stay secret. But we still want to find out what’s going on with them. So the idea was that during development of Western Gondor they started working on a session play experience where we’d get to see Frodo and Sam again, and check in on their story. And as the world builders were putting together the Dead Marshes, it quickly became apparent that they were doing a lot of work to make this place look really cool and creepy, and players would want to see this with their own characters. It’s really cool to see the Frodo and Sam story that takes place as they’re trying to get across the Dead Marshes, but there’s something really cool about going there with your own character. So they came up with a short quest arc that would give us a reason to go to the Dead Marshes, something to do there, and by completing the short quest arc it would unlock the ability to play the session play. So the goal expanded a bit as they started looking at the area.
MadeOfLions asks Ransroth to bring up the map. It’s actually pretty big.
MadeOfLions – The Dead Marshes, in all their glory. Larger than they initially expected, to be perfectly honest (everyone laughs). This was initially going to be a session play and while looking at it they decided to expand it a little bit, and initial feedback from QA and other sources was that this should probably be more than just a session play.
The Dead Marshes themselves are the site of a battle towards the end of the War of the Last Alliance, so the pools here are filled with bodies from long ago – orcs and men and elves – and you can still see some of the – it’s hard to say if it’s spirits from Mordor or if it’s swamp gas, it’s probably a little of both – playing tricks on your eyes while you’re adventuring. The chapters on Frodo and Sam and Gollum’s journey across the marshes goes into some detail on the creepy things that you see and we’ll certainly get to experience that for ourselves also, when we explore the Dead Marshes.
It’s a confusing, sort of gloomy place, on purpose, and he thinks that the atmosphere there is pretty good.
Question about whether the collections UI will be in French and German
HoarseDev – He certainly hopes so (everyone laughs).
Rowan – That’s certainly their intention.
The little lights are cool, people want to light their own lights whether it’s through a consumable or an item or a cosmetic pet
MadeOfLions – The game side of him says, “That would be awesome!” The story side of him says, Gollum talks about Frodo and Sam joining the dead ones and lighting little candles of their own. That’s a little more ominous.
Ransroth – They’d need to actually die to do that.
MadeOfLions – It’s a scary thing. From a game perspective it would be kind of neat to have a consumable in the future maybe.
Ransroth – You could just kill an orc and suck its soul and then release it in the marshes. That sounds feasible.
HoarseDev – They are expanding their ideas in terms of what’s cool for cosmetic pets and things like that, so they’ve definitely got some surprises to come.
Question about the cost of the region since it’s a lot more than they were expecting
Rowan – This is free. That’s basically it. So enjoy it.
HoarseDev – To be clear, it’s bigger than their initial intent was, but it’s not a full-blown, crazy region. They started digging in and it’s such a pivot point in the story where you really get that sense of solitude and all this really interesting stuff that they wanted to show, they just decided to build it out more than they’d initially planned.
Why is there an orc camp in the marshes? According to lore it was barren and empty
MadeOfLions – He thinks it’s important to point out that when Frodo and Sam and Gollum go through the marshes, it’s March 2nd, maybe the 1st and 2nd 3019. When we go through, it’s a little more than a week later. He doesn’t want to go too much into the quest arc itself, but the idea they’re working with is that orcs came here after Frodo and Sam went through. They weren’t there when they came through. The idea being that perhaps Sauron has sensed that something isn’t entirely right here so he’s sent orcs to investigate. This isn’t a settlement. One of the reasons for this not being a full-fledged region is because, for example, there is – with a minor exception – one quest giver in the Dead Marshes. They didn’t want to have a hub of NPCs waiting around and handing out quests. Honestly he wanted to minimize the number of players that are running around at a certain time. While they definitely want players to go out and enjoy exploring and playing through the Dead Marshes and experiencing the atmosphere, one of the reasons to keep the number of quests down was to make it so that it doesn’t feel as if so many people are tromping all over the marshes filling it up. There is an orc camp, but he thinks it’s a late arrival compared to when Frodo and Sam where here.
Is it the Dawnless Day, and do we always have that sky?
MadeOfLions – In the Dead Marshes, he believes we will.
Rowan – Because there is a daytime cycle there too (it’s night in the preview).
Frelorn and Rowan switch seats so that Rowan can sit near the computer.
How are we going to get to the Dead Marshes, because there is no existing map that borders it?
MadeOfLions – That is true. The pickup point for the quest in the Dead Marshes begins conveniently close in Western Gondor in the cave of the Avorrim from Dorthaneth. So they had to balance the ways to get people there.
Rowan adjusts the in-game time to show what the Dead Marshes looks like in the daytime at a later game point.
Rowan – It doesn’t get much brighter. That’s Daytime.
HoarseDev – A fun vacation spot. Get a tan (everyone laughs).
Rowan – That sky is pretty ominous out there.
MadeOfLions – So it’s not incredibly close, but the idea is that he wanted the on-ramp to the Dead Marshes to occur at roughly around the time when the Dead Marshes content is taking place. But since it’s gotten to that point, the Western Gondor… He doesn’t know how much has been said about future updates, so he will not really say much.
Rowan – Says, “Jump in there.” He wants to know what MadeOfLions is saying (everyone laughs).
MadeOfLions – OK then. Since the Dawnless Day will be arriving at Gondor soon.
Rowan – Shows the cloud coming over the horizon.
MadeOfLions – It makes sense for them to deal with the Dawnless Day in the Dead Marshes, from Western Gondor, which is shortly before the Dawnless Day arriving in Gondor.
If the start is in Western Gondor, does that mean it’s only free for people who have West Gondor?
MadeOfLions – He believes the quests are not part of the West Gondor content. Which means you can get into the cave of the Avorrim without West Gondor and you should be able to talk to everyone you need to talk to without it. Now, you won’t know who the Avorrim are, or who Dorthaneth is, but you should be able to.
The Dead Marshes Session Play
Frelorn starts the session play and we see Sam onscreen in the Dead Marshes.
Is it always raining?
MadeOfLions – No, he doesn’t believe so.
Rowan – Like other regions of the world it has its own weather cycle.
Ransroth – Actually really likes the rain in LotRO, and the cold. It makes him genuinely feel cold and wet at his desk when he plays.
HoarseDev – Thought he’d moved away from all that.
Ransroth – He came to Boston to get away from the British weather (laughs).
Frelorn moves the camera view around so that people can see the sky toward where the Dawnless Day will be coming through.
MadeOfLions – So Sam is bedraggled, because he’s been journeying.
Ransroth – He needs a wash!
Frelorn – He does. You’d think in the rain he’d get cleaned up a little bit.
MadeOfLions – Frodo is unhappy about having to travel through the Dead Marshes, and Sam is unhappy about having to trust Gollum.
Frelorn – Shocking.
MadeOfLions – Is so happy to be able to use Gollum again. It has been a long time, and he thinks Gollum is great, and super fun to write.
HoarseDev – He seems so at home there.
Frelorn – He really does.
MadeOfLions – Gollum says he’s going to guide them to Mordor. There are places throughout this section of the Dead Marshes where Sam might get stuck in mud, and have to work to get out of the mud. Frelorn gets stuck in the mud.
Rowan – Says he’d better follow Gollum carefully.
Frelorn – He got stuck again! This will be his downfall.
Ransroth – Says we need a session play as Gollum for the whole story (everyone laughs).
MadeOfLions – Gollum epic!
Frelorn – That would be amazing.
HoarseDev – That would be awesome.
MadeOfLions – Every chapter is the same. Follow the ring (everyone laughs).
HoarseDev – One quest.
MadeOfLions – They had to resist putting birds in there, because that’s lore-appropriate too. No birds.
Frelorn – Doesn’t imagine they’d fancy being in a place like that.
Frelorn gets to the end of the first part of the Dead Marshes session play, which basically consists of Sam and Frodo following Gollum through the marshes. MadeOfLions decides he wants to show just a bit more of the session play.
MadeOfLions – Tells Frelorn to step with care. The ground is treacherous. Follow him closely. But don’t follow the lights.
Frelorn – The lights are bad.
Frodo has been lost! They decide to end it there.
Rowan – They expect this to go live early next week.
Frelorn – As soon as it’s been confirmed exactly when it’s going live they will post up the usual posts in the forums and social media, etc. but hopefully early next week it will be going live.
Is this level 100? And thank-you for the stealth housing upgrade!
Rowan – Yes, it’s level 100.
Frelorn thanks everyone for tuning in and checking it out. He hopes we enjoy update 14.2 and says it will be going live soon.
Will the docks quest with the turtles be returning with 14.2?
Rowan – Yes, they fixed that.
Frelorn – The release notes are ready to go, and they’ll be put up on the day of the release as usual.
Will the turtle bug fix delete any existing turtles in the inventory?
HoarseDev – He doesn’t know if the inventory will be affected, but he thinks they may have to create a new pet to commemorate the situation.
Rowan – The angry turtle.
Frelorn – Asks Ransroth if there are any more questions from players.
Ransroth – No questions, just a lot of thank-yous (everyone smiles and ‘awws’ about that).
Frelorn – Says thanks to the players, and says he looks forward to seeing us in-game.
When are you going to stream your new character?
Frelorn – Technically he was supposed to go today but since they were doing this, he’s not sure. He may jump on this afternoon. He will let us all know via social media if he’ll be playing today.
MadeOfLions – Asks what Frelorn is playing.
Frelorn – He’s playing a hobbit minstrel. First time ever playing a minstrel.
HoarseDev – Excellent choice.
Frelorn – It’s been an exercise in humour, as players tell him what to do and then make fun of him when he messes it up.
Frelorn thanks the viewers again, and ends the stream. Everyone on the team says goodbye.
LoTRO Update 15 Preview Stream 10/30/2014
LoTRO Update 15 Preview Stream 10/30/2014
Frelorn says, Welcome everyone to the Update 15 preview stream, we are here to show everyone what is going in for Update 15 which is going live on November 5.
The team starts out by introducing themselves. Present today are Community Manager Andy “Frelorn” Cataldo, Executive Producer Aaron "Rowan"Campbell, Lead Designer Matt "HoarseDev" Zimmitti, Senior Content Designer Jeff "MadeOfLions" Libby, Systems Designer Trevor "Jinjaah"McEwan, and Senior Content Designer Ben Schneider.
Frelorn will be running the camera and occasionally helping answer questions so he moves off to the side, joking that we will occasionally see a hand.
Frelorn: Why don't we talk about where we are first here.
Rowan: Lets talk about Update 15 in general, Update 15 has a few really large things in it. The first one being a new class, this is Lotro's first new class since Mines of Moria Expansion in 2008. It's an ambitious thing for us we are very excited to bring you a brand new class the Beorning, sort of a race and class combination. We will talk a lot about where Beorning's come from, what their special abilities are and why you want to play one. In addition we are also journeying into Central Gondor, so we will talk a little bit about the Epic Story in Central Gondor . We also have a brand new style of Epic Battle to present that is an offensive battle, Retaking of Pelargir.
Frelorn mentions that people in the chat are commenting on only seeing part of Rowan's arm on the camera.
Frelorn: I do apologize what you guys are seeing is what we showed the press in the last few days and we weren't on camera for those.
Ben: The good news is none of us came to work in our pajamas.
Frelorn: I did think about it this morning.
Ben: It is certainly an option in the building.
Epic Battle Pelargir
Rowan: All that said we have a brand new style of epic battle we will be taking you into Pelargir, it acts as both a capstone to the epic story and also gives you a new style of siege battle where your actually on the offensive. You are setting the pace of the battle and driving it forward and ultimately your going to be helping Aragorn and the army of the dead to retake the city. What we are launching in Update 15 is a solo/duo version with a six person fellowship version to follow shortly after. So with that said I will pass this over to MadeofLions to talk about the Beorning.
Beorning's
MadeofLions: Probably the best place to start is in the beginning when Bilbo was traveling with the Dwarves many years ago he encountered a large gruff man by the name of Beorn who made his house in the Vales of Anduin. Beorn was a skin-changer that doesn't' mean that he skinned animals it means that he could adopt the form of an animal in this case a bear. We know that while Beorn is gone now he had descendants now one of them is Grimbeorn and they inherited his ability to skin change. So with this update we are adding the new player class/race of Beorning which means you are one of Beorn's children or grandchildren we leave the heritage up to you guys. This means that you also have the ability to transform into the shape of the bear. You get a new starting experience in the Vales of Anduin where Grimbeorn and now you live. This is a twenty minute to half an hour experience where you get to meet some other Beorning's, your extended family and you get to learn how to live life as a Beorning and get introduced to your skills and sort of their way of life. So now we transition to their skills.
Beorning Skills
Jinjaah: While we are transitioning to Frelorn's other character his level 50 Beorning we can talk about how the Beorning is different from the other classes. If you haven't made a trip to Bullroarer the biggest thing is that the class does not use power it uses a new energy resource called Wrath. Wrath starts at 0 and builds to 100 so the class is a lot more cooldown oriented than the others. The three specs are called The Hide, The Claw and The Roar. The Hide is kind of the tank spec where the Beorning wants to be in bear form as long as possible they have ways to generate wrath while they are in bear they can aoe spike enemies in front of them. They mainly tank through taking hits and debuffing their enemies. The Claw is the damage line that chooses between damage over time and burst damage basically the human skills apply bleeds and get damage rolling and when you switch into bear form is when you unlock the more powerful heavy hitting skills. The Roar line is the support/healing line and this uses a unique mechanic to the other lines that are more offensive this line is more defensive. The Mark of Grimbeorn on a target maybe when sacrifice or get direct damage to yourself you mitigate a portion of that damage or when you use Harken you refund the wrath dots (damage over time). The Mark of Beorn for example if you use Bee Swarm which is a damage over time attack where you summon a swarm of bees and its awesome.
Frelorn: Here we go with the bees again.
Jinjaah Yeah everyone likes unleashing bees. It's an interesting play style especially with the healer being kind of an in the pocket healer standing next to your tank almost dealing damage and generating wrath and using it to heal your allies. If you want to spec The Claw and grab a few things and switch into a bear and beat people up.
Frelorn: Is there any way you would recommend to spec into this tree?
Jinjaah: One of the cool things about the Beorning's and what we learned from U12 and class development in general is that it seemed liked players really liked transformative traits over passive traits. So one thing we tried to do in this tree was offer some passive traits that you build down the tree but also some transformative traits that alter skills. So for example if you grab five of thrash on the trait on the top left of The Claw you will notice the trait right below it adds a bleed to slash so if Im going to be dpsing then I want to get that since its basically extra damage rolling right off me. If you want to get execute what it does is consume all your wrath and deal massive damage to the target. Slam heal on the top right called Any Advantage is nice if your buddy is tanking and he has aggro then you just stand behind the guy and damage and kinda keep healing and topping yourself off if there is aoe damage going out. Final strike is a nice one the one next to it is actually interesting this is another transformative trait where you have a skill like Biting Edge which is a two strike attack and what this trait does is say I'm going to take away one of these attacks and give you that attack back as a bleed over 12 seconds. A lot of the other trees are like this like maybe you want to be a damage dealer but you still want to kind of help heal or maybe dabble into being a tank to you can kind of build the Beorning that fits your play style. Moment of opportunity is pretty cool to max out because that will give you a chance to proc a free execute that can be used regardless of the target's health threshold and will keep you in bear form longer.
Frelorn: You've left some space in the trait trees as well right?
Jinjaah: Yes one of the things we have been talking about over on Bullroarer is this class is gonna launch with 51 ranks instead of 53 which is what all the other classes have and without two legendary capstones. The reason we did this was we wanted to kind of release the class a little while and let you guys play it and get your feedback what's missing and what you would like to see and then add those additional ranks over time based on how you guys like it. We are leaving room to grow so we don't have to pull anything away.
Frelorn: Im gonna go and find something to try and attack.
Jinjaah: Yeah but you are severely under leveled for the area. (Frelorn was in Ringlo Vale, Central Gondor)
Frelorn: Yeah but I'm immortal so that is fine. Yeah when the bucks are purple, generally a bad sign.
HoarseDev: Can we take a look at the sky out there a second?
Frelorn: Oh yeah we could. Wow look at that what happened, why is it so dark?
MadeofLions: The Dawnless Day has arrived. This is Sauron's ploy to make his armies more comfortable as they march and bestow fear in the hearts of any that still oppose him. This is a cloud of shadow that has belched forth from Mordor.
Frelorn wanders over on his character and starts fighting a bear, jokes are made about bear on bear action.
MadeofLions: I wish you were fighting a different animal don't fight the bear run away.
Frelorn: Oh fine I'll run away from the bear. You don't like to see bear on bear crime?
MadeofLions: I made an entire class quest for the Beorning's which involves a misunderstanding with another bear and it possibly has a happy ending. There is actually an Easter egg in that class quest I'm not sure anyone has discovered yet.
Frelorn: As he's running around looking for something else to fight, comments all that's around here is bears what do you want me to do, (laughter from everyone) oh wait guess I can fight this buck.
Frelorn mentions that people in the Twitch chat should feel free to ask questions as they are glancing back at the stream every so often.
Questions and Answers
Question:Is the bear form only useable in combat?
Jinjaah: Yes that is correct.
Question:Can you speak on some of the Player's Council contributions this year so far?
Rowan: One of the biggest contributions and this was feedback we were getting from the players as well in a very important way was the importance of level caps or importance in this case of delaying a level cap raise. The focus we needed to bring to region content and legendary items going forward like we will be releasing for Update 16. The decision to not to do a level cap increase with U15 I would give a substantial amount of credit and support to the Player's Council for bringing it to our attention and having a very active conversation about it. In addition a lot of changes that came out of the new style of epic battle came directly from conversations with the council and being able to bring that feedback directly to the team and to Ben's desk which we did some more of yesterday. It's a great way for us to bounce some ideas off them and get direct feedback on it.
HoarseDev: Another example specifically coming off of talking about the Beorning's, a lot of the early decisions like I intended them to originally start off at level 50 instead of level 1. The council came back and said if its going to be a really Lotro character it needs to have that starting experience and MadeofLions certainly believed the same. At the end of the day they were right, the transition from being a low level character to a high level character is great. That's the kind of feedback we need a small focus group of people from before we barely even announced the class we had these kinds of discussion early on which paved the road for how we actually developed them. It's the one thing in a beta to fine tune what we have but to have a cohort of folks that can be in there obviously under NDA really early and express those kind of community things was essential.
Question:If you have leftover wrath and you're not in combat can you still turn into a bear?
Jinjaah: Yes as long as you have wrath you can transition into a bear it is not blocked by being out of combat but it does drain out over time. There is a legacy you can have that will help improve if your chain pulling and can't keep your wrath up that will help you move between pulls and still maintain bear form.
Question:How much will this new class cost?
Frelorn: It will be 1000tp as previous classes cost and there will be various packages you can buy on top of that as well.
Epic Battle Introduction to Pelargir
Senior Content Designer Ben Schneider takes over the conversation.
Ben: As Rowan gave it an excellent introduction earlier we can think of this as the first in a line of offensive Epic Battles. For those who have what's coming in the Lord of the Rings books in there mind you know there are some really big things coming up and some battles coming up that we needed to steer the state of big battles to being offensive. The way Pelargir works is the analog between like offensive and defensive skirmishes is awfully similar to the way this new epic battle will work. The retaking of Pelargir is player driven meaning that the Epic Battle will not proceed without you there are places that the defenders stand and wait and you move forward they will follow you. One of the other concepts we have introduced is Epic Foes drawing on the spirit of the cumulated Tolkien lore we've created a series of enemies that step out of the crowd and look for the good hero and those are the people they are going to take on. So while your soldiers are fighting the enemy soldiers you have someone your own size and your own power ranged (indistinguishable word). In Pelargir, we will find the Epic Foes both as stage bosses and as secondary objectives.
Ben: To set up some of the background story starting in Update 14 we've been following Aragorn as he travels across Gondor gathering troops and chasing the corsair fleet. The corsairs are headed north to join the enemies other forces whereas Aragorn is determined to stop them. As we reach Pelargir the corsairs have just taken out the Gondorian fleet which was sort of the last threat to them and the sort of side flank to the enemies forces. Aragorn is hurrying to Pelargir whereas the corsairs have as we have seen in Update 14 kind of tarried and stopped to pillage a bit. Aragorn was fast and picks up an army of undead oathbreakers and a bunch of Gondorian soldiers and when they reach the city of Pelargir the battle is ready to ensue. The role that you the player play is part of a small forward party that helps the city guards and opens the path for Aragorn and the army to march in.
They have an issue getting the Battle to pull up due to it not showing the expansion or Battles on Frelorn's account so they go back to question and answer in the meantime.
Question: How is Turbine handling Beornings killing animals from a lore standpoint?
MadeofLions: If you are a Beorning and you want to kill animals we do not prevent you from doing so, critters yes, animals you are not prevented from. There is a Beorning class quest that I did design that sort of deals with the issue. There is a bear, you are a Beorning do you feel bad about being tasked with eliminating this bear. The existence of this quest is fairly early its the level 15 class quest, is sort of my acknowledgement that maybe its not okay for Beornings to be slaying animals. We aren't actively preventing you from doing that though because there are a number of quests throughout the game that for various reasons have you slaying animals for the good of the people or supplies. We didn't want to eliminate you from participating in that entire content. If you want to choose not to do that, your welcome to, for my Beorning I will probably try not to do most of those quests because that will feel kind of icky. You will for the most part be able to do that.
Question:Will the new Epic Battle have a 6 man fellowship option?
Rowan: The answer to that is yes the Retaking of Pelargir will have a 6 man option available in the first patch following U15, it will not be available at U15 launch though.
Turbine Ransroth manages to get the Battle unlocked for Frelorn in the interim while Frelorn is relogging Ben continues the conversation on the Epic Battle.
Ben: One of the things I can talk about is some modest changes to the Epic Battle rewards system, instead of randomly dropping battle jewelry instead when the rewards bar fills up you get Stars of Merit for barter ability. We did want to still give you the feeling of oh cool I got something we are also dropping Victory Boxes when you complete any Epic Battle associated quest, primary and secondary quests.
HoarseDev: What can they get with Stars of Merit?
Ben: The primary thing is you can get the treasured Battle Jewelry and we have added a couple of other things in there as well.
Retaking Pelargir Epic Battle
Ben: This is the player driven version we have secreted ourselves into the city where the Pelargir Guard Captains have found entry, we are traveling with Elrond's sons Elorhir and Elladan. The first objective is to get to the winch and open the gate. This is player driven in that you stop moving the battle pauses with you, you don't benefit or not benefit. The enemies are corsairs and Haradrim who are the southrons from Umbar and other lands farther out of field. I'm sure there surprised to see a giant bear in the middle of the battle. On the other list of cool new enemies we've got to throw at players are Half-Trolls they've come out to benefit from the Dawnless Day. From lore they are massive and elite shock troop berserkers and are excellent swordsman. As Aaron (Rowan) said this is the solo/duo version we are looking forward to putting out a six man version as well. The goal for this version is you will have challenge you'll still get merit ratings and secondaries and succeed or fail but the real goal is to let players explore the content and putting great challenge in the six man version for players that like to coordinate as a team.
MadeofLions: The laborer is one of my favorite npcs in this update I like to think of them as really sarcastic as he is telling you his progress on the gate.
Ben: We had a couple of goals when we set out to create new Epic Battles, one was obviously we needed to create an offensive one to fit the content that was coming up. One of the other things we needed to do was tilt or tweak the ratio of some things and give the player a bit more agency and give the base platforms of characters a little more control. On the list of small things that have cumulatively been changed to make that work, the damage output of the enemies has changed some so that you actually have time to run in and do some fighting if you choose to do so. There are the Epic Foes that I mentioned earlier that are specifically designed for the players to take on. Another big element is we have shifted the way that merit is awarded now so that you start with empty merit and you are accumulating it because what we found when we looked at the feedback is that it was simply more enjoyable to be awarded merit then to have it taken away from you. You will see this more in epic battles going forward always gaining things not as much losing things. We are still supporting the battle classes that were created in the original big battles so that the initial phase is light and you are basically fighting guys but as you get into the second and third stage you'll have siege equipment and battle equipment and commanders.
Rowan: One thing I like about this type of battle is your always moving from vista point to vista point and always getting a view out over the city and getting a sense of what is going on in a broader scheme.
Ben: Our world builders did an awesome job making Pelargir looking beat up and beautiful and dark and troubled. This is not the only chance you will have to see Pelargir there is an after battle set of region content to help assist surviving citizens and unravel a mystery as to who exactly let the corsairs in. So we look down and see the banners of Gondor and Gondor region banners accompanying Aragorn into the city. We see the Oathbreakers and now we can head to the piers for the next part. This area leads us into the next stage, where we are making our way to meet Aragorn's troops and on the way we are going to rout some pillagers who have spread out throughout the city.
Ben: The Oathbreakers have now dawned all of their particle effects and if you look closely you can see Aragorn raising his hand and going, "Come by Isildur I call you" and the Oathbreakers make their sweep over the enemy forces, now because this is a game they are not just cgi movie of Lord of the Rings we wanted to end the battle with actual combat and not just a pretty picture. As the ghosts sweep over, according to the books their primary effect is to strike fear into the heart of the Corsairs most of which just jump into the water and drown but of course they run in every single direction including your direction and to get away they are not above scaling the walls and running. Of course your waiting there, and now we meet one of the Epic Foes I was talking about earlier, he is statted pretty fiercely, of course some of the Oathbreakers follow in pursuit of the fleeing corsairs. So this is our finale we have one final epic battle wave of guys come at you in a giant rush.
Frelorn: So that was everything we are going to show you today. If you have any questions feel free to ask if not remember Update 15 goes live on November 5th and we are looking forward to you guys all getting in and playing it and giving some great feedback on all the stuff these guys have worked their butts off to get into the game.
Question: Will there be raid gear for Beornings?
HoarseDev: The main focus was to make sure Beornings would have suitable gear we had to go back to a lot of older instances and add gear just for Beorning, there will be a time when crafting gear for Beorning's will probably supersede that in certain spots, you should be able to throughout all levels find some really cool gear that is just for the Beorning.
Question: Are we getting any updated crafting or guild recipes?
HoarseDev: Off the top of my head I know that we specifically have done a lot to support the Beorning as it comes out. I don't think there was really a broad huge push for a bunch of recipes, we mainly wanted to make sure the Beorning was ready to be brought into the game without being naked. We will be adding a lot more soon though.
Question: Can you change the bear's appearance?
Jinjaah: The bear's fur color will actually change with your hair color so you can choose that, for the future its something we have talked about, maybe if you guys really like it we can play it by ear and see its possible to do. Right now its primarily through the hair color changing the hair color of the bear.
Question: Will Beorning's be viable PvP'ers and will they get PvMP gear?
HoarseDev: That's the kind of thing where they are supposed to be viable, but as we all well know until it actually goes live , we will see what we need to tweak, but at the end of the day they definitely will be but you guys tend to find all of the wonderful dilemmas and best parts of our classes much more quickly than we find them either on beta server or ourselves. We will send them off into the wild, they do have room to grow and get more versatility and power but we will let you guys point out very soon whether or not they are viable.
Question: Can you give us details on store prices for Beornings/character slots/gift of the Valar Bundles?
Frelorn: I don't know the exact price for the bundles I do know the Beorning's are 1000tp. [It has been noted by Frelorn on the forums that their will be a Character Slot and Beorning Bundle for 1295tp]
Question: Will there be new music system and instrument updates in Update 15?
Frelorn: The music system changes are in the new instruments did not make it in for this update.
Question: Will we see Lotteries again?
Frelorn: Probably not, sorry guys when we changed the website over it kind of made the lottery system not work so good.
That wraps it up, its been fun thanks for hanging out with us, enjoy it and we look forward to your feedback on the update when it goes live on November 5.
Update 16 Preview Stream Transcript
Update 16 Preview Stream Transcript
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.
Update 16 Preview Stream April 30, 2015
The team starts out by introducing themselves. Present today are Community Manager Andy “Frelorn” Cataldo, Senior Content Designer Jeff "MadeOfLions" Libby (MoL), Systems Designer Trevor "Jinjaah"McEwan, and Senior Content Designer Ben "DrOctothorpe" Schneider (DrO) with Jacob "QuarterMasterU" (QU) running the camera.
We start with talking about the story in U16 with MadeOfLions.
Where are we in the story? We are right after the battle of Pelargir. Aragorn and the army of the dead have successfully reclaimed the city and defeated the corsair threat; the corsairs of Umbar are no more. When this update begins, we need to figure out what to do with the corsair fleet essentially. Aragorn has an idea that he can use the fleet to sail to Minas Tirith and get there in time to save the day. But there is a bit of a wrinkle to this plan: if the word gets out and the enemies know that these aren't corsairs sailing over the river that could cause major problems. One of the first objectives that the players will have when they start this part of the epic will be to make sure no one has heard or word of this victory has not gotten out. You will help out the Grey Company in Pelargir and ready Aragorn for departure before taking your leave of him.
Frelorn: Lets talk about the regions that players are going to be getting into in Update 16, so that will be Jeff and Ben aka "MadeofLions (MoL) and DrOctothorpe (DrO)".
DrO: So the first half of Update 16 we make our way through Eastern Gondor which covers Upper Lebennin and cross through Lossarnach until we get right up against the wall surrounding Pelennor Fields and Minas Tirith. We can start on that journey before we talk about whats to come.
MoL: Since we split Lebennin in two, Lebennin is the land of five streams so we basically covered three of the five rivers last time. So this time we are going to see the Sirith and the Erui, the Erui is interesting because this is where Castamir the Usurper met his end and Eldacar came back from the North and Castamir died at the crossings. There might be plot points involved...
DrO: To give just a little bit of a hint there are river maidens associated with the five rivers in the back mythology of this land and we met some of them and we might meet more of them. We are excited to be able to finish telling that story. One of things that is happening in the lands as you go through them is all of the people that are not soldiers are getting ready to fight against the enemy in Minas Tirith and the land surrounding it have come south to sort of safe areas in both Lossarnarch and Lebennin. We see a couple of small townships and fastnesses, mainly Tuladen and Imloth Melui where the elderly and young have sought harbor.
MoL: This is an interesting place to go because all of these refugees, many of them have fled from Minas Tirith, so as you're talking to these refugees you will be hearing word of what they saw as they were leaving. One of the things you will keep hearing about from them is that they saw Osgilliath on fire, smoke in the air, basically war is right in front of the white city. These are the people that as they fled are bringing word of what they have seen so you're going to need to investigate and find out what you can do to help on your way there.
DrO: Other big ticket items that may be of interest are that we have placed Denethor the Steward of Gondor's two sisters in these regions as sort of the foreshadowing of personalities that tie into things to come. They are named Vanyalos(sp) and Turnlos(sp) and as you meet them you find two very different personalities, we've woven a whole historical love triangle and a set of relationships. Vanyalos is the wife of Forlong the Fat who by the time we get there he has marched off to war. He is the lord of Lossarnach and much loved of his people and one imagines much loving of feasts.
MoL: Its interesting to talking about Denethor's sisters in that its possible that some of the traits that Denethor has that we as readers of the book know, some of these personality traits might appear in one or the other sisters.
Now we can move on to Osgiliath
DrO: Well lets start by crossing the river, so we have been accompanying Angor (sp) the Fearless. He is sort of your assignment from Aragorn as you head off and you come as far as the wall and you've got to cross the river. Timeline-wise he doesn't get that far, so we have to make you stop and send you across the river to help out the Rangers of Ithilien. We should take some pains to point out a few times we are south of the crossroads here and we are meeting rangers that are not the same ones that Frodo and Samwise meet.
MoL: The window on the west is quite a bit to the north. The idea here is that in South Ithilien the rangers almost certainly had other hidden fastnesses, one of which I think we might currently be heading to (in the video). This one is Bar Hurin, which is the ancestral home of the stewards. This is where Denethor and his family hails from many many years ago.
DrO: So you arrive and you find the rangers are as you know them from the books: a small group of fearless men who step in and out of the shadows and attack the enemy from behind. You have to work a bit to earn their trust and they are actually searching for the same thing that you are, which is trying to figure out where Faramir has gotten himself to.
MoL: There are conflicting reports as to where Faramir has gotten himself to. There was a lot of fighting in Osgiliath and people aren't entirely sure.
DrO: We readers of the book have an idea, but the people here in game that were sort of behind him they know that he was in Osgiliath and that things were not going well in Osgiliath, so we have reason for pause and concern. So this leads us to what Frelorn asked us to talk about, which is Osgiliath.
MoL: I suppose its not too much of a spoiler to say that there is an army in Osgiliath [and that] it’s not our army. There are Haradrim and Easterlings and Mumak's (Oliphaunts). There are archers on top of them and those are all things that will try to kill you and likely step on you as well.
First Video Clip ends here due to sound issues-http://www.twitch.tv/lotrostream/v/4538258 the next video clip for the second half when sound was fixed is found here -http://www.twitch.tv/lotrostream/v/4538789
DrO: We can basically jump into Osgiliath now. As we mentioned, the army of the enemy has just basically taken the entire city back - they have had half the city for a long time.
MoL: This has kind of happened throughout history. Osgiliath has gone back and forth a number of times. This is just the most recent and pretty frightening occasion of this, since people are missing and we don't know where they are.
DrO: The last back-and-forth has just happened, and when we arrive, some of the rangers have just retreated to deep places under the city; there are culverts where they are hiding. When you find them, you are hoping that they know where Faramir is, and the answer is they don't actually know either. So we began our search creeping through the ruins of an occupied city. This is where we decided to stage our three-instance cluster.
Instance Cluster Information by Ben aka DrOctothorpe (DrO)
DrO: We are very pleased to be bringing back to LOTRO a classic instance cluster that is basically following the path of the search for Faramir and what happens in Osgiliath prior to our arrival. It begins down in those culverts. The rangers are just sort of hiding underneath the surface, but you go deeper as you can guess it’s not good things down there. At the end of this instance (Sunken Labyrinth), you catch a glimpse of a mysterious figure who appears to be a ranger and who you suspect might know something about what you're searching for. So we have a quest chain that the instance cluster is wrapped in, and in that you follow this figure and eventually find yourself in the second instance which is The Ruined City where you are pursuing him in and among the enemy troops throughout the ruined streets of the city. You don't quite get a glimpse of him there - he manages to stay ahead of you, although you learn some things and catch up with him at the end. Finally, you ascend out of the sewers into the Dome of Stars for the final six-person instance - the first two mentioned are three-mans. The final one, we bring back some old faces of maybe unfriendly aspect and we had a lot of fun making this one. We are going to show you a distant glimpse of the Dome of Stars itself - the Dome was the ancient capital of Gondor and it’s been in ruins for a long time. It is still partially there and it literally straddles the river. The city of Osgilliath sits on either side of the river.
MoL: The Dome of Stars was smashed by Castamir during the time of the kin strife. It was left in this state pretty much. Some serious stuff will go down up there.
Frelorn: Our wonderful QuartermasterU is steering us along and showing us the sights and sounds of this area. Now its us again.
DrO: So Im sure some of you are wondering about the kind of loot you can win from the instances. I’ll give the quick version for those who don't want spoiling. We have a whole smattering of nice stuff for the Tier 1 including offhander weapons. We have set gear for completing Tier 2 - they come in random drops. For the elite players that complete the challenge, we will let you save up for five-slot essence gear. Which will create some players of truly terrifying power ... terrifying mostly to us. And the armies of Sauron.
Frelorn: We aren't taking questions yet, but I do want to share a question I saw mentioned. What is a rough estimate of time to complete these instances?
DrO: By the time players have learned how the six-man instance works in this case, we are figuring south of 40 minutes, but not by a lot. The small fellowship ones probably 15-20 minutes at least.
Legendary Item Imbuement
Frelorn: So next on our list of things is Legendary Item Imbuement, which I know you guys have been giving great feedback on the forums about and I'm going to turn it over to Trevor aka Jinjaah on the forums.
Jinjaah: A quick summary for those who don't know Imbuement is: an alternate way of advancement for level 100 players. It allows legacies to grow beyond a point of potency than there was and to grow in the future. One of the things we wanted to do with imbuement legendary items was we didn't like the idea of legendary items being a grind to level and then destroy to grind a new one. It didn't feel very legendary. So now we have created a new system now that you have created this imbued legendary item you could take this thing all the way to Mordor if you wanted to. So thats kind of the jist of it. There are various things that go into it as you will see on live. Ages change the amount of unlocks you get to start [with], as well as to where your dps legacy will start; progress from your dps legacy will transfer over. So right now, we are looking at a non-imbued legendary item, a very nice spear of the first age.
So when we wanted to do imbuement, we wanted legacies to be able to extend forever but not all of our legacies carry over into imbuement. The legendary item imbuement panel will show you what legacies will carry over, and you can hover over to cross-compare what is there. There are no points you allocate to specific legacies; it will grow as it gains ixp, [and] the bars across the bottom show how far it has to go to the next tier. On the right side, you can see what your current tier is out of how many tiers there are available. When you hover over it, you can see how many tiers there are to unlock. When you hover over the legacy xp bar, this shows you the current state/tier, what the current tier gives you, what the next tier gives you, and what the max tier gives you. You can use this to judge when you're replacing a legacy to see if there are some legacies that have secondary bonuses and decide if this is what you want to have on your weapon. It’s got some really awesome tooltips.
DrO: To make things as clear as humanly possible: on any one of these legacies, as you play the game you earn up to 25 tiers on these legacies. If you want to go above 25 tiers, you're going to need to do something to unlock those. With U16 you can unlock another 10. There are a number of items you will be able to find in-game or go through mithril coins. It’s 29 mithril coins to increase maximum tier. The idea is that, in future updates, we will extend that upper limit so that this weapon is something that can grow with you to Mordor and beyond.
Jinjaah: Yep there is no more recycling, no more reforging - this is your weapon to carry into the future.
Questions and Answers
Can we get imbued legacy scrolls in-game at the moment?
Jinjaah: The normal way of getting legacy replacement scrolls has been reworked for Imbuement. One scroll that acts as a legacy box: you use it on the item and you have a giant list of legacies you can choose from. I believe we hooked some up to the content, I believe in the epic/questing.
Can you post an updated official legacy change chart when U16 goes live?
That depends on if Jinjaah ever gets it to Frelorn... we've been asking/heckling him for that.
Guardian AOE targets - will they be increased from 5?
Jinjaah: We talked about increasing it to 7. I'm not sure if we did that or just talked about it off the top of my head. I'm not sure if its going into 16 or 16.1, we had a lot of discussions like these for the individual classes, so trying to remember it off the top of my head is hard. I can check and let you know. If we didn't do it in 16, it means that we are currently monitoring it for 16.1, which will be a large batch of imbuement fixes, and that sort of stuff could definitely be one of the bullet points.
Is it time yet to update us on the current status of the Osgiliath PvMP map investigations? If not, when will we next hear an update on this?
Frelorn: Its funny you should mention that. Investigations have definitely... intensified a bit, we will say Wheels are turning, things are being looked at, a meeting … some dedicated meetings on it have happened. As soon as we are ready to give more information on this post-U16 you will be the first to know. Right now the focus is on Update 16.
Since this might be our last LI's, will cosmetic weapons ever happen?
DrO: Its definitely something we want to do. We are investigating the possibility. It is definitely not something that's going to fit in U16.
Do I have to buy an expansion for Osgiliath?
QU: Quest Pack East Gondor will 795 turbine points and it will be in the store day of launch.
Any Mithril Coin sales coming up for U16 release?
QU: Maybe…
Why the loot rule change? It only encourages some people to take advantage of others. It's hard enough to get good players to group, let alone ones who will honor the "old rules". Why go backward with this?
DrO: So there are a couple of answers. One is that we came at the instance cluster from kind of a blast-from-the-past angle. We saw loot rule as a way to get back to the classic Lord of the Rings Online feel. We like that you get to see what everyone is getting; it's a bit of an intangible. It is not the first thing you think of when you get loot, but we believe that you feel better about everything you're doing when you have a better sense of what everyone is getting. It was getting to more of a sense of “I'm in my own little bubble” with the individual loot system. Which in some senses is great, but we hope more people will try out the master loot option when they can and make sure that their fellowship leaders are trusted and trustworthy. We are investigating ways to mitigate potential downsides; we actually believe that there are at least as many upsides in the long run overall.
Episodic content: Is it coming with U16?
MoL: No but it is coming after U16.. but more information later. Stay tuned!
Will the marks/medallions price for Scrolls of Empowerment go down? The current prices will encourage Sambrog farming all over the place.
Jinjaah: Thats something that we are looking at. There will be low and slow changes on those; we don't accidentally want to go too far, but we will be monitoring that over the next couple of dot updates.
Will there be an update about virtue traits? And will there be older mounts and newer available to buy?
Jinjaah: Virtue Trait updates no, but there are some trait updates in that some of the legacies we needed to remove for imbuement. We built the points back into traits, but in terms of mounts and stores and such...
QU: So currently not slated to have any new mounts in the store for U16. However, it is something that has been talked about, and there were some questions in last week’s livestream, where people were talking about dyeable appearances to support their warsteeds. We are talking about it in ongoing conversations.
Any news on server transfer information?
Frelorn: No news yet. Let’s get through Update 16 first.
Can we go see Minas Morgul?
That would be great, but not in this update.
Frelorn - which will come first - episodic content or the PVMP update? And can we confirm officially that there indeed *will be* a PVMP update?
You will have to wait and see.
Server upgrades: what exactly is being upgraded with this hardware upgrade?
Frelorn: Everything! So we will be moving to a new data center, which [as] we have shown with one of our other titles, has improved latency with individuals. We will be moving the European servers back to Europe, and while all that's being done everything is being put on new hardware.
Are you completely done going through the Player's Council applications?
Frelorn: No, I’m still completely buried in them. Update 16 took precedence over this. We had to make sure Dev Diaries and release notes were done. I'm digging through them - there are literally hundreds upon hundreds of them. I’m getting through them as fast as I can. If you don't get an email, assume you didn't get in, because I'm not going to email everybody to just do a thank you for trying. If you get in, hooray, if you didn't, then try again next year.
Now that West, Central, and East Gondor are out, are there plans to make a "Gondor Quest Pack" Bundle in-store?
QU: I don't see why not.
MoL: We could call it the South Kingdom!
Imbued Legacy Replacement Scroll: the ways of acquiring them mentioned were all from quests, so I assume one time. Will there be a more consistent way to get more?
Jinjaah: Yes. For U16 we are patching them to quests, but for 16.1 we are talking about attaching them to loot drops as well as potentially putting them on a barter vendor.
Have the drop rates for Star-Lit Crystals and Crystals of Remembrance been increased to compensate for their higher demand?
Jinjaah: They were changed but they weren't changed dramatically. It goes back to what I was saying of there will be more tweaks. We are going to slowly ramp them up until we feel they are in a good spot and that will be over time.
Can we get level 100 crafting recipes please?
We were just talking about this today; stay tuned post-Update 16.
How is the PvMP map coming?
After Update 16.
Is there a lockout on how many times we can do the new instances each day?
Jinjaah: No.
Update 17 Preview Stream Transcript
Update 17 Preview Stream Transcript
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.
The team starts out by introducing themselves. Present today on the stream from right side of screen to left are Athena “Vyvyanne” Peters the Executive Producer, Game Systems Lead Engineer Leo "Ransroth" Zelevinsky, Content Designer Ryan “Pinion” Penk, Senior Content Designer Jeff "MadeOfLions" Libby (MoL), Design Lead Ben "DrOctothorpe" Schneider (DrO) with Jacob “QuarterMasterU” working the camera and Community Manager Andy “Frelorn” Cataldo helping with Q&A and narrating.
Epic Book Quests
MoL: This is Volume 4, Book 4, Siege of the White City, in which we will get to Minas Tirith. I can hardly believe it. I mean I've been working on Lord of the Rings for almost 10 years now, and when I started there was Archet and a little bit of the Chetwood and now we are in Gondor getting to Minas Tirith. It's amazing and I love it. In terms of the story we are probably in March 13, 3019, of the Third Age. Osgiliath is lost, if you have been playing the epic story up to this point you know things in Osgiliath were really bad at the end of the last update. The city's defenders are pretty much routed and an army out of Mordor has pretty much taken it under the command of Gothmog who is essentially the second in command to the Witch-King of Angmar, who serves Sauron.
MoL: At the beginning of Book 4 the players are going to need to retreat across the fields of Pelennor to get to Minas Tirith. It’s going to be escaping from the city and the armies of Mordor are going to follow you. That brings us to Minas Tirith, the White City, built by Anorien towards the end of the Second Age. Anorien was the brother of Isildur who you may have heard of, when he built the city it was called Minas Anor, the Tower of the Sun. There was also a Tower of the Moon, Minas Ithil. You may know it by its current name Minas Morgul because it’s been taken by the enemy. Osgiliath used to be the capital of Gondor but now since Osgiliath has changed hands so many times over the course of history. That now Minas Tirith, renamed when Minas Ithill fell, to Minas Tirith the Tower of Guard. Essentially this is where the Men of Gondor are keeping an eye on the dark land basically across the river. This brings us to the city itself.
Minas Tirith
DrO: As you can see we are in the city on the first tier, the city has seven tiers. We have a great map that our team put together. So to pick up where Made of Lions left off this was originally a fortress and as it turned into the capital city they filled it in with residences and everything you would find in a city. One of the things that was built was this giant pier or ships prow that looks over the top of the city and forms sort of its defining feature. If we run around a little we can see in this main courtyard inside the gates all of the soldiers of Gondor gathered. They all arrived a couple of days ago, in the books they describe how the boy Bergil and Pippin get to watch them filing in and they see Prince Imrahil and Lord Forlong and a lot of people that we have heard about as we have played through the region content. People who in the last couple of updates had already marched off, well they are all here and all their soldiers are here. As you may remember it’s a lot of men but not as many as they had been hoping for. When we go to look above we will see the enemy host surrounding the city and it’s a scary, intimidating mass of enemies for the men that we have.
MoL: Building Minas Tirith has been one of the really interesting things to do because for the last three updates or so we have been talking about Minas Tirith in the game. You have basically been encountering people that have been evacuated from Minas Tirith. When you go to Dol Amoroth you hear like all these soldiers left and they were marching to Minas Tirith. They are going to go defend Gondor and so however many months it’s been it’s amazing to finally get here.
DrO: Of course many of us and many of you I'm sure were looking forward for years to getting here because it is such a monumental feature of the storyline.
MoL: Now it is so funny to be able to finally make a quest in here and to realize with seven levels of the city to play in essentially you have to learn your way around. You have to figure out where everything is which is an interesting and fun challenge for us and I hope for you guys too. One more interesting thing about the design of the city is that each of the seven levels is connected by ramps and passages which lead up to the next one. These ramps are on alternating sides of the city for purposes of defense during a siege. It was constructed in such a way that for an enemy army which we will be seeing shortly, for an enemy army to assault the city they basically like have to turn left and walk a whole bunch and pass through a tunnel and then go back the other way. I think it is smartly made for defensive purposes.
DrO:I think we have come up from the first tier to seventh tier and the white tree which died under care of one of the stewards.
MoL: Do we want to talk about the tree? So, Professor Tolkien had a favorite tree it was at the Oxford Botanical Gardens and we thought it would be a nice homage to model the white tree here at Minas Tirith. The design of the tree here is inspired by that tree which has since been cut down for health reasons.
DrO: It is really worth stepping back and taking a look to say that we have sort of made a labor of love out of building this city the thing is huge. As you get to wandering through it you'll see that we sort of spared no cost in adding in details including the people walking around. There is a handful of taverns that you can find and almost everything else you can imagine. This city lives and breathes and we are all actually really proud of it. As you can see the skies are still dark. If you can recall in the storyline the Dawnless Day came over this part of the world some days ago and it will remain a little while longer. So we get to see the gloomy version of the world at this moment. As you can see on the red skies in the distance is where Mordor and the enemy lies.
DrO: So we would like to make one last stop before we move on to our next topic, which is the Dome of the Sun. We are first of all proud of it and it’s where the seat of Gondor makes its battle plans to sort of step back in the story for a moment. Gandalf arrived a few days ago with Pippin and Prince Imrahil arrived so we are entering the stage now where Faramir has come in wounded and Denethor is in the process of getting wrapped up in his grief. Gandalf who we will see named as Mithrandir which is what Gondor calls him and Prince Imrahil are taking control of things. Which we will see both here and in the Epic Battles we have to show.
MoL: Denethor would normally be sitting with the council but he is preoccupied with his grief so he has left it to others to manage the city for the most part right now.
DrO: If we look on the dais you can see our scale model.
MoL: There is kind of an interesting design back and forth on this model in particular. When it was originally requested I pictured kind of a table with a model on it that the council of Gondor would be like planning the battle strategy and then it ended up being more table than model. So you have a really neat version of the white city but it ended up being very small on the table so one of our artists had the idea of well lets just get rid of the table and make the model bigger. So now we have like this really interesting center piece for the Dome of the Sun which is certainly better than the version on the table before.
Vyvyanne: So I just have to point out here that we managed to build not one but two Minas Tiriths for this update there is your evidence right there.
DrO: One is slightly smaller than the other of course.
Vyvyanne: Yep just a little bit.
DrO: The stretch of time that we have to tell at this point because the story gets very closely packed. The sort of final moment that we depict in this update is the assault that ends the Siege of Minas Tirith. We decided to tell that story through two Epic Battles. I think this is a great time to let Ryan “Pinion” talk us through them.
Epic Battles
Pinion: So the first epic battle is called the Defence of Minas Tirith and it is sort of the opening assault by Mordor and the axe-wielding Easterlings that are mentioned in Return of the King. So that sort of begins at the start of them shelling the city. They haven't really made a full scale assault just yet. You kind of get there just in time with Mithrandir and you get right into the battle with all the lords of Gondor that you have come into contact with in Minas Tirith. Just a reminder that Mithrandir is Gandalf. He has a couple of names. So I think we will show a couple of minutes of this. The audio for Gandalf put together by Ransroth is wonderful you just can't hear it right now since the sound is turned down. This is definitely the cleaner of the two battles things definitely get way out of hand with the second battle. In the second battle you will come against siege engines that approach the wall and and actually participate in destroying them. There are many side quests and boss matches tucked into these also Epic Foes and more.
MoL: These are incredibly technical I've seen Ryan “Pinion” screen while he has been working on these and there is a lot going on.
Vyvyanne: I think these really epitomize the biggest challenge we had coming into Minas Tirith not only building this massive city that people always hear about but is rarely ever seen in any kind of visual format. We also had to tell this tale of these people's Epic Battle quite literally and we didn't want you to have to walk through the same story a million times so we had to find ways to shake things up a bit. I'm not going to go too much into that but you should definitely hop into it with us when it’s released and check out that.
Pinion: A lot of the side quests that we have in these epic battles are dealing with stuff straight from the books, some liberties taken here and there but we wanted to give you the full experience of what you might have seen at the siege of Gondor.
DrO: Yes that is a fell-beast flying in the distance we should get a good glimpse at it and the battle below. You can't fall off. Might get shanked though as QuartermasterU about gets himself impaled on a grappling hook. You get to see the enemy preparing as it is mentioned in the books them digging trenches and setting fire in them and all these siege machines ready. We had to figure out how to pull all that together and honestly we are still a little surprised ourselves with how we got it to all come through. So we actually have a lot of the personalities that you have heard about and may have met on the battlefield a bit here. You can find Forlong, Parthadan and many others [unable to catch all the names mentioned] so more strong backup and some really nice lore moments for the people here for the story.
DrO: So the first epic battle The Defence of Minas Tirith is solo/duo and three man and the second epic battle is solo/duo and six man. One of the things that came out when we did Pelargir was people mentioning they would like a three man.
Pinion: Within about 40ish seconds we should see a Siege Tower approach the wall.
DrO: Not that Pinion has the timings memorized or anything.
Pinion: No not at all. You will know it’s coming though Imrahil calls it out. So now you have to actually go out on the towers and bring it down and fortunately the enemies were nice enough to leave powder kegs out there for you to do it with.
Pinion: So now we can go to the second battle and it becomes obvious that they have repaired Grond since the events of the last book and it’s now rolling toward the gates of Minas Tirith and everyone is doing whatever they can to stop it.
DrO: Grond as a refresher is a head shaped battering ram with evil defenses.
MoL: It should be noted that we run across Grond in the end of the last volume but this volume is an on ramp so you don't have to have done the previous ones to start it. Though I encourage you to play all of them. Sauron thinks he’s about to win so he has opened the floodgates and this is gonna be it as far as he knows. He hasn't read Lord of the Rings.
Pinion: Our world builders had fun destroying Minas Tirith after it was built. As this battle progresses you'll see Grond slowly make his way toward the gates.
DrO: So we have tried to make this as real an experience as possible for LoTRO. This is the bigger longer battle so we will say if you want to see the rest you'll have to play.
Ransroth: I have to say I'm very excited to actually be a part of the stream this time I'm usually the one helping with the stream or watching it this time I'm a part of it. One of the things I want to talk about is some of the tech work I got to do was making it to where we can actually see Grond while we are on the wall. Generally when things are very far away you can't see them but that was unfortunate for Grond so we fixed that.
Cosmetic Weapon Updates
Ransroth: One of the things people have been asking to do cosmetic weapon wise is to pretend to not be wearing any weapons at all especially our role players who would prefer to not have their mace showing equipped while they are walking around the inn. So we added a little eyeball icon to the shield and weapon. It works similarly if you uncheck the eyeball it will look like you’re not wearing it in the game, it works a little differently in that it will still show on your cosmetic interface but not in the game world. If you get into combat it will show though but not while you’re walking around not fighting anything. When we first started to do cosmetic weapons we decided to see what it would look like if we let any weapon look like any other weapon and we just opened the floodgates and just sent our QA team after it and they said that looks horrible. So if you were using a halberd and had it looking like a sword it didn't look right. So we decided to say in the beginning if your using a sword then you have to have a sword cosmetically. In this release we are moving more to the freedom side. So if you’re wearing a sword you can cosmetically equip a mace and it will look fine we also were able to make it where say if you’re wanting to wear a fish-slapper like QuartermasterU is you can now do that. There are still some restrictions if you are using a two-handed weapon you can't pretend to be using a one-handed weapon. Two-handed weapons come in groups and there is a release note that describes what those are but I think this is now a compromise. We did fix it to where you can no longer fish while using a cosmetic weapon because that looked pretty silly.
Ransroth: One of the other things we did was make it to where you can turn off your combat music in the combat options so if you want to have just the nice calm music all the time. The other user feature we looked into about turning the names off above peoples heads. What we ended up doing was giving you the ability to control the opacity of the names. We also did a bug fix for helping some of the instances that were freezing.
MoL: One of the quickest to mind was Bingo learning to swim.
Crafting
DrO: There is a new tier of crafting and there will be a dev diary out about it. The dev diary will be Monday morning hopefully. New stack sizes for crafting as well.
Crafting Nodes
We have now made it to where you can harvest nodes/scholar items etc while on a horse. If that affects immersion you are still welcome to get off the horse.
Q&A
Frelorn: I will ask that we try and keep the questions to stuff coming up in Update 17 but we will try and answer a couple of non 17 things if we feel they are relevant.
Q: When does Update 17 go live?
A: Within the next couple of weeks when we nail down a date we will be sure to announce it. We are in heavy polish mode at the moment.
Q: Is the level cap remaining at 100 with Update 17
A: Yes it is but the imbued legendary item cap is being raised so you will be able to make your LI stronger and more powerful.
Q:We see that you have Big Battles for Update 17. Will we ever be getting a raid again?
A:It is a possibility, it is something we are looking into and we want to give the ability for the players to come in as a larger group of friends and really enjoy the experience. It is just finding the right place in the story to tell that type of story. It is definitely on our plate and we are finding a way to do that in coming updates but I'm not going to give specifics on when just yet. -Vyvyanne
Speaking as a fan of Lord of the Rings there are places and things ahead that would certainly qualify. -MoL
There are things coming up for sure where a raid will be completely appropriate, -Vyvyanne
Q: Beyond Update 17 are you planning any more updates for the rest of the year.
A: Not for 2015, so basically we will have Update 17 and probably a few patches and hotfixes but after that anything will be in the 2016 time frame. Bingo will keep going into next year.
Q: Will Gandalf have voice acted lines in the Big Battles or will it mostly be written text?
A: It is mostly voice acting but there are some written lines. There are a lot of voice acted lines throughout this update we didn't want to spare it on such big moments.
Q:Are there any changes to the Stars of Merit for the empowerment scrolls and crystals?
A: The new Epic Battles will yield more Stars of Merit than older Epic Battles so if you play the new stuff you will get more and have more to spend. There have been changes since the last build on beta.
Q:Will we ever be able to list more than 30 items in the auction house?
A: If that is something that players are interested in we can definitely look at. - Ransroth
Frelorn: I can tell you guys this ahead of time because I am seeing a lot of PvMP questions, our main guy that works on PvMP couldn't be here today he had car problems to take care of.
Vyvyanne: I do want to clarify we are not dropping PvMP it is something we are still working on. We are in discussions about stuff we will be doing for the next year. PvMP is an ongoing process.
Q: Have they already or when will the virtues cap be increased?
A: DrO: We can definitely look at that, it’s not in 17 is the short answer.
Q:When will the hunter get heavy armour and a machine gun?
A: “massive laughter” That may be immersion breaking.
Q:When will Made of Lions get a substantial raise?
A: Vyvyanne: we work on that every year.
Q: Any changes to loot drops from the classic Tier 2 raids?
A: For U16 instances I know we added morgul crests to the base tier 2 quests so you will get one even when you run it without challenge on tier 2. I think we added a barter for scrolls of empowerment for Morgul crests as well.
Q:There is a new crafting level will there be an increase in the crafting guilds too?
A: Not in update 17, we did level but not guilds this time.
Q:When will we get war pigs?
A: Various comments about wanting war pigs. Jokes being made by Frelorn and a few that they would love them too.
Q: Are we getting more Class Trait Points with Update 17? How many?
A: At least 2 you get for the big battles.
Q:The Update 16 instances are tailored to tactical and ranged dps as opposed to melee classes are there more plans/fixes to allow more people to get involved in the instances?
A: I don't know if we have plans for the U16 instances but I know that’s something we always keep in mind for balancing new spaces. Coming as an MMO Player that primarily has always played melee classes I know that kind of pain so I will keep an eye on that in future things. - Pinion
In the current epic battles especially in the fellowship versions everyone will need to be busy if you want to platinum it. There will be plenty of roles for everyone, class roles change in epic battles and we are aware of that and we have been working to move epic battles towards a place where your actual class role has a bigger place. - DrO
Q: During boss fights or big fights there are three to four lines of debuffs on a boss or creature, we noticed that there is more lag. Are there any plans to fix this?
A: We are always looking at how to make the game perform better and I do have an item on my rather large to-do list that is to look at whether having more lines of debuffs contributes to lag as strong as it used to unfortunately we are just really busy doing other things. It can be fixed sort of on the system side try to put fewer of those debuffs on skills it’s a lot of work or fixing it on the engineering side make it not hurt so much. It is on our list. -Ransroth
Q:Are we moving straight to Mordor or are we going to move in other directions as we press forward?
A: This is definitely going to be a stay tuned answer let’s say there is business in the Kingdom of Gondor around Minas Tirith that is not yet finished. It will take us a while to finish it. - DrO
We have a no spoilers note on our door which you can't see which is why we are dancing around the question a bit. There are a lot of exciting things going on in the next week in the chronology of the story. - MoL
The next week will not take just a single update. - DrO
Mordor will be in our sights though - Vyvyanne
We are working hard not to miss any parts of the story that we all love. - DrO
Q:Can we jump off of the citadel like Denethor did?
A: You are going to have to try it and find out. - DrO
Q:Will there be a non-gloomy or less gloomy version of Minas Tirith after the battle?
A: You'll have to wait and see.
Q: Definitely not in Update 17 but can you make a dog/hound for Hunters like Lore-Masters have pets?
A: We can think about that.
Closing Notes:
Vvyanne: Definitely come out and play the Siege of Minas Tirith and see how gorgeous it is. I am looking forward to seeing festivals thrown by roleplayers in the garden it’s such a fantastic space.
Ransroth: I already have my lvl 100 ready and can't wait to go to Minas Tirith.
Pinion: I am also excited to see Minas Tirith and can't wait to see the epic story and epic battles.
MoL: One of my favorite characters has kinda gotten short shrift and it’s Denethor. So I’m excited because this epic book kind of gives you an insight into Denethor's frame of mind. He is living right on the edge of the black land and there is an army that is coming to do the final decisive strike on the people of Middle-earth and he is the guy that is responsible for trying to stop it and he doesn't know what he can do. I think it is great and I am super excited for this part of the story in particular and I'm very proud of it.
DrO: These guys have said it as well as I possibly could have we are super excited to be taking you guys into Minas Tirith and we hope that you are looking forward to it too.
