Twenty Questions with the LOTRO Dev Team

[Lurkerinthemist]

We view it as a question of hammers. Is a hammer a bad thing? Nope. Can a hammer be used to do bad things? Yes. Does this mean banning hammers? No. Does this mean investigating ways to make people who do bad things with hammers wish they hadn't? Yes.




I'll adredd this directly. Yes. Intentionally. Because it is impossible to have a conversation with out all parties involved present. So, yes there is. There are also PvMP players there. They have all been part of this discussion.

While I appreciate players think using their own data is revealing and insightful, the reality is we did a very focused and deliberate test where we did not tell the people looking at the data who was who. Only to look at the data and tell us who the rank farmer was. They couldn't. In fact the singled out the full time PvMPers because their renown/infamy accumulation was orders of magnitude higher than the known rank farmer in the group. In fact the known rank farmer was dead in the middle of the pack. Completely unremarkable.

If we had used the players 'simple' version of how to do things we would have banned people who did absolutely nothing wrong and never touched the one who had admitted to doing it. Sounds like a terrible policy and course of action to me.
.

Not everything always has to be automated. First, there is a POLICY and then there is a PRACTICE. Once you get those down, then you can look at automation.

Declaring rank farming to be against the CoC would be step 1, along with providing a definition of what it means to rank farm.

Step 2 is to take player reports of rank farming seriously and investigate. Maybe that run of data you provided did not highlight the behavior, but using several data points, including observation, might. Consistently investigating and taking action against reported players will have at least a minor effect on the problem as people realize this is taken seriously.

Griefing is probably going to be the next objection, to which I say, grief at your own risk. Multiple false or unproven reports should not be tolerated for rank farming any more than they would be tolerated for any other behavior.

You may not catch all rank farmers through data, but certainly the most egregious should stand out. Someone who makes 100k points on a day when the top earning players made a tenth of that says something.

[LethalLethality]

Was kinda hoping the big question regarding Mounted Combat slingshotting/rubberbanding would be addressed. If it was being worked on or if it's something that can't be fixed.

Mounted Combat is extremely fun when it works (less than 10% of the time) but extremely frustrating when you're warping all across the field, whether you have 50 ping or 150. That's kinda unforgiveable when 1) Most of Rohan is built around MC and 2)Western Rohan is more than likely going to be built around it too.

For the many players who are extremely frustrated by MC, not fixing it, and making it a central focus of your next expansion is asking for a large decrease in interest and therefore, a decrease in people who want to buy it.

Or has then been addressed in the past? If so, apolgies for bringing it up here.

[whheydt]

Just a couple of points of curiosity...

Re: Q15 (other games played). Are any of the Minecraft players doing so on Raspberry Pis?

And while we're at it...any particular reason none of Turbine's other games show up on the partial list of other games played?

[Eldarian_Grace]

you've probebly thought of it already. but no matter how you try and find a way to fix rank farming, there will always be those that slip the net anc cheat. maybe it's not about banning them, instead making it much harder to do.

could you look into updating the rating system instead?

here's a quick idea I had anyway.

Rating information
- Rating goes between 2.00 and 0.00p
- rating directly changes the amount of renon/informy opposing players earn.
for example, killing a player with 2.00 rating multiplies glory earnt by x2
killing a player with 0.00 rating always drops no glory
- each time you are killed your rating goes down 0.10
- getting a KB on another player increases your rating by 0.05
- participating in killing another player increases your rating by -0.01
- taking a keep increases your rating by 0.30
- taking an OP increases your rating by 0.25
- killing a DoF boss increases your rating by 0.20 - your rating does not effect what you earn, only what you drop.
making rank farming harder
you can ignore most of what I put and focus on 2 new factors. after being killed >20 times without killing another player in any form, that charactor will no longer drop glory points. the obvious way to get around this is to make a new freever every 10 kills. how long do you think that takes? how much harder is that? going that one step further it's be much easier to track who is rank farming if all there kills are from now deleted reavers...

How does this effect the rest of PvP?
I'm sure many of you could pick holes in this idea better than I could. but mostly, this would cut down of farming graveyards very quickly. however I don't think it'd be that hard for the adverage player to stay around a 10:1 kill death ratio (not KB btw) to still give the enemy some glory points. I would make "noobs" slightly less of a target as they probably have low rating regularly.

I also put in a heavy bonus to your rating when taking an OP and keep. your rating does not change how much glory you earn, only how much you drop. so this actually rewards players for fighting back after losing a keep instead of the other way round. high standing PvP players who can keep there rating high would be much more of a prize goal, and would be interesting how this would pan out

what do you think?

Sounds interesting, looks like it would significantly reduce or stop problem. But if everyone has this rating will it add to server load/lag? How is this visible to other player or not at all? Maybe copy and paste in suggestions or pvp for some actual replies from PvPers (ie. What do i know?)

[bohbashum]

Griefing is probably going to be the next objection, to which I say, grief at your own risk. Multiple false or unproven reports should not be tolerated for rank farming any more than they would be tolerated for any other behavior.

then GM's might be throwing bans/punishment at players who report non maliciously, but just uninformed.

I'm sure the GM's don't want a chunk of there time wasted being a political weapon for creeps and freeps to flame each other (ofc it's not always just creep vs freeps, just example)

Sounds interesting, looks like it would significantly reduce or stop problem. But if everyone has this rating will it add to server load/lag? How is this visible to other player or not at all? Maybe copy and paste in suggestions or pvp for some actual replies from PvPers (ie. What do i know?)

a rating system is already in-game. although it's very confusing and I've asked around before how it works any got lodes of explinations all countering each other. if anything, this would lessen lag as it'd be much more straight forward. you could even take out the NPC and keep part and just have the system balanced fully on kills and deaths.

also, the cosmetic star system was to show players rank to others. however this just made "star huggers" and made bad action with people doing everything they could to get cheap kills to keep there stars. however much I love the look of the stars, I don't think they fit into rating anymore

digging up super old text, this is what the rating system was designed for and somehow changed over the years or simply not potent enough of a drop from 1.000 to 0.000

check this bit of history out
http://archive.lotro.com/gameinfo/de...me-and-fortune

The final challenge we faced with our PvMP systems was handling those who will inevitably try to exploit the system. This is, of course, an unfortunate problem that every game faces. To combat this problem, we have a system in place to reduce the benefits a player gains from defeating a specific other player the more often it happens. This means that if two players try and defeat one another over and over in order to gain rank, the gain from those defeats will get smaller and smaller. Eventually, the players will get nothing at all for defeating one another. After some time passes, the penalty will lift, allowing them to get full credit again. The intention is that players involved in normal combat will not receive any penalties.

maybe it's time to dig up that old code and revamp it so it works as intended? sounds like a possible solution if you guys are going round in circles defining rank farmers

[nayyrayy]

I have a lot of friends on my old server that are wanting to transfer to the one i'm on now because theirs is dead. any idea when transfers will be back up?

or

would there ever be any plans for server mergers?
it seems that a lot of people have left the game
leaving the people who still enjoy playing unable to do some content because they cannot find groups.

[Fredelas]

Re Q12: Deeds are a kind of quest?

Yes, behind the scenes, deeds work almost exactly the same way as quests. They can have the same kinds of prerequisites, conditions, objectives, and rewards. They are just displayed using a different UI.

[Whart]

The only question that I'm really interested in is this: given that I am according to official statements the teeniest tiniest minority of players because I have fun when I play in groups of 2-24, does Turbine want my business enough to develop interesting and thoughtful group content in the future? I honestly don't mean the question to sound snarky or provocative; I truly do want to know if the minority comprised of group players matters to the company enough to influence the development direction of the game. If I'm truly such a minority that solid, non-mounted, endgame group content is a low priority, I'd like to know that so I can choose where to invest my resources.

[Adruid]

Glad as a multiboxer to see the standing against multiboxing is not hostile :-) I think multiboxing is a great Challenge and its fun to know that it is possible to do both instances and raids either on Your own or With a few less friends :-). I also don't see the running around in ettenmoors multi-boxing being a big issue either as any player With a bit of skill can easily take out a multiboxing raid more or less single-handed... A bit of Muhammed Ali tactic and take out the boxers leader and the rest of his Group will immediatly struggle. BUT I do see the other point.. Rank Farming... But here I must agree With Sapience, I don't think its the multiboxers that would try to rank-farm.. it would make more sense that two raids that speaks With eachother on teamspeak or similar can arrange such events and that is more negative. I would happily try to take over TA or an Outpost With a multiboxed raid, and I think its doable as well if you was able to be left alone. BUT that day when there is nobody around for you to actually do this is not there very often :-).

look out for my conga-line :-)

I surely don't agree of multiboxing Avatar's for the simple reason that it's totally unrealistic and impractical to see 12 look alikes running around gobbling up everything in there path. The design should be left out of Middle Earth and put in Alien games not from this world. Tolkien never told a story with multi-boxes so listen to the K.I.S.S. factor.... keep it simple stupid...lol
Grayowl

[girlsonlygirls]

6 virtues 4 the warden ? , cuz fidelity is righteous , maybe the 6th could be a skill activation.

[pibob314]

While I appreciate players think using their own data is revealing and insightful, the reality is we did a very focused and deliberate test where we did not tell the people looking at the data who was who. Only to look at the data and tell us who the rank farmer was. They couldn't. In fact the singled out the full time PvMPers because their renown/infamy accumulation was orders of magnitude higher than the known rank farmer in the group. In fact the known rank farmer was dead in the middle of the pack. Completely unremarkable.

If we had used the players 'simple' version of how to do things we would have banned people who did absolutely nothing wrong and never touched the one who had admitted to doing it. Sounds like a terrible policy and course of action to me.

With all due respect, renown/infamy data are not the only indicators of whether someone has been rank farming. I don't think anyone is suggesting using only this kind of data to establish a burden a truth. Usually, people look for correlation and indicators in multiple data sets before drawing conclusions.

I take great offence to condescending tone regarding "players 'simple' version of how to do things". Tarring us all with the same brush, making it look as though we are making facile suggestions, then putting them down as "terrible policy", is playground politics at its worst and the educated among us see right through it.

I think all you are doing is grandstanding.

Let me set out a scenario for you. Several players report an individual, let's call him PlayerA, for rank farming. They present multiple screenshots of PlayerA killing a set of 10 unranked reavers over and over again. One player even provides a 15min video of this taking place which includes PlayerA admitting to his actions in [OOC], then claiming that nothing will be done about it so it must be acceptable behavior, hence the protestations of the community are unfounded. Indeed it can be seen from the "data", that the number of kills that PlayerA has on reavers compared to other classes, is disproportionately high when compared to the normal distribution shown by the wider community. The location ID's of the majority of his kill events are all practically in the same place and the fine scale renown gain over time is rhythmic, like a heartbeat. However, the dailiy total renown gain of PlayerA, compared to some of the top (or full-time) PvPers show that PlayerA's gains were "middle of the road".

Would there be any action taken against PlayerA? Or because one particular piece of data does not support the undeniable fact that this player has rank farmed, could no action be taken? Based on the feedback we have received in this long debate, the community has been made to believe the latter is the case. I doubt that this is your intention, but the line you have chosen to pursue can only lead me and others to believe this.

Now that is beside the point; here is the real issue. People don't want to you to come up with some infallible automated protocol that fishes out rank farmers. Of course we understand that that is practically impossible. We want you, or somebody, to make a statement whereby players can categorically know what the consequences of rank farming will be IF a burden of truth IS established. There needs to be a deterrent.

Too many times we see Turbine turning a blind-eye to morally questionable, potentially game-breaking, behavior. Not only with rank-farming, but the whole school exploiting, or the flight exploiting or whatever. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with players who participate in things like this where the go to line is always, "Turbine doesn't do anything about it so it must be fine". Furthermore, they think that because others are doing it, the MUST do it too in order to "keep up". Inaction has led to toxicity becoming more and more the norm on every single server.

I'm not asking for Turbine to become a kind of cyber police force, just make it clear that if you do bad stuff, it gets reported and there is enough proof, there will be consequences. Even retrospectively, even if you buy and spend 10k TP's a month, it shouldn't matter. People must take responsibility for their choices.

[welden]

I surely don't agree of multiboxing Avatar's for the simple reason that it's totally unrealistic and impractical to see 12 look alikes running around gobbling up everything in there path. The design should be left out of Middle Earth and put in Alien games not from this world. Tolkien never told a story with multi-boxes so listen to the K.I.S.S. factor.... keep it simple stupid...lol
Grayowl

1. Multiboxing is hardly impractical! On the contrary, it is rather effective (and practical) in gobbling up everything in it's path!

2. I am almost 99.99% positive that Tolkien NEVER told this story with the idea of it being made into an MMO one day!

3. K.I.S.S. (keeping it simple stupid) is really a matter of perspective. One person's simple is another person's problem!

4. We are all entitled to an opinion. Which is okay...except when one's opinion hinders another from having their own!

Welden

[welden]

My question...

Why stop at just answering 20?

Welden

[IttleBubba]

Thank you for the 20 questions posting. This kind of honest, and well-thought out set of responses to common player questions helps us, players, and Tolkien fans, connect more with you, the development team. I'd love to see more of these from time to time.

-Popnpip of Meneldor

[Ardai]

Can we be expecting more content in Eriador like the North Ered-Luin, the pass between Angmar and Forochel, the South-Farthing or Minhiraith or Tharbad

[RingOfFire]

you've probebly thought of it already. but no matter how you try and find a way to fix rank farming, there will always be those that slip the net anc cheat. maybe it's not about banning them, instead making it much harder to do.

could you look into updating the rating system instead?

here's a quick idea I had anyway.

Rating information
- Rating goes between 2.00 and 0.00
- rating directly changes the amount of renown/informy opposing players earn.
for example, killing a player with 2.00 rating multiplies glory earnt by x2
killing a player with 0.00 rating always drops no glory
- each time you are killed your rating goes down 0.10
- getting a KB on another player increases your rating by 0.05
- participating in killing another player increases your rating by -0.01
- taking a keep increases your rating by 0.30
- taking an OP increases your rating by 0.25
- killing a DoF boss increases your rating by 0.20 - your rating does not effect what you earn, only what you drop.
making rank farming harder
you can ignore most of what I put and focus on 2 new factors. after being killed >20 times without killing another player in any form, that charactor will no longer drop glory points. the obvious way to get around this is to make a new freever every 10 kills. how long do you think that takes? how much harder is that? going that one step further it's be much easier to track who is rank farming if all there kills are from now deleted reavers...

How does this effect the rest of PvP?
I'm sure many of you could pick holes in this idea better than I could. but mostly, this would cut down of farming graveyards very quickly. however I don't think it'd be that hard for the adverage player to stay around a 10:1 kill death ratio (not KB btw) to still give the enemy some glory points. I would make "noobs" slightly less of a target as they probably have low rating regularly.

I also put in a heavy bonus to your rating when taking an OP and keep. your rating does not change how much glory you earn, only how much you drop. so this actually rewards players for fighting back after losing a keep instead of the other way round. high standing PvP players who can keep there rating high would be much more of a prize goal, and would be interesting how this would pan out

what do you think?

Looking at the Ettenmoors currently -- and taking into account what Sapience mentioned in regards to the raw data -- I have to agree with this approach. I do not foresee a conventional method (ie. anti-cheat system) working properly when it comes to rank farmers (again, due to the raw data Sapience posted about), so implementing a means to manipulate Renown/Infamy awarded like bohbashum suggested here appears to be the most effective resolution to the issue.

Not to mention it may actually make it easier to spot rank farmers in the long run, of course.

[Luthred]

Q14: Where is the Lotro server farm located? Is there really one (hardware) server for each (realm) server?
A14: ... A single world, like Brandywine for example, is comprised of several pieces of hardware not just a single machine.

Is this the reason why so many EU-Players still have problems with lags and bad server performance?

Q20: What is being done about Multi-boxing/Rank Farming?
A20: Multi-boxing in-and-of-itself is not inherently bad or against our TOS. ...

...well, it's your game, but most of the players I know are against it and don't like those players.

[SPARTIOTIS]

Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions, but are they really the most asked questions? or are they simply the questions you wanted to answer? The single most asked question/problem is and has always been about the massive lag we get in certain area's and also when raiding/pvp-ing. This has been a problem for as far back as I can remember and I guess most of us are wondering when are you going to get around to fixing this? Don't get me wrong guys, I understand how hard it is to fix bugs/problems (as you showed on Q18) however, a lot of us feel that you are fixing/changing things that are not really needed (such as the launcher) instead of dealing with the massive problem of lag. Sure, we all want new things all the time, but most of us would prefer it if you said "hey guys we will not be giving you any new changes for the next few months so we can sort out the lag issues". I am sure most of the players would be happy with that, as lag ruins the pleasure of playing this game at times. Like i said earler, I know it is not an easy thing to do, but this has been a MAJOR problem for a very long time and most of us feel that it is about time that something was done about it. I myself am lucky enough that I have a decent system and I don't suffer lag as much as most people (although I do get quite a bit when raiding at times), but there are a lot of players out there that do. I do however understand that you guys work hard in what you do to give us this game and I do NOT for one minute think it is easy, but sometimes you need to take 1 step backwards (review things) before moving forwards again. So please guys, how about fixing the MAJOR problems before doing other things.

[Duranium]

Nice new feature

[wachkussen]

Reading this thread, I am seeing a lot of players looking for rank farmers to be punished. Doesn't really concern me, as I don't PvMP. However, I do have one thought to offer that might be useful. Trainee teachers ( at least, in England ) get taught that punishment is not a solution. What punishment actually does, on those occasions where it works at all, is to suppress bad behaviour for long enough to allow better behaviour patterns to take hold. I.e. it buys you time. That's all - and there is always risk of not getting even that much out of it.

With that in mind, therefore, what seems to be actually needed, is not systems to detect rank farmers and drop the sky on them, but rather, systems to render rank farming a pointless activity. I.e. Turbine should be looking for data that defines an 'epic struggle' - which would probably include varied and active responses from the opponent - and then award rank for engaging in those kinds of fights - only.

[Edrogar]

Would you be willing to provide the same or similar data, but with the character/player name obfuscated so that the community could try to devise a way of determining a rank farmer?

Netflix did a similar thing with their suggestion algorithm a few years back and received a bit of a performance increase.

Yes, but Netflix still keeps throwing films in my face that have nothing to do with any of my preferences on a constant basis, translate those results into players and you get a lot of people being reprimanded for something they haven't done. The best way to combat it in my opinion is not to just police it but to also make it a lot harder for them to achieve.

[Edrogar]

Is this the reason why so many EU-Players still have problems with lags and bad server performance?.

No, this would be why EU players and any other players across the world can actually play the game without crashing the server every time they do something in game.

Game servers are generally operated in what they call clusters, each cluster is a group of machines that operate one or more "zones" in the game, for example Breeland might be on one cluster and Lone Lands on another, hence why when walking between the two you might experience i slight glitch as you cross the boundary line and why there is loading when being transported instantly.

In each cluster are multiple machines that control different aspects, for example one might control any instances in that zone, another a major city, another the landscape, other machines will handle database functions (the data for your character while you are on that cluster may be stored on one of the machines in temp files, a bit like out temp internet files etc in windows) and so on.

Doing it this way spreads the load on the server and reduces the amount of information each single machine needs to handle and this reducing lag, memory and storage issues, making it more playable for us.

[Jullandar]

Concerning Helm's Deep. A few days I realized we are probably getting another scaled raid with HD and I'm putting my money on Rift, because Turbine knows how everyone and their pet loves Rift. The other side of it is that they will probably turn it into the same kind of mindless grind that we had with BG, OD etc. when they were scaled, and no-one will "love" it any longer. :/ Hopefully I will be proved wrong.

[GrandCru]

Q20: What is being done about Multi-boxing/Rank Farming?
A20: We’ve been having a very active discussion with the Players Council about this recently. One of the challenges here is breaking the issue into its component parts.

Multi-boxing in-and-of-itself is not inherently bad or against our TOS. The Launcher allows you to run multiple clients and the bug preventing this was recently fixed.

Rank Farming, which doesn’t require mutli-boxing by the way, is another matter entirely. We’ve run several investigations to figure out how best to address it and so far haven’t been happy with the results. False positives, which could lead to potentially banning Top Tier PvMP players because they accumulate more renown/infamy than most rank farmers over the same period of time, are a major concern.

It’s a much more complicated matter than simply checking a database and banning those who rapidly accumulate infamy and renown. It’s a complex issue and we continue to discuss and investigate reasonable and appropriate ways to address it. - Sapience

I am still hesitating between Incompetence and Double Talk, but I'll still stick with the latest.

- For more than 3 (THREE) years, rank farming has been dealt with by EU-Codemasters. How about you ask(ed) them?

- You have logs (hopefully), population distribution, deeds...
When you have that :



or



What do you see?

[GrandCru]

Alternatively you'd see that :



But that would not be conclusive enough. Obviously.

Q21: Any plan of adding a +200% Infamy/Renown Gain in the store?