Ask The LOTRO Team – Answers to your questions – February 6, 2014

[Namesse]

Correcting this.

The trait tress came about because Turbine felt they needed to be changed. We're not even halfway through the story, and we had so much skill bloat, skills that had very little variance, etc that there was little they could do when a new expansion came about. You either got one new skill that did the same thing as another skill you had before every expac, or you got nothing but a level cap increase.

It was just too bloated and cumbersome, and really impacted Turbine negatively when it came to future things to do.

It's only turbine that thought new skills need to be added when leveling. The players thought that an IC and raid should be included with an expac, but Turbine decided they didn't need to be, just as they could have decided that new skills weren't needed. They could have taken the time and money spent on skill trees and given us an IC, with no change to our existing skills.

[Valkrist]

I respectfully disagree.
I never EVER said to myself..
"oh man I have absolutely TOO many skills! I can't handle this! I hope they take some of these cumbersome old skills away and give me brand new ones instead! Oh and I bet gating the ability to use skills I have now behind a point system that I have to buy the expac for and grand every questline over and over and over again for would be absolutely amazing! Please SIGN ME UP!"
I'm so glad they sold me a main class that could heal AND dps AND be useful in a group then took it away and said "nono.. here you go .. its better.. now you can heal OR dps.. its great! Trust us!"

Absolutely

The casual dismissal of others' playstyles and the attempt to invalidate others' tastes and perceptions on these issues ['No, you may think you find use for that skill, but you really do not, for it is bloat."] obviously still remains. Even if this was a reason for the changes, it never should have been stated as such. "Don't casually dismiss your players' playstyles and expect them to be happy with change" is a lesson that was hopefully learned from this

[LethalLethality]

I respectfully disagree.
I never EVER said to myself..
"oh man I have absolutely TOO many skills! I can't handle this! I hope they take some of these cumbersome old skills away and give me brand new ones instead! Oh and I bet gating the ability to use skills I have now behind a point system that I have to buy the expac for and grand every questline over and over and over again for would be absolutely amazing! Please SIGN ME UP!"
I'm so glad they sold me a main class that could heal AND dps AND be useful in a group then took it away and said "nono.. here you go .. its better.. now you can heal OR dps.. its great! Trust us!"

Congratulations, you didn't have a problem. You're also not the one designing the game and deciding that there are long term things to consider when it comes to levelling up. Just because you don't have a problem with having a lot of skills from a player's standpoint does not mean it's not a technical nightmare to add to a class every expac.

[solo1376]

Am I missing something here? I thought the intent was to have new content every quarter? Or is that info not released yet? Revamp is not new content no matter how it is spun. Also I saw more "no" "not planning on it" and "we talked about it" then yes. Very disappointing. I can't believe that the majority of people would rather have some sort of BB then actually have instances and raids. Well to be honest the future of 2014 looks boring. I do have some alts that will enjoy the revamp providing that they don't ruin the classic feel of those areas (such as Dol Dinen, Giants Hall). Overall very disappointing.

Yeah this is about how I feel. Add in the 50 other comments on no new raids and almost no new content and then you will know exactly how me, my kin, and my lotro friends feel.

I cancelled my vip, my kin is dying ( I have known these people for 4 years), and this feels like Maintenance mode to me.

Disgusted and Disappointed with the way you guys dodged so many questions and said no to everything group oriented.

[Lohi]

yep nothing to be done , just like at level cap in lotro for the next year or two

And this is not a bad thing! I hate that there are even levels, but you can't do anything about that since just about every game has them; levels are nothing more than a way to keep score. If we had no level cap whatsoever (which I think some players want) we'd have players at level 1,000,000 by now.

[Lohi]

I'll pay TP, maybe, depending on cost. But I won't use MC, plain and simple, no matter the cost.

Same here. Some people seem highly allergic to TP for some reason, despite getting a 500 TP/month allowance. Extra cost does not mean extra cash outlay for VIPs.

Mithril coins are different in several ways; it's an additional currency which seems designed to make you unsure how much equivalent TP you're really paying. It was fine when it was nothing more than a unified token to replace rez tokens and other minor stuff. But moving it to buy store items and such is just ridiculous. Extra vault space should have been purchased with gold or TP, never with some alternate currency.

[Lohi]

If you're not a Tolkien junkie, well 4/4/14 awaits you.

I don't expect that to but the answer. It's yet another vaguely generic MMO with a single-player game lore tacked on. And it is EXPENSIVE!
This game, even if you despise it, is extremely inexpensive and the best value on the market. Traditional MMO style title that you can play for $5/month or less (or even free), or splurge and get a full subscription and never have need of the store.

As opposed to ESO with is $60 merely to log in your first day to have a look around, there will be NO free trial, then $15/month subscription with NO discounts for multi-month purchase. Some of this I think is because the publishers suspect ESO won't last for several years and so they want to grab their profits early and fast before the buzz dies down. Now there are indeed some very angry store haters out there, and they're enthusiastically supporting the ESO pay-or-scram model and saying that F2P leads to a game full of hordes of immature players and gold spammers (stuff that has not occured with LotRO). Frankly the anti-store hysteria is baffling.

I am a very long term elder scrolls fan (not some skyrim newbie), and I will not be subscribing to ESO.

[frickinmuck]

No new pvmp map is planned:
Another year without a new map... You know what fine. I'm ok with putting a new map on the back burner as long as the current pvmp probs get fixed or improved.

Serious question: Why do people keep clamouring for a new PvP map? The current map is plenty big enough, and at times actually too big for the population of the moors, and means tons of running around looking for action. Maps are important for PvE for obvious reasons, but PvP? I totally don't get why people keep asking for new maps. A new map would have the immediate effect of turning the current map into a ghost town, and the long-term effect of spreading action so thin that it would be even more of a pain than it is now to find action.

Because MC is like Bioware Points which serves to make you spend more than you normally would by further distancing itself from real world currency.

As is, you purchase TP, then use that TP to purchase MC, to then purchase what you want. You get no transaction history with MC, you get no dollar amount per MC, and it's an overall unsafe feeling currency that can't be tracked.

THIS. I dislike anything that tries to lead people more and more away from a clear understanding of how much money they are spending. And transactions that are not tracked or logged in any way - no thanks. Taken together, those two factors make currencies like mithril coins feel shady and disingenuous.

[Lohi]

It was just too bloated and cumbersome, and really impacted Turbine negatively when it came to future things to do.

The game is old essentially, and mistakes in the past kept lingering around. This is not just a Turbine problem but I see it in many other games as well when they've been around several years and with several expansions. You can't raise level caps forever, it just can not work. You can't just keep adding skills when you raise level caps, it just can not work. And yet because the markets keep demanding that all games keep raising level caps and keep adding new skills/abilities/stuff, the longer a game is around the more that this stuff accumulates until it needs cleaning up.

Ie, consider WoW, it essentially revamped its entire world from scratch in the third expansion. There was just no way to make the old zones interesting after several expansions. And this did drive away a lot of players. Currently it's been bleeding off customers despite having huge budgets, because frankly it's old and players have mostly been sticking around waiting alternative game to arrive.

No game is ever going to remain fresh forever.

[frickinmuck]

The way I see it, there are two possibilities:

#1: Turbine cannot produce traditional endgame content. This would obviously be due to things already mentioned in this thread, namely budgetary restrictions and lack of staffing. If this is the case, a simple and direct notice of this would cause all the uproar and 'negativity' to end. Well, perhaps be redirected, in any case But those who are still hoping for such things would no longer feel the need to do so.

#2: Turbine is choosing not to produce traditional endgame content. This could be for any number of reasons, but most likely would be because they believe there are better profits to be made focusing on other content.

#3: It could be a pork pie.

[Beaniemooch]

Congratulations, you didn't have a problem. You're also not the one designing the game and deciding that there are long term things to consider when it comes to levelling up. Just because you don't have a problem with having a lot of skills from a player's standpoint does not mean it's not a technical nightmare to add to a class every expac.

Because not putting them on your skill bar was beyond comprehension. Why add new skills? It's not like we're getting new skills now, so why feel they had to add them then.\

You're right, I'm not the one that designed the game. I'm the one that paid to play here on 3 accounts. As a customer I expect a quality product, and frankly that's not what's being produced.

[Lohi]

Serious question: Why do people keep clamouring for a new PvP map?

Way way back during Moria I think, some dev hinted that there was some look towards thinking about maybe having a new PvP, possibly, sometime, but don't hold your breath. Ever since then people have been waiting for a map. I remember there was excitement on the moors about this (remember that there are many creeps who never play anywhere else in the game except that one zone). Over time that excitment became disappointment, then anger over broken "promises", then feelings of being discriminated against, outright accusing Turbine of "hating" PVP players, etc.

Frankly at this point I doubt there will ever be a new full PvP map. Possibly I could see a mini-zone or space, ala another delvings, maybe a pvp skirmish, but not a full blown zone as there aren't enough PvP players for it. To make a full zone work they'd have to shut down the old zone, otherwise the pvp player base would be split, not enough to defend both zones, etc.

I really think that MMOs need to be either PVE or PVP, and that trying to do both at once inevitably damages both PVE and PVP. But back when you were required to have a subscription, few players would want to subscribe to two expensive games and so they always wanted one game that did both. Now with F2P or premium style games becoming popular, I think splitting the two play styles can work.

[LethalLethality]

Way way back during Moria I think, some dev hinted that there was some look towards thinking about maybe having a new PvP, possibly, sometime, but don't hold your breath ... Over time that excitment became disappointment, then anger over broken "promises", then feelings of being discriminated against, outright accusing Turbine of "hating" PVP players, etc.

I think this is exactly why Turbine is hesitant to say what they may or may not be working on or what they'd like to work on until they know for sure it's coming at some point. There's always gonna be a group of people who see it as a declaration of promised content who will then go on to hold it against turbine from that day forth.

[DRNA]

On a live stream someone asked me what made me happy in my job and I gave some vague answer about how when I leave a meeting and feel I did a good job of getting something I know the community really wants onto the schedule and that we made a great choice makes me happy. That was me trying not to spill the beans about this. I had left this meeting about a hour before that.

I have other secrets, too.

Note: This forum is being tracked and can be seen in the dev tracker. It just takes a couple of posts for it to show up.

I understand the ongoing "Take the Hobbits to Isengard" events as being a huge gesture on the part of yourself and the Turbine Staff to reach out and acknowledge the player base. Running 3 or 4 of these events would seem to get pretty monotonous, much less to commit to 29 of them. When I first visited one of these live streams, I was taken aback that questions were even being asked ..and answered. I think it was during the Evernight run that I asked what the most and least enjoyable aspects of your job are. In my strange way, this was an attempt at giving you a break from an onslaught of questions which I felt you probably weren't able to talk about at the time. I was also trying to acknowledge your investment in this game as much as any other player. Given the endless flux of peoples concerns, wants, and frustrations, I think sometimes this gets lost somehow. From what I've seen though, the tone of players questions and comments during the streamed events has been pleasant. As with anything else, communication is probably vital. Having threads like this one only reinforces that. My two cents. Thanks.

[PoeticNightmare]

Way way back during Moria I think, some dev hinted that there was some look towards thinking about maybe having a new PvP, possibly, sometime, but don't hold your breath. Ever since then people have been waiting for a map. I remember there was excitement on the moors about this (remember that there are many creeps who never play anywhere else in the game except that one zone). Over time that excitment became disappointment, then anger over broken "promises", then feelings of being discriminated against, outright accusing Turbine of "hating" PVP players, etc.

While I am not justifying some of the comments over the new pvmp map incident, you are downplaying what actually occurred. There was no "hint". They flat out announced that a new pvmp map was coming. They also took a very long time to finally admit that it was not coming. Personally I was not upset over it but I can totally understand where people where coming from. It was a statement and then a while later there was another saying no map, and in a manner that implied people should've just known. And it took all those upset people posting about it for them to finally confirm.

---
•Expanded Monster Play – LOTRO’s monster play system will get a major revamp including opening up the feature to all players, changes to monster player skills and advancement and a brand new region for players to battle for or against the forces of evil.
---

Don't act like people just pulled it out of thin air.

[Lalraen]

As it stands now I :

Log in
Check kin list sadly missing a lot of people who will never come back
Check friends list hoping I will see a few names of people I sorely miss
Think about going to Ettens but realize that until it's balanced whats the point
Check the vast empty wasteland of global and shake my head at the complete level of lack of concern on how to play a class exhibited by so many new people
Inwardly complain that this game doesn't present a whole lot of challenge or skill or even the tiniest effort to reach cap
Check mail then log other alts to check mail
Stand around wondering what is there for me to do and why am I here if there isn't anything to do
Shake off negative attitude
Try to keep friends and kinsmen active and involved in runs to try and capture what we used to have and hopefully hang on to what we DO have til something new is given to us to challenge us
Inwardly cringe when I am forced to call upon global for a few dps as we can't manage to find 12 people for a run in 4 kins of regulars online
Realize sadly after failing the easiest of challenges that people don't take the time to actually learn their classes anymore because they can button mash their way to 95 easy enough
Log out

Yes this. Exactly this. I personally run around in circles to add to the variety.

I am excited about the housing and kinship updates. Then I can do all of the aforementioned activities in my house. I can understand trying to increase our sense of community during times of reduced new content, but I am hoping there is a balance. As much as I love the game and my kinship, I don't log in to look at my exquisitely-decorated house. I know appeasing more than one group at a time is difficult though.

I would love to see some updating to pvmp. I think it's probably safe to say we all would. As someone mentioned elsewhere, adding a catapult is just going to result in folks staying in grams ... but with a catapult. I would imagine it would increase Grams camping because hey, catapults are fun. (Who needs to hide in keep NPCs when you can hide with a catapult? Boom!) For many of us, endgame is pvmp. A new map would be awesome. I think some of us would feel less ignored if you just added a frog to the bird out there. Or a new rock to stand on while we wait for fights. Or even if you just put the right level potions at the healer in GV. Many of us keep VIP just for pvmp. As much as I love LOTRO, it doesn't feel like it is worth it lately.

If we're trying to add to community value now, some other server events would be nice. Or adding resources for folks that try to organize them.

(Please add a cookie recipe also.)

[Gottapee]

As it stands now I :

Log in
Check kin list sadly missing a lot of people who will never come back
Check friends list hoping I will see a few names of people I sorely miss
Think about going to Ettens but realize that until it's balanced whats the point
Check the vast empty wasteland of global and shake my head at the complete level of lack of concern on how to play a class exhibited by so many new people
Inwardly complain that this game doesn't present a whole lot of challenge or skill or even the tiniest effort to reach cap
Check mail then log other alts to check mail
Stand around wondering what is there for me to do and why am I here if there isn't anything to do
Shake off negative attitude
Try to keep friends and kinsmen active and involved in runs to try and capture what we used to have and hopefully hang on to what we DO have til something new is given to us to challenge us
Inwardly cringe when I am forced to call upon global for a few dps as we can't manage to find 12 people for a run in 4 kins of regulars online
Realize sadly after failing the easiest of challenges that people don't take the time to actually learn their classes anymore because they can button mash their way to 95 easy enough
Log out

[Radbug]

Correcting this.

The trait tress came about because Turbine felt they needed to be changed. We're not even halfway through the story, and we had so much skill bloat, skills that had very little variance, etc that there was little they could do when a new expansion came about. You either got one new skill that did the same thing as another skill you had before every expac, or you got nothing but a level cap increase.

It was just too bloated and cumbersome, and really impacted Turbine negatively when it came to future things to do.

Awesome - so progression is now buying back our old skills at 2 points (4 levels) a pop. Wonderful. Can't wait.

And I'd like to thank those who got rid of the skill bloat whilst still managing to keep my 3 tracking skills (broken in Moors) and keep them on a shared CD.

/golfclap.

[Radbug]

Adding to this. Players were so surveyed outside of the forums and the game. I was asked the questions and I gave what were to me to be reasonable answers. Think of this as a Nielsen survey. People have never been surveyed by Nielsen and thus may discount them; until they get picked for the surveys.

So heads you win, tails we lose?

Well played.

[Radbug]

Didn't realize there were surveys for it. Thanks for adding to it.

Nobody I know in game has ever mentioned these surveys. I have never seen them mentioned in /glff or any other chat channel. I don't see posts about these surveys on any websites. I'm not surprised you didn't realise they exist.

[Rasimir]

The game is old essentially, and mistakes in the past kept lingering around. This is not just a Turbine problem but I see it in many other games as well when they've been around several years and with several expansions. You can't raise level caps forever, it just can not work. You can't just keep adding skills when you raise level caps, it just can not work. And yet because the markets keep demanding that all games keep raising level caps and keep adding new skills/abilities/stuff, the longer a game is around the more that this stuff accumulates until it needs cleaning up..

Well, the truth is: yes, mistakes happen, and it is a tough decision to live with past mistakes or to correct them. In our case though, they decided to correct them in order to be able to provide a better experience with new content ... without delivering this content. There was nothing in HD that added to our classes, and shortly after they announced that there would be no expac in 2014. The answers given now indicate even more that there won't be any level cap increase or new skills anytime soon, if ever again. All this 'correcting mistakes of the past to be able to go forward into a bright future' is for nothing, this 'future' isn't to be seen anywhere. For me this is an epic fail. All this efford could have been saved and we could have lived with the past mistakes, and they could have done some content instead. Then we wouldn't have the massive complaints about the game bein too easy, and we would have perhaps some instances.

All the answers and the discussion around them leads me to another question: Could someone tell us how many people at Turbine are really working full time for Lotro? How many artists are still there, how many coders? From what I read in the beta forums, there are just a few left, and those stll around have multiple tasks to do. There simply isn't a dev team anymore that could develop instances and expacs, I fear.

[Capt.Hunor]

....

All the answers and the discussion around them leads me to another question: Could someone tell us how many people at Turbine are really working full time for Lotro? How many artists are still there, how many coders? From what I read in the beta forums, there are just a few left, and those stll around have multiple tasks to do. There simply isn't a dev team anymore that could develop instances and expacs, I fear.

Probably only a few, because you can meet our old friend Jeffrey Stiefel, advertising for the new Turbine Game "Infinite Crisis".

[Mar-Evayave]

You're right, I'm not the one that designed the game. I'm the one that paid to play here on 3 accounts. As a customer I expect a quality product, and frankly that's not what's being produced.

Turbine can make some of the people happy all of the time, or all of the people happy some of the time, but they can't make all of the people happy all of the time. It just doesn't work that way. What's a treasure to you may be trash to the next person. And since Turbine can't make thousands of different versions of this game to cater to everyone at once, they have to make one version of this game and make it in a way that most of the people will be happy.

And what sort of brain-dead business would tick off the majority of its customers on purpose? The only logical and financially successful method is to make it's majority happy. Whatever majority that happens to be. And since you are clearly unhappy with the way this game is going, you, like many others, would seem to be in the minority. And it's sad, it truly is, but between making the majority happy and seeing the game last a good while longer, or making the minority happy and dying out sooner due to reduced revenue (fewer happily paying customers = less income), I'd rather the majority was happy.

In the past MMOs have been a very different fish. Overwhelmingly not free (subscription-based), very group-oriented, etc. But for whatever reason (whether it was the possibility of MMOs dying out merely because, in today's economy, they couldn't pass muster with just their VIP income) that has shifted. Many MMOs have gone (and continue to go) F2P. They then found themselves with a much larger playerbase, and using a store to offer their game piece-meal to their new customers, they had to step back and assess the F2Pers' opinion of the game. The fact that you have A) longstanding VIPs and B) newcoming F2Pers (or Premiums) means that you have two very different mindsets. As a rule of thumb, I do not play any MMO that does not have a F2P option. If I eventually go VIP, then fine, but I don't have money to waste on a game that I may end up hating. It took a long time for me to play LOTRO before I decided to sub.

And that's just me. Now add on a few hundred thousand (or more -- I haven't the foggiest idea what the size of the average MMO's playerbase is) extra opinions. No two will be exactly the same. Many of them will be different versions of the same story. But in taking a step back and observing all these new players, any VIP-to-F2P MMO is gonna have to decide what to do next so that they keep the newcomers playing and make a profit off of them. The fact that they are F2P (or Premium) often points to them not having money or not wanting to spend money frequently. So if they are going to spend money, it's gonna have to be good. So the MMO is gonna have to make it good. And if the potential income from their new F2Pers (if those players are kept happy) outweighs the existing income from their VIPers (regardless of how happy they are), then it's pretty obvious which way the MMO is going to go.

What's the outcome? It's hard to say. We've seen MMOs who try a strictly-VIP model in today's MMO world bite the dust. SWTOR nearly went under. ESO may likely as well if they can't meet the high expectations that have been set. Who can say whether ESO will bite the bullet and go F2P shortly after launch as well. Facing with the option of paying for a mediocre game and playing a different mediocre game for free, how many would take the first option?

[Capt.Hunor]

Turbine can make some of the people happy all of the time, or all of the people happy some of the time, but they can't make all of the people happy all of the time. It just doesn't work that way.

That's polemic.
SoA and MoM make ALL the people happy. And we are talking about 3 years. Surely not "all of the people happy all of the time" but long eneugh.

[Mar-Evayave]

That's polemic.
SoA and MoM make ALL the people happy. And we are talking about 3 years. Surely not "all of the people happy all of the time" but long eneugh.

Says you. You are not all people. Are you telling me that absolutely not one single player perhaps dropped their sub during SoA and/or MoM? Are you telling me no one ever complained about anything during that time? O.o I think you are looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses, because that simply isn't true.