How SSG should prepare for Isendard release

[LotroVidz]

Hey all!

I think the Isengard release will be very vital for the future of the legendary servers. You really did hurt the population with SOA/MOM, the population on SOM is about the same as in the end of Moria but those that left during that time didn't come back.

Here is the most important points that I want to see done before the release(please add more if you think i missed something):

• Balance check, you need to do an overall balance check for the instances, raids and landscape difficulty.
• Please let us barter the gear the way we did it back in the day, not for skirmish currency.
• Announce release date well before release, let those who actually want to jump into Isengard get some time to level.
• Try to release it with PVMP, make adjustments to the scaling system to make 75 freeps stronger.(release it as a beta, and adjust it accordingly)
• Close Ithil, the fact that you released another server instead of increasing the server cap was the most stupid decision you did.(a server should be able to handle more than 1,6k players in 2019!)
• Merge the servers as i said, we don't need to split the small community we have. Give us date, and people will start transfer, its free already!
• Do some advertising, release some news about your intentions of the upcoming release show us a trailer or something like that.

Will you do anything for the Isengard release? Or will this be another abandoned project?

I would really appreciate some kind of response from you SSG.

BR

[MrCuddleBear]

Seems like a troll post.

1.) People on Ithil do not want to give up their names and be forced to join anor.
2.) PvMP isn't a priority so they can glance right over that one.
3.) Not everyone is in a raiding kin, keep the ability to barter for decent gear in the skirm camp.
4.) Class balance is fine with the exception of those classes that haven't had a balancing pass (champions, runekeepers)

[LotroVidz]

Seems like a troll post.

1.) People on Ithil do not want to give up their names and be forced to join anor.
2.) PvMP isn't a priority so they can glance right over that one.
3.) Not everyone is in a raiding kin, keep the ability to barter for decent gear in the skirm camp.
4.) Class balance is fine with the exception of those classes that haven't had a balancing pass (champions, runekeepers)

1.) Ok, so people rather play on a dead server?
2.) Idc, it should be a priority for LS
3.) It's instance/raid gear, it should come from that content. And by bartering it in a few mins will make content last much shorter.
4.)I didn't mention class balance.

Let me just add that staying far away from the original content and how things worked is a bad idea, that's why so many people left in the first place.

[WhiteWolf21x]

If I remember correctly, I recall Sev saying that they did a pass of Isengard instances and were able to fix a few bugs. Maybe the purple bug got fixed lol. But again I may have heard wrong.



As for anything else, I would prefer for them to wait till after Minas Morgul. The expansion is probably the most important update in terms of game health and I want all available people working on that before doing things like scaling pvmp. Unless the changes affect live servers of course.

[LotroVidz]

If I remember correctly, I recall Sev saying that they did a pass of Isengard instances and were able to fix a few bugs. Maybe the purple bug got fixed lol. But again I may have heard wrong.



As for anything else, I would prefer for them to wait till after Minas Morgul. The expansion is probably the most important update in terms of game health and I want all available people working on that before doing things like scaling pvmp. Unless the changes affect live servers of course.

Lol, we don't even know if Minas Morgul is going to be released this year.. There is no way the LS will survive that long.

[Pontin_Finnberry]

If I remember correctly, I recall Sev saying that they did a pass of Isengard instances and were able to fix a few bugs. Maybe the purple bug got fixed lol. But again I may have heard wrong.

You have not heard wrong, they are indeed working on Isengard for legendary servers to fix bugs and such, they are using Legendary servers to go back to old content to fix/change things as little.

[Echoweaver]

You have not heard wrong, they are indeed working on Isengard for legendary servers to fix bugs and such, they are using Legendary servers to go back to old content to fix/change things as little.

I thought I saw a blurb for Isengard on the legendary servers on the main page today, but I don't see it now....

[azurebob99]

I think the Isengard release will be very vital for the future of the legendary servers. You really did hurt the population with SOA/MOM, the population on SOM is about the same as in the end of Moria but those that left during that time didn't come back.

More than vital, Isengard is pretty much the last chance for decent population growth on the legendary servers. In spite of what some people may jump in to say about how the game is better than ever, Helm's Deep was great and everyone who claims otherwise is blinded by nostalgia, few people (if any) are interested in the level 85 cap, and no one is waiting in the wings holding off on subscribing and playing on the legendary servers to re-experience the greatness of Helm's Deep or most of the content that followed. There may be some niche interest in Throne at cap 105, but likely not enough for anyone who isn't already playing the game today to sit through imbuing a LI even halfway through.

This would be the time for some brand of post admitting that SoA and MoM on the legendary servers were handled...less than ideally (the Mirkwood content was incidentally balanced due to the previously overtuned scaling instances coincidentally more or less lining up tuning-wise with the massive stat bloat with only minor changes made deliberately, rather than due to a significant deliberate effort to make it what it ended up being), and that SSG have taken that to heart and will put forth effort to rebalance the Isengard instance cluster and possibly the RoI landscape to be less effortless than it is today, as well as fixing itemization at cap 75 by hand. Ideally, this would be coupled with some brand of PR campaign that included advance warning of when RoI would hit the legendary servers, as well as an email campaign politely inviting old players (especially those who have played on the legendary servers before, but don't any longer) to give them another chance, possibly including a week of free subscription time for anyone who has played on the legendary servers (or anyone whose sub has lapsed since they launched) to allow them to do so at minimal risk. [Note that I have a lifetime account and I am therefore not suggesting this to benefit myself]

None of this is going to happen.

Balance check, you need to do an overall balance check for the instances, raids and landscape difficulty.

I think the ship for lanscape difficulty sailed a long time ago and there's no point even asking for it to be balanced (would be nice though!). On the other hand, morale values on mobs in the Isengard cluster are back to approximately what they were when said cluster launched, while player DPS is SIGNIFICANTLY higher (when cap was 75, 3,000 DPS was fairly high for a DPS class, especially without perfect gear, with classes like captains and LMs doing closer to 1,000; player damage today is...higher) and it would be nice to at least bring morale values in the tier 2 instances in line with what they used to be relative to today's DPS. Or we can stick with 20 second, mechanics-free boss fights, which some people claim everyone wants and people clearly LOVED in past iterations of the legendary server's endgame.

Please let us barter the gear the way we did it back in the day, not for skirmish currency.

Orthanc gear was actually always bartered for skirmish currency, just with individual pieces gated by completion of the boss-kill deed for the corresponding boss in tier 1 Orthanc. Draigoch gear was also available for skirmish currency from RoI launch, except the helmet and shoulders which required coins from Draigoch (you can now obtain those two pieces using either skirmish currency or the original boss drop coins). Seeing as the main challenges of Draigoch currently are managing to not kill him with raw damage before finishing the challenge, him not deciding to bug out during the final phase and the people in your group staying awake until the fight ends, I don't see any reason to fiddle with this, especially as Draigoch armor is just filler until you get something better for many classes. If Draigoch were to be significantly buffed in some way to make it something other than tedious, that would be a different story, but that's not going to happen.

In short, this already is pretty much where it always has been and doesn't really need changing.

Try to release it with PVMP, make adjustments to the scaling system to make 75 freeps stronger.

Seeing the amount of effort put into PvE (allegedly the core selling point of the game) on the legendary servers, this probably won't happen. Would be nice though!

Close Ithil, the fact that you released another server instead of increasing the server cap was the most stupid decision you did.

The populations of both Anor and Ithil are so small at this point that merging them would accomplish very little. If one server has 150 people and the second has 200, after 50-100 leave due to losing their names to a merger, you'd barely gain anything. Hell even if no one quit due to losing their names (highly unlikely), the difference between 200 and 400 players at prime time won't have a noticeable effect.

They already allow free transfers, if people really wanted to migrate they can. The people holding out on Ithil are mostly doing so by choice, and holding a gun to their heads would likely just make them leave. Of course it could be nice to make the fact that said transfers are free more readily available to players who are not aware of it, so they can make use of said transfers if they do want to move to a marginally more populated server.

Do some advertising, release some news about your intentions of the upcoming release show us a trailer or something like that.

Seriously. Press release! Trailer! Email campaign inviting people who have tried the legendary server and quit to give it another chance, with a free week of VIP to entice them! Something other than dropping RoI, as-is, with no fanfare...you know, like what happened with Mirkwood.

Will you do anything for the Isengard release? Or will this be another abandoned project?

The writing appears to be on some brand of wall. Or at least past experience supports this viewpoint.

[Herwegur]

Seems like a troll post.

See. Why put any effort into improving your product when you have a pack of forum hecklers waiting to sink teeth into any thread that dares to criticize your product. And they even do it for free.

[LotroVidz]

I was also going to add that if they don't plan to do further investment in Legendary servers. At least make it a f2p feature, because it still has store so I see no reason for this being a VIP only server.

[FolklegendRedux]

You guys are kidding yourselves if you think Isengard is going to somehow grow the LS populations. SoA was by far the most popular part of the game followed by Moria, and the LSes have been hemorrhaging players ever since they launched. At best, SSG can hope to keep the players they have left, but the LS populations are not going to make a U-turn and start growing again. And that only addresses the short-term. What happens when they catch up with the regular servers and are still by far the least populated servers? Where's the benefit of keeping them running then?

[sapienze]

I was also going to add that if they don't plan to do further investment in Legendary servers. At least make it a f2p feature, because it still has store so I see no reason for this being a VIP only server.

I agree with most everything you bring up in this thread, but...

Until the cost overrides keeping the LS online verses the income brought in, nothing will change. By income, I mean the game as a whole. Now as it stands the original servers are the main contributor to the LS existence and at the same time the LS draw away resource time from the main games progression. Though at the time, none of the players could know all the starter area revamps were for these servers and not for the main games population, the obvious cannot be denied. This effort being put into the LS will stay on course probably for another reason most players haven't though of. This being employment of people who have a skill set which has current and future value. Another is it may have been a prerequisite to becoming part of DBG to show SSG has in fact a full compliment of employees who can handle such task.

For better or worse these servers are here and its too bad for SSG and the players they weren't more closer to the notion of "Classic" than what we have. It's my opinion the LS should be shut down and have the employees reallocated to the main games development. The LS populations are below the numbers prior to the previous consolidation. So there is already a precedent for doing so.

[LotroVidz]

You guys are kidding yourselves if you think Isengard is going to somehow grow the LS populations. SoA was by far the most popular part of the game followed by Moria, and the LSes have been hemorrhaging players ever since they launched. At best, SSG can hope to keep the players they have left, but the LS populations are not going to make a U-turn and start growing again. And that only addresses the short-term. What happens when they catch up with the regular servers and are still by far the least populated servers? Where's the benefit of keeping them running then?

It's not just about how popular the game was in a certain time range. Even so, ROI was very popular, there was tons of servers back then. I was on Snowbourne and at the release of ROI there was 1200 players in the glff channel alone. People left LS because it was unbalanced. If they did it right the endgame would be superior to what we have at 120.

[Herwegur]

As far as LS are concerned, Isengard is the last expansion with a respectable instance/raid cluster (discounting Mordor for obvious reasons).
Not only that, but this instance cluster is unscaled, meaning its original rewards are fully intact - hence incentive to run it on level.

HUGE mistake for SSG not to revert back to original rewards/barter tokens in Siege of Mirkwood on LS. That alone would have retained more players, had it been done.

Expecting LS population to die before "Rohan" release. Who is interested in 85 cap? To do what, rebuild Hytbold in a couple weeks? Grind pointless Erebor instance cluster for skirmish bounties and silly relics/settings?

And then those bored 85-capped players will re-run older instances like Rift and Moria, and back we are to 10-second boss fights and "game is too easy" drivel.

[SharlaSedai]

1.) Ok, so people rather play on a dead server?
2.) Idc, it should be a priority for LS
3.) It's instance/raid gear, it should come from that content. And by bartering it in a few mins will make content last much shorter.
4.)I didn't mention class balance.

Let me just add that staying far away from the original content and how things worked is a bad idea, that's why so many people left in the first place.

1. Yes, I love Ithil and the people on it. I MUCH prefer a smaller server (my regular server is Gladden), as I find them to be (usually) friendlier with a more family-like atmosphere. Not so much trolling and pissing contests. IDK about Anor, but the amount of people I see playing on Ithil is not much different than it was when it opened. A few have left, but Ithil is not hemorrhaging players, at least not at the time that I generally play (afternoon/early evening EST.)
2. As I have stated in MANY other posts, they JUST said a couple of months ago that they WILL be looking at balancing PvMP once they get done balancing the Freep classes. They have to have a goal to aim for, so they are establishing the Freep class balance as that guideline for what they will adjust Creep to. Once they get PvMP fixed on the regular servers, maybe they'll bring it over to the LS.
3. Instance gear, I don't mind getting from Skirm vendors. You have to do Skirms to get the currency, so the work still has to be done. Raid gear, I agree should come from raids. Landscape people don't need raid gear. And I am DEFINITLY NOT a raider, lol.

[icefriend]

So apparently the release is less than a week a way and once again there's zero information/announcements to hype up at least some excitement for the update

[Aelir]

So apparently the release is less than a week a way and once again there's zero information/announcements to hype up at least some excitement for the update

Honest question, where was it said it's a week away?

As for zero hype, you don't hype up an embarrassment as it only makes you look bad... zero hype from SSG about Legendary Server expansion releases, speaks for itself, and this silence communicates very eloquently.

[LotroVidz]

You guys are kidding yourselves if you think Isengard is going to somehow grow the LS populations. SoA was by far the most popular part of the game followed by Moria, and the LSes have been hemorrhaging players ever since they launched. At best, SSG can hope to keep the players they have left, but the LS populations are not going to make a U-turn and start growing again. And that only addresses the short-term. What happens when they catch up with the regular servers and are still by far the least populated servers? Where's the benefit of keeping them running then?

What will happens is that you can transfer your character over to the normal servers and LS servers will be shut down.

[LotroVidz]

As far as LS are concerned, Isengard is the last expansion with a respectable instance/raid cluster (discounting Mordor for obvious reasons).
Not only that, but this instance cluster is unscaled, meaning its original rewards are fully intact - hence incentive to run it on level.

HUGE mistake for SSG not to revert back to original rewards/barter tokens in Siege of Mirkwood on LS. That alone would have retained more players, had it been done.

Expecting LS population to die before "Rohan" release. Who is interested in 85 cap? To do what, rebuild Hytbold in a couple weeks? Grind pointless Erebor instance cluster for skirmish bounties and silly relics/settings?

And then those bored 85-capped players will re-run older instances like Rift and Moria, and back we are to 10-second boss fights and "game is too easy" drivel.

The 85 cap isn't any worse than 120 cap so =P And i doubt the next level cap with Minas Morgul will be any better than Mordor/Ered Mithrin endgame.

I find it funny that people trash talk endgame levels after level 75 but fail to realise that all caps past Mordor is just so much better in comparison. You actually need to do the content, and there is no endgame gear from lootboxes.

[cipher_nemo]

I'd support closing Ithil to get more players on Anor. But that's a biased opinion since I'm on Anor. Still, if the shoe was on the other foot, I'd be happy moving from Anor to Ithil if Ithil was more active.

Population on Legendary servers severely dropped after about two or three weeks of Mines of Moria content. Very few players came back for Mirkwood. There are probably many reasons, but I know one of the reasons is that SSG really didn't do enough marketing of the release of Mirkwood content on Legendary servers. It was a rather quiet announcement without much excitement. But in general, I think most people starting on a Legendary server at their release wanted the original Shadows of Angmar content experience, with all of the level 50 end-game stuff to do. So once that excitement was exhausted, they either went on to other games or went back to characters on their regular servers.

You'll see a blip of activity for festivals and fares, but not much else anymore. Anor is very quiet compared to what it once was, and so is my kinship. The dozens of very active, always-at-endgame characters and their alts are suddenly inactive, with last logins ranging in months. It's rather depressing, so I don't bother recruiting anyone anymore. Most new members who join my kinship end up leaving due to low activity, which makes things a Catch-22. Over time the active players will slowly trickle into the largest of the kinships just to get activity, until those dwindle as well and they move back to other non-Legendary servers or find other games.

[icefriend]

Honest question, where was it said it's a week away?

Cord mentioned it on his stream a few hours ago.

[Narthalion]

For better or worse these servers are here and its too bad for SSG and the players they weren't more closer to the notion of "Classic" than what we have. It's my opinion the LS should be shut down and have the employees reallocated to the main games development. The LS populations are below the numbers prior to the previous consolidation. So there is already a precedent for doing so.

This.

The LS were a sad attempt by the Devs to distract subscribing customers who had become frustrated with the way LOTRO had mutated in the last few years. It really solved nothing...only giving participants a short-term break from the grind and mess of current higher lvls on the regular servers.

Now, the frustrations of players are catching up with SSG. And these unfixed problems are continually shrinking BOTH types of servers.

[Stormtower]

This.

The LS were a sad attempt by the Devs to distract subscribing customers who had become frustrated with the way LOTRO had mutated in the last few years. It really solved nothing...only giving participants a short-term break from the grind and mess of current higher lvls on the regular servers.

Now, the frustrations of players are catching up with SSG. And these unfixed problems are continually shrinking BOTH types of servers.

This. +1

The very reason I did not resubscribe to play on the LS in the first place. It was obvious from the beginning.

[Nymphonic]

At least make it a f2p feature, because it still has store so I see no reason for this being a VIP only server.

I always wondered why it was VIP only with the Store being there.

[Aelir]

I always wondered why it was VIP only with the Store being there.

$ + $ = $$