Bullroarer Update 23 (Build #1) - Preview and General Feedback

[Decrepify]

wide array of stuff which doesn't make sense

I am sorry, but I'm not buying it one bit whatsoever.
Whatever spirit of community this game had was divided long, long ago between dutifully ignorant, raiders and casuals, each one blaming another for the game losing players.
Getting groups for non-meta stuff is getting near impossible, even on weekends, as people just do their dailies and log off.
Also, at least during Pelennor instance cluster, people who earned their gear knew their classes and knew their roles.
That completely goes out the window with these, as I used to make a lot of groups for SS T2C farm and had no issues explaining, provided people were reasonably geared and knew how to listen. With these instances, what are the odds that I'll misjudge someone who might have a few decent pieces but is completely inept at even the basics of their class, which will more than likely result in a failed group.

Another reason for the locks, frankly, is that they also give us time to address serious problems that might arise, such as content or reward exploits, before they can cause too much damage and force us to commit a server-wide rollback or something horrible like that.

-Vastin

Server wide rollback due to instances exploits? Right, sure.
Have you perhaps instead considered actually fixing stuff before launching it? You were warned during Throne beta about the Mumak skip, COS T2C on lower levels and you never fixed those until there was a massive uproar.
You now have the perfect opportunity to extend the beta till late September, each week focusing on another aspect of it and thoroughly testing it. To aid in that, offer incentives for participating in active feedback on BR, e.g. titles and perhaps cosmetics or TP...

[Arnenna]

@ cordovan. Just heard you on the stream, and you want to know why the instance gating shouldn't be in place. Here are a few reasons for you.

The player base is diverse and come from many different places around the world. For example, I play with friends from Europe and America, as well as other continents. If instances are locked down from meaningful reward, to once per day, then it creates a scene where players become segmented quite severely. Does Joe, save his daily quota to play with his American friend, or his European friend on Tuesday?

You mentioned that you may not be fully understanding the issue and then went on to say that gated currency is working as intended. That for most part is not what people are talking about. We mostly all understand the need to cap ash, both in the wallet and in daily yields. An instance lock takes care of that, but the by-product is that people will only play the instance once per day. After that, they have nothing left to do, so log out. To remedy this, the ash reward could stay capped to once per day (quest hand in on completion of the instance), as long as there is some other meaningful reward in the instance that will keep players "grinding their faces off" (as you put it). You weren't here for the days of level 85 and rare gold items. Players would run the same instance all day long, for weeks or even months, searching for that one single drop off the boss kill. It worked, and any player logging in at any time of the day, could easily find a group for the run. It could be an item that is totally exclusive to that rare drop in that run (i.e. not in any lootbox or at any barterer), and your playerbase will keep on grinding for it.

We get that you all think it's a pacing mechanism, but really, it's more of a stifling strangle hold on players that enjoy group content. There isn't much difference between the two following scenes.

1. Player grinds their face off by playing for hours and hours each day in the first month, gets their stuff and logs off because of "nothing left to do".
2. Player logs in, plays an hour or less to do the instance, then logs off for the rest of that day because of "nothing left to do".

The world is full of different people. Fast sprinters and long distance pacers. Keeping them all running is whats important. Keep the sprinters racing and they will always come back to run the race. Restrict them to long distance pacing and they will soon give up and take up basketball instead.

[Hephburz-2]

You now have the perfect opportunity to extend the beta till late September, each week focusing on another aspect of it and thoroughly testing it. To aid in that, offer incentives for participating in active feedback on BR, e.g. titles and perhaps cosmetics or TP...

Give stuff away, focus on real feedback and delay the update? Bizarre. Unheard of. Unrealistic. (All things SSG won't do).

[Jerguc]

Pacing is in fact the main reason for the raid locks. In theory it helps keep the community together in terms of timing and their interests in the game.

In the past we've run into the problem that the community divides widely in the pace at which they approach the game. Some people only run a couple hours on the weekend, maybe do one or two instance runs and they're done for the week. At the other end of the spectrum some groups will literally run instances nonstop for 48 hours straight from the moment the content drops - and then yeah, they're bored and out of sync with the rest of the community, which has barely even gotten a look at it yet.

So the locks serve as a server-wide pacing mechanism. It certainly doesn't keep everyone on the same page community-wise, but it helps keep them in the same general ballpark, at least for a while. Granted, it may seem a little old-fashioned in the age of binge watching Netflix shows, but that's the reasoning at any rate.

Maintaining some sense of community is a Big Deal(tm) in an MMO, especially a very long running one like LOTRO, and there are a lot of basic design elements to the genre that make it especially difficult to maintain - such as leveling, which striates the community all over the board into groups that have difficulty playing with each other. Thus we make efforts where we can to try to keep the concept of community and group play relevant.

Another reason for the locks, frankly, is that they also give us time to address serious problems that might arise, such as content or reward exploits, before they can cause too much damage and force us to commit a server-wide rollback or something horrible like that.

-Vastin

I get the reasoning behind this and lock on instances would not be a problem if there wasn't BiS gear dropping from lootboxes. This same loot we now get from lootboxes could easily be put on the loot tables in other older instances. Like the way it was on lvl 85 cap. Each instance dropped a specific drop for each class. Put the locks on those instances and increase the drop rate and it gets people to do content. What about skirmishes? They're useless now unless you need marks and meds. Nobody does them anymore. They could easily be revived with this.

[Arnenna]

Obviously the best reason for SSG is that it helps limit the ash anyone can get daily, outside of lootboxes, making those lootboxes even more attracting for the players and increase their sales. You don't care if the people can gear fully on day 1 with lootboxes, but you care if they do it with farming.

This is absolutely correct. If this is about not letting people get too far ahead and all geared up too early, then there should be firm restrictions on how many lootboxes they can open per day as well, but that's never gonna happen.

[RingOfFire]

Pacing is in fact the main reason for the raid locks. In theory it helps keep the community together in terms of timing and their interests in the game.

In the past we've run into the problem that the community divides widely in the pace at which they approach the game. Some people only run a couple hours on the weekend, maybe do one or two instance runs and they're done for the week. At the other end of the spectrum some groups will literally run instances nonstop for 48 hours straight from the moment the content drops - and then yeah, they're bored and out of sync with the rest of the community, which has barely even gotten a look at it yet.

So the locks serve as a server-wide pacing mechanism. It certainly doesn't keep everyone on the same page community-wise, but it helps keep them in the same general ballpark, at least for a while. Granted, it may seem a little old-fashioned in the age of binge watching Netflix shows, but that's the reasoning at any rate.

Maintaining some sense of community is a Big Deal(tm) in an MMO, especially a very long running one like LOTRO, and there are a lot of basic design elements to the genre that make it especially difficult to maintain - such as leveling, which striates the community all over the board into groups that have difficulty playing with each other. Thus we make efforts where we can to try to keep the concept of community and group play relevant.

Another reason for the locks, frankly, is that they also give us time to address serious problems that might arise, such as content or reward exploits, before they can cause too much damage and force us to commit a server-wide rollback or something horrible like that.

-Vastin

Are you talking only about raids, or do you also mean the raid chest locks used within normal instances (Court of Seregost and Dungeons of Naerband)? If you mean the former, I completely agree. If you mean the latter, they're kind of counter-productive from what I can see. Keeping certain things as daily rewards for an instance makes sense, but without any further incentive to keep running the instance more times afterward, it starts leading into the issues Arnenna brought up.

The Featured Instance tech already does this to an extent, with its daily reward box. If 3-man and 6-man instances with raid chest locks were to instead do this for certain daily progression-related rewards (ie. a box guaranteeing: Ashes of Enchantment, 1 Anfalas Star-lit Crystal (Bind on Acquire), generic disenchantable equipment piece (Bind on Acquire), some form of barter item for instance cluster loot), and current loot drop rates toned down to be more in line with other current instances along with making equipment drops from boss chests both unique as well as not disenchantable, and then finally removing the raid chest locks themselves, I suspect the situation will be much improved over its current iteration. Gear rewards may or may not be of interest depending on what class and build a player is going for, but things like Anfalas Scrolls of Empowerment would certainly give some incentive to run these instances more than once a day.

[yafga]

I think we already have a good solution to the instance lock issue - use the same tech that you do for Featured Instances. First time you run it for the day you get a special reward. Every other time you run it you get regular chests. This incentivizes people to run it every day, but doesn't punish people too harshly who run it more than once to help friends.

Also, Vastin, it is important to differentiate between raid locks and instance loot locks. I completely support raid locks (actually, I really love the way you re-did raid locks for Abyss), but instance loot locks are another thing entirely. In my opinion, rather than help bring the community together they break it apart by making people less likely to group up at all more than once a day.

Have you not payed attention to the P2W aspect here? They put locks on loot, but you can still buy it from store... Why do you think they put locks on the instance loot? SO people will buy it from store to bypass the locks and get it faster, quick bucks for SSG. SIMPLE! They are lying to us, wake up.

[Osglinthor]

Obviously the best reason for SSG is that it helps limit the ash anyone can get daily, outside of lootboxes, making those lootboxes even more attracting for the players and increase their sales. You don't care if the people can gear fully on day 1 with lootboxes, but you care if they do it with farming.

oy vey!!!!

[mmdur1]

I don't agree with instance locks (for 3 and 6-mans) helping maintain a sense of community. Instances like in Pelennor Cluster and Court of Seregost (before it got locks) were farmed daily for months and months by essentially the whole playerbase. I also don't believe it's fair to say all the hardcore farmers will do it for a day and quit. If the quality and rarity of the rewards are commensurate to the mechanics of the instance, and vice versa, it shouldn't be a problem to let all playstyles go at it freely.

Exactly right. Instance locks hurt the community more than help it. If SSG needs to introduce some mechanism for slowing the accumulation of ash or whatever it's going to be called with the new update,I think that utilizing the Featured Instance tech is the way to go.

[B749]

Pacing is in fact the main reason for the raid locks. In theory it helps keep the community together in terms of timing and their interests in the game.

In reality it does quite the opposite. Do dailies, beat CoS (the only working instance that actually gives us any Ash), log off. Maybe run a FI to get your daily dose of t8 essences and Wastes reputation items (Yay, more Rangers' Journals for a lvl105 area we've moved on from over a year ago!). Good luck trying to get a run going when all your friends already have locks for the one instance we have... Solution? Simple. Add endgame rewards to ALL scaling instances. Suddenly, you have a massive group endgame ranging from easy to challenging and players can play instances all day long if they want without running out of instances they aren't locked for! Unless of course the real reason behind this is to keep ash acquisition low enough to bump up key sales...

In the past we've run into the problem that the community divides widely in the pace at which they approach the game. Some people only run a couple hours on the weekend, maybe do one or two instance runs and they're done for the week. At the other end of the spectrum some groups will literally run instances nonstop for 48 hours straight from the moment the content drops - and then yeah, they're bored and out of sync with the rest of the community, which has barely even gotten a look at it yet.

So the locks serve as a server-wide pacing mechanism. It certainly doesn't keep everyone on the same page community-wise, but it helps keep them in the same general ballpark, at least for a while. Granted, it may seem a little old-fashioned in the age of binge watching Netflix shows, but that's the reasoning at any rate.

Except it doesn't, since people can literally just open up the store, buy a stack of keys and gear up in a few clicks, regardless of what 'pacing' you enforce upon those actually playing the game rather than the store. Or, even if they never bought a single key from the store, they can still have enough Ash piled up to buy a full set of new gear the day a new patch launches. This entire paragraph makes no sense, or at least wildly differs from the ingame reality. It sounds to me like the people who made this decision to put locks on the instance chests didn't know what's actually going on in terms of other endgame?

Maintaining some sense of community is a Big Deal(tm) in an MMO, especially a very long running one like LOTRO, and there are a lot of basic design elements to the genre that make it especially difficult to maintain - such as leveling, which striates the community all over the board into groups that have difficulty playing with each other. Thus we make efforts where we can to try to keep the concept of community and group play relevant.

These locks are doing the exact opposite for instance-focused folks because there is only one proper playable instance. The idea sounds fine in theory but you need to have a decent amount of relevant group content for it to work.

"Hey guys, who's up for some group content in LOTRO?"
- "Sorry man, locked for CoS already!"
"How about another instance then?"
- "Nothing besides CoS gives relevant rewards, since SSG still hasn't bothered to make Naerband playable and for some reason just won't hook up Ash or endgame gear to any of the dozens of other instances they've made in the past."
... end of conversation and end of argument?

Take a day or two, create a [Box of Ancient Spoils] and a [Ornate Box of Ancient Spoils] with some Ash and endgame relevant goodies in them and hook them up to the old scaling instances on T2/T2c, put a daily lock on each of them if you must. Just allow players who want to come play group content in the game to actually play group content and earn some rewards. Sure, you don't want the entire community farming the quickest instance all day long for maximum time/reward ratio. But the current implementation is far too restrictive and removes the last motivation for group players to keep logging into the game.

Another reason for the locks, frankly, is that they also give us time to address serious problems that might arise, such as content or reward exploits, before they can cause too much damage and force us to commit a server-wide rollback or something horrible like that.

-Vastin

Sorry but this sentence is hard to believe seeing as you still haven't fixed several major exploits and bugs in Abyss, took months to fix a widely known exploit in CoS allowing players to get Challenge rewards on level 105, left Naerband completely broken and have a track record of being incredibly slow to fix major issues (remember The Ruined City running exploit, anyone? I think it took them about a full year before they bothered to fix that...).

Appreciate the response, but it's unconvincing and does not match the ingame situation at all. Besides, I seem to recall us being told when the locks were first introduced that it was to allow for higher drop rates of high quality gear from them, rather than this whole 'pacing' story you bring forward now?

[Seodric]

You don't care if the people can gear fully on day 1 with lootboxes, but you care if they do it with farming.

Exactly!

i will then propose a limit to how many keys you can purchase in store in one day ... to let's say, max 5 keys per day?

[Hephburz-2]

"Hey guys, who's up for some group content in LOTRO?"
- "Sorry man, locked for CoS already!"
"How about another instance then?"
- "Nothing besides CoS gives relevant rewards, since SSG still hasn't bothered to make Naerband playable and for some reason just won't hook up Ash or endgame gear to any of the dozens of other instances they've made in the past."
... end of conversation and end of argument?

Nothing more needs saying.

[elzeqq]

Just remove the locks and make the instance main source of gearing... All we are asking is a normal instance cluster with normal itemization, it's not that much...

[B749]

Exactly!

i will then propose a limit to how many keys you can purchase in store in one day ... to let's say, max 5 keys per day?

*chuckles*

[Black Steel Key]: Crack open a Mordor Lootbox! Only purchaseable once per day to allow for better pacing of gear progression!

Oh wait, that's what it's already like actually trying to play this game. My bad.

[Arnenna]

Exactly!

i will then propose a limit to how many keys you can purchase in store in one day ... to let's say, max 5 keys per day?

Should be the same as the amount of instance rewards you can earn each day, to keep it consistent and in line with what instance locks are trying to achieve. That would be . . . one key per day.

[Celebreneth]

I don't agree with instance locks (for 3 and 6-mans) helping maintain a sense of community. Instances like in Pelennor Cluster and Court of Seregost (before it got locks) were farmed daily for months and months by essentially the whole playerbase. I also don't believe it's fair to say all the hardcore farmers will do it for a day and quit. If the quality and rarity of the rewards are commensurate to the mechanics of the instance, and vice versa, it shouldn't be a problem to let all playstyles go at it freely.

In reality it does quite the opposite. Do dailies, beat CoS (the only working instance that actually gives us any Ash), log off. Maybe run a FI to get your daily dose of t8 essences and Wastes reputation items (Yay, more Rangers' Journals for a lvl105 area we've moved on from over a year ago!). Good luck trying to get a run going when all your friends already have locks for the one instance we have... Solution? Simple. Add endgame rewards to ALL scaling instances. Suddenly, you have a massive group endgame ranging from easy to challenging and players can play instances all day long if they want without running out of instances they aren't locked for! Unless of course the real reason behind this is to keep ash acquisition low enough to bump up key sales...

Except it doesn't, since people can literally just open up the store, buy a stack of keys and gear up in a few clicks, regardless of what 'pacing' you enforce upon those actually playing the game rather than the store. Or, even if they never bought a single key from the store, they can still have enough Ash piled up to buy a full set of new gear the day a new patch launches. This entire paragraph makes no sense, or at least wildly differs from the ingame reality. It sounds to me like the people who made this decision to put locks on the instance chests didn't know what's actually going on in terms of other endgame?

These locks are doing the exact opposite for instance-focused folks because there is only one proper playable instance. The idea sounds fine in theory but you need to have a decent amount of relevant group content for it to work.

"Hey guys, who's up for some group content in LOTRO?"
- "Sorry man, locked for CoS already!"
"How about another instance then?"
- "Nothing besides CoS gives relevant rewards, since SSG still hasn't bothered to make Naerband playable and for some reason just won't hook up Ash or endgame gear to any of the dozens of other instances they've made in the past."
... end of conversation and end of argument?

Take a day or two, create a [Box of Ancient Spoils] and a [Ornate Box of Ancient Spoils] with some Ash and endgame relevant goodies in them and hook them up to the old scaling instances on T2/T2c, put a daily lock on each of them if you must. Just allow players who want to come play group content in the game to actually play group content and earn some rewards. Sure, you don't want the entire community farming the quickest instance all day long for maximum time/reward ratio. But the current implementation is far too restrictive and removes the last motivation for group players to keep logging into the game.

Sorry but this sentence is hard to believe seeing as you still haven't fixed several major exploits and bugs in Abyss, took months to fix a widely known exploit in CoS allowing players to get Challenge rewards on level 105, left Naerband completely broken and have a track record of being incredibly slow to fix major issues (remember The Ruined City running exploit, anyone? I think it took them about a full year before they bothered to fix that...).

Appreciate the response, but it's unconvincing and does not match the ingame situation at all. Besides, I seem to recall us being told when the locks were first introduced that it was to allow for higher drop rates of high quality gear from them, rather than this whole 'pacing' story you bring forward now?

These two posts pretty much cover everything I was going to say after reading Vastin's post. Excellent analyses from both.

[Seodric]

Agree with the post above.

[B749]

Besides, I seem to recall us being told when the locks were first introduced that it was to allow for higher drop rates of high quality gear from them, rather than this whole 'pacing' story you bring forward now?

Went to check some patch notes, I was indeed able to find this statement in the U21.3 Release Notes:

• All bosses in the Tier 2 Dungeons of Naerband and Court of Seregost instances now have an increased chance of dropping Incomparable gear.
• Naerband and Seregost instance chests now have a one-day lock on them to allow for a very large increase in drop rates.

*shrug*

[Thurinuor]

Pacing is in fact the main reason for the raid locks. In theory it helps keep the community together in terms of timing and their interests in the game.

In the past we've run into the problem that the community divides widely in the pace at which they approach the game. Some people only run a couple hours on the weekend, maybe do one or two instance runs and they're done for the week. At the other end of the spectrum some groups will literally run instances nonstop for 48 hours straight from the moment the content drops - and then yeah, they're bored and out of sync with the rest of the community, which has barely even gotten a look at it yet.

So the locks serve as a server-wide pacing mechanism. It certainly doesn't keep everyone on the same page community-wise, but it helps keep them in the same general ballpark, at least for a while. Granted, it may seem a little old-fashioned in the age of binge watching Netflix shows, but that's the reasoning at any rate.

Maintaining some sense of community is a Big Deal(tm) in an MMO, especially a very long running one like LOTRO, and there are a lot of basic design elements to the genre that make it especially difficult to maintain - such as leveling, which striates the community all over the board into groups that have difficulty playing with each other. Thus we make efforts where we can to try to keep the concept of community and group play relevant.

Another reason for the locks, frankly, is that they also give us time to address serious problems that might arise, such as content or reward exploits, before they can cause too much damage and force us to commit a server-wide rollback or something horrible like that.

-Vastin

Thanks for the details and clarification. I hope it's now more understandable for some of the players here.

[Arnenna]

Thanks for the details and clarification. I hope it's now more understandable for some of the players here.

The reasoning is understandable, but the reality of the situation isn't.

I can't farm too far ahead of my peers because daily locks prevent it. That looks really good on paper as it means that I cannot create too much of a gap between myself and other players. That, as a by product, means I log off after I have done my daily quota, and anyone logging in after me, hoping to do their daily quota, is one player down on who they can group with. Multiply that over a whole playerbase and there will be players that log in late in the day, who will never find a group. They fall behind and the gap is created as a consequence of the mechanic put in place to prevent gaps from forming.

I can however, progress at the speed of light with enough lootbox keys, because there are zero limits on it. Running ahead no longer matters, gaps no longer matter. There's the fly in the ointment (the flaw in the reasoning).

[Skyfoot]

Thanks for the details and clarification.

At this point a blue name could say there is a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow and you'd fully support it. He didn't clarify anything--he just dug himself a deeper hole.

[SSG_RedPanda]

I'm not going to bank on the old black keys opening the new boxes on Live, though I'll be shocked (pleasantly surprised) if they do. I don't think there would be a new type of box, without a new type of key to open it is all. If your assumption that black steel keys will remain the opening tool is correct, then that eases both the grind and the P2W aspect of all this, and players have a reasonable chance at in game earning through doing content . . . so naturally, I hope you are right about it.

If it's a new key, with dailies that award 3 a week (as originally planned for Mordor), then I'll probably be too busy reading the deluge of complaints (valid ones) on the forum, to actually do any of the grind.

I've seen no new key on the database, and there is nothing to suggest it on BR, so, either you're correct, or SSG are holding off on letting that bee out of the bonnet (which will really speak for itself).

Black Steel Key will open the new boxes.

[SSG_RedPanda]

I get the reasoning behind this and lock on instances would not be a problem if there wasn't BiS gear dropping from lootboxes. This same loot we now get from lootboxes could easily be put on the loot tables in other older instances. Like the way it was on lvl 85 cap. Each instance dropped a specific drop for each class. Put the locks on those instances and increase the drop rate and it gets people to do content. What about skirmishes? They're useless now unless you need marks and meds. Nobody does them anymore. They could easily be revived with this.

We're making changes to the gear in the boxes for the next Bullroarer. The highest they can have will be 370 incomparable gear. Essences will also come down. The Tier 2 instance gear hasn't been shown yet as well.

[fmac81]

Black Steel Key will open the new boxes.

Slightly off topic to the black key situation, but hoping a blue name could perhaps comment on the state of the Mac BR client? There's been at least 4 threads created about the client error we're getting ("you do not have the current version of the client installed"), but they become buried by new threads... Would dearly love to try this new update for myself...

Even if its just a "we'll look into it", would be music to my ears.
Thanks,
Throllo

[ruimoreira25]

LOVE LOVE LOVE all of what I saw (landscape and cities and ruins) about gear I really didnt searched for it (more of an rp player here). Really liked the surprise in the Grey Mountains (no spoiler here) but I still hope the next surprise will be the female dwarves. Thats all I have to say. Nice outifts too. The new ones. Maybe new mounts aswell I guess! Specialy from our new friends! Can't wait to see the new things coming soon!