Official Discussion: A letter from Kate Paiz 2013

[ShammWoww]

It errors for me in Chrome, but loads fine in *shudder* IE *shudder*

Go Microsoft!

[Isharra]

Player Council: very interesting.

New zone: always cool!

Skill pruning: a little hesitant about this. I like having lots of different tools in my toolkit. However I do understand the sheer number of different skills available are cluttering up toolbars a lot. If amalgamating skill functions helps pave the way for fancy new skills, then cheers to that!

[greatmom]

for those who can not see the letter here it is

Hello all!

January has been an exciting month for us on the dev team! We’ve wrapped up our plans for 2013, and I’m very pleased to announce some new big initiatives for LOTRO you can expect in the coming year:
•Player’s Council – We are doubling down this year on the conversation between Turbine and you, our players. We are going to start a Player’s Council, a group of players who participate in more regular & structured feedback sessions with the dev group. We want to make sure that as we grow and extend this game, that we are incorporating your likes and dislikes about what we are into what we release. The Community Team will be releasing more information about how we’re going to construct and run the Player’s Council in the coming weeks.


•Western Rohan – I am at this moment standing on the parapet of the Hornburg, looking out over Helm’s Deep as devs populate the landscape with hundreds (soon to be thousands) of Saruman’s Uruk-hai & Orcs. We will be bringing you the rest of Rohan in two installments – Wildermore, a northern region between the Wold and Fangorn, will be released this spring, after our 6th anniversary, and later in the year, you’ll be able to see Western Rohan, Edoras, and participate in battles of epic proportions. Much more on this to come…


•Housing – I am extremely pleased to say that this year we will be tackling a major revision to the Housing system. In February and March we will be gathering information about how Housing should change, and then we’ll be releasing revisions to the system in the latter half of the year. We look forward to leveraging our new Player’s Council to help shape and guide the extension of this feature!


•Class Adjustments – Later in the year, we will be making some significant changes to the skills and traits of the Free Peoples classes. We’ll be pruning out skills that just feel disappointing in play and increasing the potency of others. The end result will be fewer skills, but a more profound impact on moment-to-moment play. How you choose to specialize your class will make a real difference!



There are plenty of other things happening this year, and we’ll be doing more dev chats via Twitter to keep getting the word out, so stay tuned for more details and more news in the coming weeks.

[Nallaglor]

May I suggest Turbine that with this years expansion, you plan better with the release date so you dont have the problems you did last year. Please start the beta for it earlier with this one then you did with last years.

well said!

[Levanas]

(With my deepest apologies dear Turbine, but) where is the juisy news? We'are already these "updates", thanks to last dev chat. What about re-newing of the avatar graphics and animations, Kinship revamp, any new game system, and are we going to see a another expansion or update?

And about the Player Council: I'm not an doom and gloom(er) but I have no hope for this comm.system. You're not giving proper and detailed answer to us, so not sure about this Council-thingy.

(So sorry for my broken English)

[0Pinger]

Player’s Council

How about an extension to player helping players, voluntary player GM's or more likely Knowledge masters KM's than Gamesmaster. Thinking of the Ark program from Anarchy Online which is mostly staffed by voluntary players.

They start out as a Greeter, who popups in starter zones helping the cannon fodder. Only powers they have is to port players to them, but monitored as it was a skill that was to be used only when required, if abused they got kicked from the program.

Next rank they take ticket/petition reports, a bit like your current crop of first line support but more so, help with what they can and pass on to someone higher up if they can't.

Next rank they have gained the trust and knowledge to have more commands at their disposal, item/mob spawning. Also character quest/mission flag inspecting. Guess much like you senior GM's but they Know what they are talking about, they aren't using a known faults database and using copy/paste replies, but actual game knowledge as they have played the game for years, not just 15 mins that most GM's seem to have

Higher ranks above those as well, mostly Training/ Policing the GMs and Event organisers, they mostly ended up as paid employees

[Tirian-Hammerfist]

Changes are looking good:

Player council - interesting to see how this works, though getting a cross section of different player opinions may be tricky... on things such as class revamps there will be a certain level of consensus, but other issues I'd be interested to see how you manage to cope with the wide range of opinions (or at least how you manage to represent these in the player council).

Wildermore - sounds good, I always love the Spring update as the epics and landscape quest lines, such as the Eorlsmead one, are some of my favourite bits of the game. However, as Western Rohan is smaller than the East, and you're splitting it into two pieces, will we therefore be getting less landmass with the expansion? (or will there be many quests in a smaller area, southern-Evendim/Moria style?) Slightly disappointed this wasn't the Eastfold, but I hope we'll get to see Aldburg and the surrounding area en-route to Gondor (unless we go round to western Gondor... but this is rather early speculation )

West Rohan - really looking forward to seeing this too, though as mentioned above, the smaller size is an issue... unless there is lots of focus on Helm's Deep and proper city quests for Edoras (don't just make it a hub in the way that we've seen before with Bree/Caras Galdhorn etc - this should be a truly large city (especially considering Bree is a town).

Housing revamp - YAY! 1 possible problem I can forsee is that the store becomes a part of housing, whereas traditionally it has never been (or at least I've been able to fully kit out my house and the kin house without using the store). While 'more pegs' is a key issue, there are some other social features which would be nice, to allow kins to be in the same housing area, to make it a hub with forge/relic master, auctioneer, vault, crafting facilities etc - there's a lot of potential here.

Class adjustments - this seems good in principle... and yet from the perspective of a guardian as my main, I can't see many skills which I don't use regularly... retaliation is one that is a bit superfluous, unless you are avoiding doing AOE, in which case it is necessary, shield blow, as a starter attack never really amounts to anything other than with one of the Orthanc sets, and our heals are a bit superfluous, and ignore the pain is solely used for generating a block/parry response... but apart from that, most of my skills are used on a frequent basis. This could go very wrong, but I have hopes that it will 'finesse' (though I have a hatred of that stat) the class experience.

Thanks for the communication!

[Thorgrum]

Another positive interaction from Turbine. We need more of this and when they do it we as the community should embrace and encourage it. The players council sounds like a good idea, more input into the process by the players sounds spot on to me. Housing revamp is long overdue, really no turning back now that its in the letter good for her for putting it in there. New region(s) no surprise here and pruning class skills are necessary but i personally dont trust the lotro dev's all that much, guess we will wait and see.

The only negative for me was the lack of acknowledgement on the performance issues. While i didnt expect it to be a major theme, its having an impact for more then a few on the game and the ability to enjoy the product. Its elsewhere on the web as well, and while this might not have been the right mechanism to address it, they absolutely have to get infront of the issue and at least increase the official discussion about it.

Ignoring it is just going to cause more people to post, producing the wrong kind of noise. You want to look proactive on an issue you cant resolve right away, not reactive. Overall good stuff B+ !

[Nyrion]

Player Council is quite intriguing to me. If it works out well, this on top of hopefully frequent Dev Chats should result in much better communication both ways.

Nice confirmation of us getting both Edoras and Helm's Deep this year. Wildermore was pretty much common knowledge due to some curious BR testers.

Housing - Eh. Still don't care about it much, I just hope that whatever you do with the system finally gets people to shut up about it.

Skill pruning - Seems okay to me in theory. Skill bloat is bad, but I don't really like the other extreme of having half a dozen skills and that's it, as it is in some other MMOs. Hope this is done delicately is all.

[Justin-]

Im lookin forward to the updates

At the moment housing has no real objective to other than you have a chest to store stuff in (but then we have the vault) - Making this more useful will be interesting.

The new expansions sound cool and I look forward to them too.

Cutting down the skills I see as a positive as there are way to many skills,

Does anyone else wanna see a team spar option? I like the spar function, but me and many others have said that being able to spar in teams would be fun too XD

Also ever thought about kin v kin battles? And more instances/skirmishes/raids

Lookin forward to it

[CaerArianrhod]

Player’s Council – We are doubling down this year on the conversation between Turbine and you, our players. We are going to start a Player’s Council, a group of players who participate in more regular & structured feedback sessions with the dev group. We want to make sure that as we grow and extend this game, that we are incorporating your likes and dislikes about what we are into what we release. The Community Team will be releasing more information about how we’re going to construct and run the Player’s Council in the coming weeks.

Are you going to have european (in particular german and french) players in the council, or will you exclude that part of the playerbase?

[Zombielord]

Wow this sure sounds great, but ...

# Players council:
Not sure if that works out hontestly, lots of people have their focus on lots of different aspects of the game. Remember plans on adding fellowshipwide desperate flight? Coming from a person who just started the game? (Not blaming him/her but I'm sure you'll get my point here)

# Western Rohan:
Moving a little too fast? Mounted combat is nowhere near where it should be ... Is that going to be the next 'housing'? Added and neglected for years to come?

# Housing:
Come on, we've written thousands of guides about housing you really *should* know by now what we want -.-

# Class adjustments (again)
Fate update seems like a hard pill to swallow for some people here ... so a total class overhaul leaves me very very sceptic.


just my 2 cents

[Tecro]

I am confused, there has been a discusion thread in the forums for as long as I can remember about what to do with housing. Now you say you have to gather information in a couple of months then spend more time deciding what to do. You have what people want, why are you stalling. Makes me think you haven't done anything about it to this point.

[FieldMedic]

Player Council - I'm glad to see that you are engaging the community more, frankly this is something that you should always have been doing but it's good to see you engage us again -- I still remember when your motto was "Turbine: Powered by our fans." But please, make sure this Council is willing to be honest with you and confront you directly to your face, this is the only way that you will grow. If you find that the Council is filled with nothing but "YES, sir!"'s then please feel free to kick them all out of it and keep doing that until you get players that will be real with you.

Housing - Thank You. I'm glad to see you addressing this issue again. I don't like saying this, but, it's about time!

[JTollers]

I have always been impressed with LoTRO's responsiveness and interaction. In terms of what customers get for most other products, it's quite remarkable.

Between the twitter Q/A, the producer letters, the interaction on the forums, and even responses to PMs, it's pretty amazing that devs still turn out steady updates.

When I look over where this was 5+ years ago, and where they game has come thus far, it has really adapted and evolved. It has stayed competitive, and the reason is not just merely the lore/content (bc several MMO fail hanging on that alone), but on considering player feedback and customer service.

As a leader of a kin that has been around as long as Turbine's LoTRO, it was also nice to be acknowledged by them, and Sapience sent a very nice personal note as well.

I am looking forward to the mentioned items including the player council. I am curious as to what is want from PPP in that regard, and was also slightly bummed not to see a mention of LI revamp or when the kinship revamp is slotted (although happy it was acknowledged in the twitter chat).

[Tecro]

Fixed the link for you guys. It was directing to a secure page instead of the public one. Should be good n


We've paid very careful attention to what others have done and where it has and has not worked as well as they'd hoped. We're making every effort to avoid those pitfalls.

I'm am far less worried about the politicking here because I feel the LOTRO community has shown time and time again to be one of the best, and most mature, in the games industry.

Really, just look at glff on any server then talk about maturity.

[BigLotroFan]

It took that long to write this letter? There isn't much and most of it we already knew....

[Sapience]

Since it's my whiteboard currently overflowing with the outlines for this I'll try to addres a couple of points on the Player Council.

Player Council is quite intriguing to me. If it works out well, this on top of hopefully frequent Dev Chats should result in much better communication both ways.

This is the intent. To help us get a broader, more regular flow of information into and out of the community as a whole.

Another positive interaction from Turbine. We need more of this and when they do it we as the community should embrace and encourage it. The players council sounds like a good idea, more input into the process by the players sounds spot on to me.

We're still building out the concepts, but I have gone back and looked at some of the suggestion thread on ombudsman and other feedback processes and suggestions to get an idea of what shape this should take.

As I mentioned, the whiteboard is overflowing and honestly it's been wiped clean a few times based on feedback from other members of the Community Team and after reading what did and didn't work elsewhere.

Final form is still in transition, but please feel free to throw a post in the Suggestion forum if you have thoughts.

Player’s Council

...

While a very interesting idea it's more of a player GM/mentor program. It's not something we're currently looking into, but it is an interesting idea. You should post it in the Suggestions forum so it doesn't get lost in what I'm sure will be a lengthy discussion here.

[The_Bruce]

Sorry, I've been more excited over letters from the Inland Revenue

[Yula_the_Mighty]

How about an extension to player helping players, voluntary player GM's or more likely Knowledge masters KM's than Gamesmaster. Thinking of the Ark program from Anarchy Online which is mostly staffed by voluntary players.

Turbine had this program years ago before Lotro launched with advocates, sentinels and world overseers back when Microsoft ran Turbine games. There was a nasty lawsuit demanding pay for volunteer hours filed against AOL. The entire program was disbanded to avoid any possibility of a similar lawsuit. Not only would significant distraction and costs for a law suit. There were a lot of pay dollars on the table.

The big question is whether Turbine - Warner Brothers - Time Warner wants to dip their foot into this potential tar pool based on historical data. One way to solve the issue would be to dismiss all the USA customer employees. Locate customer service out of the reach of USA courts and laws such as Asia, I suspect part of the reason for locating the EU service in the USA to minimize EU entanglements. Europe would not be a good place to put the customer service department. Maybe Canada.

[Ayrolen]

We've paid very careful attention to what others have done and where it has and has not worked as well as they'd hoped. We're making every effort to avoid those pitfalls.

I'm am far less worried about the politicking here because I feel the LOTRO community has shown time and time again to be one of the best, and most mature, in the games industry.

So will this be an NDA-required thing, and if so, what makes it different than just applying to the PPPP if we wish to test/provide feedback on new content/systems?

Or is this meant to be more of a focus group type of thing, like the Suggestions forum, but on a smaller scale?

[Belnavar]

Player's Council: Could be great, could be a disaster. I have enough faith in Turbine to know that this won't be used as the only source of information, which is good, as collating views from a small group of people is a sure fire way to create changes that might aggravate the larger population. I echo concern about people using this to "lord it over" others, as if they are somehow effectively acknowledged by Turbine. Perhaps this can be solved by an NDA so that members of the Council are not made public. Also, as a journalist I cannot help but see this as partially a PR move

Wildermore: Expected, but good to hear some confirmation. I presume a mid-May release date. If it can match Great River in quality, content, variety, rewards, etc. then we are in for a treat. Fingers crossed, but very optimistic.

Western Rohan: Also expected, but good to get another confirmation. Glad to hear Helm's Deep will be epic in scale. I wonder if we will see siege warfare as another system added to the game? Probably not until Gondor.

Housing: Semi-officially announced on Twitter, but again, good to be properly confirmed. Long-awaited by so many, and could add significant value to the game (I'll be more inclined to do more Hytbold dailies now if I have somewhere to put all that Rohan furniture). Hoping for a mix of in-game and Store unlocks.

Class changes: This is where I am a little concerned. I understand there is a bit of skill bloat and not much room for expanding skills. There is also the fact that most odd levels have no new or improved skills, making them somewhat anticlimactic (made worse with RoR's 3 skills, which leave larger gaps). We certainly need a better sense of advancement and progression. My main worry is that we lose the complexity of the classes, which is what makes them great. I don't want a carbon clone of SWTOR's system (and certainly not the universal cooldown, which lead to me using my most powerful skill over and over on my bounty hunter), and I also hope we're not forced to trait a certain way to be truly effective. More variety and choice would be great. I expect this to be somewhat similar to the MC system.

-Bel

[Thorgrum]

This is the intent. To help us get a broader, more regular flow of information into and out of the community as a whole.

My first piece of advice would be how do you want to treat PvP and PvE. Are they going to remain distinct entities going forward or will they be melded into the council as a broad approach? My second piece of advice is, keep them distinct and seperate with the complete understanding that PVE content and balance trumps the PvP content.

Im taking off my PvP/creep goggles for this but its my belief you should keep and make these distinct within this process. As an example I go on and on about the changes I want for hunters in the moors, I dont really consider the overall implication for the rest of the content in my narrative (as Im sure you and yours have discerened). Id go so far as to reccomend distinct sub groups within the council.

As a PvP player, I have an opinion on housing but im not as vested into the issue its probably a better idea to engage another player on the subject. Anyway good luck with it Sapience and P.S. the maturity thing was nice, you know we're having a special election in MA soon you might have the chops for a political career.

[Cavar]

Well I have to say I am really surprised housing is getting worked on.

Don't be. There's a HUGE wasted revenue stream there for the Store.

Want another chest in your house? Sure, that'll be 645-995 TP.

Want more indoor cosmetic hooks? 150-295 TP should cover it. Same goes for outdoor.

Want access to services like crafting, legendary npcs? Ok, fork over 995-1295 TP.

Want a house wardrobe that allows you to store house cosmetics instead of keeping them in your vault/chests? 775-995 TP.

I'm just guessing on the TP costs, but you know that's why they are doing it.

If most people are like me, they will buy these things and Turbine will reap the rewards.

[BodyDomeLight]

The reason I enjoy LOTRO a lot more than other MMOs is because I think the class and skill design are first class. Well, that and the IP.

So while most of the letter sounds great, the skill adjustment stuff leaves me a little bit concerned. The sky isn't falling for me or anything. But I wouldn't like to see LOTRO get homogenised with other MMOs in terms of classes and skills. I like that my Captain (and my other classes, for that matter) has a broad toolset to dip in and out of, with all of his large array of skills getting used at some point.

I just have pessimistic visions of Warcraft-style 20 skills to click, each one a slightly varied damage version of the last with a slightly different self-buff. Bleeeeah.

I'm fairly sure that won't be the case, but writing out my fatalism here helps ease my bubbling mind.