Lotro _needs_ a comprehensive bugfix and rebalance update

[hurant]

Suggestion: Dedicate a series of updates (Update 17.1 - 18 perhaps?) for a comprehensive bugfix and rebalance update

Motivation:

Lotro Team has done a great job pushing out new content at a high pace.
However, there is very little comparative effort dedicated to fixing bugs and evaluating game mechanics introduced in the past, including those introduced by past Lotro Teams.

I think the Lotro Decision Makers might be underestimating the value of bugfixing and evaluating mechanics, focusing almost all resources on producing new content.
New content might be a reason to come back to the game for many people, but it is proper mechanics that keep them in the game.
I believe this should justify spending some time on getting bugs and game mechanics under control.


Please note the player base (including myself) could give many, many elaborate details. In fact it has been done on the
forums for many months now. I will try to avoid giving a complete list of details myself unless I can get any sort of blue name response.

Some major points that need looking into:



1. Healing versus damage, T2 instances hidden mitigations

The dynamic of healing was changed greatly with trait trees introduction. Healers (esp. minstrels) no longer need to struggle to heal.
Heals restore everybody's morale to full all the time, provided the healer is able to heal (i.e. when not stunned or feared or kiting 30m away from group).

This dynamic lead to greatly increased damage in T2 instances. Additionally, as we recently learned, there is a -6750 effective mitigation debuff in level 100 T2 instances.

There are at least 4 huge drawbacks to this situation:

1. Non-tank classes need to gear very, very defensively for [most] T2 instances.

2. When the healer is unable to heal for a short time, there is very likely chance of someone dying within a few seconds.

3. In PvMP you need ridiculous damage and CC to kill anything grouped up with 2-3 skilled freep healers. -50% incoming heal debuffs do not change this in the least.

4. Gearing a tank is mostly about getting huge levels of morale and mitigations, critical defence 50% or more. The ability to slot other stats (e.g. finesse, inc heal, crit) is situational, in many cases it will put you in danger of being defeated.

5. In extreme cases success or failure depends not on healer's skill, but on getting critical heals that heal 200%+ of

regular heals.

Suggested solution: tone down freep healing, tone down the damage and hidden mitigations requirements in T2 instances.



2. Cross-tree trait potency (Very powerful abilities not locked to trait tree passives)

Some of the classes iconic abilities are locked to trait tree passives.
Some are not!

This opens up for very strange situations:
- red LM can debuff just as good as yellow LM
- red guardian can heal to full with Thrill of Danger
- red warden can have 90% mitigations with 60% uptime and extended HoTs, mastery evade reset
- yellow beorning can have both very powerful heals and strong damage, very unlike heal trees for other classes
etc. etc.

Suggested solution: lock the very powerful abilities to trait tree passives, leave medium-potency abilities possible to get from the other tree.



3. Class abilities

Some class abilities are undeniably broken:

- Champion's Duel does not count as a slow, therefore it stacks with other slows, cannot be removed by creeps in any way, works on instance bosses immune to slows.

- Warden fist-spear line gambits DoTs do not stack.


Some class abilities are very, very suspicious:
- Why does warden parry and on-enemy-defeat heal, guardian engulfed by light & prey on the weak heals do not have any internal cooldown?
- Do DPS RK and beornings need percentage based self-heals of very large magnitude and very short cooldown?
- Why does RK armour of the elements reflect a daze off DoTs and auto-attacks?
- Does a tank guardian need permanent 70% mitigations (76% with just captain and minstrel buffs)? Does a warden tank really need to take minimum 75% more damage in such a setup, at least 40% of the time?



4. Stat contributions and essence availability
- Medium armour classes should not need more mitigations ratings for 50% than heavies for 60%.
- Vitality is a broken stat, not useful even for warden or guardian. Needs urgent change!
- Primary stats essences are inferior to mastery essences for many classes.
- Might grace period end for wardens is now long, long overdue. Will it ever end?
- The essence availability is very limited. The level 100 ones come from repeating epic instances ("essence farm") or Big Battles, also as a very rare drop. Perhaps there should be a way to get level 100 essences from scaled T2 instances.
- There is no way to craft (the very needed) morale essence.



5. Unmitigated damage

Many class abilities deal unnecessary unmitigated damage (not obeying mitigations or damage reductions).

E.g. Tenacious warden BB bonus can crit for 3.8k unmitigated damage.
E.g. LM fire-shields reflects 468 damage to wargs multiple times per second.

If at all, unmitigated damage should stay at very low numbers or at 4% of damage reflect like the Creep Orc BoF recently revamped.
Absolute value reflects should only work per-skill, not per-damage.



6. Finesse bugs
Many skills in the game seem to be unaffected by finesse or -resistance legacies.

E.g. warden morale-taps ignore finesse completely.

Should be either corrected or reflected in tooltip.



7. [PvMP] Creep corruptions and traits
- Creep corruptions grant wildly varying levels of stats compared to essences:
mitigations: 901/2766 = 33%
mastery: 1600/1229 = 130%
critical rating: 2020/1229 = 164%

Suggestion: move all creep corruptions stat contributions to 164% of a blue level 100 essence.

- Inflexibility:
The 3-bonus makes arguably the corruptions very inflexible (e.g. a creep NEEDs to have 3 of the same type to get the bonus, even if he/she does not want the stats for some reason).
Perhaps moving the "3 Equipped"-bonus to "2 Equipped" and moving the "6 Equipped" bonus to "4 Equipped" would be a very good idea for more flexibility.

- Loss ouf creep outgoing healing on mastery corruptions
"3 Equipped" Mastery boost used to grant +3200 mastery of both types. Now it grants +5% damage, but does not affect outgoing healing. It really should be fixed.

- Some creep traits are still beyond useless, like the morale regeneration ones.

- Creep Melee Criticals, Tactical Criticals, DO NOT increase the magnitude of respective skills. Only the critical rating does. I believe this is a bug and should be corrected.



8. [PvMP-Ettenmoors] NPCs and Outposts
- Ettenmoors NPCs were not scaled like the Osgiliath ones. The NPCs freeps fight need a comparable morale and damage boost, they should not stay identical.
The NPCs that creeps do fight need a damage boost as well.

- Important Ettenmoors NPCs (in keeps and outposts) will randomly attack and move to a nearby player, causing a reset.
-- Can be exploited for griefing / unfair advantage purposes. E.g. r0 warg runs in, hits once, runs back and resets the NPC.
-- Keeps and outposts NPC only attacking target with highest threat would help against this.

- Ettenmoors DoF NPCs are not immune to force taunts. A single tank guardian/captain can cause a reset of those NPCs, i.e. of DoF middle boss.
-- Suggested solutions:
---add immunity to force taunts and threat catch-up mechanics for DoF bosses
---OR give Warleader a force taunt on one of the low-cooldown shouts
---OR disable force taunt component on skills in Ettens.


- Many Ettenmoors NPCs that creeps fight do not drop the loot they are supposed to drop.
-- Sargent's Patches (spelling?) are only dropped in the HH OP.
-- In many keeps First Marshals do not have open tapping, they drop one total FM Mark, not one for everybody.


- Outposts are the deciding factor in many fights. I believe their importance should be reduced.
Suggestion:
your faction has 0 outposts: 160% of +3400 both masteries bonus for +5440 both masteries
your faction has 1 outpost_: 180% of +3400 both masteries bonus for +6120 both masteries
your faction has 2 outposts: 200% of +3400 both masteries bonus for +6800 both masteries
your faction has 3 outposts: 220% of +3400 both masteries bonus for +7480 both masteries
your faction has 4 outposts: 240% of +3400 both masteries bonus for +8160 both masteries

Note: Removing the bonus completely will cause creep heals to be very, very, very low.



9. [PvMP-Osgiliath] Problems with the map

Nobody plays the map on my server (a large EU server, if not the largest in terms of PvMP).
The top reasons, I believe:
- Very boring "center bridge shuffle".
- No tactical mastery for creep healers resulting in -10% heals or even more and only around -0.5% freep/minstrel heals.
- Infamy/Commendation bonus much lower. 90% max vs 203% or more max.



10. Problems with specific instances
E.g. BG raid: the "beast" is no longer invisible, but runs with 200% or more the speed it used to run.
E.g. Many problems with Osgiliath instances still not fixed.

[hurant]

I did forget a quite important thing:

11. Buff/debuff refresh lag

There was an (*) update to Lotro that changed two things: how often debuffs refresh and how often morale bars refresh.

* - Anyone on forums able to pinpoint which specific update was that?

It is my belief that the changes were as follows:

- buffs and debuffs on your target were changed to refresh on every change instead X time interval (1s perhaps?)

- morale bars were changed to refresh every Y seconds (Y = 5 seconds?)

Outcome: Crippling graphical lag when targetting NPC or player with many buffs and debuffs.

- In extreme cases targetting such NPC or player will occasionally nearly stop Lotro for many players for good 10s - 15s.

- In most cases players suffer greatly reduced performance because of this.

Easy solution(?): Revert the change, make buffs / debuffs refresh only every Z time interval (1 second? 2 seconds?).





--- Reserved for future updates, including, but not limited to other players' feedback. ---

[Geventh]

Nice post!
Let's hope Turbine does something about it...

[Beaniemooch]

Much of what you mention has been requested, talked about, pleaded for and known by both Turbine and players for over 2 years. Good luck.

[kickman77]

Amazing post and I agree with everything that was said.

[Coeprandua]

The way to move forward is providing exciting new content and more options. There is no bug in the game right now that is ruining my experience more than the fact that I am bored. The mmo market is flooded with exciting new worlds to explore, there is just no time to mess around with old, rotted content.

The system is not broken the way you described. DPS roles don't need to gear defensively for t2 content. If you believe this, you are falling for your own con. RC, LT, SL, SS, SG - all successfully completed t2c with a hunter having 62k mastery and 192% ranged damage increase unbuffed.

Restricting traits, making the trees more specialized, taking away options in general... these things will just make an already dull gameplay even worse. They will increase the grind as people will need more specialized gear if they don't want to lose functionality.

Freep healing does not need nerfing. The was majority of people don't know how to heal. A lot of minstrels have trouble healing my 52k-morale tank in RC. A 20k-mastery rk heals me like a god. What does this tell you? Player skill varies on a very broad spectrum. 60% of ppl would get hit hard by a Nerf, 25% would enjoy the game a tiny bit better, 15% would laugh so hard they would cry.

In other words, this mess is dated. Move on, explore new grounds. Its what I'm doing right now.

[Yula_the_Mighty]

You can be sure that Vyvyanne has monthly, quarterly and annual revenue targets that her team has to meet. Miss those targets and the development team get downsized. Vyvyanne will be replaced by someone that is more inclined to work on providing updates that generate revenue.There is no way to charge for the kind of changes that you are requesting.

I can not speak for how tightly the owners Warner Brothers have control over operations. At where I work, we have a corporate financial person that is our overseer. Reviews every expense. Reviews all proposed development activities. The purpose is to make sure that the development team is correctly focusing its efforts on things that are can be sold for dollars.

Most likely Vyvyanne has a Warner Brothers accounting overseer to help her make decisions that will keep the dollars flowing in. She is going to have to work in changes for the existing software such as bug fixes into the mix of new content and Lotro Store items that generate revenue. Something like a pure revision update that has nothing that can be sold. That is going to be a non starter. It will be totally rejected as unacceptable.

It was a possibility when Turbine was an independent game company and their CEO is gamer. Back in 2010, Time Warner via their wholly owned company Warner Brothers purchased Turbine. Turbine and its products are now part of a USA public stock company that is totally driven by the need for total revenue and a decent profit margin on everything they do.

Another problem that Turbine has that isn't talked about much. Turbine's fifth game Infinite Crisis launched to live and closed in 2015. Resulting in a massive loss. This kind of financial disaster results in a immediate reaction from the folks upstairs in this case, Warner Brothers. Taking a much bigger interest in the day to day operations of the division that fouled up.

Again, no idea what the situation with Lotro and Vyvyanne is. In my own personal experience as a software developer, when a different project with our division fouled up royally. Our part of the organization did our best to hunker down in the hopes we would not be noticed by the corporate Visigoths. That meant keep plugging away while trying to ignore all the unpleasantness in the next building.

[siipperi]

Another worth of mentioning is yellow LM unmitigated embers that hit about 40k.

[hurant]

Much of what you mention has been requested, talked about, pleaded for and known by both Turbine and players for over 2 years. Good luck.

And I'm fully aware of that. What I'm trying to do is to raise awareness to the fact that progress in software development is not only about releasing new products / new features for existing product. It is also maintaining that product in a bug-free and working-as-intended way as possible.

The way to move forward is providing exciting new content and more options. There is no bug in the game right now that is ruining my experience more than the fact that I am bored. The mmo market is flooded with exciting new worlds to explore, there is just no time to mess around with old, rotted content.

The system is not broken the way you described. DPS roles don't need to gear defensively for t2 content. If you believe this, you are falling for your own con. RC, LT, SL, SS, SG - all successfully completed t2c with a hunter having 62k mastery and 192% ranged damage increase unbuffed.

Restricting traits, making the trees more specialized, taking away options in general... these things will just make an already dull gameplay even worse. They will increase the grind as people will need more specialized gear if they don't want to lose functionality.

Freep healing does not need nerfing. The was majority of people don't know how to heal. A lot of minstrels have trouble healing my 52k-morale tank in RC. A 20k-mastery rk heals me like a god. What does this tell you? Player skill varies on a very broad spectrum. 60% of ppl would get hit hard by a Nerf, 25% would enjoy the game a tiny bit better, 15% would laugh so hard they would cry.

In other words, this mess is dated. Move on, explore new grounds. Its what I'm doing right now.

Ignorance is a blessing, they say. Are you seriously describing lotro as "old, rotted content" and then making some claims?

RE: "DPS roles don't need to gear defensively for t2 content."
I've also used glasscannon builds where it was possible. Let me tell you: most of the time it was only possible on ranged classes such as hunters. Try the same trick on a melee class and in many cases you will get defeated on your melee DPS.
Other times there are some t2 raids where a RK with 12.5k tact mitigations was getting hit by 23k AOE from a LM-debuffed boss. That RK was 1-shotted by that AOE.
Lastly, in 6-mans or even 3-man a debuffing class, esp. LM will work wonders to help you survive unavoidable damage. Please note not all t2 groups want to or just can take a captain and a LM.
Lastly, completing an instance successfully does not exclude a glasscannon DPS eating up many in-combat rezzes or staying dead from aoe damage most of the time.
Your "proof" is therefore very weak.

RE "They will increase the grind as people will need more specialized gear"
I hope you are aware of what guardians, wardens, even RKs and some other classes can pull of while "DPS" specced. If not there are plenty of videos on the forums, watch them and educate yourself.
If you do not have a problem with abilities like "heal to full" that are available basically without cooldown* for some classes, then you need perhaps to reconsider.
* - without cooldown I mean either one of many such abilities is always available or it has sufficiently low cooldown

RE "Freep healing does not need nerfing."
You completely missed the point. It was not about nerfing, it was about balancing it out so that heals AS WELL AS T2 raids/instances damage are not 80%+ of morale.

Most likely Vyvyanne has a Warner Brothers accounting overseer to help her make decisions that will keep the dollars flowing in.
[...]
Again, no idea what the situation with Lotro and Vyvyanne is.

Thank you for your input. I liked the last part best ;P
If their way of thinking is remotely similar to that way of thinking that Infinite Crisis might become something different than... erm, well, infinite crisis, I see where the problem is.

It is my opinion that fixing some of the bugs should be very beneficial in terms of $$$, but of course I can merely suggest that to these people via this very forum. Whether this suggestion gets any attention, is highly doubtful. We all know lotro gets bug fixes, trait changes, but in my personal opinion it happens at a VERY slow pace.

I am aware some of the changes I am asking for are rather complicated and very unlikely to happen. Let us not exaggerate however how flipping a flag on 3 skills from "stack once" to "stack once per player" costs.

[Vyvyanne]

We actually have been doing this. If you look at the release notes over the last year, you will note that the major XX.0 updates are large content pushes while the XX.1, XX.2, etc releases tend to be more balance, bug and quality of life.

[Almagnus1]

We actually have been doing this. If you look at the release notes over the last year, you will note that the major XX.0 updates are large content pushes while the XX.1, XX.2, etc releases tend to be more balance, bug and quality of life.

Can you give us a more comprehensive list of what you have done, to help combat some of this?

Any chance you can refute/discredit what Yula has said? He's been your worst enemy for a while now.....

[LagunaD2]

We actually have been doing this. If you look at the release notes over the last year, you will note that the major XX.0 updates are large content pushes while the XX.1, XX.2, etc releases tend to be more balance, bug and quality of life.

With all due respect, the quantity of bugs being fixed is negligible compared to the number of bugs that affect core gameplay and need fixing.

There are abilities, traits and legacies that have been obviously bugged since the Helms Deep class revamp which have not been fixed or even acknowledged.

Also, going back even further, warsteed movement remains an embarrassment to the game.

[Pontin_Finnberry]

Also, going back even further, warsteed movement remains an embarrassment to the game.

What about war-steed movement? seems fine to me, maybe something I'm missing?

[littlesquinky]

You can't sell bugfix to people. If a bug is serious enough to be addressed (eg plotstopping bugs, crashes etc) it will be fixed in a hotfix, anything else has to be scheduled with stuff people are willing to pay for. You can't propose a bugfix/rebalance iteration to your PO or PM, it won't be accepted unless that person is a software developer and thinks not addressing those issues will derail the project in the long term. Very unlikely to happen. Customers are willing to pay/subscribe for stuff that brings enough value to them, if you try to sell them bufix or subtle improvement they will say 'hey you should have done it right first time'. As for rebalance specifically, they are very subjective, unless something is really broken or very very op nobody will mess with it until a lot of data has been mined.

Source: working in the industry, following current FOTM software development practices

[Leixy]

Vyvyanne has actually done an admirable job since taking over LotRO 9 months ago. They've knocked out hundreds, if not thousands of bugs in the last year. Problem is, there's thousands more to go, and she was given a limited staff that mostly still needed to build new items for the game to keep players interested.

Part of me feels like LotRO should have always had a hybrid QA / Dev team that was only tasked with solving bugs, they didn't build new content, only fixing old content / engine performance.

Of course, Vyvyanne probably doesn't have that sort of budget for an 8 year old game.

Here's all the major patches in the last year for fixing bugs & re-balancing the game:

https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Upd...vember_5,_2014
https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Upd...ember_10,_2014
https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Upd...ember_15,_2014
https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Upd...ember_18,_2014
https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Upd...bruary_4,_2015
https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Upd..._-_May_4,_2015
https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Upd...-_June_8,_2015
https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Upd..._June_11,_2015
https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Upd..._July_20,_2015
https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Upd...August_3,_2015
https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Upd...ugust_19,_2015
https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Upd...ugust_26,_2015

[LagunaD2]

What about war-steed movement? seems fine to me, maybe something I'm missing?

Moving along an empty, open road, with little or no nearby NPC or player activity, my warsteed movement freezes/stutters regularly, like every 5-10 seconds or so. In actual combat, or when obstacles are present, it can be much worse - like teleporting forward, backward or sideways large distances instantly.

I play on a high-end (Windows Experience score 7.8) system with low (100 ms or less) latency.

[Laerien]

What about war-steed movement? seems fine to me, maybe something I'm missing?

There you go



Also, everyone can see the amazing smooth gameplay.

[ChromiteSwiftpaw]

There you go

https://youtu.be/f31XX2_Pvag?t=389

Also, everyone can see the amazing smooth gameplay.

What I'm seeing in that video is someone stressing the encoding/capture they are doing causing them to have hitchy (sometimes frozen) gameplay.



As for war-steed problems there are several factors that can cause the hitchyness/lag that one experiences with war-steeds:

1) The server that the current zone you're in is experiencing heavy load. (Reduced awareness will sometimes pop up) War-steeds seem to be very tied to the server so any little bit of problems with the server will cause your war-steed to jump sideways, ghost you through things then yank you back only to have you discover you're caught on something, etc.

2) The client LOD (level of detail) loading issue that causes momentary hitches every few seconds as you're riding across a zone. If you look ahead of you you can see the hills pop-in with different textures as you get closer to them. The longer your client has been running and the more places you've been in game (zoning in and out of instances, houses, etc.) the more the hitches become pronounced. Having Frills enabled also contributes to this.

3) Poor video performance due to the game's display engine not being optimized enough. If you're riding through a city or town where all the lights have just been turned on, or many players are in the same area or there is a lot of transparencies you will get some really poor performance on your war-steed (and just running around on foot, even)

[Leixy]

I think the main issue with war-steed movement is the map, engine, and server cannot keep up with the speed of where the player drives the client. the server is constantly far behind the player and compensates by randomly moving the war-steed to where it thinks the player is. So a player may be riding on the open plains, but the server thinks the player is stuck 50 meters back at a rock.

So from a player perspective, war-steed hitch and lag like crazy making the game-play terribly poor.

On normal steeds, the player just rides around the map, and updates the server ever so often with where the player is pathing, being exactly in sync with the server isn't that important because if you hit a tree on your client, you just move around it, but when in combat, the mob needs to know whether you hit the tree or not for positioning purposes.

It may be something like, normal steeds update the server every 1/3rd of a second on a player location.

But for war-steeds, 1/3rd of a second is 10 meters at full speed, which is the difference between hitting a sign post / rock / tree vs riding smoothly across the landscape.

This should be as close to zero pathing update latency as possible, so the latency with the game client is the only factor causing hitching. And when in combat, players and mobs need to be sync'ed correctly so there's no lag between mob attacks and player attacks, as well as the landscape not causing hitching.

Turbine fixed the puddle dismount bug this year, maybe next year Turbine can fix the war-steed hitching problems on the new server hardware. Yes, please.

P.S. as far as texture load lag contributing to hitching, if that's a problem, then Turbine should give us a graphics setting to fully load all the textures in a zone in Video RAM so load time is zero as long as we meet certain vid card requirements, that they tell us.

[Galbril]

Can you give us a more comprehensive list of what you have done, to help combat some of this?

Any chance you can refute/discredit what Yula has said? He's been your worst enemy for a while now.....

Which of Yula's 34k posts would you like her to refute.....:P

[maartena]

Can you give us a more comprehensive list of what you have done, to help combat some of this?

Any chance you can refute/discredit what Yula has said? He's been your worst enemy for a while now.....

Compile the patch notes from the last few years. The forum only shows the last few 16.x updates, but with Google and Archive.org you can probably get every single patch notes since 2007, as many fan sites have been posting them as well.

[bucko39]

They've knocked out hundreds, if not thousands of bugs in the last year.

Thanks, I needed a good laugh.

[Coeprandua]

And I'm fully aware of that. What I'm trying to do is to raise awareness to the fact that progress in software development is not only about releasing new products / new features for existing product. It is also maintaining that product in a bug-free and working-as-intended way as possible.



Ignorance is a blessing, they say. Are you seriously describing lotro as "old, rotted content" and then making some claims?

RE: "DPS roles don't need to gear defensively for t2 content."
I've also used glasscannon builds where it was possible. Let me tell you: most of the time it was only possible on ranged classes such as hunters. Try the same trick on a melee class and in many cases you will get defeated on your melee DPS.
Other times there are some t2 raids where a RK with 12.5k tact mitigations was getting hit by 23k AOE from a LM-debuffed boss. That RK was 1-shotted by that AOE.
Lastly, in 6-mans or even 3-man a debuffing class, esp. LM will work wonders to help you survive unavoidable damage. Please note not all t2 groups want to or just can take a captain and a LM.
Lastly, completing an instance successfully does not exclude a glasscannon DPS eating up many in-combat rezzes or staying dead from aoe damage most of the time.
Your "proof" is therefore very weak.

RE "They will increase the grind as people will need more specialized gear"
I hope you are aware of what guardians, wardens, even RKs and some other classes can pull of while "DPS" specced. If not there are plenty of videos on the forums, watch them and educate yourself.
If you do not have a problem with abilities like "heal to full" that are available basically without cooldown* for some classes, then you need perhaps to reconsider.
* - without cooldown I mean either one of many such abilities is always available or it has sufficiently low cooldown

RE "Freep healing does not need nerfing."
You completely missed the point. It was not about nerfing, it was about balancing it out so that heals AS WELL AS T2 raids/instances damage are not 80%+ of morale.




Thank you for your input. I liked the last part best ;P
If their way of thinking is remotely similar to that way of thinking that Infinite Crisis might become something different than... erm, well, infinite crisis, I see where the problem is.

It is my opinion that fixing some of the bugs should be very beneficial in terms of $$$, but of course I can merely suggest that to these people via this very forum. Whether this suggestion gets any attention, is highly doubtful. We all know lotro gets bug fixes, trait changes, but in my personal opinion it happens at a VERY slow pace.

I am aware some of the changes I am asking for are rather complicated and very unlikely to happen. Let us not exaggerate however how flipping a flag on 3 skills from "stack once" to "stack once per player" costs.

Lmao. Did you read your own post? I always reread my posts before submitting.

What I said is based on actual gameplay experience. Do you know what that is? Because it seems to me you're just using sweeping generalizations and wild guesswork in trying to make a point.

I'm just saying your bunker tactics is unnecessary, but if you don't come out of it you will never realize. Been there done that. Sorry, not gonna record it on a video to let you grow, cuz something tells me your ego would get in the way anyway.

[Leixy]

I think players want the bugs fixed.

I think Turbine wants the bugs fixed.

but I think Turbine wants to destroy the One Ring before WB might eliminate their funding for the world builders.

It's a development race to get to the Frodo/Sam/Smeagol Mt Doom session play, whether you like it or not.

[Vulcwen]

I think the main issue with war-steed movement is the map, engine, and server cannot keep up with the speed of where the player drives the client. the server is constantly far behind the player and compensates by randomly moving the war-steed to where it thinks the player is. So a player may be riding on the open plains, but the server thinks the player is stuck 50 meters back at a rock.

(.. rest of the quote cutted to prevent walls of text ..)

A distinctive difference between normal movement and warsteed movement is that warsteeds can move faster than a client loads in objects on the landscape, allowing you ride through objects, while you shouldn't. Another difference is that for regular movement, the client decides, and only in a few cases the server overrides the client (at the moment a slow/root is applied, while for warsteeds, the server has priority over the client at all times. The client doesn't immediately change the position of a player when the server overrides the client for warsteeds, but actually tries to smoothen out the movement, because when the client receives the message, it knows that that situation has already passed, so based on that info, and info the client has itself (including player input) it estimates where it needs to go next (using their own collision models). When the difference gets too large, the client has to correct it more drastically, and that's when rubberbanding happens.

An image to clear things up a bit (quickly drawn, it should be smoother than in this image XD)


In this image, a player runs towards an object, just before the object, he quickly corrects, and on the client, he can get around the object this way. On the server he first hits the object, before processing the left input, which eventually has little impact, after that point, the player stays stuck behind the object, while on the client he keeps riding. At some point the client realizes the difference is too large, and you rubberband back to behind the object.

On a regular mount(or on foot), the server would've accepted the player's position, as long a proper connection is present, and you won't end up rubberbanding.

Im currently too tired to write about other issues, I'll see that some other time :P A key in my post will be the aspect of player skill in class balance, which is something that is easily overlooked.