Changes to Motes/Ember/Figments

[WorrBinpike]

To me in the blue statement are to many "we will see", "in the future" etc.

And good luck to convert Lotro to a "Fashion Wars" game, this works in GW2 because graphics are awesome, but in Lotro graphics and especially characters looks utterly bad.

Also good luck to Cordovan with tomorrows Cord of the Ring Show....there will be a hell of a ####storm i guess about this.......

[wispsong]

It looks like this part of the player base wasn't hitting enough of their targets...too much having fun, not enough grinding/spending.

And my spending will change due to this, not my playstyle.

It’s clearly a case of they want us to pay more real money for cosmetics. But they need to be more forthright about it. He danced around it explaining the theoretical underpinnings of the Figments currency, but it wasn’t really made clear. Not the best transparency …

Then maybe put them in the store where we see what we get for our LP.

So was problem to be solved here that some folks had collected too many cosmetics???? How did this imbalance the game?

As it sits right now are we supposed to stop questing in case figments are getting added to the current quests we are doing?

We definitely need more information than taking it on faith that there will be some method for cosmetics/decor collectotrs to continue to play the game without having crack open our wallets more than we already do. Cause right now shutting down the convestion is saying hey you can get a few hundred every couple months off festival wrappers, but until then feel free to gamble on spinning the wheel of lootbox purchases as this is the only option between festivals.


Of all the things to address I'm shocked this somehow made it to the top of the pile.

I don't need more information; it is clear that they want every player to buy keys for a lucky chance. Not going to happen on my part. I wouldn't mind buying these items diectly in the store where I can see what I get for my money, but I won't gamble.

Here is what I would do in Raninia's shoes:


Figments
The plentiful amount of embers resulted in a situation where people had so many they were bartering them into figments. This impacted key sales for lootboxes. This is a fair point from a business perspective ... cosmetics are cosmetics, and in a F2P game that is the best stuff to charge real $$$ for. But just be up front about it, and perhaps just put this stuff in the LOTRO Store so the game has fewer perception issues when it comes to being greedy. Give out a handful of LP for finishing the festival wrappers.

Ember prices are too high, and I prefer fluff that lasts over gear that expires. I wonder why they are so reluctant to sell directly in the store where I can get what I want and go instead this gambling route. I see the day coming then every item will be a gamble and then I won't need any more LP.

[Erusen]

Embers:
- The purpose of Embers was to act as a way to mitigate being unlucky with RNG. However, what it turned into was the fastest and best way to get the gear. We don't want players to run things that aren't the content the gear comes from as their primary way of getting that gear. In looking at why this was happening, the disenchanting of gear from any tier of any group instance was obviously where the bulk of Embers were coming from, in a way that really pushed players to grind to maximize their time. And especially, grind lower tier content to get higher tier gear. So that's why we removed the gear disenchant option to Embers. We'll have more ways to earn Embers when this goes live, and we'll be balancing around how many Embers a player can earn without opening lootboxes, as that's how most players play and we want to make sure you're still able to consistently get the gear you want... but the way we want you to get most of your pieces is by running the content where it drops.

Giving the benefit of doubt - that the intention on this update is not to steer players towards the LOTRO store (dont blame me for my low trust, after I bought a unfinished Brawler class).

If the issue is getting gear running things that are not the content the gear drops (mostly Raids and high tier instances) - why didn't you say that alongside with the gear drops there will be a very good amount of Embers dropping from these instances (that way you bypass the RNG and still make the instances have value on replaying.

An even better solution for raids RNG would be skip the gear that drops on the chests and put the amount of embers for 1 piece so we choose what we want to get.

Other way of keeping the replayability of the instances, even easier one (and the multiplayer aspect of the game going) would be creating weekilies quests for multiplayer completion of cap level instances (not solo, we already have it) - you could even put a reset for mithril coins if monetization is needed.

[Raninia]

I can see what you are trying to do, but the Lootsystem is not made for what you are trying to do. It's another point why the player base is complaining so much.
I already run an instance as much as possible. Unfortunately this is once per tier 4/5 per week T3 is more or less irrelevant at that point. Well with so much trash gear floating around it's often pretty demotivating to get the right stuff. Especially escalating this into a raid situation. The primary way is already to run instances to gear up. Barters are only so popular because the Loot is so bad and you cannot get good gear.
Another big problem is right now, that there are only such few instances to do. If we could only run old instances for usefull purposes, this would be much less of a problem.

Change the Lootsystem and probably it will be better. Leave it and i bet satisfaction will go down the drain.

Thanks for the answers anyway.

I think it's fair to say that we have to keep improving our loot system and these changes won't work by themselves. LOTRO is a big game, and these currencies affect huge chunks of it in varying ways. I'm comfortable saying we'll keep taking feedback and working to improve the looting system, but we have limited resources, and I'm not convinced these changes by themselves wouldn't alleviate some of the issues you're describing as well.

But I'm not against looking again at locks if those become too big of a barrier. Our current lock system is cleaner, but it could still be improved.

First ty for your responses. Its nice to see the thinking behind the change, at least now it makes some slight sense. Can you give us some ideas of these sources you keep mentioning? At the moment it feels like we will have to keep farming weekly stuff that gets boring very quickly.

I mentioned some of the sources in the reply post, but generally speaking: landscape quests, instance quests, Reward Track, Events, in addition to expanding on existing sources, these're all places we can look to include for more sources of Figments and Embers.

Does this do that?

Instances would no longer give any embers at all with this change. So you'd only be getting pieces that randomly drop for you. But the pieces that randomly drop for you don't respect which spec you actually play as, a Champion could receive a bunch of might tank/heal gear despite never playing tank and not even having a healing traitline. Combine that with loot locks and you may often find that you can't get any useable pieces to drop each week.

On the other hand if you spam the weekly quests and open lootboxes you'll receive a bunch of embers that you can use to directly barter for the specific piece you want.

Whilst I'm definitely not fond of the pre-U32 loot system I don't think you're making much improvement here.

Part of the work we're doing is adding more group instance-based weeklies. It's certainly possible we'll have to continue tweaking that balance, to make it more lucrative to play the content where the gear drops, but those kinds of changes are less systemic.

Yeah, I'm having trouble reconciling the stated goal with the changes. They're removing Embers from dropped gear because it incentivized people to run the group content they just spent a lot of time, money and effort creating, but they're just going to add Embers back in...somewhere else? Increasing the reward from trivial solo weekly grinds at the same time they're trying to keep people from getting too many Embers from lower-tier group content? It makes no sense.

To be more specific, we want you to run T3 to get T3 gear, not T1 to get Embers because you have the T3 deed. There's no problem if all you want to do is run T1 for T1 gear, but we shouldn't be disincentivizing you from running higher tiers, the difficulty of them does that already

Sorry, but your whole post has main focus on funnelling players into a certain playstyle. Some players, in fact, a lot of them don't roll that way, they never have and they never will. They do their weeklies and earn gear that they can use, and then buy the rest at the ember barter. It's been the way since ash was introduced in Mordor years ago. Its why this whole new currency system was born in the first place. Youve got to have been on these boards for a very long time to remember what's been said in the past.

I certainly haven't been here as long as many folks on these boards, so I'll defer to your experience there. But I don't think we're funnelling players here as much as you're indicating. By disconnecting Embers from Figments, players who care about cosmetics - who aren't often the same as high-end raiders - have less incentive to grind instances they don't enjoy, and players who do enjoy both have to debate less what they do with their Embers. Breaking the two currencies apart gives us more flexibility in terms of what we give you, and makes decisions on how to use them much easier for you.

The players that you seem to be completely overlooking are not going to go after those drops, especially with the new difficulty levels that the game has now. They may have got their feet wet a few years ago, but its a very deep end now. Story-mode drops rubbish, and the ember gear is superior to it, so I don't know what you're expecting or why.

I'm not sure the distinction you're making here - if someone wanted to get the higher end gear, they needed to complete higher tier content already in order to even be able to barter for it. That isn't changing.

You say you don't think this will prevent players from running group content. But you're wrong on that. Drop into game over the weekend on an anon char and join a few pugs, see how much trading for ember burning goes on. You've got to have been in it to know how it works. Players are generally good at helping others in the game, as long as they can get a little something out of it. Take that away and they'll run to gear - then stop.

I have no doubt there's significant amounts of Ember trading now, but I've also played games with PUGs where there's no Ember-from-gear concept and still seen significant gear trading. In fact, the utility of the gear is strictly tied to its stats now, as opposed to its potential disenchant value. So any gear that isn't valuable to you, but is valuable to someone else in your group, is even easier to trade or give away, as the cost to you is much lower. Similarly, if you're on the other end of that, and someone else gets a piece they don't need which you want, you may not even need to give up a drop you got to

The last few years, and as far as I know, the future - ember gear is not the best in game. That drops in instances and raids. It is easy to tell a player that does the content apart from a player geared from the ember barter. And when you consider a full set of both, side by side, they are a million miles apart.

Just a note - above you wrote "Story-mode drops rubbish, and the ember gear is superior to it," were you referring to quest gear? If so, that's generally true, as initial Ember gear is usually the instance gear. However, when we version Embers to Motes, at the same time we'll also be changing the gear that was available for Embers into gear that will be available for Motes. So, for example, if you're joining endgame content later, you'll be able to buy the early instance gear for Motes instead of Embers, and that gear will be superior to quest gear.

[QUOTE=Arnenna;8118786]So this, get the hard gear by completing a deed, is not accurate. The hard gear is in t3 and above.

That's true, but the only thing you need to do is beat those tiers once to unlock the Ember barter, and once you do that, it's currently faster and easier to get that gear through the barter than running the instance at a higher tier.

And 2 - 3x current ember prices? Yeah, you'll have no players left.

This will really depend on what acquisition rates look like, which we're confident we can tweak, and are easier to change than a system.

Sorry, late edit as tea was ready to be taken off the stove. If you really, genuinely want players earning drops from runs, they wouldn't be able to get everything they want with a wallet full of LP and a clicky finger now would they. But hey, they can. You going to change that? If key sales aren't the intention, no reason not to. Its no different to buying all the gear from earned embers.

If players choose to spend LP on lootboxes, that's been their choice for a long time. But those're supplemental options - are focus is on better aligning the experience. Right now, most players are not interested in running T3+ for most content after they've gotten their individual completion, and we think these changes will help improve that issue. I'm not naive enough to think it'll fully solve everything once and for all, but improvement is still a worthwhile goal.

Its very nice of you to step up and volunteer to take the flack on this, but, this has been going on since long before you arrived.

I can't speak to what was happening beforehand, but I can confidently say I was the one who pushed these changes.

Every single thing you just wrote, feels really disconnected from the actual reality. People do farm content to get the gear they want, because the actual instances have, now hear me out, WEEKLY LOCKS and the gear they drop is TOTALLY RANDOM so you can get TANK gear on a class like HUNTER that can't even tank. So of course people get the deed and then farm embers because after multiple weeks of not getting the gear they want and having to wait and be frustrated, they turn to ember grind and the barterers to mitigate bad luck. Your proposed changes will only accelerate this trend, but instead of running instances to do it, people will farm weeklies and possibly open lootboxes. The aim behind your changes either shows a lack of understanding of how the game loot system works or is just lying in the face of your customers becaue you want to push opening the lootboxes. I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt and hope you have good intentions.

Sure, I agree, players will run more weeklies. And by aligning and adding more weeklies to group instance content, and especially the places where the drops are, you'll end up running weeklies in those places.

If you want players to get most of their pieces by running the content then have that content be the only way to get the gear. None of your changes to the ember system will address the biggest reason players barter for gear - unreliable RNG + restrictive locks. People want to do the latest content to get the latest gear, but you only get a couple rolls per characterweek with the favored locks system. Rework it and have all instances give instance-specific (maybe even instance-and-tier-specific) currencies for barters and you solve this. You can still limit this with the lock system so that people only get "X" pieces of gear per week if you're worried about hardcore grinders having an advantage over players with less hours per week. Have the barterers later sell the currencies for an appropriate motes/embers cost to provide a catchup mechanic once that content is deemed no longer contemporary.

A few folks suggested doing some sort of gear or instance token, several calling out Throne as a model they liked. I wasn't around for Throne, so all of my knowledge of it secondhand, but several things have changed since Throne. For example, Throne had two tiers, whereas today we have five. We're trying to be more thoughtful with adding new currencies as well, as we're trying to make it easier for us to maintain our content over the long term, since we know now that we'll have to support Legendary Servers. These suggestions are ones we've been discussing internally and will keep doing so, but I can't speak for how the Hiddenhoard raid loot will work.

Ok, now to catch up more on the thread. As a heads up, I'll also be on Cord of the Rings tomorrow to answer more questions!

[JasonEvan]

This is a pretty gross change. Since coming back to the game 2 months ago from over a decade away I have been content leveling up in the open world and crafting. I used to do a ton of skirmishes, raids, and 3-mans back in the day though and was looking forward to getting back into that once I got to level cap.

I'm not gonna do that now. Also, this seems a huge disservice to crafting as well. Crafted gear is relegated to the garbage heap and the instance gear system is making acquiring it needlessly obtuse. I suggest making it MORE attractive a system for the users. You know, doing something that your players like?

SSG, you have the BEST community in all of MMOs. Everyone agrees on that across the MMO space. Stop trying to get them to leave. This is a baffling decision to me, a person who left and said he wouldn't come back until you addressed the LI system. It took a decade and we aren't still fully there yet are we?

[Osglinthor]

@Raninia

You need to understand firstly why people opt for most efficient ember farm and deed only run into barter in the first place. All of this is result of terrible personal loot and 1 time per week lock. Do you have any idea how bad it is to not be able to run 3\6 man multiple times per week. One lock for t4\t5 is beyond terrible. You have to spend a month or two for piece just because of #1 bad rng and #2 being locked out of content. So why the #### should I run instance over and over during perioid of few weeks\months in worst case scenario instead just afk trough 1\2 weekly barter piece I need and not log in till something better comes. LET US fking farm 3\6 man content and gear. Esp after you remove embers from loot. Nothing usefull drops either way that can be farmed. What you plan to do now will kill any instance runs even more. Since there will be even less reason to run them.

[Snobs]

The changes to Embers/Motes/Figments is one of the worst changes this game have ever seen. Let this be very clear. There are so many things wrong with it, it is actually unbelievable:

1. It promotes more Pay2Win. You will get way less Embers from actually playing the game (= running instances). If you want more Embers than what you can get from weeklies, you gotta pay $$$.
2. Running instances on max level and T3-5 is completely useless when you already have the gear. You will instead run 130 T1 instances for the weekly quest. There is no need to ever run T3-T5 again. And btw, there is nothing wrong with having instance gear giving embers.
3. Higher Caps will likely lead to higher prices which means it's an even bigger grind (= and even more Pay2Win).
4. Ember Cap will be reset multiple times which makes it completely irrelevant.
5. Figments of Splendour are no longer going to be earnable by playing. You will have to pay to get the Cosmetics.
6. Items already give half the amount of Embers they used to give during 130 cap. It was halved because "we had too many sources for Embers" (= 11 instances + 2 Raids). Now we have 2 3man instances and 1 6man instance, so this argument can't even exist anymore. The Embers should be increased, not further decreased.
7. Trading gear is more useless than before.
8. Players are being punished for no reason.
9. This entire update is a step back into a wrong direction. It's a downgrade.
10. People will quit this game because it's a terrible change.

And the most important thing is: There is no benefit for the players in any of this. It is intended to be a misery for player experience.

[Caladria-Gr]

If players choose to spend LP on lootboxes, that's been their choice for a long time. But those're supplemental options - are focus is on better aligning the experience. Right now, most players are not interested in running T3+ for most content after they've gotten their individual completion, and we think these changes will help improve that issue. I'm not naive enough to think it'll fully solve everything once and for all, but improvement is still a worthwhile goal.

You do realize that instead of running (even low tier) content to hoard gear pieces to disenchant so we can barter new gear when barterers appear, now you are just forcing us to roll low lvl toons, do low level deeds, hoard LP and use that LP to buy keys (for free, you wont get a dime) and still get the embers needed to barter gear on day one, right?

[Fegefeuer]

I certainly haven't been here as long as many folks on these boards, so I'll defer to your experience there. But I don't think we're funnelling players here as much as you're indicating. By disconnecting Embers from Figments, players who care about cosmetics - who aren't often the same as high-end raiders - have less incentive to grind instances they don't enjoy, and players who do enjoy both have to debate less what they do with their Embers. Breaking the two currencies apart gives us more flexibility in terms of what we give you, and makes decisions on how to use them much easier for you.

So Raninia says that by breaking the connection between embers and figment you give better experience and more choice to players?

Seriously?

I think what you mean is that you want to remove flexibility to players and instead force them to earn currencies as you wish. First time I see a game company saying that by adding limitations you are giving flexibility, it's a joke.

Please don't tell me my theory is hypothetical.

[NailFelagund]

Horrible change, clearly designed to force players to spend more cash. I will cancel my subscription and I don't know if I am motivated anymore to grind for gear on my 140 lvl captain. This is turning out to be one of the worst expansions ever. Shameful.

[Dorri_Hammerfist]

I apprechiate the attempt to sell snake oil to customers but still a hard no from me to these changes.

From what Raninia said, SSG doesn't have plans to add sources of Embers/Motes/Figments. If anything 'we have to look', 'we have to see'. No hard plan and no hard math behind it.
Oh, and Raninia, you promised reward track with U32 but so far it is somewhere hidden in the mists of future and it is vaguely described as something that should be a remedy to all problems, heal the sick, and feed the hungry, provide embers, and give figments.

With all this versioning of gear you envision you'll take away dev time to change values and numbers each time, the precious time they otherwise would spend on polishing instances, bug fixing, itemisation, story, class balance.

[Markbjorn]

Just admit it Raninia.

Your previous experience was in a mobile microtransaction game,
and you were hired by SSG to improve the microtransaction in Lotro
your boss in Lotro is NOW pushing you to squeeze more revenue from Lotro Store.

Well, it's capitalism.
I don't blame you Raninia, you are just doing your job.

It's a shame such a beautiful game like lotro have become like this.

[Joedangod]

Part of the work we're doing is adding more group instance-based weeklies. It's certainly possible we'll have to continue tweaking that balance, to make it more lucrative to play the content where the gear drops, but those kinds of changes are less systemic.

Hm, I feel like I need more context on what those group instance-based weeklies would be.

If it's a case of "Clear X instance Y times" then people are just going to continue spamming T1 runs to finish the weekly.
At the same time "Clear X instance Y times on Z tier" isn't much of an improvement, if the number of clears required for the weekly is equal or lesser than our lock count then we'll just burn through the locks early in the week and not have any reason to run instances after that. If the number of clears required for the weekly is greater than our lock count then you're pushing us to do a bunch of runs with loot chests that are purely cosmetic.

Feels like you're putting a lot of effort into trying to make the loot lock system work despite it being the thing people have a problem with. Think LOTRO would be better off taking a page out of WoW's book and just let us spam instances to our hearts content. Still have the option of gating slightly higher ilvl versions of the instance gear behind weekly locks if you're concerned about content longevity. Although if instances are a solid way of progressing the LI reward track I suppose that could also work.

[Storm_]

Man this is so bad... at first I thought it would be fine when someone from SSG stepped in and answered some questions, but all that what Raninia has said just made me feel more uncomfortable with the changes...

All the sources of "additional" ways to earn embers seem pretty annoying and more grindy for the playerbase, so there would naturally be more players taking the shortcut of buying keys in the shop.

The ONLY halfway reasonable change would be to change instance-barters from requiring Embers, to some Instance-Gated resource like it has been with Morgul Crests. If some sort of change/mechanism like that isnt implemented, you promote PAY2WIN in such way that I can not and will not support this game.

[Morgahad]

I think it's fair to say that we have to keep improving our loot system and these changes won't work by themselves. LOTRO is a big game, and these currencies affect huge chunks of it in varying ways. I'm comfortable saying we'll keep taking feedback and working to improve the looting system, but we have limited resources, and I'm not convinced these changes by themselves wouldn't alleviate some of the issues you're describing as well.

But I'm not against looking again at locks if those become too big of a barrier. Our current lock system is cleaner, but it could still be improved.



I mentioned some of the sources in the reply post, but generally speaking: landscape quests, instance quests, Reward Track, Events, in addition to expanding on existing sources, these're all places we can look to include for more sources of Figments and Embers.



Part of the work we're doing is adding more group instance-based weeklies. It's certainly possible we'll have to continue tweaking that balance, to make it more lucrative to play the content where the gear drops, but those kinds of changes are less systemic.



To be more specific, we want you to run T3 to get T3 gear, not T1 to get Embers because you have the T3 deed. There's no problem if all you want to do is run T1 for T1 gear, but we shouldn't be disincentivizing you from running higher tiers, the difficulty of them does that already



I certainly haven't been here as long as many folks on these boards, so I'll defer to your experience there. But I don't think we're funnelling players here as much as you're indicating. By disconnecting Embers from Figments, players who care about cosmetics - who aren't often the same as high-end raiders - have less incentive to grind instances they don't enjoy, and players who do enjoy both have to debate less what they do with their Embers. Breaking the two currencies apart gives us more flexibility in terms of what we give you, and makes decisions on how to use them much easier for you.



I'm not sure the distinction you're making here - if someone wanted to get the higher end gear, they needed to complete higher tier content already in order to even be able to barter for it. That isn't changing.



I have no doubt there's significant amounts of Ember trading now, but I've also played games with PUGs where there's no Ember-from-gear concept and still seen significant gear trading. In fact, the utility of the gear is strictly tied to its stats now, as opposed to its potential disenchant value. So any gear that isn't valuable to you, but is valuable to someone else in your group, is even easier to trade or give away, as the cost to you is much lower. Similarly, if you're on the other end of that, and someone else gets a piece they don't need which you want, you may not even need to give up a drop you got to



Just a note - above you wrote "Story-mode drops rubbish, and the ember gear is superior to it," were you referring to quest gear? If so, that's generally true, as initial Ember gear is usually the instance gear. However, when we version Embers to Motes, at the same time we'll also be changing the gear that was available for Embers into gear that will be available for Motes. So, for example, if you're joining endgame content later, you'll be able to buy the early instance gear for Motes instead of Embers, and that gear will be superior to quest gear.

So this, get the hard gear by completing a deed, is not accurate. The hard gear is in t3 and above.

That's true, but the only thing you need to do is beat those tiers once to unlock the Ember barter, and once you do that, it's currently faster and easier to get that gear through the barter than running the instance at a higher tier.



This will really depend on what acquisition rates look like, which we're confident we can tweak, and are easier to change than a system.



If players choose to spend LP on lootboxes, that's been their choice for a long time. But those're supplemental options - are focus is on better aligning the experience. Right now, most players are not interested in running T3+ for most content after they've gotten their individual completion, and we think these changes will help improve that issue. I'm not naive enough to think it'll fully solve everything once and for all, but improvement is still a worthwhile goal.



I can't speak to what was happening beforehand, but I can confidently say I was the one who pushed these changes.



Sure, I agree, players will run more weeklies. And by aligning and adding more weeklies to group instance content, and especially the places where the drops are, you'll end up running weeklies in those places.



A few folks suggested doing some sort of gear or instance token, several calling out Throne as a model they liked. I wasn't around for Throne, so all of my knowledge of it secondhand, but several things have changed since Throne. For example, Throne had two tiers, whereas today we have five. We're trying to be more thoughtful with adding new currencies as well, as we're trying to make it easier for us to maintain our content over the long term, since we know now that we'll have to support Legendary Servers. These suggestions are ones we've been discussing internally and will keep doing so, but I can't speak for how the Hiddenhoard raid loot will work.

Ok, now to catch up more on the thread. As a heads up, I'll also be on Cord of the Rings tomorrow to answer more questions!

@Raninia you mention that there will be option to get figments, ok i keep your word, but - you also said there will be option to get traceries and now? they drop from instances, of course, but randomly, even with old SS farm i did it hundred of times, and dont have even half of them gold. Why not instead give us that tracery barter tokens or box where we can choose what tracery we want. So i I'm afraid the same will be with figments.


About ember gear - I always prefered the instance gear over it but.... since ered mithrim only way to get weapons is ember, they just better than any other non ember weapon. You make 3 raids on lvl capps and all drop similar armors or jevelry but i think you forgot about weapons, now is the same situation, for now we cant have GOOD weapons from other way than ember, and i doubt that raid will bring us some. I would not mention special class item, as a warden i still using the trhone one..

[Gildoriel]

Hm, I feel like I need more context on what those group instance-based weeklies would be.

If it's a case of "Clear X instance Y times" then people are just going to continue spamming T1 runs to finish the weekly.
At the same time "Clear X instance Y times on Z tier" isn't much of an improvement, if the number of clears required for the weekly is equal or lesser than our lock count then we'll just burn through the locks early in the week and not have any reason to run instances after that. If the number of clears required for the weekly is greater than our lock count then you're pushing us to do a bunch of runs with loot chests that are purely cosmetic.

Feels like you're putting a lot of effort into trying to make the loot lock system work despite it being the thing people have a problem with. Think LOTRO would be better off taking a page out of WoW's book and just let us spam instances to our hearts content. Still have the option of gating slightly higher ilvl versions of the instance gear behind weekly locks if you're concerned about content longevity. Although if instances are a solid way of progressing the LI reward track I suppose that could also work.

Honestly, what fun is a weekly quest to "clear x instance y times" (with or without "on z tier")? This doesn't make anything less grindy. In my kinship all most players ever want to run is Pug, AZ and occasionally SaSu. Oh and Forge and Loft of course. There's nothing else worthwhile for people who want to gear up for raids. For me, it is just disgusting how repetitive gameplay is becoming. I've been asking for a new rotation for Featured Instances for the past two years now. Nothing happened. I get it SSG wants people to run the newest content, but then they have to provide enough diversity so it doesn't become boring. The Gundabad expansion is now what? 3 months old? 2 months? And already I think "oh no, I don't want to login, please no Pughlak anymore, no Loft and no Forges, and - most of all - no missions". Which might of course be related to the big overall goal being gone after the destruction of the One Ring and the resolution of the Gothmog story arc.

Don't get me wrong: I really liked the Gundabad stories. But that's not the point. The point is that in the books, they didn't do every battle dozens or hundreds of times. For me, improvement in a game means that something new is happening. The story evolves, you get new information, new Lore, a better understanding of things happening. That is progression for me. That is why I liked the page collection quests so much. Or the Gothmog Epilogue. Simply upgrading your gear from Item Level 460 to 467 or beyond doesn't amaze me in the slightest way. And if you have to run every instance 20 or more times to upgrade your gear, then it is ... boring. I mean, I understand you can't get everything in a single run. But I'll never understand people who would run the same instance up and down for a whole day to get some traceries or jewellery. So, instance centered weeklies are not something I am really looking forward to.

[sapienze]

As a heads up, I'll also be on Cord of the Rings tomorrow to answer more questions!

In more than one player circle, Cord's Friday streams are known as "Acolyte Hour". There are numerous stories of the heavy handed moderation during those streams to players asking honest questions only to get banned from participating. It is no wonder his steams have a low active community count.



How about this.

Why don't you do your own live stream on a Saturday around 3pm EST. ? You'll have a larger audience collected from a better time choice. And... you'll have a better insight to all the play styles outside of Cord's casual style crowd. You will catch anyone throughout the US, EU, South America, and even into eastern reach of Europe and beyond. Sorry Aussie and Kiwi world my suggestion won't help you much.

[tanlis]

... but we have limited resources ...

You and Cord continue to use this statement anytime the community point things out to you that need finishing/fixing. But yet you continue to push out new changes constantly before fixing the previous ones. Yes, we know there are different people who work on different systems. Yes, we know some things will always be in flux(class balance). But just take some time and clean up the things that you've changed lately before you start on this new endeavor.

I mean just look at what you put out with this statement. It was not thoroughly fleshed out as to what was being done and how it was going to impact players. If it had been, maybe you wouldn't be having to explain as much.

I am curious, was this idea even run by the Palantir group? If so, what were their thoughts on it? Or are they even used anymore?

This pace of something new every 3 months is not sustainable for the players, let alone your development team. You need to take the time to cleanup things and be able to put a bow on them. Sure, they may not be 100% done, but they are at least in a state where the majority of players are content. Right now, that isn't the case.

I certainly haven't been here as long as many folks on these boards, so I'll defer to your experience there. But I don't think we're funnelling players here as much as you're indicating. By disconnecting Embers from Figments, players who care about cosmetics - who aren't often the same as high-end raiders - have less incentive to grind instances they don't enjoy, and players who do enjoy both have to debate less what they do with their Embers. Breaking the two currencies apart gives us more flexibility in terms of what we give you, and makes decisions on how to use them much easier for you.

Additional ways to gain figments is a great idea. But here's the thing and that was nice about being able to exchange embers/motes for figments. When I ran instances and I didn't get a piece of gear that was useful to me, I could turn it into something that was eventually. And then when I got enough embers/motes, I could get something I wanted. Whether it be the piece of gear I needed or when I was set on that front, I could convert them to figments and get a cosmetic. I didn't feel like I was wasting my time running those instances.

So if you want to incentivize people to run the higher tier gear to get the gear they need. Beyond giving us the gear we should expect to get from that tier. You should ensure that when I run those instances(at any tier), even if I don't get the piece of gear I want, I at least get something that I can find a value for later on. Making me feel that I'm not wasting my time should be an objective to this change.

[leonias]

Alright, gonna go ahead and see if I can provide some answers and context on stuff here. I was the big driver of this change, so any frustrations or questions can be (politely) directed at me and I'll do my best to address it. Any successes are the team's. I don't ever really remember to look at my Private Messages, so I encourage you to keep responding to this thread, and I'll continue to read and respond as I'm able.

I've picked out a few consistent concerns and questions I've seen, and resp



I think it's fair to say we could've done more to indicate our intentions, so let me do so here. There were a few different reasons we wanted to make these changes:

Embers:
- The purpose of Embers was to act as a way to mitigate being unlucky with RNG. However, what it turned into was the fastest and best way to get the gear. We don't want players to run things that aren't the content the gear comes from as their primary way of getting that gear. In looking at why this was happening, the disenchanting of gear from any tier of any group instance was obviously where the bulk of Embers were coming from, in a way that really pushed players to grind to maximize their time. And especially, grind lower tier content to get higher tier gear. So that's why we removed the gear disenchant option to Embers. We'll have more ways to earn Embers when this goes live, and we'll be balancing around how many Embers a player can earn without opening lootboxes, as that's how most players play and we want to make sure you're still able to consistently get the gear you want... but the way we want you to get most of your pieces is by running the content where it drops.

- Embers being barterable into Motes and Figments never made a lot of sense to me, and in discussions with the team and observing player interactions, led to a lot of unintentional consequences we didn't like. Most players were converting into these other currencies because they were hitting the cap so often, and didn't really value them. This is generally ok for Motes - I'll explain why below - but less so for Figments - which I'll also explain below. Removing the ability to losslessly barter these currencies allowed us to feel much more comfortable raising the caps dramatically - of everything besides Figments, which I'll explain below. Breaking apart this relationship meant that we could better tailor rewards to players and give them good amounts of each of those things without having to worry that we were giving them game-breaking amounts, for example, so now we have the opportunity to give you Embers in places where it makes sense you'd care about them, and know that you're going to use them on the cap-level gear.

- The versioning is important for a few reasons:
1. It gives us a lot more flexibility to raise the currency cap, because if something goes wrong in a particular cycle and we give out too many sources of Embers, we can be comfortable that we haven't wrecked progression for Updates to come.
2. Similarly - and the reason the cap existed in the first place - Embers were a currency that only ever increased in value as you kept it. The best times to spend it were either when you were capped out or in the next Update, because the gear in the future would generally be better than the gear in the past. That turned it a completely different thing than we wanted it for. As mentioned above, the goal for Embers is to give you a way to mitigate bad luck, but if spending it is often the wrong move long term, it doesn't feel great no matter what you do with it. Versioning Embers into Motes lets us make it clear what Embers are for and give you lossless value without making you want to hoard it forever.
3. One of the issues we ran into was that in order to properly price new gear, we had to keep moving the price up and up until you basically needed to have Embers capped to spend it. This wasn't exactly a great experience for players. Versioning lets us maintain more consistent pricing, limits how much we need to increase prices as we roll out smaller content updates, and make it such that we can set them more sensibly in general. Even though we're increasing the cap by an order of magnitude, prices won't increase to match.
4. Versioning specifically Motes also lets us re-establish Motes as the catch up currency - more below - and lets us move gear that won't be top-end into Motes at that time, so it'll be even easier for players to catch up.

- We're going to add more sources of Embers. Some of those will be new repeatables, but we can now also do more one-off grants from different sources, such as landscape quests - the Epic, for example - and the Reward Track. One-off grants will generally be bigger than any of the repeatables, but now they'll be valuable and won't feel nearly as bad to get, where before a one-off could've easily overwhelmed your capped amount. Similarly, we won't be just multiplying the pricing by 10x as we did the cap, so you'll still gain value from these.

Motes
- The purpose of Motes was to essentially be a catch up currency, either for yourself or for your alts. You can also use it to get gear that has cosmetics you value. Now that we'll be versioning more consistently, we can do a better job of shifting stuff over to Motes more often so catch up is easier, and it gives us the opportunity to do more consolidation.

- With Motes no longer being barterable, we can also add more catch up things to it, like the Enhancement Runes mentioned in the announcement. This is something I'm personally pretty excited for, as it opens up a lot of great possibilities for improving the pre-cap experience. We're discussing more ways of taking advantage of that, and will have more to announce in the future.

- Motes are going to still be available to disenchant from gear because we want to maintain the Motes sourcing, even when you're doing max content. Motes will be pretty easily and reliable gained from multiple sources.

- Because of all this, we want to make it easier for you to hold onto a lot of Motes, so we've dramatically increased the cap to match. There's also an element of protection here to make sure we don't accidentally overdo it, but we're not versioning Motes to anything else.

Figments
- We're looking at the pricing structure we currently have. Giving the player a bigger cap will make it a bit easier for us to adjust pricing, but we're not planning to double the cap and then double all the costs, there's no value in doing so. We aren't increasing or changing Figments as dramatically because they're still an eternal currency in this model - however many you earn today is as many as you'll have until you spend it. And similar to how Embers are, whenever we add new cosmetics to the barterers, they're available for Figments directly, so your Figments have nominally infinite value. Of course, cosmetics tend to be a bit more subjective than power comparisons, so we expect that most players will get a bit choosier in terms of what cosmetics they prioritize. This is definitely trickiest for players who liked to collect 'em all, but we'll keep an eye on that and see what we can do.

- We're also going to add more sources for Figments, just like are with Embers, again such as with landscape quests and the Reward Track. We'll keep an eye on how acquisition looks for those, as we want to avoid the problems that caused us to make the change for Embers.



We can certainly debate this, but I don't think that's what the end result will be. If we find that players can't acquire gear consistently by playing the game, we'll adjust to improve that.



Yes, the current other Ember sources will continue to work. And as mentioned above, we'll continue to add Embers in more places.



I mostly explained this above, but caps give us flexibility for pricing while also giving us protection in case we make sourcing that currency too easy. That's why the caps have been low for these currencies until now (and why it remains lower on Figments).



I don't think that's what'll happen, but we'll see how it plays out. Part of the goal with this is to increase the value of running the instances that have the gear you want, and to make that the primary way to get gear. Right now, Embers are the best way to get the gear you want, not playing content.



So this certainly isn't true for Motes, based on what we described. It's less true for Embers, though of course we are removing some of the "normal" - by which I assume you mean "current" - ways of getting them, but as I've said above, we're adding new ones with 32 and beyond. Figments are definitely in the trickiest position here, but we'll be adding new ways to earn them as well. We'll see how that plays out and adjust as needed.



We expect that most players won't hit the Ember cap like they're used to, but that's ok, because we also expect them to more consistently use their Embers as well, which is the goal. We certainly don't plan on making them ridiculously easy to obtain, but we are going to add more ways to get them.



Figments will still be available from Festivals, and we'll be adding additional sources in 32, such as with the Reward Track. We'll do landscape quests in the future, not sure if any of those will reward Figments in 32.



No, these'll be disenchantable into Motes, not Embers. Only Adventurer's Gear will disenchant into Embers.



Repeatable sources of Embers will be more frequent, but I don't think we'd put that amount on boss chests.



Plus additional sources we add.



It'll still contribute to Mote accrual, but not Embers.



We'll see some price growth, but Ember prices will probably stabilize at 2-3x of current prices. We'll see how that plays out. Mote prices probably won't change at all. Figment prices are more variable, but we're not talking about a 2x increase there.



To be clear, that's not the intent. We still want players to get the game and get the gear. But we want y'all to play where that gear drops more, as opposed to farming easy content to get the hard gear after earning the deed.



More power to ya. Enjoy your break, we'll be here when you're ready to come back.

I'll try and come back to this thread periodically over the next few days!

politely it is !!! this game has the most embarassing developers i've ever seen and are a pure disgrace to the good players comunity it has... keep feeling proud of such silly ideas and over and over ruining the game, the game is nearly dead and you guys turning it into a p2w just gives the last drop really. role players wont sustain it... cosmetics shouldnt be you main concern... lots lots #### really. thats being quite smooth really. exodia being n1 group just shows how dead game is :3

you sir Dev for coming here answeing 1 by 1 is just a ####ing clownery, worth the ideas devs bring up to the game... thanks for keeping that clear to us that its just hopeless to expect the game getting better


lord of clowns <3

[Ishlana]

Reward Track

When will we see any details about this magical cure to all of our ills? Isn't it also supposed to be in U32? Instead we're told about these (awful) changes out of nowhere, but the Reward Track! will fix it. It will take care of all our remaining LI issues too! Can we see it yet? At all?

[elvenes]

I guess this is how they think will collect funds to pay for the graphics revamp and all other updates EG7 wants for the game before the amazon series releases

[NailFelagund]

I guess this is how they think will collect funds to pay for the graphics revamp and all other updates EG7 wants for the game before the amazon series releases

Do you think they would change their attitude if most players cancelled their subs and refused to buy lootboxes? That's the only way they will listen imo, because they've shown recently they could not care less what we think.

[Thranthir]

While I appreciate you taking the time to explain a lot more thought about these changes, I have the feeling it's not fixing the original problem.. which is that it just takes to long to get the gear you want via playing an instance.. that's the whole reason the barter option was introduced in the first place.. to alleviate the bad luck RNG..
The reason people farm lower level content to get embers is because that is the most attractive way of earning gear.. if the RNG in the drops would be reduced immensely where bartering is no longer the most attractive way of earning gear, people will stop farming the lower level content for it. If you don't change the RNG but make it more difficult to earn the barter currency.. that can also make running the content more attractive.. but then both ways will become a burden and people will probably start playing less and less because it becomes less fun.

As has been said by others the way gear drops now is just too unreliable, there has to be something that can be changed to the way the RNG works to make the gear drops more interesting, maybe give a selection box from which someone can choose defensive, offensive, support and than that will give a box that on open will give a random item that fits within that category.. that would still give you some RNG.. but it would reduce the RNG by a massive amount and make getting gear much less of a chore..

Again thanks for the step up, I wish it would have been in the initial announcement but hey can't change the past

[Laerthan1997]

[QUOTE=Raninia;8119071]I think it's fair to say that we have to keep improving our loot system and these changes won't work by themselves. LOTRO is a big game, and these currencies affect huge chunks of it in varying ways. I'm comfortable saying we'll keep taking feedback and working to improve the looting system, but we have limited resources, and I'm not convinced these changes by themselves wouldn't alleviate some of the issues you're describing as well.

But I'm not against looking again at locks if those become too big of a barrier. Our current lock system is cleaner, but it could still be improved.



I mentioned some of the sources in the reply post, but generally speaking: landscape quests, instance quests, Reward Track, Events, in addition to expanding on existing sources, these're all places we can look to include for more sources of Figments and Embers.



Part of the work we're doing is adding more group instance-based weeklies. It's certainly possible we'll have to continue tweaking that balance, to make it more lucrative to play the content where the gear drops, but those kinds of changes are less systemic.



To be more specific, we want you to run T3 to get T3 gear, not T1 to get Embers because you have the T3 deed. There's no problem if all you want to do is run T1 for T1 gear, but we shouldn't be disincentivizing you from running higher tiers, the difficulty of them does that already



I certainly haven't been here as long as many folks on these boards, so I'll defer to your experience there. But I don't think we're funnelling players here as much as you're indicating. By disconnecting Embers from Figments, players who care about cosmetics - who aren't often the same as high-end raiders - have less incentive to grind instances they don't enjoy, and players who do enjoy both have to debate less what they do with their Embers. Breaking the two currencies apart gives us more flexibility in terms of what we give you, and makes decisions on how to use them much easier for you.



I'm not sure the distinction you're making here - if someone wanted to get the higher end gear, they needed to complete higher tier content already in order to even be able to barter for it. That isn't changing.



I have no doubt there's significant amounts of Ember trading now, but I've also played games with PUGs where there's no Ember-from-gear concept and still seen significant gear trading. In fact, the utility of the gear is strictly tied to its stats now, as opposed to its potential disenchant value. So any gear that isn't valuable to you, but is valuable to someone else in your group, is even easier to trade or give away, as the cost to you is much lower. Similarly, if you're on the other end of that, and someone else gets a piece they don't need which you want, you may not even need to give up a drop you got to



Just a note - above you wrote "Story-mode drops rubbish, and the ember gear is superior to it," were you referring to quest gear? If so, that's generally true, as initial Ember gear is usually the instance gear. However, when we version Embers to Motes, at the same time we'll also be changing the gear that was available for Embers into gear that will be available for Motes. So, for example, if you're joining endgame content later, you'll be able to buy the early instance gear for Motes instead of Embers, and that gear will be superior to quest gear.

So this, get the hard gear by completing a deed, is not accurate. The hard gear is in t3 and above.

That's true, but the only thing you need to do is beat those tiers once to unlock the Ember barter, and once you do that, it's currently faster and easier to get that gear through the barter than running the instance at a higher tier.



This will really depend on what acquisition rates look like, which we're confident we can tweak, and are easier to change than a system.



If players choose to spend LP on lootboxes, that's been their choice for a long time. But those're supplemental options - are focus is on better aligning the experience. Right now, most players are not interested in running T3+ for most content after they've gotten their individual completion, and we think these changes will help improve that issue. I'm not naive enough to think it'll fully solve everything once and for all, but improvement is still a worthwhile goal.



I can't speak to what was happening beforehand, but I can confidently say I was the one who pushed these changes.



Sure, I agree, players will run more weeklies. And by aligning and adding more weeklies to group instance content, and especially the places where the drops are, you'll end up running weeklies in those places.



A few folks suggested doing some sort of gear or instance token, several calling out Throne as a model they liked. I wasn't around for Throne, so all of my knowledge of it secondhand, but several things have changed since Throne. For example, Throne had two tiers, whereas today we have five. We're trying to be more thoughtful with adding new currencies as well, as we're trying to make it easier for us to maintain our content over the long term, since we know now that we'll have to support Legendary Servers. These suggestions are ones we've been discussing internally and will keep doing so, but I can't speak for how the Hiddenhoard raid loot will work.

Ok, now to catch up more on the thread. As a heads up, I'll also be on Cord of the Rings tomorrow to answer more questions!

All I see is an immediate plan to push lootboxes sales for embers while giving no immediate other sources of embers and MAYBE, POSSIBLE, SOMEDAY, AT THE SAME TIME WE FIX THE NEVER-ENDING LAG (which to me is saying, NEVER) we will add more ways to get embers, your attempts at deflection are pathetic, why do an update that is immediately bad and then just provide POSSIBLE, HYPOTHETICALS, FUTURE WAYS TO FIX IT AFTERHANDS, why just now hear me out, NOT DO IT UNTIL THOSE MEASURES HAVE BEEN PUT IN PLACE TO MAKE IT COMPLETE, WHY ???????? IS THERE ANY REASON I CAN THINK OF ? OF COURSE, PAY TO WIN !

[wispsong]

I mentioned some of the sources in the reply post, but generally speaking: landscape quests, instance quests, Reward Track, Events, in addition to expanding on existing sources, these're all places we can look to include for more sources of Figments and Embers.



Part of the work we're doing is adding more group instance-based weeklies. It's certainly possible we'll have to continue tweaking that balance, to make it more lucrative to play the content where the gear drops, but those kinds of changes are less systemic.

I certainly haven't been here as long as many folks on these boards, so I'll defer to your experience there. But I don't think we're funnelling players here as much as you're indicating. By disconnecting Embers from Figments, players who care about cosmetics - who aren't often the same as high-end raiders - have less incentive to grind instances they don't enjoy, and players who do enjoy both have to debate less what they do with their Embers. Breaking the two currencies apart gives us more flexibility in terms of what we give you, and makes decisions on how to use them much easier for you.


If players choose to spend LP on lootboxes, that's been their choice for a long time. But those're supplemental options - are focus is on better aligning the experience. Right now, most players are not interested in running T3+ for most content after they've gotten their individual completion, and we think these changes will help improve that issue. I'm not naive enough to think it'll fully solve everything once and for all, but improvement is still a worthwhile goal.

Ok, now to catch up more on the thread. As a heads up, I'll also be on Cord of the Rings tomorrow to answer more questions!

As mentioned before embers and motes are only good for conversion to figments for me. Am I supposed to stop all questing right now because there is the possibility that figments are added? The next event I even consider playing through the wrapper is Midsummer. I don't like the spring maze and anniversary doesn't have enough variety to begin with. It is laughable that a 10-year anniversary quest only counts as one toward the daily count although it takes longer then 10 of the others and sometimes has more than 10 objectives.

I'm not interested in being funneled into instances; I can barely do T1. But then by taking away conversion that gives a player choice to spend their hard-earned currency this doesn't matter to me at all anyways. Let players who enjoy both debate where they spend. I would think that embers are used for gear and they exchange motes for figments because these are the players who will have plenty of both. And why are these players more important than those of us who can't do instances?

I have bought one key to see what is in a lootbox and since then have not spend LP on keys and have no intention to start. In fact, I filter the boxes so they won't clutter my inventory. If you want to be taken serious about your intentions, make keys earnable in game only. The store rarely gets anything new, and I was wondering if it is even worth buying LP since apparently you have no intention of putting the items in that would sell like all carry-alls, new housing and pets. Lalia's as somebody mentioned could use some love as well.