Thread: Official Discussion: A letter from Kate Paiz 2013

Hello all!

January has been an exciting month for us on the dev team! We’ve wrapped up our plans for 2013, and I’m very pleased to announce some new big initiatives for LOTRO you can expect in the coming year:

Read the full letter and discuss it here

Ya gone done and made it forbidden!

EDIT: Was a Chrome issue. If you can't access it, use Firefox or IE maybe

Skill pruning: good. LOTRO has far too many skills for certain classes. Just don't go too overboard.

I wish we could get some more graphical improvements. Specifically on our characters. Animations could be improved (idle animations in LOTRO are kind of meh) but I think what would really help would be redoing the hair. The hair options for characters are very blocking looking. Simply put, hair doesn't look like hair in this game. It looks like something sculpted out of clay.

I'm looking forward to 2013. The rest of Rohan should be awesome.

Originally Posted by Cutedge

Skill pruning: good. LOTRO has far too many skills for certain classes. Just don't go too overboard.

You can read it? Hm, I keep getting an error page when I click the link :l

Nice to read what's on the table. I have to say I have a knot in my stomach about the whole player council thing. Other games have done this with their forums and I feel like it creates a lot of politicking and, for lack of a better way to say it, people acting like they are the smartest in the room. I can't say for certain that this is what will happen here. Hell, we don't even know how it will work yet. Still, knot in my stomach.

Wow, very interested in finding out how the player council works

Originally Posted by Dyslex

You can read it? Hm, I keep getting an error page when I click the link :l

Yeah it loaded for me correctly in Safari. The background doesn't show up correctly in Chrome for some reason.

The link is weird. It has the trademark symbol in the URL.

Try this link, it has the TM symbol escaped out:
http://www.lotro.com/en/game/article...nline%E2%84%A2

Player Council - I am very much pleased that Turbine will be increasing Developer-Payer communication, and am interested to see how this is implemented. Definitely a positive system to be creating, and kudos to Turbine for increasing communication.

Wildermore - Seeing this hinted in a video, it is good to have full confirmation this is the small region update. Very excited to see this region, as its scale seemed quite large.

Western Rohan - The way you describe it makes me more eager for the expansion, and it will be good if you can release Western Rohan before the end of the year, but remember, just like Rohan, don't feel rushed to meet the release date and extend it if you need to. The past choice of extending the release date of Riders of Rohan was one that was certainly worth it.

Housing - Good news; I do still wonder why I continue to pay upkeep to my house at the moment, so I am looking forward to these changes, and if possible, can you remove the upkeep and make it more of a mortgage format? So that we pay off a certain amount of upkeep and then we do not have to pay any more?

Class Adjustments - Again, good news, but just hope the changes to gameplay of classes don't change too drastically, but still, a change is needed.


Overall - 2013 is looking to be a good year, and I'm definitely looking forward to each update.

That's all?! It's just a short summary of the dev chat!

What about new changes regarding the translation or the game UI? Lot's of errors we reported months ago are still not fixed. I'm fed up with reporting bugs - no one cares about non-english ones.

Well I have to say I am really surprised housing is getting worked on. Now the big question will be what all you be doing in changes. Looking forward to seeing that.

This player council, dont like it so much.

Worked once for me, now Forbidden when I went to try and copy and paste it.

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

Originally Posted by Trobon

Nice to read what's on the table. I have to say I have a knot in my stomach about the whole player council thing. Other games have done this with their forums and I feel like it creates a lot of politicking and, for lack of a better way to say it, people acting like they are the smartest in the room. I can't say for certain that this is what will happen here. Hell, we don't even know how it will work yet. Still, knot in my stomach.

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

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

I and my 6 houses /salute you.

Here's some feedback:

Player's Council:

Isn't this what the Palantir Private Preview Program is for? Is Turbine not getting enough direct feedback from the community to the developers there? Or will a different set of concerns be addressed?

Western Rohan:

I'm definitely looking forward to this. There's no specific mention of it being an expansion, either. I think it would be an interesting experiment to see if Turbine can release it just as two normal quest packs, with any extra accompanying features being a la carte purchases from the LOTRO Store.

Housing:

In addition to player feedback, this is one area where I think it's appropriate to closely investigate the competitors' options and pick the best aspects of each of them.

Class Adjustments:

I think some simplification would be popular with new players, and help retain them as customers. However, no matter how Turbine implements it, there will be some veteran players who will resist change. Try to use a scalpel and not a wrecking ball.

Housing revamp!! woohoo!!

Interesting that the next expac (Western Rohan) will be out in the fall, sounds like the world builders have been busy; however, the last installment in Eastern Rohan isn't even out, tho due soon.

Has there been any acknowledgement that players want new instances with an expac? Or at least very soon thereafter, not 3-6 months later? Even if Turbine chooses not to follow that path, players do expect the instances to be included in the expac price.

Seriously disappointed at this letter, it told us nothing we didn't already know. What is the point if you are not going to give us any real information? I see nothing to get excited about here.

link works for me in IE but not in Chrome.

Nothing too exciting. I'm scared/worried about "skill pruning". That's a very vague statement. Who decides which skills "feel disappointing" and should be removed? Can't say I'm a fan of such sweeping changes when the game is about to celebrate it's 6th anniversary. But it seems like this current crop of Devs has already decided that the road ahead is to completely scrap the existing way our characters are built and make them over from scratch using a completely new system.

The changes and new content sounds very exciting.

Very excited to see what changes to the housing system there will be. I have always liked the housing system but thought is was pretty limited.

New content is always welcome.

Also, can't wait to see what class changes are coming. Pruning of the skills would be a welcome change, there are always skills that I seem to never use but still try to keep them on my bar just in case. LOL

I may be out of topic... My apologies in advance.

Is there any news about mailbox improvement?
Is there any thinking about cross-server mailing and multiple-items pack (in a single mail) delivery?

In my opinion there should't be too much changes on the skills, because I think the high number of skills we have in LOTRO make the game better than most other MMORPGs. I've played many games where you have very less skills and this is boring...
Moreover you should not worry about the number of skills... You did a nice job by explaining all the skills and the gameplay ingame. LOTRO has one of the best intro/tutorials I've seen and many tooltips which help understanding...
What could be done is to combine some skills, e.g. the hunters skills to search for mobs. I think they should be combined to one skill which effects all kinds of mobs.
But please don't try to make the gameplay less and less challenging just to satisfy players who can't play their class (to exaggerate it a bit^^)

The other changes I'm awaiting curios, most of all the rest of Rohan.

edit: An improvement for the support for German players (for example the ability to copy characters on the Bullroarer or bug-report UI in german) would be nice.

But all in all LOTRO is still the greatest MMORPG I've ever played. Please remain so

Okay, so it looks like I'll be cancelling my sub to WoW and coming back to LOTRO full time as a VIP.

I've got lots to do before Spring comes!

Very excited about a new Housing system! And, of course, the Rohan expansions. Thanks for the update for those of us who hate Twitter...

Originally Posted by Sapience

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

I very much hope you're right about that. I do have some measure of faith in the LotRO community. I just don't want to see it get hurt over something that is supposed to be helping everyone. Its so ironic when that happens to a community. However, as I say, I do have some measure of faith still.

I look forward to seeing how this year plays out. It looks to be interesting for sure.

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

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

Go Microsoft!

Player Council: very interesting.

New zone: always cool!

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

for those who can not see the letter here it is

Hello all!

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


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


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


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



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

Originally Posted by Eartholloth

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

well said!

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

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

(So sorry for my broken English)

Player’s Council

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

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

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

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

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

Changes are looking good:

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for the communication!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Im lookin forward to the updates

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

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

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

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

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

Lookin forward to it

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

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

Wow this sure sounds great, but ...

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

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

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

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


just my 2 cents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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