This Week in Dev Diaries

This has been a busy week in href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/lotro">the Lord of the
Rings Online. It started last week with Kate
"Nereid" Paiz's href="http://www.lotro.com/gameinfo/devdiaries/933-producers-letter-december-2010">Producer's
Letter, which is basically an official run-down of all the
stuff you've likely already read here. Mostly, she explains the
reasoning behind some of the new content, updates and changes to the
system, and some of the upcoming changes in 2011 as well. One surprise:
apparently the November Update is now officially known as "Journey to
Winter-home."

Monday saw the first Journey to Winter-home patch, fixing some
gameplay issues. There was a particularly bizarre glitch in the Volume
II, Book 5, Chapter 5 instances in Moria, where the NPCs would randomly
scale at wildly varying character levels. The range seemed to be
anywhere from level 3 up to level 70, making the instances occasionally
unplayable. That was fixed with the Monday patch, according to the href="http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/Release_Notes_November_2010_Update,_Patch_1_Official">Release
Notes.

In preparation for the launch next week of the 2010 Yule
Festival, the devs have bestowed upon us a couple of Developer Diaries.
The href="http://www.lotro.com/gameinfo/devdiaries/939-developer-diary-2010-yule-festival">First
One, by Lauren "Budgeford" Salk, discusses the planning,
design and general behind-the-scenes-ness of Winter-home, the new
location specifically designed for Yule Festival. She also discusses
the inspiration for the setting of Winter-home:

Middle-earth had ordinary problems, with greedy, rude
hobbits
like the Sackville-Bagginses, nosey neighbors, and judgmental millers
like Mr. Sandyman to ruin a perfectly pleasant evening at the Ivy Bush
with unkind gossip.

There were also the Bill Fernys and squint-eyed southerners
of
the world, who began to get mixed up in the creeping shadow of evil.
There does not need to be a force of Sauron’s malice and power in the
world for such unfriendly characters to exist, sadly. These are
unpleasant folk who make life more difficult, but they aren’t so evil
that they deserve to be slain by a hero. A hero who killed someone just
for being unpleasant or malicious wouldn’t be much of a hero. Frodo’s
early belief that Bilbo should have killed Gollum when he had the
chance didn’t translate to reality, when he looked on a mortal creature
worthy of his compassion.

It was this moral grey area that became my inspiration for
Winter-home...

So the spirit of the season is moral ambiguity. Winter-home
has Grinches and Scrooges and Krampuses.

The href="http://www.lotro.com/gameinfo/devdiaries/945-developer-diary-yule-festival-theatre">Second
Dev Diary takes a detailed look at one of the
events of this year's Yule Festival: Frostbluff Theatre. Player will be
able to take to the stage and show off their style="font-family: monospace;">/acting skills
by performing emotes in front of an audience. Do a good job and you
will receive the praise and adoration of your peers. Do a lousy job and
they'll huck rotten tomatoes at you. Seriously, rotten tomatoes -
there's a vendor in the theatre selling them. Of course, the gamer
mindset being what it is, your peers will likely huck the rotten
tomatoes at you anyway, regardless of how well you actually perform.

This week also saw a lot of promotion for sales and specials
at the LotRO Store. Several href="http://www.lotro.com/lotrostorefeatured">Yule-themed
Items are available to purchase starting Tuesday, December 14
(the day the festival launches). This week saw the introduction of href="http://www.lotro.com/lotrostorefeatured/913-lotro-store-daily-deals">Daily
Deals, with a different premium item being offered at 50% off
every day of the week for the entire month of December. Also new to the
store is a separate half-off sale called href="http://www.lotro.com/turbinetuesdays">Turbine Tuesdays,
which offers a different item every week. Turbine Tuesdays are also a
part of the DDO store.

Next week is likely to be a busy one: the Yule Festival
launches on Tuesday, and Winter-home will likely be standing-room-only
for the first few days.