TenTonHammer.com - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Ten Ton Hammer: Terrific! This is definitely the sort of thing that the players are looking for.

Jeffrey: Two more things we can tell you about. The Loremasters are also getting a new pet, a lynx. The new pet will be a stealth attack based creature, which is pretty cool.

Ten Ton Hammer: How are the stealth attacks going to work? Will the players have to make the creature go into stealth mode?

Jeffrey: While he's in attack mode, some of his attacks will be stealth based and he can basically hit multiple targets at the same time. The other cool thing that the Loremasters are getting what we call "Animal Friends." They're basically cosmetic pets. They aren't combat pets, but you'll basically be allowed to have your little bunny follow you around - or your cart or your dog.

Ten Ton Hammer: *laughs* Will they have birds that follow them around and land on their shoulders?

The storage in kinship houses will be shared among the kinship members..

Jeffrey: And poops? *laughs* Nah, not yet.

In general , we're always focusing on things that are going to make the players happy. For the Loremaster it's crowd control and more pets. For the Minstrel, really making him solo-able. Those are the macro-foci.

Ten Ton Hammer: We've got some more questions straight from the community, if you don't mind.

Jeffrey: Not at all.

Ten Ton Hammer: Will kinship housing provide individual vaults or will it be a unified kinship vault?

Jeffrey: It's basically the same storage mechanism as you have normally, there's just more chests available to the players. They're shared by the whole kinship.

Ten Ton Hammer: Will players have the ability to recall to another individual's house? Like if they had a friend that gave them every permission available to them?

Jeffrey: No. Only the primary owner of the house gets to recall.

Ten Ton Hammer: A lot of people were really impressed with the size of the neighborhoods during the test server previews. Will there be any kind of street signs or something like that to help players navigate these immense neighborhoods?

Jeffrey: Each neighborhood will have its own map. They just weren't in the preview build that we showed players.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are there plans to take the reputation system up a notch? Adding more quests and items associated with factions or more dungeons associated with reputation and faction?

Jeffrey: There's a couple different components to that. It's unlikely that in the near future that this will turn into an all out faction game - and I think that's underneath some of the question - but we do have the system now, so we're going to be leveraging it. There's going to be reputation involved in the neighborhoods that we've implemented, I believe, and hopefully we'll be adding more reputation halls along with more specific quests inside those reputation halls.

Ten Ton Hammer: As far as the barter system is concerned, are there plans to make that a little more robust?

Jeffrey: Sure. There will certainly be a lot more things that can be bartered for, and presumably more places that you can go to barter items. For example, even with housing there are barter items in the system, and there are even dropped items now that you can barter with a taxidermist that will give you a stuffed item that you can display in your house. Any system that we put in we're going to leverage as much as we can throughout the game.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you sharing anything with Book 12?

The developers are also planning to leverage the reputation system within the neighborhoods.

Jeffrey: *laughs* Unfortunately not yet. Soon...very soon, but not yet. We want to get Book 11 in front of people first. But we are already working on it.

Ten Ton Hammer: Gotta pimp Book 11 first, right?

Jeffrey: *laughs* Unfortunately it's not that luxurious. We started working on Book 12 weeks ago, when we were finishing Book 11. It's never boring around here...never a dull moment.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you thinking of raising the level cap anytime soon?

Jeffrey: We will...someday. *laughs* You can quote me on that. It's likely that a level cap increase will happen in the traditional way it happens in MMOGs.

Ten Ton Hammer: Like with a retail expansions?

Jeffrey: Yeah, something like that.

Ten Ton Hammer: I'm guessing that any new classes will come in at that time as well?

Jeffrey: It's always good to guess. We're definitely not ready to talk about that stuff just yet.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are there any small changes being implemented that we haven't talked about yet or need covering?

Jeffrey: Well, there are always need deeds that come in with every update; there are always some cool ones and some funny ones.

Ten Ton Hammer: Any that you can talk about?

Jeffrey: Well, I'll say that there are about ten new deeds. There's a whole bunch of new quests  with a lot of them in High Pass in the Misty Mountains. If you remember High Pass, it's the area of the Misty Mountains that forced the Fellowship to go through the Mines of Moria. So you're going to be up there doing all sorts of stuff, following different quest arcs and that sort of thing. You get stuck in a blizzard there, so there's a little playing with weather. We're not going crazy with it, but there's just a little bit of playing with it. We'll also be putting in some new live events. With each Book, as time goes on, we want to continue to ramp up live events within the game, and we're trying to put more and more support of that into what we're building and the team that we're putting together.

Ten Ton Hammer: How has the player interaction been with the player run events? I know that at the end of beta testing that there were so many players that you couldn't even move. Is that the sort of situation you see now? Or are there less players at the event?

Jeffrey: If it's an event that we've organized, it usually runs pretty well because we design it in such a way that we spread out the population and we don't have those kinds of problems. If it's an event that happens impromptu, we can't really control it - but we will help and try to distribute the population into a couple other places. It also helps that the game is more robust and optimized since you experienced the beta testing event. That said, we are very careful with how we design our live events.

Ten Ton Hammer: Finally, is there anything else you'd like players to know?

Jeffrey: This is only the beginning. Y'know, we're not making these giant neighborhoods and this huge raid for nothing. It's all steps towards bigger and better things, areas where we can leverage the areas that we've developed.

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