Questions by Cody
"Micajah" Bye

Answers by Jeffrey
Steefel (Executive Producer for Lord of the Rings Online) and Adam
Mersky (PR Director for Turbine)



The holiday season is upon us in full force and nearly every massively
multiplayer online game has embraced the burgeoning spirits. style="font-style: italic;">The Lord of the Rings Online
stands proudly among the games with slated holiday events, but the
coming of the holiday season also means 2008 is just around the corner!
The Ten
Ton Hammer staff tracked down Executive Producer Jeffrey Steefel and
Public Relations Director Adam Mersky to check up with the game's
future course and ask the devs a few questions about some of
the changes that are being made to one of the more prominent live
zones. Although we didn’t get to ask any Book 12 questions
(Turbine simply isn’t ready to talk about that just yet), the
developers were happy to discuss the holiday season, expanding to
different countries, and the major area
"redo" that's been dubbed the Great Angmar Revamp. Pull up a chair and
read away!

---

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you
guys simmering down at all for the Christmas season?



Jeffrey Steefel:
We may be simmering down on the things we talk about until the
beginning of next year, but other than that we're working at full steam
because when we get back from the holidays we're going to be in the
final throes of getting the next book released.


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Celebrate the
holidays with your kinship in LOTRO!

Ten Ton Hammer: So are
you taking any sort of break?



Jeffrey:
Some of us are. Obviously we're a live service and the service
components - whether its customer service, the community group, or the
operations teams - they're taking shifted time off. Some people are
probably going to be taking their time off at the beginning of next
year so that the right people are going to be there to service the game
if needed.



But in terms of development, we certainly make sure there's at least
enough time to make sure people can take a few days off during the
holidays and even a little bit more if our schedules provide that.



Ten Ton Hammer: The Great
Angmar Revamp seems like a pretty thorough "redo" of a zone for
something that's been live for awhile now. How did you come to decide
that it needed such a thorough renovation?



Jeffrey:
This is an indication of our larger strategy in general. On the one
hand, we need to make sure that we know where the game's going and
where we want to take it. At the same time, we've gotten really good at
understanding what is and is not working exactly the way we want it to
in the game. We put a fair amount of cycles into pouring through what's
going on in the forums to doing a variety of surveys to look at the
various trends in the information and coupling that with data showing
what people are actually doing in the game.



These things tend to line up in the areas where people are universally
having problems and then taking a break from the game for awhile. With
that information in hand, we can then say that something isn't working
exactly the way we want it to work in the game. This feeds directly
into our development plan. That's not to say that just posting about
something in the forums will automatically cause an item to be adjusted
in the next patch, although there are some people who think that!



Ten Ton Hammer: That's
definitely true! *laughs*



Jeffrey:
However, we do spend a majority of our development time on items that
simply make the game experience better. We launched an MMO - the
biggest game you could possibly launch - six and a half months ago and
for us to presume that everything we did at launch was perfect and
didn't need refinement would be foolish. Angmar servers as one of those
examples, and there was some discussion about it as part of a larger
overall discussion about the nature of the content we've put into the
game; how much of it is soloable, accessible, or groupable; and how
well we've pointed out what it takes to complete this type of content.
Overall this is something that we're definitely focusing on and I think
players will notice the changes we've made. You saw a little bit of it
in Book 11, and you'll probably see even more of it in Book 12.

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style="font-style: italic;">There were some
general zone improvements made in Book 11, but the most noticable
changes will come in Book 12.

There are a large number of players that spend the majority of their
time soloing, and so it's a challenge. The advanced players want to get
together in groups and have challenges that they feel has no possible
chance of being completed without a group, and a lot of people,
including the advanced players, also want to be able to jump into a
session by themselves where they can be challenged and rewarded without
grouping.



Since Angmar was one of the highest areas when we launched, it was hard
to know where we wanted to set the balance between really, really
challenging and accessible; really, really rewarding and making the
players work for it. And at the same time, the area - in general -
wasn't as well put together as we wanted it to be and we wanted it to
be more perfect than anything else we made. You can ready more about it
in the dev diary, but when you get better at what you're doing, you
find better ways to lead players through the content and Angmar was one
of those areas where both the players and designers thought were
confusing and it wasn't really fun.



Back in the early days of MMOGs, figuring out the game and learning
where you needed to go was part of the gameplay. Now that's not really
the case. People want to play the game and not be lost. Players want to
go into an experience and have a general knowledge of what they're
going to encounter and where they need to go.



Finally, everyone knows that there's only so much you can do to a game
before it launches. There's a ton of perfecting you can do to zones
before a game launches, but there's only so much that can be done.
But...it's Angmar! Players were playing through those later stages and
they were fighting....boars?!



Ten Ton Hammer: Evil
boars!!!



Jeffrey:
It's not quite that bad, but Angmar should be the place where you
encounter the most nasty things possible. In many parts you do -
fighting trolls and other nasties - but it was uneven. So we wanted to
go in and make it even. We're looking at a lot of the epic content
because players want to explore that content but they may not want to
put together a giant group to power through those areas. Those are some
examples of a long list of things that we're working on for next year,
some of which will show up in Book 12 and some will show up in Books
13, 14, and so on. And it focuses on play styles, content, and giving
people more choices.

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style="font-style: italic;">Zone revamps should
not occur very often, at least not to the scale of the Angmar
improvements.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you
expect that this revamp sort of thing will be happening very often? Or
is it like something that happens once every two books? Are you looking
at all the other zones as well?



Jeffrey:
This will only happen when we have a good reason to do it, so the
answer to this would be no. It's not going to be like we're changing
things and slipping this in underneath people every time when introduce
a new book. The experience would have to be significantly better if we
were going to change anything, especially after the area has launched
to the general public. Many people have significant commitments to
what's already been introduced to the game, so it would be ill advised
for us to change things all the time.



I think there are some places in what we launched that we've changed
simply because they were done poorly or certain aspects of the game
where our decision turned out to be incorrect. Once people started
running around the game it was obvious that there were areas we needed
to change, and it states in the dev diary that we've just gotten better
at making this game. On top of that, we are becoming better and better
at learning what the players actually want.  Six months from
now that could change. *laughs* It probably will.



But going forward, I don't think there are going to be many areas that
we're going to change as thoroughly as what we're doing to Angmar. But,
we always want to be willing to change things that aren't perfect; if
something's REALLY in the way of allowing the player's the experience
we'd like them to have, then we're going to fix it.