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Ten Ton Hammer: You wouldn't ever see that here in the US.

Jeffrey: The expectations are just very, very high for them. When something's broken, they expect it to be fixed immediately. Because the player's dedication to the game is so intense and they spend so much time and energy on things, they just need more from their customer service.  Since a lot of their content in Korea is also transaction based and they pay by the minute, there's this constant clock ticking when they play and if they can't achieve what they'd like to achieve it can cause some major problems. It really ends up being the same amount of money in the end, but there's something more immediate to it when you're charged by the minute.

Korean consumers demand a lot from their CS reps.

It all boils down to huge expectations, and we were hearing these horror stories about people showing up with a gas can and a lighter and threatening to light themselves on fire. There was another guy that came with an axe or a different story about someone stripping down naked and rolling around on the floor.

To meet those needs, we put in a bunch of work to give them even more sophisticated customer support tools and control over what they do. The good news for us was that it advanced our technology and what we can do with our tech and what we can give to our partners elsewhere. It's fascinating and is a terribly interesting learning experience.

Ten Ton Hammer: What's the state of the game in Korea?

Jeffrey: Right now it's in closed beta. Sometime within the next month or so they're going to head into open beta. Once they go into open beta, it's essentially launched and after a little while they turn on the money meter. It's much like what we do with our 30 day free trial. They often tend to give themselves around 30 days, but it's a bit more flexible since they're not retail bound.

I don't want to go into numbers, because we never know if that's going to happen or not, but the type of numbers they're talking about for open beta are....stunning. I don't want to share those yet because I don't know if it's going to actually happen or not, but we have a pretty high confidence that our partners know what they're doing. They're the number one company on KOSDAQ, and with half of the population of Korea playing online games the numbers could be astounding.

Our biggest goal right now is to help LOTRO reach that critical mass where it jumps beyond normal market projection growth and becomes a phenomenon of its own. To be fair, that's only happened once in our industry, but I feel that by beginning to expand our game throughout the world and garnering a huge audience, it will really help us take the game to the next level. That along with Moria should really help things along.

The LOTRO devs hope to achieve critical mass with their release in Korea.

Ten Ton Hammer: So what's going on with Book 14? What can you tell us about it?

Jeffrey: It's the beginning of the end of Volume One. It's the end of the epic story that has spanned quite a number of our books now. You'll essentially end up back at the forge where the three Elven rings were forged. It's kind of an interesting way to wind down that particular epic story and begin Volume 2 that begins with Moria.

You get some early clues that some Elves from Lorien are trying to tell you that there are some bad things going on in Moria, and Book 14 basically sets the stage for Moria. You and other brave people of Middle Earth are being asked to go into the mountain and basically settle down some of the badness that's been stirred up by the passing of the Fellowship. We usually avoid talking story too much with the press - we don't want to spoil the story for the players - but Book 14 should have some interesting nuances that help players really experience some nice elements from the story in Book 14.

That and we really want to leverage the event system. It's something that we built into the game and have put in lots of hooks and mechanics into the game itself. We're going to be pushing on that more and more, because it really adds to the dynamism of the game without having to get tons of GMs on all the servers every day.

Ten Ton Hammer: Speaking of events, are you going to do anything before Moria rolls out?

Jeffrey: We always do something. This one in particular will probably be more along the actual "live" lines with GMs and that sort of thing, but we don't want to announce anything specifically oriented towards Moria yet. We want to have enough flexibility to move things around, but it has been good to flex our muscles with the live system events in the past.

Ten Ton Hammer: When do you think the roll out date of Book 14 will be?

Adam Mersky: We're targeting July.

Ten Ton Hammer: How has the response been to the 14 day free trial? Are new customers trying out the game?

Adam: It's done really well for us. With all the new Books we put out, we see cycles in the interest of players to the game. I don't the exact numbers, but we're constantly are bringing more players into the game. I think players are getting to the point where they're really interested in coming into a different game and seeing what we're all about. It's a pretty healthy cycle, but we don't talk about numbers.

Along with that, we've really been working on perfecting our download technology and getting people into the game as quickly as possible. It makes a big different when you can get people into a game in minutes rather than hours. It changes the game. We've had a lot of success with this technology, and it's going to make a big difference.

The LOTRO free trial has been going very well.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is there anything else you can tell the Ten Ton Hammer readers and LOTRO fans?

Jeffrey: It's going to be a busy summer for Turbine. With all of the events, the roll out of Book 14, and the marketing push leading up to Moria, there's a lot going on. The money we raised recently is also huge, because it gives us fuel for the growth that we've been planning.

Ten Ton Hammer: So some of that money is going to LOTRO?

Jeffrey: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. The great thing about LOTRO is that its a franchise that is sustaining itself. Now it's about doing things like putting even more muscle behind our international launches. You've heard anecdotally and less than anecdotally about the fact that we're reaching out into other platforms and exploring all that, and that takes money. Overall, we want to increase our operations as a publisher and a developer. There's a lot of stuff to do to achieve that.

Adam: You've got to remember that it's not about everyone being in their own little section. Turbine is a company as a whole, and when we get money it goes into every game. The work that Jeffrey did to upgrade our system to Dx10, that investment gets pushed into all our games. Hopefully DDO will get the Dx10 upgrade later this summer or early fall. Everything we do typically impacts our entire product line.

Jeffrey: We're overhauling our entire UI system, and that is no small task. There are other things that we're doing, but that all takes money. The unspoken part of that entire thing is that it gives us enough to hire people so that our most experienced folks can also begin to spend some of their creative time doing R&D on the things that Turbine wants to do next. What IP do we want to pursue? Acquire? Create? If there aren't enough of you to continue to developer a game and do R&D, you really can't push forward into new areas. Once you have the personnel to do that, you can begin moving forward.