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.


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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.


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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.


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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.  



To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Lord of the Rings Online Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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