Lord of the Rings Online MMO News, Guides, and Features at Ten Ton Hammer

Cody: Someone who refers to himself as a former Perpetual developer asks if there’s any plans to give kinship leaders more control over their kinships?

Jeffrey: All kinds of plans, and it’s back to that when, how, who. We absolutely want kinship leaders and officers to have more abilities to do specific things with their kinship. There’s a lot of things we’d like to do, some of them have their own technical hurdles, some of them have to do with the amount of time and work that’s required to do it and do it right. But absolutely, everything from how you manage your house to how you manage your experiences together, how you get people together. We have lots of plans, it’s just a matter of which ones we think are most important and how soon we can get them into the game. But we’re well aware of the fact that our kinships would like more support for what they do, and they’re certainly very important to us. There’s a lot of things we want to do, it’s just when and what we want to do.

Sardu: Question from SilentNemesis - might we see any pet classes in the future?

Jeffrey: Not on the immediate horizon, but people think pets are cool and we do too. It’s just a matter of in what context does that make sense. So whether that’s adding a pet or herald or something like that for an existing class or it’s including it when in the future we add a new class remains to be seen, but there’s no question that that’s something that’s cool and something players like and we’d love to expand on in the future. It just depends on in what way and what and where and why. We’ve had many discussions and potential ideas about that but certainly nothing that I’d want to talk about right now.

Cody: We’ve got a question from an old Asheron’s Call player, and they ask if we’re ever going to see the random loot tables that players saw in Asheron’s Call?

Jeffrey: We love that too, there’s a lot of old Asheron’s Call player - myself included, and in my case old has many meanings - clearly people loved that. There’s pluses and minuses to that kind of system - we have a more similar system to that in Dungeons and Dragons Online. Making a fundamental change to how loot is generated is something that would be pretty significant to a game like Lord of the Rings Online and would have a pretty significant impact on the way the game is and the way that itemization and progression works. It’s unlikely that we’ll have anytime in the near future the munching of treasure that we had in Asheron’s Call, but again, as with everything we could probably have a 2-3 hour session on the pluses and minuses of doing that in this game. We probably had monthlong sessions back in the early days of development about it because we know how much people loved it. It just turned out to be not the best solution for this game on balance in terms of all the other things we were trying to do. We absolutely share that same kind of fondness for that particular mechanic in Asheron’s Call. It was a pretty much fundamental mechanic in AC.

Ethec: Kilithin and Sankan62 and about five other people were asking if there’s any possibility of seeing mounted combat in the game?

Jeffrey: Always that possibility. It’s just a matter of how and what does that really mean. We’ve seen in a lot of games that it’s something that has to be done with great care and done well. There are parts of Middle Earth that would feel awfully odd without an awful lot of mounts and an awful lot of people utilizing them in a more sophisticated fashion than you currently do in the game. It’s hard for me to imagine that that day isn’t part of our future, it just has to do with how we’re moving forward through the world, the complexity of the technology that we have to create in order to make sure that when we do it it’s absolutely the way we want it to be. In the shorter term, there’s some things we want to do with mounts in general, but until I’m confident that I can speak absolutely to what that is, that’s something we’re not speaking just yet. But that’s something we’ll definitely be talking about this year.