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

Audience Questions

Ten Ton Hammer: Will the soldiers in the Skirmishes be limited to the Skirmish quests, or are they going to be persistent? Will this cut down on actual humans grouping together?

Steefel: We like humans grouping together too!

The goal of providing these soldiers is really just to enhance the particular Skirmish experience that you’re in. I don’t rule anything out because the developers behind LOTRO are very clever people, but I don’t think there are any plans to take these Skirmish soldiers out into the open world landscape.

This is really just to bring that particular functionality to the Skirmish environment.

Ten Ton Hammer: With your expansion into extra overseas markets, does that extra income allow you to put out patches faster? Or maybe have additional members on your content team so you can make bigger patches? To some players, the patches seem to have grown farther apart in their release schedules.

Steefel: Ultimately the goal is to grow the franchise in every way that we can, and globally is part of the goal as well. There’s lots of way that we’re doing that, and we’re working through a lot of partners around the world right now.

But absolutely, the more successful the game is worldwide, the more we have to reinvest back into our game. What’s interested is that as we get into the next year of our service, the game is maturing and the audience is maturing. So the way we invest money back into the game is also diversifying. Some things that you’ve seen previously may appear as they did before. We’re trying to have the same cadence in our content updates as we have in the past, but we’re spending some of our resources and time on things like “how are we going to make sure our infrastructure and gameplay we’re providing are solidly positioned for the future?” We want the game to continue to grow and evolve for years and years to come, and that takes a lot of time and energy.

We also spend time on other things, like making sure our graphics engine continues to evolve while the industry evolves around us. We want to stay current. We want to make sure the that we can focus our attention on the things that players are really enjoying – like the smaller instanced encounters that I’ve talked so much about – while still doing a good amount of the content we’ve done in the past. We have to constantly evolve and change to bring that to the players.

It may seem like we’re doing more or less work depending on the type of content updates that we’re putting out there, but it really has to do with a more holistic approach to make sure the game continues to grow and can support a larger audience.

Not to mention that servicing our overseas partners takes its own time. Localization is a long process not to mention how those gamers can be serviced. People consume the content differently in different parts of the world, so our goal is to continue to feed the franchise and continue to provide you with more interesting and exciting things to you, the player.

I feel that Moria was something special and was a big benefactor from this. We spent a lot of time and energy and investment on that project, regardless on how it was or wasn’t going to sell because we thought it was important to bring that value to all of the gamers.

It’s something that we’re going to keep focusing on.

Ten Ton Hammer: One of the ways LOTRO sets itself apart is through the legendary item system. Some players believe that the development on that system has gotten stale and has veered away from the original vision for that system. Could you talk a little bit about the future of item advancement?

Steefel: What we’re doing now is feeding the system, and in upcoming books we’re going to be making changes to how the legendary item system works and fleshing it out some more. We want to provide different types of inventory and provide a more robust playing field for the types of things that you can find. We want to also find more ways to get these items through experience and encounters.

These are all things that we’re working on to iterate on the system and grow it slowly. Again, it is a powerful system in the way it is intrinsically tied to the advancement of players, so we have to be very careful and proceed cautiously so we don’t do anything that will fundamentally change the advancement path for any particular player build.

It’s not an easy thing to do, but it’s something that we’re focused on. We’re going to continue to work on expanding and extending it, and we have a number of people spending a lot of time looking at player feedback and monitoring player behaviors.

Again, I think it’d be very interesting to see some specifics on what the players are disappointed in not seeing from the item advancement system and which features they would have liked to see put in.

Ten Ton Hammer: One of our audience members states that they’ve taken Chicken Play to the extreme! They want to know if they can cross the Misty Mountains… as a chicken…

Steefel: Now you’re talking about the War of the Ring!

Ten Ton Hammer: Exactly.

Steefel: A Chicken Skirmish facing off with Sauron himself.

Ten Ton Hammer: Sauron cannot withstand the Chicken Zerg!

Steefel: We have a major fondness in our heart for what we called – before launch – Critter Play. I’d love to have more time to experiment with it over time, but it is kind of an experiment, because as fun as it is there are other things that are very time consuming that we’d like to continue to focus on in the game.

I’d love to see chickens venture forth into the battle torn areas. I’d love to see a chicken standing atop the Great Crest during the Battle of Helm’s Deep.

Ten Ton Hammer: I think that’s a challenge…

Steefel: The month of April *does* come every year, so you never know what might happen.