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

Ten Ton Hammer: What’s being done to address server stability? Some players are getting some crashes and server resets. Can you speak to that?

Steefel: Sure, and I think this is something that we’ve addressed in the forums to some degree. As we talked about earlier, as these games grow and evolve and we move into the deeper content, we continue to grow. We’re pushing the edges of our content systems in ways that we haven’t done before as a company. Moria was doing all sorts of things that we’d never explored before – lighting, underground spaces, etc. – and we’re just branching out and experimenting a lot more.

At the same time, the audience is growing and we’re now in the part of development in this game where we’re asking ourselves “how are we going to grow and evolve and get bigger over the next ten years?”

It really strains our system. We are in the process of making some pretty big changes, both in the technology and our infrastructure so we can expand our capabilities quite a bit. There’s definitely been some bumps along the way, and I think everyone here at Turbine will be the first to admit that. We’ve spent a lot of time and energy taking the steps that we need to so that we can ensure that the stuff we’ve been seeing doesn’t happen anymore.

We want to return to the quality and stability that we’re not only known for but extremely zealous about and want to have. That’s what we’re focused on, and we’re spending a lot of time and energy in making sure that things get markedly better.

And I think players will be seeing that. We just need to catch up with ourselves a little bit, but I think players will be seeing improvements soon.

Ten Ton Hammer: Some players contend that PvMP gets unbalanced with each book that’s released; either for the Freeps or the Creeps. What are you doing to alleviate that?

Steefel: Our developers working on PvMP spend a lot of time culling over the forums and trying to understand what is working and what isn’t working. Trying to balance any PvP environment is challenging.

For Moria, we did a number of things specifically trying to address this. One was systemic, in that the system itself, in the Ettenmoors, tries to take an assessment of how many people there are on either side of the conflict and, if they’re unbalanced, try to balance them out by granting session play characters to either side. That has certainly helped us out with some of the terrible imbalances that we’ve had in the past, but we’ve done some other things as well in terms of reorganizing some of the content and making it easier for people to find each other.

There’s no question that it is a challenge and we’ll continue to work on it. We’re definitely aware of it and we’re trying to make it better as often as we can and to the best of our ability.

Ten Ton Hammer: Final question, what’s your plan for Dol Guldur? Is it going to be more solo-based or group-based?

Steefel: What we’re going to try to do is apply of our experience that we’ve had to date. There are people that really like to get together in groups and take on challenges, and Dol Guldur will definitely have those sorts of opportunities.

On the other hand, there are a lot of people that like to do whatever they want to do in the game on their own or with a small group of people. There will definitely be things that you can solo and things that you can do with a very small group of people.

This is a constant balance for us, and it’s one of the things that drives us to do things like Skirmishes, where the instance is dynamic. We’re well aware of the needs for solo versus group content, and solo and small groups are something that people are zealously attracted to.

Ten Ton Hammer: Thanks again for taking the time to talk with us Jeffrey, and we look forward to our next conversation!