by Stacy Jones on Sep 27, 2007
One problem plaguing the LOTRO community as of late has been one of scammers trying to con personal information from members of the LOTRO community by posing as Turbine. This issue was addressed a while back on the official LOTRO forums by Meghan "Patience" Rodberg - Online Community Manager - Turbine, Inc.
Turbine takes the security of your personal information seriously. Recently, we've received some reports of suspicious emails from turbinegames.net and accmanagement@turbinegames.net. These emails request the verification of your account information including username and password. These emails are not from Turbine, Inc. Please do not reply to them if you find one in your inbox.
Turbine will never ask for your account name and password via email. Please forward any such requests to us at fraud@turbine.com for investigation.
Legitimate email from Turbine will only be sent from turbine.com, ddo.com, lotro.com, and thelordoftheringsonline.com. Email from any other domain claiming to be from Turbine should be also be forwarded to fraud@turbine.com.
This response caused quite a stir on the official forums for a while, so we decided to find out what is being done to protect members of the LOTRO community from scam artist. We asked if players should be concerned about keyloggers and that kind of thing, or are these attacks pretty low-level phishing schemes? We were fortunate enough to get an answer from Jeffrey Steefel, Executive Producer for LOTRO. He stated
There's two separate issues, but the macro issue of spamming is something we can talk a little bit about in general. There's no big exploit that players should be worried about. This is just a canary in the coal mine, we saw something that could be something down the road and we're just heavily investigating it letting players know in case something should happen that sounds familiar to them, which gives us a little more information. If there's ever anything that we feel is putting a large number of players or their accounts in jeopardy, we're going to do something very immediate to stop that from happening and we're going to communicate that to the community.-Steefel
With a firm answer on that issue we turned to the second problem plaguing patrons of Middle-earth, the overwhelming amount of gold selling spam. One measure we have seen taken recently is the new in-game spam report option to aid in reporting these spammers. While this is a topic developers tend to avoid discussing as to not give away their methods, we did receive some answers on the issue from Steefel
I feel like one of those police lieutenants that gets up and says, 'Obviously we can't comment on the case right now.' So I won't comment on specifically what kind of measures we take, but we have a lot of people in Customer Service and in Community Relations it's a full-time job for us to actively and proactively figuring out who the people are. That's a combination of what the players tell us, but much more than that, looking at what's going on in-game and looking for patterns that pretty well tell us where to look. And then we take action, we enforce our Terms of Service this is not something that's allowed in the game. If we discover that you're engaging in that kind of activity, we're going to take action, we're going to get you to stop.
The other action we're doing is making some changes to some of our types of membership accounts. So that players coming in to some of the Trial and Referral accounts that can be abused by these people will have less ability to do so. -Steefel
Book 10 introduced a new and innovative form of play in LOTRO called Session Play. This is a short session series of quest that was introduced for players just looking to log on and have a short bit of fun if they didnt have time to get deeply involved. The most notable area of this new mechanic is called Chicken play and it puts the player in the form of a chicken seeking to protect their roost from harm.
With this new form of play now live, we decided to see if the developers have plans to expand on Session Play. Will we have groups or Kinships of chickens? Perhaps even more critters to play as in Middle-earth. Steefel was kind enough to give us a glimpse of their future plans for Session Play
The chicken is the beginning of what we hope will be many types of critters and creatures that players will be able to run around in the world as. Things as kooky as, Im a rat in Moria. But it's been interesting to see how people react, we want to see how chicken play is being used, what's working, what's not working. It's an oddly not violently controversial thing where hardcore gamers both inside and outside the company go, 'What? Are you kidding me?' Then they start playing it and have a fun time. Inevitably, almost 9 out of 10 times, they end up coming to me afterwards and saying, Alright, I've got to admit, I'm kind of warming up to chicken play, and I don't know why.
In terms of more group dynamics, it really depends on what kind of adoption we get. The purpose of session play in general is really meant to be a really quick, really contained, almost arcade experience. Something you could do really quickly, without a lot of commitment you just jump in, have fun, and be done with it. So, what we want to be careful of while we're trying to think of how do we include people together and have them do things in groups that it doesn't become dependent on that, taking away that feeling that this is a quick session where I can play.
That said, the troll or ranger, for example, as session play is meant to be one person occupying that [character]. But the real fun is if I go in as a troll and I hook up with my party and, even though I'm not fellowing with them, I can still do a tremendous amount of damage along with them on behalf of that party and we can certainly settle up in terms of value and rewards in our own way. Same thing with the chickens I don't know how high level a chicken you are, but you'll eventually get to the point where you have "peck" as one of your attacks and my understanding is that with 10 or 12 chickens pecking, you can eventually take down a boar or some other creature without getting killed. Whether we'll have chicken conjunctions or chicken kinships is unclear, but I certainly get the question. I like "coup-ships", personally.-Steefel
In almost every MMOG new to the market there are always complaints of a shortage of high level content or what has become known as end/elder game. LOTRO is no different.
There have been many inquiries about Elder game content and Tentonhammers Jeff Ethec Woleslagle decided to get an answer. He asked Steefel. Do you feel that with Annuminas and the Book 11 content, the endgame or elder game is finally coming into its own, or do you feel like this really is just the tip of the iceberg? Steefel was nice enough to give us a detailed response to this question
Yes and yes. It is the tip of the iceberg in that we're focusing more heavily on it now, in particular. And we did so again with Book 11. We're going to be focusing more on the whole monster play mechanic and PvMP and everything that's going on in the Ettenmoors. We did a little of that in Book 10, we're doing some more in Book 11, and we're going to be continuing to do that quite a bit next year.
So, yes, there is more focus on it. We try to really get a sense of what's going on in the game, where we think the majority of players are, and what they most need because we can't do everything all at once. So Book 9 was very focused on levels 27 to 39 because we knew that that was where the biggest demand was going to be, and then we started focusing on the higher levels.
Elder play or elder game - we talk about this all the time, what does that really mean? That's a concept that's come into being, what it's really addressing is: what you want in a perfect world, is for every type of player to have something new and fresh and challenging to look forward to. What's happened in these games is that, since it's basically a level grind-based progression in a lot of cases and you get to the quote-unquote "end of the game" you end up needing something to perpetuate the grind. You go from being on a treadmill to being on a carousel. And that's what the "endgame" becomes. It's a game that you're trying to win over and over again at a higher level of challenge.
What we'd love to be able to accomplish is for players to not feel like they go through this path and get to the "end", and then there's a different kind of play that I do perpetually at the "end." What we'd like to do is say that wherever I am in the game, I've got new, challenging stuff to look forward to that's providing me with the stuff that I really need.
To that respect, we're very focused on what people normally refer to as elder game at this point in terms of the challenge level of the content, the kind of bosses that you're going to be encountering. At the same time, we've also got a lot of players saying, 'We want more solo play!" So we're trying to balance that too. Monster Play, PvMP, where we think that's going, is part of what you would call the "elder game." How does the experience change significantly when I get to this part of the game. That was a lot of words, I don't know if that helped at all.-Steefel
In closing our interview we had to inquire about one last topic that has been on the minds of the LOTRO community. Since the Summer Solstice festival, players have wondered when and if we might see another festival or event in Middle-earth. Steefel gave us a reassuring answer that will make all those festive in spirit very happy
You guys saw what we did for the Summer Solstice and that's the kind of system we'll be using for this kind of stuff. The answer's yes, we want to do all kinds of things with it. So, we've built this events system into the game where there are things, events that can happen in the world whether it's making certain items available at vendors or making certain buildings or NPCs or other types of generators appear that weren't there before, built into the game, and triggerable by season, holiday, time of year, time of day, or manually triggered by us for one particular reason or another.
One of Turbine's strengths has been the live event, especially in Asheron's Call, special things happening at special times. So we are definitely going to draw on that experience.-Steefel
This is the last in this series of segmented interviews. It is clear from the information we have gained that the developers at Turbine have big plans for every aspect of Lord of the Rings Online. From Balrog raids to holiday festivals, it is clear we can expect big things to come. With Book 11 on the horizon and the developers working in full swing, we will have plenty to do in Middle-earth for many days to come.
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