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Lord of the Rings Online: Instances 2.0 Part 3
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Lord of the Rings Online developer Joe "jwbarry" Barry has penned the third of five diaries about the forthcoming changes to the instances when LOTRO goes free-to-play later this fall. In this article, Barry takes a look at specific instance clusters and discusses the changes, if any, that the dev team has made.
Instances:
Annúminas Cluster: The Annúminas cluster, with its three Fellowship instances, was the first set of spaces we upgraded. These were well-received instances when they were shipped and were still considered to be in solid shape, so we didn’t anticipate much work being needed to polish them up.
Haudh Valandil: The first space, Haudh Valandil, was in fairly solid shape. The feedback primarily focused around the overall pacing, frustration at the length of the front end of the space while clearing the bottom versus time spent at the top, and the messaging involved with lighting the torches.
Ost Elendil: It was a great feeling to have one space very solidly in the ”Done” pile so early.
Glinghant: The final Annúminas space was Glinghant, and we realized it would need the most work. The first thing we did was to rip out the lever puzzle. It was never well-communicated what was going on, like when you succeeded or when you failed, and the final nail was that it enforced having six people to play the instance.
Eregion Cluster: The School and Library at Tham Mírdain were the next spaces we looked at. We had created a solid foundation for the system with Annúminas, and we wanted to ensure we had some Small Fellowship content as an offering as well.
Read the full LOTRO Dev Diary: Instances Pt. 3.
Comments
Sad but NO LOTRO for me, at least in Turbine/Wallet Bros hands.
I hate F2P and there it stays - forever lost in darkness of Sauron's realms.
It is not realy a full FTP game you know... It is a hybrid system. You can always pay the sub and not bother with the store.
All talks about hybrids are self-delusion IMO. Already shown prices are higher as those 500 TP subs & laifers get monthly (eg. Angmar is 900 TO etc.). OK, already existing areas ya already bought ya get free but new coming patches ya must pay. So what about to be VIP and subs = ya get unlimited gold and housing and PvMP and more bags and shared banks etc. BUT, hold on, those things we got already before! So no paying for VIP we got old things plus 500 TP, all more expensive must be payed additionaly = come and say this isn't money-pump.
Plus I'm more than 125,7% sure that soon they will sell all kind of P4Win stuff, they already started with. Ya can buy deeds and traits (I remember that hard work to get all deeds maxed), no one stupid brainless throw $$$ and get the saame. It's Olympics where all doping and such is prohibited, exc. when ya pay for it: throw 100K $ and stuff yarself with amphetamine, cocaine and EPO, and w2g
That would be game where Spain won his gold medals, and some say Bahrein sultan pays 50M $ and his company gets too gold medals even not playing single game.
I call this kind of thing cheating, and this is legal, payed cheating. IRL one must be busted and called corrupted clerk if ya give away services for money what others must work, here in MMOs all is OK, only give more money and ya good to go. If there are staying no one honest game in world, so it be - i will ignore them and pay my D&D tabletops. At least when my players wanna cheat they will pay to me :P
It is nice to see a good MMO try and make itself even better. I only wish there were an evil side to play becasue I think PvP in this game could be really fun. I know they have the creeps vs freeps zone but I'm talking full on PvP server wide. Still, a solid game that is only getting better and better. Keep up the good work turbine.
Yes but everything will revolve around keeping sales up...that is the way of business, The way to keep sales up is to have extensive grind and extreme rarity on important drops so there is value in using the store to cut down on the grind and get things within a reasonable time frame.
Some instances will become even more hardcore so they are almost impossible to win by the non-hardcore unless they buy store buffs.
They will HAVE to keep sales up to progress in their profession and the only way is to have folks NEED stuff from the store.
The future of MMO's are clearly not going to be for you...I'm sorry about that...Well, not really cause I don't care much about the Cash Shop trends to be perfectly honest...And I'm NOT going to be buying much on them either...But I am sorry folks like you are going to be leaving these games because of Hybrid Sub Models...No question they are here to stay...I think it's pretty evident these Producers are willing to risk losing players who will quit on principle...The only thing you can do is call their bluff and see what will happen...Good luck!
Wrong. DDO is a great example of how Turbine handles a hybrid model. They are commited to making sure that you will never have to buy buffs to win anything. Having played DDO prior to its going free to play I can personally vouch for their system.
That's very true. Turbine was prepared to lose a certain amount of subs when they changed the payment model. Apparently they did lose some subs but not as many as they thought. They also gained far more in new players and got more subs out of the deal than they thought.
The amount of money they made was also far greater than predicted.
So they are banking on the same thing happening with LOTRO.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
wow, yea they are doing a huge amount of over-hauling.
This is very similar to DDO, when that went the micro transaction model they did a gigantic update. And since then they have been spewing out big updates every few months.
Cant wait for lotro to go free... and I also cant wait to see the back of those who are leaving JUST because its changed its payment model, lol.
And ya can stay waiting - I think no real old-school MMOers dont never come back. OK, they can win more numbers as we see there is crowd of stupid players with wallets ready to drained off money. Good, make more some such a braindowned wow ver.5.x to drag them all in.
Maybe then some indie co. can see that there is still quiet big market for normal players and make some games for us. Game that drags many Mios isnt definitely good, it must be dumbed down easy carebabys playing yard, not real big intense world to adventure around. Sad only they did this with such a nice IP as LOTR was... But I still hope they fail and soon IP will be free for real MMO
haha, this is an awesome statement. I keep reading it over and over again but still have no idea what its means xD
But as for 'old school' mmo'ers.. well, I think they are still playing Everquest, those that art became the 'modern' Wow Mmo'er :P
>>haha, this is an awesome statement. I keep reading it over and over again but still have no idea what its means xD
>>But as for 'old school' mmo'ers.. well, I think they are still playing Everquest, those that art became the 'modern' Wow Mmo'er :P
Old school online gamers would mean the text based online rpgs.
Which there are some still out there. That said, even before EQ or UO graphically speaking there were graphical online rpgs like NWN (Never Winter Nights) on AOL, Drakkar which you dialed into and Twinion. All three existed back in the early 1990s.
On the F2P remarks, I'm of a mind that as long as they work as Turbine has done them, then I don't have an issue. As one of the old school gamers you learn to roll with the changes if you want to continue to play.
From codemasters...
From the US forums - yet more pay to win items.
Superior Draught of Power
Restores 80-160 power every 2 seconds for 10 seconds
10 second cooldown.
Minimum level 60
Superior Draught of Morale
Restores 80-160 morale every 2 seconds for 10 seconds
10 second cooldown
Minimum level 60
Both 175 tp for 5. Both types of pots on a separate cooldown from the in-game pots, and stack with in-game pots, and give around 5-6x more morale/power than the in-game pots in the same 2 minute timeframe...
Not available outside of the shop in the current beta build.
IF THIS isn't P4W what it is? And if this a turbine's way, then - NO, i don't to learn with this, I quit and most my friends in LOTRO who were ol'timers are all quit it.