LOTRO Reporter Episode 263

Cari is joined by Chris again this week. He tries to level his Beorning to 20 during the show. He doesn’t make it. 18 2/3 of the way.

Audio Version:

What We Did in Game

Chris

Beorning – Level 18 2/3!

Cari Mac

Nada – Sick for a week

News

Producers Letter

http://www.lotro.com/en/game/articles/2015-producers-letter

New Executive Producer: Athena “Vyvyanne” Peters, Executive Producer of The Lord of the Rings Online.

Our story continues in 2015 with both Osgiliath and Minas Tirith! Although there will be multiple updates throughout the year, these major locations will be the focus of our largest releases. Each expands the world of Middle-earth even further, and puts us in view of the Ephel Dúath and Mordor itself.

Major 2015 Initiatives:

Legendary Items: With the Osgiliath update, you will be able to Imbue Level 100 Legendary Items. An Imbued item continues to gain experience and will no longer need to be deconstructed to advance. These items are already in internal testing! There are many details still to work out, but you should expect a developer diary on the topic early this year.
New Fellowship Challenges: As we push into the heart of the War of the Ring, this is the perfect time for us to renew our focus on group content and instances. Expect new instances in Osgiliath, along with additional Roving Threats and group content on the landscape.
Quality of Life: We have been working to identify your most persistent bugs. You can expect a renewed focus on resolving issues that may be small but troublesome, to improve overall gameplay experience.
Episodic Content: We are currently in development on a new type of quest content that will roll out like an episodic TV show, a little at a time, as you follow a new friend across Middle-earth seeing familiar places in a new light.
Server Populations: Based on your feedback, we’re taking measures to get everyone onto the more populous servers, so that finding parties is easier and festivals and live events are more fun. We are working on both improved server transfer tools and upgrades to our environments to improve playability. Also we will be moving our European servers back to the EU! More details on this coming soon!
PvMP: The team is also seriously investigating a new PvMP map in Osgiliath. This landscape would tell the story of the Battle of Osgiliath, and the layout of the city (split by the Anduin) is perfect for smaller and more tightly focused conflicts than the Ettenmoors. This would make the perfect platform for gradual improvements to the PvMP experience, overall. We’ll provide additional updates on this initiative as we get deeper into 2015.
And that is just for the first half of the year!

Clarification to some questions issues from the letter

https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=7296194#post7296194

Group Instances in Osgiliath: We are specifically referring to a cluster of instance content for 3 & 6 man fellowships that is neither a Big Battle or a Raid. We evaluate the type of content we build with each region for what is appropriate and feasible. So we might do a raid again some day, but Osgiliath is not the time to do it.

Osgiliath PvMP map: This will be a different “layer” to the map. This way players will be able to explore Osgiliath in PvE mode in Update 16 and the goal is to then also provide a PvMP version shortly thereafter (not on the same release date).

Music: We currently have our sound engineers looking into the issues with the newer version of the music system that we pulled out late last year. Our hopes is that we can have it fixed with or next update, but I am still awaiting implementation and testing of the fixes to see if they are affective. Once we have it in we will of course be placing it on Bullroarer so we can get feedback before it is released. More info once I have it.

EU Servers: This will simply be a move of the physical servers to Amsterdam. The service will still remain in the hands of Turbine, so we will all still have the same downtime, updates, etc in sync with one another. Better location and newer hardware should result in better performance all around.

Server Populations: We are still working through the details, but part of our efforts here are to make the transition as seamless as possible for Kinship leaders to keep the players together. The idea is to bring you together, not spread further apart. This effort also includes upgraded hardware and a move to a better location for internet traffic for the US servers. This is a large and complicated process which I am fully focused on. More details on this in the coming weeks as more of the timelines and tech solidify.

Sadly due to many circumstances, the chances of the lotteries coming back are pretty much non-existent at this point. From my understanding they would basically have to start from scratch and build the system over again which requires the work of multiple groups and quite a bit of time.
one of the top priorities in improving the transfer system is making sure that account level purchases like Mithril coins could transfer from server to server with you
Possible Free Server Transfers
Level Cap increases: Not in the cards for this year
Group & Solo content: Both of these styles of play are very important to the development team, so there is never an intention to only do one for the foreseeable future. In fact, just the opposite. We are constantly trying to balance the availability of play for all styles of adventure. Just because one update has group content in it, does not mean that it will not also have content that is solo-able or that the next update won’t fit that bill. I personally, due to the random times I have to jump in and out of game, tend to be a solo player, so I would hate to see that option go away.
Minas Tirith: will not be an expansion. It will be another large regional update slated for the second half of the year.
Itemization: We are constantly looking into ways to improve itemization. I won’t jump into that heavily because it is very detail specific and is better handled by the developers working directly on it. As we get closer to the Osgiliath release you should see Dev Diaries and posts outlining the specific design ideas and asking for feedback.
Release Schedule: We are looking at 2 major region releases for the year. Osgiliath in the Spring and Minas Tirith in the Fall. Between those releases will be smaller updates with other features, fixes, etc. I do not believe in assigning or announcing dates on updates until we are nearing a completed state as that impedes the opportunity to make corrections based on feedback or testing. This is why I also don’t talk in details about things you might not see for a couple months or more, because details change.

Server Mergers/Closing are a Coming

https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=7297210#post7297210

There will be no forced data merge from one server to another, or to combine two servers. When/ if players move, they will make the choice themselves of which of the available worlds they want to move each of their characters and account or kinship to.
Yes, we are likely to close a number of servers to play, but only after a large grace period and even after that the characters will remain available to be moved to another server to play on indefinitely. We have an idea of the servers we will wish to keep and which to close, but that list is not yet set in stone and may be subject to change as we see the results of transfers and some of the hardware investigation we are doing.

Also it appears I may have posted some incorrect info yesterday. We may not be able to allow EU <-> US transfers due to data concerns that remain from prior merges. But we are looking into it to see if any of our new tech might bridge that hurdle.
Cross server play/ chat is something we looked into but was not feasible with the age of our code and sheer amount of character data that could conflict.

Rowan left LOTRO for a “New Project” at Turbine https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=7295914#post7295914

http://i.massively.joystiq.com/2015/01/07/lord-of-the-rings-online-fixes-reputation-exploit/

Lord of the Rings Online has a new head honcho, as former Executive Producer Aaron Campbell has transferred to “a new project” at Turbine. Stepping into his shoes will be former DDO Franchise Director Athena Peters.

15.1.2 Hotfix Patch

https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?&postid=7295767#post7295767

We have fixed and exploit which was allowing players to become more powerful than we intended.
We have placed level restrictions on the following reputation items. Players now must be at least the level listed next to the item below in order to gain reputation from the item. We will of course monitor the feedback on the levels of these items and make any needed adjustments.

Did You Know

Switch Sound Playback source to Generic Software on Speakers and it should restore combat sounds

Community

Winterstock II

https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?555842-LANDROVAL-Winterstock-II!

January 16th-19th, 2015

Thorin’s Gate, Landroval server

Schedule: Fri Jan 16th, 1:00pm-7:00pm (6 bands) and 8:00pm-11:00pm (3 bands); Sat Jan 17th, 12:00pm-6:00pm (6 bands) and 9:00pm-1:00am (4 bands); Sun Jan 18th, 1:00pm-6:00pm (5 bands) and 9:00pm-11:00pm (2 bands); Mon Jan 19th, 3:00-5:00pm (2 bands) and 8:00pm-11:00pm (3 bands). All times are /servertime; schedule subject to change.