Pumping Irony

I was doing Filikul runs nearly every Monday and Thursday last year but only one since my recent return to LOTRO. I always did PUG raids before, but lately my kinship attendance has been picking up. Tonight when I logged on there were 15+ level 65 characters on so we did a quick Filikul run. It was a first for several of them. I was the only Lore-master so we couldn’t use the strategy I used last year. For that matter, I currently have Arwellyn traited for full-on flaming dps, so her crowd control, healing and power sharing are gimped.

Tonight was The Stoned Alliance’s very first kinship-only Filikul run!

I haven’t played DDO in over a year so I can’t say how things are there, but since F2P launch the number of compromised LOTRO accounts have skyrocketed.

Mine included.

Luckily, I was online at the time. My kinship had just finished an instance run about a week-and-a-half ago and were in the process of reloading back into the world when I got the message that I was being disconnected because I had just logged into the Brandywine server. Huh? Suspecting the worst, I immediately hit up the Turbine Account page and changed my password then re-logged back into the game, which would boot the hacker offline just like I had been minutes earlier.

I was lucky, and did that before the hacker had time to switch servers to where my active characters are.

Other kin-mates have not been so lucky. Two days after my attempted hack, one of the kin’s main hunters was hacked while he was at work. I was in-game at the time, as were a few other regulars, and wondered why he wouldn’t talk to us. Our kinship leader just happened to login and notice the odd behavior then noticed the hunter trying to clean out the chests in our kin-house, so kicked him (and all alts) from the kinship until the mess was straightened out. Later the hunter logged in again — this time the real player — standing naked at the mailbox. Gold gone, armour, weapons, vault, etc. had been cleaned out.

Tonight, my kin leader was also hacked. It’s an ongoing process as I write this — we’re all in Ventrilo together as Turbine gets to him. They did reset his in-game password so he could login, but they also automatically apply a one-hour ban on the account, which just expired a few minutes ago. So far all of his characters were standing at the mailbox but only his gold is missing. All armours, etc. and vaults are intact. Permissions were altered to the kin-house, however, so apparently more of us are still being targeted. Our kin-leader is down roughly 500 gold, but in the big scheme of things, that’s probably not of much value anymore. Armour is bartered these days, and cannot be bought. His crafting materials and Symbols of Celebrimbor would go for much more on the Auction House than Turbine would give him as a condolence prize.

The forums are going crazy with threads of compromised accounts. Turbine’s primary response? “It’s not our fault. Check your PC for keyloggers.”

Turbine also has a No Rollback policy, which is retarded. No, I don’t think they should rollback every little thing, because that makes it too easy for players to game the system, but having an immobile policy to never, under any circumstance rollback a character even when proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was compromised is equally retarded. Even Blizzard will do a character rollback.

I’m not buying the “it’s not our fault” and “it’s always a keylogger.” It’s been documented and proven numerous times that when creating an account, your account info is sent via unencrypted plain text. If your email account is compromised, bingo. Second, thanks to the Skirmish Leaderboards, it is incredibly easy to see all the players. Near as we can tell, it shows either your forum username (in my case, my game and forum usernames were the same) or your game username (our hunter has never signed up for the forums, so we easily found his game login on the leaderboards). At that point, passwords can be brute-force hacked.

LOTRO readers, consider this a forewarning and go change your login password, and make it something separate from your forum login if you have one. I’ve still not seen a single gold farmer spam, but I’m hearing the prices on the LOTRO gold selling sites has recently risen (also coincidentally after the F2P launch) so they’re going after as much gold as they can get, any way they can get it. Apparently why farm the gold when you can just steal it?

Quick question for you walking LOTRO encyclopedias out there:

While I realize the Lore-master loading screen (Turbine calls them “logo screens” whatever) is artwork, not a tweaked screenshot, is this light armour outfit actually in the game? If so, what’s it called?

I had planned on visiting the family for Christmas as a surprise, but my travel options fell through and I barely made it home Christmas Eve at all. My girlfriend is in New York with her family as usual, so that left me home alone for the holidays. I decided to see whether my LOTRO burnout had worn off or not, since dabbling in STO at least got me re-interested in the MMO genre again.

Enedwaith

I briefly visited the new zone of Enedwaith in the F2P Beta but only to see things and visit the stable masters. Now I’ve taken Arwellyn through the majority (it seems?) of the actual Enedwaith content, with only a small fellowship quest and a solo quest (which I’ve attempted three times, and still have no clue how to survive it solo *grumble*)

Either Enedwaith is a bit lacking on the quests, or I burned through it too quickly, or some of it locked out per the Epic Book stuff, but it seems like things should have lasted longer than they did. There are still plenty of daily quests that I”m running for reputation and barter tokens. Arwellyn will be wanting both of the mounts for sure, and possibly some of the other stuff bartered there. She is nearly to Ally standing with both the Grey Company and the Algraig.

Mirkwood

Another mount was added to the Malledhrim elves faction, so I’ve got Arwellyn bouncing over to Thangulhad every day to run the two daily quests that reward a Malledhrim Gold Star Emblem. She’ll need 20 for the new mount, then another 20 for the Return to Mirkwood skill. Not sure which I’ll get her first — probably the Return… skill.

Moria

Arwellyn is kindred already with both factions of Moria dwarves but I’ve got her running all six crafting instances, which barters for a total of six Lothlorien Gold Leaf tokens. Apparently when she was doing the Lothlorien content, her player (cough) didn’t notice there was also a mount for the Lothlorien elves (cough) so she’s asked me to ensure she has one.

Otherwise, she still needs plenty of quests and deeds in Moria proper and its instance cluster.

It took two days of LFF-ing but I finally got a group for Volume II, Book 8, Chapter 3 last night. Turns out, it’s a 3-man instance which is pretty rough. My group makeup? Arwellyn, a hunter and a champion. Heh. No actual healer. I’ve got Arwellyn traited so her only heal triggers every 20 secs rather than 30 but still… that’s a rough way to go. We were using crowd-control to the max, and AoE damage as much as possible but some of the mobs spawn a crowd of bats, which makes induction difficult if not impossible. There is one area where five mobs are pulled at once, and multiple bat spawns, and there’s just no covering that for our group makeup. Rather than give up (all of us had taken quite a bit of time just finding a group so we were in it to finish) we created a unique (and expensive) strategy: Run in! Kill at least one of the spawning bats before wiping! Rinse, repeat! Needless to say, that part of the instance was extremely time-consuming and expensive on the repair bill. Aside from the Epic Book quest, that instance has a daily quest with both Normal and Hard Mode. We almost got it done in Hard Mode but it was 2:30 am EST and the hunter had to leave. Can you believe we were in that instance for well over 3 hours and it never occurred to me to get a single screenshot? In any event, Arwellyn at least got that one out of the way, but now 2.8.4 is yet another similar 3-man instance. I’m hearing it’s not quite as bad as 2.8.3. I hope that’s true…

Bree

Just before writing this article, Arwellyn also reached Kindred status with the Men of Bree and obtained the Return to Bree skill!

Yule Festival

Originally I was going to skip the new Winter-home zone and all its quests. I did not enjoy the Haunted House for the Fall Festival so I was originally content to simply run all the standard fare, get some cosmetics and the new festival mount.

Then I figured, what the heck, it’s an entire new zone, I should at least check it out, right? So Arwellyn met the mayor of Frostbluff and some of the town’s citizens. As of this writing, she is 25/30 on the deed. Once completed, two more quests open up. Completing one makes the other ineligible, but luckily I have no interest in obtaining street urchin cosmetics for Arwellyn. Generous and heroic notwithstanding, she can be a haughty little elf when she wants, and she has already made it known that she wants to help the rich citizens of Frostbluff so she can parade around in the extravagant robe cosmetic.

Otherwise, here’s the only screenshot I had the foresight to snap so far this weekend: Arwellyn in Frostbluff, riding this year’s Glittering Yule Steed, and wearing the yule tunic and pants, yule scarf, yule stocking cap, and the hoodless yule cloak. She decided to let the snow-dusted traveling outfit wait until next year, though she’s been known to change her mind at a moment’s notice, so we’ll see where she makes me take her during the Yule Festival’s duration.

Gold

Despite all the repairs, travel fees, and housing upkeep, Arwellyn actually made out fairly well this weekend: 12 gold richer than when she started! Someday I should actually bother to use the Auction House to sell stuff (assuming things sell? I never use the Auction…) So that’s 12 gold without really even trying, just playing the game normally. Not too shabby!

I returned to LOTRO a few days ago after taking a break shortly after the F2P Beta began. Between brief beta participation, automatic completion of several new deeds when F2P went live, plus my monthly Turbine Point stipend for being a Lifetime VIP, I had around 6,000 or so Turbine Points. I bought three additional storage “chests” for Arwellyn: one for her vault, one for wardrobe, and one shared storage. Then after a few days of participating in this year’s Yule Festival, she went to her personal house and came to the realization that F2P has rendered housing essentially pointless.

LOTRO housing has always had its share of criticisms: the “hook” system, the instanced neighborhoods with nothing to actually do or bring you there, and so forth. Other than the cosmetic appeal of arranging your personal house how you wanted and perhaps displaying trophies of your achievements for passers-by to see, the primary use for housing was additional storage, which until F2P was at a premium.

Storage

Unlike WoW and some other games, you never get more backpack and bag space while adventuring. This became (and still is) a major problem when Turbine decided to make all reputations use multiple tokens. Despite the fact these tokens are bound to that character and serve no other purpose than as a barter currency, those tokens take up bag space. A recent patch began the process of moving them (only two token types so far) into a “barter wallet” but for now, bag space itself is still a precious commodity and I still find myself needing to stop adventuring to travel to the nearest vendor NPC more often than I would like.

Under the new F2P game, while bag space itself is still an issue, players can purchase additional storage for one character’s vault, or the shared storage and wardrobe. All three storage facilities are available from the vault NPC with a single click of the appropriate button on the storage UI frame, and we can drag and drop easily from one to the other.

Where does this leave housing? A Standard House, such as Arwellyn owns, has a single 30-slot chest. A Deluxe House has two chests, and a Kinship House has 3. Also each chest is located in a different part of the house so not only do we have to remember what we put in each chest, we have to run around the house to get to them. The chests also do not accept bound items, and certain housing decorations are unfortunately bound to a character, so off to the vault we go to store those.

In short, housing storage has always been, and currently remains, an inconvenience. I’d imagine for a true F2P player with a gold cap, there’s no point whatsoever to owning a house when the system is so limited and inconvenient compared to the new vault and shared storage systems.

The trick becomes: how to solve the storage and also the original problem of fixing the housing system altogether.

One easy solution is to give a house a single chest, then use the Store to purchase additional space in that chest. In fairness to owners of Deluxe and Kinship houses, they should be retroactively awarded the space they already had with their multiple chests.

The convenience is a problem that likely has no solution, however, and unfortunately best be left alone. If the storage UI had a new Housing Storage button where we could access it from the vault NPC along with all our other storage options, now there’s even less incentive to actually visit the neighborhoods and your house other than to change the decorations. Regardless, I would like to see the Housing Storage accept any housing decoration item, bound or not.

Neighborhoods & Homes

I imagine some, if not all, these thoughts have been in the forums since launch, but I avoid game forums whenever possible. Here are just a few random thoughts and suggestions I have had about the overall housing and neighborhood system for the past few years.

To give the Art Dept. something to do in between terrain mini-expansions (Lothlorien, Mirkwood, Enedwaith, et al) how about a choice of neighborhoods? Say, three different neighborhood types per area. For example, Arwellyn lives in Ered Luin so rather than the single default Falathlorn neighborhood, have three to choose from, each with its own distinct look and terrain.

The current neighborhood system has 30 houses: 16 standard, 10 deluxe and 4 kinship. My suggestion is to keep the limit of 30 but redesign the terrain so that players can put any size house on any plot. Perhaps keep the limit of 4 kinship houses as a maximum but if players buy up all 30 plots for personal homes, so be it. I would love to move Arwellyn into a Deluxe house so I could display more of her trophies and decorations, but the Standard house I chose for her is in one of the more scenic spots in Falathlorn while the Deluxe homes are all in places I have no interest in being, not to mention being crammed up against a neighbor’s property. “Location! Location! Location!”

Kinship neighborhoods. I thought of this long before F2P came down the pike, so not sure how this would work within the new game, but I always wished there was an option for a kinship to own a full neighborhood. Put the kinship house in whichever plot you want, and only kin-members may purchase plots for their homes in that neighborhood. Add onto that wishlist the optional ability for the kinship leaders to assign a tax (a la WAR) so kin-members help pay for upkeep of the kin home and neighborhood. While I’m wishing, how about setting aside certain plots for gathering (ie. set down a farm or area that mining or wood nodes spawn). Turbine has always been against crafting in the neighborhoods in order to keep the social hubs active, and I’m in the minority of supporting that decision, but I’ll make this one exception that if the kinship owns the entire neighborhood, why not have fields for gathering but still require that we travel to one of the social hubs to visit the crafting stations?

Interior layouts. The LOTRO Store is the perfect opportunity for the Art Department to design new custom interior layouts and sell them in the Store. Runes of Magic does this quite well; I see no reason Turbine cannot follow suit. ’nuff said.

Hooks. Ideally, I’m with the majority and would prefer the hook system be removed altogether and just have the house type have a maximum item capacity, but let us place items anywhere and in any position like SWG, EQ2, VG and RoM allow. But if the hook system absolutely must remain then at least let me move the hook. If it’s a wall hook, let me shift it anywhere on the walls. Same with floor hooks, etc. Arwellyn has a chandelier that someone crafted for her but her Standard home has no ceiling hook to use it. Why can’t I sacrifice a furniture hook to get a ceiling hook? Again, just have a hook limit but let me choose any number of any hook type until I reach that limit.

Activities. This is a tricky beast. The neighborhoods have always been ghost towns. In the two years Arwellyn has owned her home, she has seen under ten people, total, in her neighborhood. Housing is a casual, role-play-ish aspect of the game, so why not encourage that for starters?

Why not include some aspect of each seasonal festival inside the neighborhoods? As it stands, only a town crier NPC gives festival locations. Have something to do for each festival in the neighborhoods. Have the neighborhoods decorated for each festival as well. (Side note: LOTRO is one of the least festive MMOs I’ve ever played when it comes to festivals and NPC decor, which seems at odds with its generally casual nature.) Crank it up a notch and alter the terrain graphics to reflect the season. One of the skirmishes features Bree-town during winter and it’s a nice change. While I admit it makes no sense to have only a tiny parcel of land reflect seasonal changes while the surrounding world remains static, I’m simply saying it would make the neighborhoods more festive.

How about player events such as bands? The more popular spot I’ve seen is either inside or outside the Prancing Pony in Bree-town for musicians to gather and play. Why not offer a spot for this in the neighborhoods and the band can pay a fee to have all town crier NPC’s advertise their performance all over Middle-earth, similar to how guilds can pay the NPCs to advertise for them in Age of Conan. Make it easy to get to the neighborhood instance as well; there are too many to remember all the names. Perhaps the town crier NPC can offer a “quest,” the function of which is primarily to ensure that you enter the proper instance? How about creating a “band” mechanic, which could be a mini-guild with a chat channel and its own reputation system, but players contribute to the band’s reputation, just like audiences call in to vote for their favorite on America’s Idol or Dancing With The Stars. The Yule Festival already has a new event where players perform emotes in a play while the audience throws flowers or rotten fruit at the good or bad performers. Just beef that idea up a bit and give players more performance events they can run themselves as well as a system for audience participation and voting. The higher the reputation tier a band reaches, perhaps the more special effects such as fireworks, etc. they can have during their show?

I think Turbine currently has their “Tell us what you think!” program going, this time focusing on changes to the housing system, but if memory serves (and it may not be) this isn’t the first time they’ve asked for suggestions on housing but done nothing whatsoever. Still, I think housing is on the docket for an update in 2011 along with PvMP so we’ll see how that goes. As I said, these are just some of the thoughts I’ve had over the years but never put to words.

As Turbine tweeted earlier today, they have released us from the NDA for their upcoming F2P/Freemium conversion. I have an actual article in my head that I may sit down and write tomorrow but for now I’ll just leave you with a slideshow of the Beta 1 screenshots I took.

I have had neither time nor motivation to participate in Beta 2 yet other than keeping the client patched. Mostly because I found myself approaching the situation I was in during beta for The Burning Crusade which caused me to cancel my WoW account, delete every character on every server and never look back. I don’t want that to happen with LOTRO so I have intentionally backed off my playtime in Beta 2.

I did tweet this earlier, but need to vent and get it off my chest here in more than 140 characters. I’ve done my fair share of beta testing and it isn’t often I come across the type of NDA that doesn’t even allow testers to admit they’re in beta. Turbine did that to us. Then they release every possible tidbit of information to the gaming sites and blogs, then very detailed developer diaries. Meanwhile we’re still under NDA so we can’t even comment on all this because doing so is admitting you’re in the beta and therefore violating the NDA. Is there much left to even discuss at this point? It was an extremely aggravating experience, to say the least.

To reiterate, these are all Beta 1 screenshots; some things have changed. I will make a separate gallery for Beta 2 when I get time to play, test, and take screenshots.

Caught the blurb on Massively so I popped over to Twisted Pixel’s site, and sure enough, they’ve posted that they’ve completed a contract to help build Turbine’s upcoming unannounced console MMO.

It’s still hush hush, but we just finished a contract with Turbine to help them build an awesome new MMO intended for consoles.

If you want more than that, you’ll have to take it up with Turbine, because we can’t spill the beans on their top-secret game.

It was a fun project, and we’re proud of our work. We can’t wait to play it ourselves when it’s released.

This is exciting news! Twisted Pixel has produced two of the most highly-acclaimed XBLA titles out there – The Maw and Splosion Man – and gives me hope that whatever the game may be, it won’t use the Turbine Engine. I enjoy Turbine’s games, but that engine is coming up on a decade old and it seems like they keep piling features on top of the ancient crap instead of cleaning it up and keeping it updated under the hood. Epic and id update their engines and design entirely new ones; it’s time Turbine stepped up to the plate as well.

Of course now the speculation goes into overdrive of what the game will be. I could have swore Turbine said (or implied) it would be a new IP but players won’t seem to drop the idea of a DDO port. The concept of DDO – a co-op group completing adventures – would work perfectly on consoles; after all co-op is the Big Thing this year, but would require a massive overhaul of the UI and inventory mechanics. We are also accustomed to buying DLC Adventure Packs already on consoles, though I have my doubts that a full in-game store would go over well in the console world. The instanced adventures would work well given that consoles have much more limited RAM and resources than higher-end PC’s. I could see a console DDO going over quite well if it were given a better engine and the fluid controls and graphics/animations we’ve come to expect on modern AAA console titles – something Turbine struggles with on the PC with limited success.

A console version of LOTRO? Nah, DIKU and consoles just don’t get along. An “arcadey” version of LOTRO with a playable evil side? Why would Turbine bother when Snowblind is already finishing up that exact idea (non-massively multiplayer) with Lord of the Rings: War in the North?

The much-speculated Harry Potter MMO? Now we’re at least talking with not only a new IP but one that belongs to Turbine’s new Dark Lord owner, Warner Brothers. It’s been talked about for a long time, and WB has stated they would like to see the IP given the MMO treatment. My own hope is that if it happens, it’s not too kiddy-fied. Not everyone who enjoys Harry Potter is a kid, nor are a good deal of console players, and I would hate to feel flatly excluded from a title.

How about a console MMO set on Dereth, the world of the Asheron’s Call games? That would bring some attention back to that IP and perhaps to the original MMO that is still running (and I’m certain Asheron’s Call will end up going the hybrid freemium route eventually) and possibly lead into an Asheron’s Call 3 MMO on the PC as well.

How about moving on from fantasy (Turbine has 3 fantasy IP’s already) altogether? Done correctly, we console players certainly still love our fantasy, but also seem much more willing to accept other settings than are our PC compatriots.

I’ve been back to LOTRO for roughly two months-ish and have been dabbling with Arwellyn’s progression in a few areas. She’s been kindred with the Galadhrim in Lothlorien for some time now, though other than wearing the armour as a cosmetic outfit I’m not really seeing where kindred is any advantage. I’m sure I’m missing something somewhere?

One of Arkenstone’s best Lore-masters, Hexhazzard (Arwellyn used to be included in that elite group; not sure where she stands now after being gone a year) leads Filikul raids every Monday and Thursday when the locks expire so I’ve done every one of them and this past Monday, Arwellyn had enough Bright Emblems of Nimrodel to barter for her first level 60 First Age legendary staff!

I gave it the same name as the Second Age staff which was crafted for me awhile back since I had a Relic Master NPC deconstruct that staff.

I spent some time using IXP runes to level the staff then spent the legacy points, so here are the beginning stats on the staff so far:

Both Massively and Ten Ton Hammer put up the E3 preview of LOTRO’s upcoming content update, which sounds like it will coincide with the business model shift this autumn. Currently untitled, Book 2 will continue the storyline where Book 1 The Oath of the Rangers left off. It sounds like this will also be a FREE update, not a Quest Pack in the LOTRO Store; though I also read the new zone of Enedwaith and the Epic Book quest line will be free, and the rest of the quests will be in a Quest Pack. So, that bit is unconfirmed currently.

As stated (accidentally?) by Adam Mersky back in March, the update will contain a new landmass of Enedwaith, which will be a level 62-65 zone located directly south of Eregion. From the preview map seen on Massively’s article, along with guesstimates from the forums, it sounds like Enedwaith is roughly the size of Eregion as well. Also we can see two points on the south to travel to Dunland, which is technically a part of Enedwaith so we’ll see how that gets handled later.

The update will include four dungeons, although three are solo instances while the final is a public dungeon similar to Goblin Town, Haudh Iarchith or Sarnúr from the original Shadows of Angmar game. This means the progression of instance clusters and raids will still be in Mirkwood until at least the next update.

Finally, Turbine is ripping out part of their Skirmish technology and applying it to the Shadows of Angmar instances, such as Great Barrows, Fornost, Carn Dûm and all the other fan favorites (well, was Fornost ever a favorite?). The instances will now scale in level, and reward level-appropriate loot, though it sounds like they will not scale to fellowship size like a Skirmish would. Additionally, no Skirmish Soldiers allowed. I find this a little unfortunate; it might be nice to have a small fellowship then round out the group with Soldiers just like you can do in DDO or Guild Wars, though I’ll be the first to admit the Soldier AI needs some serious work and the cooldown on the Direct Soldier skill needs to be removed.

Some players whine at recycling old content but personally, coming from MMO after MMO that simply abandons old content, I think it’s great that Turbine is always looking at ways to keep older content relevant and in the regular playlists. Not an easy thing to do on a traditional DIKU leveling game.

UPDATE: Sapience stopped by the LOTRO forums today to clear up misconceptions that have been spreading since the E3 preview.

I’ll try and shed some light on a few things that seem to have confused people or that have come out somewhat out of context. E3 can be crazy that way sometimes.

The LOTRO Store
We sent out a number of screen shots last week that were mock ups of the store. If you look carefully you can tell they’re only for illustration purposes and don’t reflect any actual items. For example there is a shot out there that shows a “Helm” with a really nice image of a helmet and a description that says it’s a potion.

Some of the item descriptions aren’t even related to LOTRO at all. So I would say take much of what’s shown in the screens as placeholders. As we progress through the beta process, everything is being constantly reviewed. Beta players are already providing some great feedback, even though we’ve only been in Beta for 1 day!

Scaled Instances
To clear up any misunderstandings; Instances will be scaled by the player, not automatically. It works like the level setting for Skirmishes. So for something like Helegrod you could choose to run it at level 61 if you wanted. I know some are worried about a ‘solo raid’. The instances will not scale in terms of group size. Fighting Thorog is still going to take 24 people.
Also, not every instance will be scaled at launch. The team is working hard to get as many in as they can, but time is finite. The plan is to revist them all, but they’re not all going to happen in Book 2.

To give you some idea of how major this change is, JWBarry is currently writing his first novel, also called the Instance Scaling Dev diary. Seriously, it’s a book.

Enedwaith
It’s a level 62-65 area with a lot of new content. Berephon is really excited about this area! So much so he’s going to write a Dev diary all about it. Enedwaith, not his excitement.

Hope that helps clear things up a bit

A day late and a dollar short on writing this, eh? Hey, I was more motivated to play the game rather than write about it this past weekend. Plenty of others have done the writing, and I agree with most of what other informed and reasonable (thus automatically disqualifying Keen) bloggers and writers have already said.

I’ll openly admit, despite being “in the know” about how Turbine handled things in DDO, that my first reaction to the LOTRO announcement was a sharp gasp, followed by a Darth Vader-esque “Nooooooooooooo!” But that reaction was caused by years of exposure to what “Free to Play” or “F2P” has meant under the predominantly Asian model. A few seconds later, my mind returned to reality and I realized this will most likely be a great thing not only for LOTRO, but also something the other developers and publisher may want to watch with a keen eye.

What will it mean for me, personally? Looking at the VIP Chart on the Beta Signup page, nothing is going to change in my own gaming, aside from finally giving me a few options I’ve been wanting. I am a Founder and a Lifetime member, which means I will automatically become a VIP member without the subscription and I’ll still get the 500 Turbine Points in addition to the Loyalty Reward points for my existing account status.

Do I feel disappointed because I bought the Lifetime membership and three years later the business model is changing? Of course not, why should I? The Lifetime membership was $200 up front which gives my account access to the game for the entirety of its life with no monthly subscription. That isn’t changing with the new business model. Also, that $200 was worth roughly 18 months of subscribing to the game, which is now celebrating it’s three year anniversary. Even with the few breaks I’ve taken, that Lifetime has more than paid for itself and I have been playing for free for quite some time now.

Was the Lifetime part of the problem? Most of us celebrated Turbine for trying something new in allowing the Lifetime memberships. Was it short-sighted of them? Perhaps, though I can’t imagine they went into this without the bean-counters doing the math first. Then again, it was Turbine who said the “typical” MMO player subscribes to a single MMO for a total of roughly 18 months — exactly the value of the Lifetime membership. Now that in many cases, such as my own, where the Lifetime has paid for itself and we are seen as “moochers” getting the full game for free, Turbine has been accused of attempting to monetize the Lifetime members, starting with the Adventure Pack for the Mirkwood mini-expansion a few months ago. Of course they are. They are first and foremost a business, and businesses need income. Personally, I am in a situation of having far more money than time, and I wouldn’t mind continuing to support my game of choice but have had no means to do so other than purchasing the two expansions that have released. The new business model will give me that option, though it’s entirely possible that the bonus + monthly Turbine Points I’ll be accruing will cover the couple of options I am currently interested in, still leaving me in a position of not contributing additional income to Turbine.

While we may have been pleased that LOTRO offered the Lifetime memberships, we were much more skeptical when Flagship offered them for Hellgate: London. When Flagship sank, we were practically astounded that Cryptic had the audacity to offer them for Champions Online and Star Trek Online – especially given Cryptic’s modus operandi for producing games that are rather lacking in the depth and longevity departments. I feel safe in stating my belief that the Lifetime experiment was well-warranted and worth the attempt but has worn out its welcome and usefulness; I doubt we see many more of them offered.

Why do it at all? We can easily look back at DDO – which had 65,000 subscribers at its peak and probably half that at the time of its F2P announcement – and say the switch was to save the game. Not only did it save the game, the game’s reputation and exposure has increased, it’s player base has increased 500% and subscribers (VIP members) have increased 300% since the switch, and it has added two servers. Does that automatically mean the exact same thing will happen for LOTRO? Absolutely not, though Turbine is going ahead and adding two more LOTRO servers right away rather than adding one like they did for DDO then the second one came later when it was needed. LOTRO doesn’t need saving like DDO did. After the first few months of launch, LOTRO settled into the comfortable population range of approximately 250K to 300K, give or take, according to most educated guesstimates. It has maintained that same population for three years. It has slowly lost players but gained new players at roughly the same rate via the same revolving door population we see on the majority of other subscription MMOG’s. In other words, while the total population has been fine and providing steady income for Turbine, it is also stagnant. I could probably say the same of EQ2 and most other subscription MMOG’s that have released prior to 2008. The hybrid “freemium” model allows more choices for game access, thereby opening the potential for increasing the total player base, providing all players with more people to adventure with, interact with, and befriend, regardless how long or how often any of us chooses to play. I never read anything of EQ2 growing. EQ2 already has each zone individually packaged and could very easily fit the model Turbine and KingsIsle are leading the way with. Vanguard is merging to a single server and is in desperate need of something to gain players, though I suspect SOE is well on their way to phasing it out like they did with Matrix Online, leaving it on life support until finally no one remains on the development team then shutting it down. Despite having recently launched a great expansion, Funcom would do well to adopt a similar model for Age of Conan and their upcoming The Secret World. Same for Cryptic and their games, rather than forcibly double-dipping their customers.

Interestingly, if you look at Turbine’s slideshow presentation on DDO at the Virtual Goods Summit last year, while DDO saw a 500% increase in total players, they were seeing 22% of the players making purchases in the DDO Store. The basic math says that the monetary income is still at 100% of what DDO was earning before the switch, but I’m  certain there’s more to it than those simple numbers. Semi-related side note: Turbine always refused to release population and income numbers, and due to their status as an independent studio were able to get away with it. Now that Turbine is part of Warner Bros. will their numbers be published in quarterly or annual financials? Also noted is that many of the top-selling items are consumables, which fits in with the overarching F2P model already. With LOTRO, that’s a catch since LOTRO does have a full crafting system. A fear that scholars in particular could be affected if the potions and scrolls they craft were available for sale in the LOTRO Store. Turbine has stated they are very keenly aware of this and the Store will not impinge on crafters, but we’ll have to wait until Beta and the re-launch to see. Looking at the VIP Chart again, however, I can make some predictions. All players will earn Destiny Points but only VIP Members can spend them. I predict all Destiny Point consumables will be placed in the LOTRO Store so players have access to those benefits but also provides an attraction for the VIP Membership. Rest XP (technically it’s called Enhanced XP in-game) has the same limitations. We can already spend Destiny Points for two bubbles worth of Enhanced XP but I will predict Turbine creates a few more tiers of Enhanced XP items for sale in the Store.

Quite frankly, I would be in favor of the LOTRO Store selling levels if I wanted to instantly have a level 50 or 60 or 65 character – with the restriction that I already have a character of that level. I can look at my Minstrel alt, who was created back in the day strictly for grouping in instances and raids, not for leveling and soloing. The raid group I was in practically power-leveled the minstrel to 50 within a couple weeks and immediately got her into the instance scene my Lore-master was already involved in. That hasn’t changed now, and I’m dreading having to solo her through Moria and beyond when my only goal for her is end-game content. I have other classes I want to level, but not that one. I would gladly pay Turbine Points to instantly bump her to level 65 so I can get on with what I want her to do.

One concern I do have with the new business model is a change in world design. The Shadows of Angmar game gave us the “seamless” open world of Eriador to adventure and explore. Mines of Moria gave us a separate “world” to load into but again was seamless and open. However, since then we’ve been given Lothlorien and Mirkwood, which are neatly-packaged individual zones – one might go so far as to call them public instances – with no means of “seamless” travel. We know the next landmass to be added to the game is Enedwaith, a level 62-65 zone. Will Enedwaith and all future landmass expansions be “instanced” individual regions for sale in the LOTRO Store or will Turbine maintain some “world integrity” and continue development with seamless travel options? Looking at what the plan for the Free players, it seems they’ll get all of Eriador (the original Shadows of Angmar game) for free, but only the initial starter zones – Breeland, Ered Luin and The Shire – will have any quests. Those should get Free players to level 20. After that, they are free to travel all of Eriador and can grind monsters to their heart’s content to level (slowly since LOTRO offers little XP per kill; the bulk of the XP is from quest rewards) or they can purchase Quest Packs in the LOTRO Store to gain access to all the NPC quests in a given region or regions. That gives me hope that Turbine has the means to continue building Middle Earth as an open and mostly-seamless world rather than DDO-izing (or perhaps AoC-izing would be more appropriate?) the game into packaged zones for sale that we have to load into as we’re seeing now with Lothlorien and Mirkwood.

While I am 110% in favor of this switch, I am not going to jump on the bandwagon that the days of subscriptions are over and F2P/RMT is the future. Well, RMT is a big part of the future, but I digress. What I foresee coming to an end is the days of only subscription or only F2P. We’ve had that for well over a decade, and the fact is customers like having choices. In MMO’s alone there are so many of them that one single title rarely keeps our attention for long. Like it or not, admit it or not, but most of us are Tourists at heart. It was one thing in 1999 if you played EQ and only EQ. There was only EQ, AC or UO to choose from and most players back then picked one and stuck with it. That is no longer the case, and developers are finally accepting that fact. I’ll echo DDOCast host Jerry’s sentiments from his interview on Episode 40a of the Casual Stroll to Mordor podcast that for the past decade developers have had the attitude of “play our game, and only our game!” Now, they’re waking up to the fact that we players cannot or do not behave that way any longer and are beginning to have the attitude of “play our game, too!”  Turbine is among a select few studios now on the cutting edge of what will slowly evolve into how we access our online games in the future, and has nothing to do with the “death” of one model or the other, but rather that I think we’re nearing the end of the days that MMO studios force their customers to put all their eggs in one basket, and start providing customers with alternative choices instead.

Finally, the existing community has been fearful and decrying that the community will downgrade into a cesspool of Barrens chat when the Free players overrun Middle Earth faster than the forces of Mordor. Bollocks! Just look back a year after DDO’s announcement and you’ll see the exact same fears. DDO’s community was so small already, it didn’t take them long to band together under a flag of elitism and snub their noses at the incoming Free players and the behavior they would surely bring. The reality is that, at worst, the maturity of the DDO community stayed the same but from what I’ve seen it seems to have improved. LOTRO has always been known for its mature community, certainly, but it has never been totally pure and free of the immaturity and “community degradation” that so many are fearing. I had people on my ignore list back in Beta. During launch there were gold spammers. The Brandywine server was once (possibly still is, I don’t play there anymore) nicknamed “BrandyWoW” because having the largest server population also meant the largest population of idiots. To this day there are still Barrens Chat-quality conversations in the OOC channels, and don’t even get me started on what often takes place in the user-created GLFF channels. Every single one of you GLFF douchebags who engage daily in the tired arguments over “Guardian tanking in Overpower stance sucks!” or “Wardens suck!” or “Corpse jumping makes you a giant douche!” and countless others have already lost every single right to complain about any “degradation of community” because you are already exactly what you’re complaining about. Go look in the mirror and shut up. Sure, initially the kiddies will come, but guess what? LOTRO’s design and game play won’t sustain them; they’ll go back to WoW with its fast action and Power Ranger shoulder pads or whatever other game has already supported their behavior. What we will gain is what we already want: more players who have the maturity we expect, the desire to play, but perhaps were unable to afford or justify the monthly subscription. Just like it took a few months after launch for things to settle down, it will settle down after a few months after the switch as well.