the best post I've seen lately : LOTRO - Discussions

from: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?t=313557

subject A list of what went wrong

original post by: Orac (this is the set up post, the reply is the really good one)

I am posting this list because I don’t believe the devs understand the level of discontent with the player base. My kin is falling apart along with every other kin I’ve raided with due to players leaving the game. This list is my attempt to explain some of the reasons why this is occurring.

1. Raid or die. What brought my kin to LOTRO was the idea that solo play, crafting, group play, raids, and PvP were all treated as equally valid forms of play. The rewards were even across all forms. I’ve been here since the first closed beta. The devs at the time clearly stated this was one of the founding principles of LOTRO. I bought my lifetime membership based on this theory and I feel ripped off. Raid gear is clearly better. First age gear is only from raids. You must have first age gear to pass the harder 6 player missions. At the end of SoA, I had a fairly equal split of gear from each type of reward. Now anything but raid gear is complete trash, and you must endlessly grind 6 person content to qualify for raids. Turbine changed the core mechanic of the entire system and seems to act surprised when non-raiding players complain. This happened on Everquest II and my entire kin left that game as well.

2. Paying for nerfs. My characters will never be as powerful as they were in SoA. Each time I give you $50, I have to grind endlessly for hours for the net benefit of being a less powerful character. This along with the endless grind destroys your players desire to keep playing. It’s no longer fun and we don’t feel like we have achieved anything after all this work. Half my kin quit at the beginning of MoM and the other half are leaving currently because this is no longer fun. Other kins I’ve come to know through being forced to raid in MoM are in the same boat.

3. Radience gear. Radiance gear completely gates end game content. We play for 2 years and we don’t get to see the conclusion to the story line unless we are raid players. The devs made some posts seeming to indicate SoM would address this, but DG is such a difficult raid, you must have full radiance gear to be powerful enough to have a remote chance of winning. What is the point of being allowed into a raid at a lower radiance if it absolutely prevents you from winning?

4. Excessive Grind. The grind in LOTRO has become abusive. MoM added the grind of leveling 2nd age weapons from rare critter drops for days. Then it was grind raids for 1st age weapons for weeks. Now we are grinding for 2nd age weapons again, but at a drop rate best measured in months.

5. Puzzle fights. Rather than making new content, the devs have spent their time making a handful of content gating missions a series of puzzle fights. By this I mean you must know how each boss behaves, bring the appropriate characters, hit the exact skill at the exact time, and if you fail everyone dies and you get to try again. Almost no margin of error and you must play the game EXACTLY as the devs imagine or you can’t win. If your group doesn’t have the exact mix of players with the exact type of required gear, you loose. When we find ways around this tightly scripted content, it’s considered an exploit and the mission is changed to again force us to play EXACTLY the way the devs want. If you want proof, just look at Dark Delvings.

6. Lack of content. Pace of free updates has come to a screaming halt. SoA was amazing with the content delivered. MoM had a single land expansion in a year. Endlessly playing the same 6 missions does not constitute content. It’s a hamster wheel and I want off.

7. Core mechanics. Core mechanic problems are not fixed, while inane items like session play, festivals, lorebook, lorebook rankings, bizarre puzzle fight mechanics, legenary weapons, tokens, and revamping old areas are worked on. Let me give you a great example. My main is a Guard and for the first 3 months of MoM, he was nearly worthless due to broken threat. For 2 months of beta leading up to release, I posted real numbers and details on what was broken and no meaningful action was taken.

8. Dev abandonment. Devs no longer post meaningful information. Look at the near complete absence of dev posts in character forums. The reason we feel abandoned is because we were abandoned. I would write long posts in beta with painstakingly acquired details. Nothing was done to fix issues for months or acknowledge there was even a problem. Why should I keep trying to describe problems?

9. Money. Money in the game no longer has meaning. Everything is bind on acquire. Crafting is primarily for consumables. 95% of the best gear is only found in raids

10. Beta users. Beta users have very poor debugging tools at their disposal to validate core mechanics. Hiding the math has only caused more problems. We’ve asked for better ways to help Turbine debug their system, but without threat logs, accurate combat logs with more detailed math, we can’t help. Herbalists healing negated by armour and critical defense stopping critical heals is mind numbing. With the proper visibility in logs, these would have easily been found in beta in time to be address before looking like fools on the live servers.

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http://forums.lotro.com/showpost.php?p=4343055&postcount=8

reply by: Kreegan

I only disagree with one thing:

Quote:

...I don’t believe the devs understand the level of discontent with the player base...

End of Quote

Quite frankly, I believe three things are at work:

(1) "Direction from above" -- The management team (at the business/producer level) has schemed mechanisms to maximize the profit margin they can realize from the game. Turbine is a business; businesses don't last long without making a profit, especially when conduct of business is dependent on investor willingness to continue investing.

Turbine is dependent on two large investment groups and several independent investors. Considering the typical cost of a AAA game (around $30M), Turbine likely has to service a very large debt load. Meanwhile, they're handling two large court cases (one likely mired in international contract law) and rumor has it that they are developing another [console-based] game. [*edit: see below]

Profit is net revenue minus costs of business, so their goal is likely sustained revenue (subscription income) at the least cost to doing busines (meaning reduced development). From information available on the web (just Google "Turbine, Inc."), their revenue in 2008 was just over $18M. They had 140 employees at that time (since this is only January, 2010, their 2009 numbers are not available). If you estimate the average cost of labor (noting their two facilities are in fairly high cost-of-living areas); recognizing that the cost of a manyear is salary x (1 + overhead rate) x (1 + G&A); you can do some simple math and realize that they probably only realized $2M-$3M after expenses in 2008. Factor in their debt service and they're not exactly rolling in the dough.

With another development in the works, most of their technical workforce is most likely dedicated to that effort. The workforce supporting LotRO is a sustainment effort, not a marching army of software engineers, graphic artists, level designers, database specialists, and community service personnel focused solely on LotRO. The various departments in Turbine probably contribute resources as needed, but priority almost certainly goes to their new development effort.

That being the case, until such time as their lawsuits are resolved and the new development effort is completed, the management focus is probably on minimizing costs of LotRO, while retaining as much of the subscription base as they can -- realistically recognizing that they are probably going to lose subscriptions in the interim.

So, we get a minimalistic "expansion", grind, improperly balanced mechanisms within the game, etc.

(2) "10-year old Dungeon Master (DM) Arrogance" (this is tongue in cheek) -- Many years ago, back when D&D came in a white box with several poorly written sets of "almost-rules", DMs basically fell into two categories: (a) those who wanted the players to have fun; and (b) those who wanted to be "the dictator". Category (a) DMs created their worlds and then adjusted the game play based on player actions, creating a story around their players within the boundary conditions of their worlds (gameplay was all about the player). Category (b) DMs created their stories and players were just pawns (gameplay was all about the DM). Every neighborhood had their 10-year old (mentality) kid who wanted to be the DM. Some had marvelous imaginations; however, with the advent of D&D, kids sitting around a table with pencils and graph paper replaced the days of street football, and the 10-year old (mentality) DM was the replacement for the kid who owned the football and always claimed, "If I can't be quarterback, I'm taking my ball and going home!"

Enter the modern world of the MMORPG developer; each has his/her own level of creativity, but each also has his/her own biases as to how the game should be played. Each has his/her own intent for how a quest/instance/other content they've designed should be played, and based on the amount of work they've put into the effort, have a lot of pride in the work that has been done. Invariably, without enough QA available to check work (due to funding constraints) and without enough play-testing (does anyone really think player beta-testing is anything other than an indirect form of marketing?), players are ALWAYS going to find ways to bypass developer-perceived key parts of their work effort, trivializing their designs, completing instances and quests in a fraction of the time they were designed to be done, etc.

Boy, talking about how to piss off a DM... er. I mean developer.

(3) "Original game design" -- In retrospect, a lot of the original mechanics in SoA were not well designed for long term growth; a typical problem with level-based (character and gear) games. With gear and statistics applying percentage-based improvements to character performance, eventually characters become so "uber" that it is impossible to create challenges for the players (that aren't ridiculous in scheme; e.g., why are orcs and goblins in starter zones so miserably incompetent relative to orcs and goblins in later zones? genetic disorders?). So, the current developer team retrenched. Has that been done well? That's certainly debatable.
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The long and short of this is that I'm certain the developers are well aware of the discontent from their customers. I don't think that they don't care; I think that they're between a rock and a hard place from a business perspective, they're human beings, and they're attempting to adapt the original game mechanics for the long term.

Does that mean I'm personally forgiving of the mistakes that have been made? No. I just understand them.

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The game was ruined by Moria, making such a big deal about such a relatively small part of the three books, but hey we have a dungeon game, should be easy to make an expansion that is mostly dungeons...

The legendary lottery system was the second nail sure the gear needed to be redone all games start or add a way to enchant or add items to gear to personalize it that is fine in itself but not with a system (legendary items) that seems to do only one thing well, be a time sink

I took what turbine gave me if they think a minstrel should be able to mentor people on how to play a cow bell during a fight, great, or getting increased kick damage and decrease kick cooldown on a captains halberd. fine

I play still because (the game and lifetime subscription were free for me:) and I still have 2 friends (from about 20 who USED to be on EVERY day) who show up everyday and I guess thats enough....

plus I'll probably just for being ornery get all 9 classes to 65, all but two are _in_ SoM, the last 2 are at the intro (can never find anyone to group with, barren) all 7 crafters have their vineyards recipes, 5 have their som recipes......

*edit added

http://www.massively.com/2008/06/08/is-the-world-of-harry-potter-turbines-next-mmo-project/

http://www.codemasters.com.my/news/?showarticle=9269
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/23/rumor-warner-bros-wants-codemasters/

http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/696857/Update-Is-Warner-Bros-Considering-Buying-Out-Codemasters.html