Thursday 8 January 2015

2015 in LOTRO and what's coming!


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The new Producer's letter has just been released with some very exciting news for PVMP players.


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.

Osgiliath is one area I've been excited to see from day one, and I always felt it would make an awesome PVP zone...

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.

Much of the playerbase will welcome new instances. I'm not much of a raider myself but I'd love to get involved for this area.

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.

Finally!

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.

This sounds very interesting. Perhaps Turbine are taking notes from Guild War's Living Story and Star Trek Online's episodic model.

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!

Key for me is that they drop the price, or do away with charging altogether.  Making it easier is all very well, but if I wanted to transfer all nine toons from Windfola to Landroval, we're talking $200+, plus the charge for extra slots to accommodate the characters.
 

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.

I Called this back in 2009. Awesome idea and I really hope it pans out. Turbine have made promises about PVMP before and not fulfilled those promises.

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