Twenty Questions With Turbine!

Yesterday Sapience gave us some answers with a Q&A Dev Team post.  I decided to give you guys the questions I thought were important and hopefully explain the importance of them.

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Q4: Do the developers find the player council helpful or just another annoyance?

A4: The council has been very helpful. It gives us the opportunity to have very focused conversations. The threads don’t go on in to 40+ pages and the topics are very pertinent to current development. So far it has been a great and responsive sounding board. – Zimmitti

I am really glad that Turbine is listening to players even if it is only a select group.  I think this could greatly raise the quality bar of their end product and I can’t wait to see how it affects expansions and updates.

Q8: What is the future looking like for pvp? Is it basically a done deal for Turbine with no future? Is it considered a burden that they just want removed from the game? Or is it something they would like to revive and try to make better? Are the couple PVP only council members basically wasting their time with trying to work on pvp stuff?

A8: We don’t have any serious big features planned for PvMP in the near term. We’ve got time booked to rebalance things to accommodate the Freep class changes and we’ve got a few ideas that might be interesting… or really may not happen.
The systems changes we are putting big effort into right now on the freep side are focused and challenging. If I were to shake up PvP while trying to get everything else balanced, I assure you everything would suffer. – HoarseDev.

As many of you know I am a big PvMP fan and I actually consider this good news.  Turbine says here that they are allocating time to balance PvMP with the new class changes.  This was one of my biggest fears that they would just leave it the same so it is a good start.

Q13: I wish I knew the real reason for the lags and if and when you are going to eliminate them. I suppose it is a problem in the server code/engine and/or client/server protocol which is not easy to fix?

A13: There is more than one cause for lag today, and as time goes on and the game (and the internet) change, new causes of lag are introduced. We have folks who work on this all the time, and if you are not satisfied with the results, well, know that we aren’t either. We have some brand-new performance monitoring technologies that we have recently put on the live servers, which have started to provide important clues. We are hoping for some significant improvements with the expansion pack, especially for some of the Mounted Combat cases. – Nathan

I know they promise to fight lag and make things better all the time but I am glad to know that they are not happy with it.  That is a great thing because it means they are really working on it and I hope the fixes for mounted combat do actually fix it finally.

Q16: Given player concerns about the license and Turbine’s relationship with Saul Zaentz/Middle-earth Enterprises, can you say anything about LOTRO ending in 2014 as some have predicted?

A16: We plan to support LOTRO for many more years to come. We are very fortunate in that we enjoy a great relationship with Middle-earth Enterprises. They visit our offices several times a year to check out our upcoming plans for LOTRO and continue to be very supportive. – Sapience

I am not surprised at all by this but it is good to have it in print and put rumors about LOTRO ending to rest.  It is a strange though there is no licence talk here.  I wish they could say the current legal situation.

Q17: To satisfy curiosity would it be possible to find out what the new PvMP region that was going to ship with RoI was going to be?
A:17 I can’t go into crazy detail but some of the things kicked around were smaller, more focused spaces with specific objectives. Think skirmishes, but bigger and with both Freeps and Creeps competing for conflicting objectives. Several were on the table. They never really quite worked out. In terms of locales, Redhorn Lodes, Amon Lhaw and a spot in the Blue Mountains were in the works. – HoarseDev

I understand that the content could have been terrible and completely broken but at least give us the PvMP skirmishes.  I have been asking for something like that for years.  Personally I am fine staying with the one map, just give us the PvMP skirmishes please.  I hope one day Turbine does release this kind of content for LOTRO in a big way.

Q20: Why can’t we mail more than one item at a time? How hard is it to change this?
A20: This has come up for discussion several times. It’s difficult to concretely answer a question like “how hard is it to…”, but suffice to say this is more than a few days of work – “bigger than a breadbox”, as we like to say. – Nathan

Then give the mail NPC’s a bread house to live in.  That should be enough to convince the mail NPC’s to carry more than one package at a time.

In all seriousness I wish Turbine would devote time to this as I think it is worth the time, even if it takes an employee a few weeks.

What do you think about the twenty questions?

12 comments

  1. Lindellon /

    For over seven years, through betas, launch, updates and expansions, it’s been indicated over and over and over again that PVP, by any name, is not nor has ever been a concern for the LOTRO development team.

    It was an after-thought; always has been. And yet people continue to be upset that they don’t put any resources towards it. Turbine knows what side of the bread gets buttered, and the PvMP community, though vocal, has always been a minority that refuses to acknowledge the silent, overwhelming majority.

    Money talks — no amount of GLFF chatter or vitriolic naysaying to the contrary changes that fact

    • Andang /

      I totally agree that PvMP has never been the focus of the game. I am actually one of the few who loves where PvMP is since Rohan as they did a huge update. That being said, I think if they devoted even more time to it by giving players things they could purchase, it would at least pay for the time to have an employee working on it.

      With that being said, if getting more PvMP content affects the PvE experience in a negative way, I would much rather them work on making PvE content the best possible experience.

      I wish people who are rude in GLFF like you described would leave the game as LOTRO has one of the best communities that needs to be protected to the end.

      • Lindellon /

        Yes, I should probably explain that comment. I came to this website quite shortly after observing a rather heated and unpleasant exchange of chatter in Landy’s GLFF regarding this subject.

        Never meant that to refer to you directly at all, Andang — apologies if it came across like that in any way.

      • Andang /

        I didn’t think you did…

        I just wanted to show that there are still plenty of well behaved PvMP players out there.

        No worries! =)

  2. Nevermind PvP, Helm’s Deep, and IP licensing…what about Sapience’s candy jar?!? It’s a travesty in this world we live that one must have the need to worry about the current level of his or her vessel of treats!

    …though it would be lovely to update the mailing system. 😉

  3. AnElephant /

    Before anyone brings the wording in Q16 up, here is the next comment from Sapience:

    “On Facebook someone suggested the wording for Q16 should be ‘developing’ not ‘supporting’. So, ok. Developing, supporting, making, cavorting in the shire, whichever works better for you.” -Sapience

    • It’s a valid point, though. Those two words mean totally different things in the software lifecycle 😉

      That being said, I think we all knew what he meant.

      • Andang /

        We all knew what he meant but we have thought we knew before and been wrong. It is great to know that we were right this time.

  4. Fionnuala /

    I am disappointed about the (unsurprising) new that there are no planned updates for the music system. You would think that the one truly unique aspect of the game (aside from the IP its self) that promotes community activity like nothing else would warrant some development time. I guess I’ll just have to try to be content as long as they don’t break it again.

    • Andang /

      Yeah I was very disappointed by this as well but, as you said, it was not a surprise.

  5. Aranthier /

    I’ve also been thinking about PvMP skirmishes, and I completely support them. However, this could affect PvMP negatively, by changing the way PvMP works altogether.

    Let’s say that these “skirmishes” last about twenty minutes, and have a ten to twenty minute downtime between. Think of how dead free roam PvMP could become from this, with everyone being involved in the skirmishes.
    A solution to this problem (yes, I’m solving my own problem) could be to simply increase the downtime between skirmishes to, say, an hour or so. This would give people that took part in a skirmish enough time to spend the rewards they gained from the skirmish, then get back into the free roam PvMP for a while until the next one starts.

    That being said, I’d still be completely supportive if they decided to make this, and indeed completely supportive about almost every other PvMP expansion/update.

    • Andang /

      I personally would be fine if the old system died as long as the skirmishes were much, much better. It is a game and so it is about having fun…that being said, at the same time I don’t want to see it go away.

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