[CC] The very hungry SSGpillar

Keeping in critters tradition there was supposed to be a prep-article for Update 23. At least there was one planned. The community streams were quite clear. The raid wouldn’t scale, a few extra crystals and scrolls, finish any tier 2 challenge deeds. And any new gear and essences would finalize in the last few weeks. Except the major curve balls that got thrown in rapid succession at the end. We’ve gotten so much more in this update then we’d expect. A bit too much i think.

What was the plan?
The mordor expansion had plenty of system issues that SSG wanted to remedy. From the difficulty at the start to gearing options and some lackluster instances. Most of these got smoothed out over the lifetime of the updates. As those updates passed. A new instance cluster got requested and confirmed. A chance to double up the development time they had.

This is probably the start of the endless stair for the update.  A small change of plan that got overloaded as more and more got loaded on the dwarven bandwagon. With the new instances a new set of gear was needed. This gave them the opportunity to make a detailed road map for Update 23 and all its 23.x sub patches. Every new update over the next 6 months will bring better gear carefully orchestrated for players to go through. If this is done well all the content is released at a spread out pace with none left behind or feeling left out.

For more about this check out lootbox/gear article.

Mini expansion instead of region pack
Only if you start to take apart the update you get a real sense that it’s more then just a questpack. It’s closer akin to Siege of Mirkwood (+/- 2800 lp’s) then Far Anorien (1995 lp).  Some parts are connected to each other, but it requires time to make them. So lets take a look.

1. Iron hill region + Ered Mithrin (both smaller then a normal questpack)
2. New instance cluster
   1. 2 3-mans and 6-man
   2. 4 resource instances
   3. solo version
   4. Tier 3 challenge mode
3. New raid (largely no details)
4. Global ratings overhaul
5. Gearing overhaul
   1. Ash, ambers and figment
   2. Lootbox
   3. Favored loot
6. New crafting tier (separate for updating neglected items)
7. Harvestmath festival additions
8. Shire visual upgrade
9. New Featured instance (rotation)

If we’d compare that to Far Anorien it’s a tiny bit more. Even compared to Mirkwood which has nearly as much updates (but likely a larger developers team) it does feel like SSG chewed of more then before.

What went wrong
For readability i’ll just go over these things in the bulletin points. Forums have been bashed on both bullroarer and live already.

1. The questpack itself was largely successful. A cancellation and relog fixes nearly every issue
   1. Grappling hooks in the Ironfold and the Beorning daily are waiting for a hotfix.
   2. Not enough experience to get you from 115-120 in this questpack.
2. Instances themselves seem pretty issue free, but the underlying system are a mess.
   1. Fire mitigations are far too high
   2. Signature + mobs are missing damage making tier 2 far too easy. Except that people seem to prefer Glimmerdeep (see point 1).
   3. Each instance has 3 versions that are not clear. Some quests do specify which one you need to run.
3. Not much wrong, cause we hardly know anything.
4. Global rating and stats revamp got delayed 4 beta builds due to internal issues. Which in term pushed out several other fixes that could otherwise be done. More emphasis could have been given on tweaking and making minor changes. Major flaws got uncovered during the testing that have simmered under the radar. Think tactical class legendary weapons not getting upgraded and scaling for legendary weapons in areas such as big battles and the ettenmoors.
5. The minute we need to consort to outside game diagrams and schematics for gear and loot rules something is going wrong.
   1. Convoluted, but good idea for the future. Really needed a visual explantion at the start.
   2. The same.
   3. Bugged, not working as intended, how many, how much, when, where? Same as 1 and 2. But far less thought out.
6. Most of the bugs have been caught in time, but still needs someone going over the numbers before launch.
7. We’ll see.
8. The shire changes got added too late, no time for debugging or reporting was available. Feels like a sideproject gone wrong.
9. No new armour available at launch. Expected with the gear quality, but when, if, what will happen to it?
   1. Older gearing bugs that are still around, wrong loot tables, wrong maximum levels in instances and mobs. Still needs a fix.

Conclusion
The list is extensive, should have been a lot shorter and could have been alot shorter.  SSG tried to make system changes that can should get their very own update. The questpack is great and could have launched  after the first few builds. They made a vicious circle starts with you the instances you need for the quests. You need a gearing update for those instances. And you need a rating update for the gear update. After that the instances need another tweak.  By that time they couldnt stop and were too far in their development to stop. The caterpillar got too hungry and the cooks couldn’t keep up.

Eventually it will all work out i think, but this might just happen again. A clearer objective and means to test. SSG is making good headway with revamping lotro to 2019. But system changes shouldn’t go by so casually as they did this time around.