Former Turbine Employee Reveals LOTRO Secrets

Note: The content in this article may not paint LOTRO in the most positive light.

Aylwen, a user on the LOTRO Community forums, claims to be a former Turbine employee who has worked on LOTRO.  While there is no way to confirm the forum posts are from a former employee of Turbine since he, for good reason, does not give his real name, he does give images of the company and game that would be hard to acquire otherwise.  His posts also line up with posts from other possible former employees that have been posting in various places over the years.

In this article I have included several of the bigger items from his posts as well as some of his images but for all of the content from the 50+ posts you can head over to the original thread on the LOTRO Community forums.

Aylwen says he was an employee at Turbine from Volume 1 Book 14 until right before F2P and then again for a short time before Rise of Isengard was released.  He was mostly responsible for Quality Assurance of PvMP.

Aylwen says that the atmosphere at Turbine was great when he started in 2008.  Over time though he discovered the leadership and direction of the team were the biggest problems, something we have heard again and again from previous unconfirmed former employees.  Aylwen continues on calling the deal with WB “a deal with the devil that in retrospect had to be made.”

Later in the thread, Aylwen gives more details about the deterioration of the atmosphere:

“For the first year, through most of MoM, there was decent department relations, it was pretty informal, respectful, generally productive. As things got tougher, and people started to fear for the future…, that atmosphere soured. …So a lot of egos…started becoming the order of the day and last I saw, that hasn’t changed. “

Later on in one of the posts Aylwen talks about the team trying “to do too much with too little,” even referencing a console version of LOTRO to “woo WB.”

“We tried to do too much with too little, attempting the LOTRO console game, building a proprietary downloader (Propel), mock ups of a Harry Potter MMO to woo WB…all of which soaked up bodies and millions and came to nothing. To me IC was classic Turbine, even in the WB era.”

Later he also says they tried to bring LOTRO to the Asian market.  He says it was a huge fail that Turbine quickly tried push under the rug.  He also blames the recent layoffs at Turbine to the unsuccessful Infinite Crisis.

One of the more surprising things from Aylwen’s posts is that there was never a planned PvMP map even though players were told there was one.

“Again, to use PvMP for an example, there was a case where someone…indicated in response to queries from some PvMPers that, yes, a new map was on the way. The thing was, that was absolutely not on the table, no plans for it whatsoever. I think she just wanted to make the players happy at the time (a very human response, not a malicious lie, just a promise she was in no way qualified to make).”

Aylwen continues on, talking about the reason WB purchased Turbine:

“…WB didn’t acquire Turbine for the sake of LOTRO. They wanted Turbine’s technical expertise in supporting online games. LOTRO itself was just a fringe benefit. Thus WB crammed dozens of new staff into the Needham building while keeping LOTRO bare bones, disconnected Turbine’s NetOps from Turbine (and christened it WB Net), and, when I came back, had LOTRO QA testing the Batman online shooter. But in a sense WB’s disinterest in LOTRO and sheer wealth has probably spared LOTRO from being shut down. They don’t care enough to kill it where a smaller company might have by now.”

WB not wanting Turbine for the games seems to be fairly true as many gaming analysts and unconfirmed former employees have pointed out before.  A few months ago I even noticed that 93 names from Turbine were in the credits of Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor.  Some of those are shown in the screenshot from the credits on the left.

Later in the thread, Aylwen talks about the leadership and F2P:

“Apart from perhaps Kate, nobody was happy about the move to f2p. Nobody was very thrilled with Kate coming over to LOTRO either although it must be said that at least she was more of a presence than Steefel had been (in two years, I spoke more to the CEO and other execs than the LOTRO execprod…he’d sit in the back during product reviews, nod, smile, say good job, then disappear again).”

 

He continues to talk about leadership and F2P, mentioning right before F2P there were 85,000 US subs:

“Kate got lots of attention for the DDO f2p transition. A cynic might suggest that the Paizs had flat lined DDO already and when Ascherons Call’s concurrency numbers are beating DDO on a nightly basis, you can only go up from there. LOTRO was certainly ailing when they made the call to go f2p. We all assumed it would happen eventually but not so soon. In March or thereabouts in ’10 an email went out from Crowley stating that LOTRO’s US subs were down to around 85k (the only time specific sub numbers were ever mentioned even in-house while I was there) and could we maybe ask our friends to try the game? But nobody wanted the f2p thing.”

“Even within the industry I found that most considered LOTRO a major success and had no hint that we were in trouble.”

It is really surprising that LOTRO needed to go F2P since Turbine staff publicly said that they didn’t need to but chose to after seeing the success of DDO’s transition to the model.

Aylwen proceeds to talk about the salary problem at Turbine, saying they wouldn’t pay competitive wages compared to the rest of the industry. Aylwen also says that the developers would sometimes not point out problems of the game just so they didn’t get the blame for it.

Aylwen also gives his two cents on the class revamp:

“I don’t have an inside track on why they did the class revamp. But I can say that never once, either during my first stint or brief second tour, did I hear anyone talk about ‘skill bloat’, either as a player or dev concern. As Systems QA working daily with the devs responsible for such matters, I certainly would have. It’s really a silly notion if one thinks about it. When have you ever heard an MMOer complain about having too many skills?”

Aylwen does say that some of the problems at Turbine seem to be par for the course when compared to the rest of the industry.

“Nothing I’ve said is out of left field or giving away top secret information, nor unsuspected by many players. I’m not a disgruntled employee looking to hurt Turbine; I loved Turbine for those years and still feel a lot of affection for many I met there. I reckon 7 years as a player, 2 1/2 as a Turbinite and brother of another, gives me the right to express a few observations.”

“…on the other hand the very fact that this little company, that in 1998 or so operated out of a garage basically, managed to build and maintain three well-known MMOs is an incredible accomplishment. Really it should have been impossible. And arguably had Turbine been a more conservative and less ambitious company, LOTRO never would have been made in the first place. As someone who loved LOTRO it did drive me nuts that we didn’t always have the best people in the right positions. We had too many management and lead positions occupied by people far more concerned about staying in a comfortable bubble of job security than pushing any envelopes. And that atmosphere tended to foster aquiesence; it was a miasma of mediocrity that pulled people in, regardless of department. Criticism was either ignored or pushed back; the art director’s policy on art figure bugs was simple: closed, there were no art bugs. But… I would go back to Turbine at Westwood in a heartbeat. There was a magic there, so many good souls within those walls. LOTRO wasn’t the game it could have been-and maybe nevercould have been-but it still gave me the best gaming experiences I’ve ever had. In talking about the story of LOTRO, I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m simply railing against Turbine. It really is, in its totality, a more complex tale, warts and all, then just ‘so and so dropped the ball’ and x mistakes made. Bittersweet, for sure.”

He also confirms that many of the past features that have not been expanded upon are because those were former developers pet projects.  Now that they are gone, those features are abandoned.

“Thanks for the kind words and for giving me a chance to revisit one of the great loves of my life and share my own perspective. For me personally it was the player-the human-story that made LOTRO something more than just a game. Not everything that I’ve said about the inner workings of LOTRO is exactly complimentary to some of us involved on it but that too was a human story and (my hope being) provides a little more context to the LOTRO experience we all shared.”

Finally I would like to say that all of this could cause you to become negative against the game, or against Turbine.  Aylwen said himself that he is not against Turbine and he said he worked there.  While there may be problems, the game is still alive and fun to play.

Also, now more than ever, I have a drive to play LOTRO.  Over the last year, especially since the most recent layoffs, I had been worried about the state of LOTRO and it made me quite negative for a while about the game.

A few months ago I decided that instead of being worried, it is much more productive to enjoy the game as much as you can in case LOTRO is getting close to its death.  I have stepped away from an online game before that was near death without experiencing everything it had to offer and regretted it.  To this day I still wonder what the final levels of that game held but I will never know since the servers are offline, never to come on again.  I do not want to make that same mistake with LOTRO.  Whether the game is one month or hundreds of months from the end, I am going to enjoy LOTRO while it is here, until its dying breath.