As part of Amazons push into the world of Tolkien it has taken an unknown stake in the developer of Lord of the rings online SSG. While the series is still a few years away, the development of a game world the size of Middle-earth would take years.
As part of the investment in SSG, they get access to a dedicated team of developers that is familiar with both the world and story telling that comes with such a prominent IP. For the developers it opens up a whole new age. Amazon has rights to the Silmarilion aren’t part of the rights SSG has. Which would allow them to expand into the second age and historical events before the Lord of the rings.
Through a 3rd party Amazon provided the means for them (at that time Turbine) to introduce the race of the High elf. This gave them an insight as to how the studio would integrate the second age into the existing game world. While originally a new race wasnt on the table. The story we can now play with our own characters was meant to be a session play. Unbeknownst to the developers this was just a possible start.
The departure of Dr. Octothorpe took most by suprise in december of 2018. Behind the scenes this was part of the transition of Amazon into a stakeholder. Currently Dr. Octothrope is part of the story boarding team that works on Amazons prime lord of the rings and it’s tie-in with Lotro.
During an interview at Pax east it got spoiled that before the Minas Morgul expansion will launch we’ll receive free episodes as a prequel to events in the Morgul Vale.
Future content
While details are sparse it’s expected to have the first episodes to involve the High-elfs in episodic content to be released around the time the Minas morgul expansion has launched.
Early impressions of Minas Ithil
The city now known as Minas Morgul was part of the Gondor until it got conquered in the Second age by Sauron. Roughly in the time frame where the series is about to take place. More details are expected as the current marketing campaign by Amazon is finished as the maps get more detailed.
Robust client required
The second age prequels are expected to be released as part of the second wave of hype train by Amazon (and SSG). Rumors hav it that part of the investment, a more robust client is required by Amazon before the next milestone is greenlighted. This might explain the rush on the once legendary 64-bit client.
So what could it be (own speculation)?
Will it be a high-elven episodic content like Bingo Boffin? Or will it involve the ancestors of Aragorn? The rumours of Aragorn to be the focus of the series makes me believe that it will focused on the Dunedain and Numenoreans in Minas Morgul. Free to play content in a Gondorian city of Minas Ithil that ties into the the upcoming expansion of Minas Morgul? A new class part of the expansion that focuses on the Dunedain rangers? Doubling down on development and using exiting assets sound like a wise plan. Just in case the deal falls short.
In short
Amazon through a 3rd party funded the development of the High-elf race as a test during the Mordor expansion.
Dr Octothorpe left SSG to join the amazon prime lotr series as part of a deal for a Lotro-tie in with SSG
Part of the 2nd wave of marketing, unknown content will be released by SSG late 2019
Details about this content is expected to be released during the summer (depending on timetables of the client updates and expansion timelines?)
New 2nd age “session plays” and/or anew class for the Minas morgul expansion?
Everyone looks at their calendar and realizes what date it is.
Black friday isn’t saurons version of where the orcs can leave their ties at home before going to work. It’s the time a lot of shops go on a sales bonanza. Including digital sales. Standing stone games isn’t that different. So without further ado.
Siege of Mirkwood™ – Digital Download – $9.99 $1.50
Rise of Isengard™ Base Edition – Digital Download – $19.99$3.00
Riders of Rohan™ Base Edition – Digital Download – $19.99$3.00
Helm’s Deep™ Base Edition – Digital Download – $39.99$6.00
Verdict, Get them now if you ever considered getting one of these expansion. Especially Helms deep. Weirdly no sale on the quadpack for easy clicking
Lotro ingame store – $ sales – Double bonus points
With every packet of lotropoints you get a bonus of 20 to 80% extra points. During this you will get double those extra points.
Base
Bonus
% offer
Type
500
200
40,00
Double bonus point
1250
700
56,00
Double bonus point
2500
1900
76,00
Double bonus point
4200
5000
119,05
Double bonus point
8400
11200
133,33
Special offer
12600
18800
149,21
Special offer
Remember, you usually get half of these bonus points. So the numbers are a bit lower. But still a nice boost.
Verdict, It’s not 85% off, but still one of the best times to get them*. Cause you will usually want these points. Especially for the next paragraph
Lotro in-game store – LP sales
The long-awaited release of the expansion and the high elf to the lotre is here for the price stated in August
The mordor expansion is now available for 2495 lotropoint – No Aria of the valar included
The high elf is now in the store for 1000 Lotropoints
Other sales
Today
Wardrobe storage,
Cosmetic items
Till monday
75% off Virtue Bundles if you want them
3 more unlocks for shared storage and bank storage
50% of select housing sets (no idea which)
Complete Crafting Tiers
30% off Valar and Valar upgrades
Third Age Item
Legacy Scroll Boxes
Mordor showdown – sale prices
Which mordor do i want to get? They balanced the prizes and sales pretty well.
Option 1 Full – Aria of the valar (5021) + mordor (2495) + high elf (1000) = 8500 Lotropoints/ $60 or $ 80 digitial sale
Dont want the cosmetics, mount etc for the digital sale. Get the double bonus lotro points
Option 2 LP expansion – No valar + mordor (2495) + high elf (1000) = 3500 Lotropoints/ $40 or $ 80 digital sale
Easy, Get the double bonus lotro points.
Option 3 Mix
Option 3.1 – Mordor (2495) $30 or $ 40 digital sale, but with valar that you don’t want
Dont buy the lotromarket Mordor if you dont want a valar. Get LP and buy it from the store. Safe 10$.
Option 3.2 – Aria of the valar (5021) + mordor (2495) =7500 Lotropoints/ $60 (1700 leftover) or $ 40 digital sale
If you do want the valar, but you don’t want the high elf. Buy the 40$ market standard bundle. Safe 5 to 20$
Option 3.3 – Only high elf (1000) $ 12 or $ 80 digital sale
Be smart and get the lotropoints
Now go play while saling to the west or east if you got mordor. Couldnt find a Vevo or origanal version
So, what did I possibly found to complain about now? Not much really. Mainly, I bring some spoilers. Well, maybe just a little gap in information on when the expansion is going live. According to +Loft in Bullroarer there should be one more beta round this following weekend, but according to Cordovan on the forums they are for now on schedule for the 31st of July. So is there a beta 6 then? Why if the feedback won’t be of any use? I don’t know, it’s just a little strange.
I am happy to tell you that this issue has now been fixed and we are no longer pulling the whole camp by attacking only one orc. Don’t have the test video from the new build, but I can tell you that I was testing it with one eye shut waiting to get some painful punishing. Among other fixed issues, the Lost Lore pages do not wait for you to get to level 110 anymore, etc. There must have been some complaints about the spies near the Udun starting area, so they are now moved. Now we will need to really look for them and I was just about to use the 3 locations to get that quest done.
You will be able to experience something similar to Glittering caves. Don’t worry, Big Battles are not coming back, it’s just a landscape cave with 2 Lost Lore pages in it. And since some of the quests were a little bit buggy and wouldn’t advance I can’t say if there are other quests here or not. I think it has a camp site outside of it. Not sure if this is just for convenience or will something else be tied to this location as similar camp sites are put next to regions for an instance.
I am not entirely sure do I want to suggest that Allegiance advances a little bit slower, but I guess I’ll say it. I have a feeling I finished it a little bit too fast. No, I do not want another SSG grind for whatever, but with the deeds I had finished, Lost Lore quests, crafting and crafting instances I was able to finish Kingdom of Gondor and get to level 6 for Dvarwes. I can’t tell too much about Allegiance though, since it doesn’t feel like it was finished and crafting instances disappeared for me in the build 5, so I am not sure how it could move forwards. One thing I will say is that I think the travel skill we get has a too long cooldown. All the allegiance hubs have internal locations you can not exit or enter using a door. Which means there is a lot of traveling involved. If traveling is the only way of moving back and forth we will need hours just to finish one chapter of the allegiance quests. In the spoilers, the last two chapters of the Kingdom of Gondor. It involves a certain flora. Excuse the clicking, had a new mic setup.
I think this red should be in its eyes.
Hidden shckles
Hidden lever
To be honest, apart from crafting instances disappearing, Legolas not being present to turn in a quest, Sam instance and Orcs jumping into the fire pit so you can’t kill them, I am not too bothered with the landscape. It feels like a lot of kinks they need to work on are the cosmetic ones for armour, avatar changes and High Elf. Another one was an Elf intro instance for the allegiance being the king of AFK. There is certainly work to be done. And while there is some polishing to be done I would certainly not mind if the expansion did hit the live (beta) servers on the 31st as the game seems to get a little bit empty these last few days, even though the quieter period started even earlier. And hopefully we will not have another Lang Rhuven.
For three weeks now I have been reporting on the news from Mordor Beta builds, mentioned some bugs and posted a few videos and screenshots. This fourth week I have started with an announcement of the pre-order and the possible (not likely) date that the expansion will be released – July 31st. And that article was very mild if you have followed any of my other ones. The reason for that? Shock, maybe. Hoplessness that this game will do anything right. I am in dire need of a real life +6 hope token.
So, several days ago this was announced and the forums lit up like a Christmas tree. And who could blame the people for reacting? SSG certainly can’t. What was the issue?
For some the issue was pricing. And yes, even in the first article, I wrote that the price of the various packages for the expansion was a little bit steep. Being very generous with the wording there. But when we look a little bit deeper, what can we read there? It is not that we were saying (yes, I was among those people on the forum) that we do not have the money to pay for this. Although, there were such comments also, I don’t feel like those were the majority. We mainly focused on several key things.
We did not see the value of those packages. What SSG fails to recognize is that the value is not the a la carte price of all the items put together, the value is determined by the players and if they consider something valuable or not.
The editions
The standard edition package is coming only with what the expansion will include – quests, deed, allegiance, group content – and a new item called Aria of the Valar that will bring one of your characters to level 105. Basically, since the instances are coming out much later, you are getting a glorified quest pack. The race of High Elf was announced quite some time ago and it was spoken about in the forums and Cordovans streams and it was always announced to come with Mordor. Now, we do not get this race with Mordor if we decide for the standard edition. Why? Well, that is because SSG thinks that High Elf is not a key part in experiencing Mordor. They may or may not be right, but when something was mentioned over and over again in the same sentence as Mordor then it would be only natural to have it in the standard edition. So, the issue doesn’t become if they are right or not, the issue is who in their right state of mind says for months that something is coming with Mordor and then changes their mind and unbundles this. No other MMO has ever done that. And I don’t know who wants to pay 40 USD more for a privilege of cosmetic changes to the elf.
So, if we are not getting the High Elf in the standard edition, why do we get the Aria of the Valar at all there? Well, that is so we do not need to level up and still are able to experience Mordor. Is it safer to assume that by now people are ready and waiting for Mordor or that there is some low-level who wants to go there immediately? I am not sure about everyone else, I understand that there are players with less play time on their hands or just aren’t as into it as others, but I have six characters on level 105 and ready for a t2c raid. I have one more who is level 41 and I do not intend to level him up, as it is a duplicate class, made for scouting servers on transfer and became my crafter. So, Aria of the Valar for me and people like me or just the people who like to level up while questing and experiencing the story has zero value.
Aria of the Valar, or any Valar package for that matter, has that much less value because it doesn’t really prepare you for anything. You gain levels, the trait points that go with those levels, usually 4 virtue levels, some gold, legendary items and some weak purple gear to get you by. If we were to compare this level-up service to other games you would have been much better prepared to go into the level cap content than you are in LOTRO. Valar packages do not give you trait points you usually get from certain quest lines that you are now way over the level for, it does not give you safe passage through Angmar if I recall correctly and it doesn’t even unlock the stables in Middle Earth for you. So, what other games seem to consider mandatory SSG considers priviledge.
I mentioned my six raiding characters. I’m not a real big fan of elves, but I do have an elf Rune-Keeper. I have a captain, also, so High-Elf doesn’t bring anything ground breaking for me that I would want to purchase it to level it up from the start. However, because of very bad racial traits of the “regular” elf, I would gladly pay for an “upgrade” to my “regular” elf, which, of course, isn’t offered and it is questionable if it will ever be. So, value of the High Elf to me and similar players – also 0.
The highest package that SSG is offering also has a one month VIP code included. And admittedly, players who have a life-time VIP are not in the majority, they do not have any need for a VIP code. So, this is another item with zero value to those players.
And I must admit I am surprised that after all the hype about Chance Thomas, the soundtrack is not included in any of the packages.
Interestingly, SSG thinks that the High Elf, which is planed to be priced 1000 LP at U22 launch (which is called U22 for now, may be a dot update), and several other things like cosmetic armor, cloak, kite, character slot, title and alliance mount are worth the jump from 40 to 80 USD. Well, first of all, who flies a kite in Mordor?! And second of all, this is probably the worst value for money you could decide on. This now begs the question is SSG really that divorced from reality and has no clue about business or PR or is this only a stunt to get people to buy a massively overpriced package and spend 130 USD. Sadly, I am convinced that SSG has allowed itself to ask for so much based partly because of what is in the package, but also based on the sentimental value of getting near the end of the story. We are not being sold a cheaper expansion because we are being sold our adventure, maybe our childhood, our dreams… Certainly not quests.
Not to speak of, and of course I will, that this is not a pre-purchase in any other way than that it is available before the launch of the game. But it will also stay available after the launch. So the people who are pre-purchasing aren’t actually getting anything from the packages as a reward or a perk for supporting the game, those are being sold and used to badly justify the price they are asking. Also, more on price… I would guess that SSG would like more real money from a pre-purchase than some real and some fake money from LOTRO points. So how come that you are punished for buying the expansion now? The expansion will be priced at 2495 LOTRO points and, as said before, the High Elf will be 1000 LP. That is much less than 40 USD. So, basically, people who are pre-purchasing and paying with money and supporting the game are punished and people waiting for the U22 are rewarded?
The business practice and the history of the game
And we do not have here only a case of overpricing the expansion packages, we also have a case of… Well, first of all no advertising, even if it has been told that there will be some. But also false advertising because players have been told for weeks that the price of the expansion would be similar to the older ones, but none of the old ones went above 100 USD, to my knowledge.
LOTRO has made much more money when it went F2P, so it didn’t need to learn on mistakes or successes anyone else did, they had their own. So, instead lowering the price and attracting more people to buy it, their excuse for the VIP in the package is that you can gift it away. Whatever money they make now I am positive that they would have made twice as much if we were able to make our own packages. I’d gladly raise the price with the mounts, I have gotten them with the other pre-purchases too, why not now, and with the XP item, etc. But what I do not want is to be cheated out of money with things that have 0 value for me.
All of this has only been made worse by the release date that SSG offered us. Some of us have been on all the iterations of Mordor Beta builds and we have seen the work that needs to be done. It would be generous to say that this release is rushed. We are falling through bridges, NPCs are in the ground not being able to finish quests, High Elf still needs work, avatar upgrades are not finished, skins of mobs are not all there, loot tables are not finished, various items are not showing their correct level, whole camps pulled by attacking one mob, etc. And we now need to work with another yet unfinished iteration of an update/expansion, allowing for possible exploiting or otherwise caused frustration by the rushing of the release date. I am not aware that LOTRO has any competition now.
Turbine or SSG, call them what you like, certainly has a history of not testing things through or just not caring about it. It has been said on various occasions that Bullroarer, which is considered a beta test server, is in fact alpha and SSG in its various forms has treated live servers like they were beta. Just flash back to when people could not raid because they were preparing for Mordor and buffed Throne of the Dread Terror raid.
To not go too far back, the update that brought us the Wastes comes to mind. As it came live we have experienced massive amounts of lag for days. Addressing the lag was actually addressing the motivation to players to cause lag by removing the reputation drop items with the excuse that they weren’t even supposed to drop, after the history of them dropping through the whole game. Nobody from SSG has given any official statements anywhere, apologized for the inconvenience or even tought that they could add a week at least on people’s VIP subscription. Maybe I am reaching here, but the lack of communication there, not the lag, is what made me drop my VIP subscription and buy the raid with the accumulated LP. Looking a little more back, we had the fiasco with the Bell-O-Dale flowers that some people farmed enough of sapphire extracts in a few hours and some were hurting for days.
Many people on the forum were talking about developers not being able to do something because of Warner Brothers or Turbine or whatever… But SSG is Turbine. We have the same developers in the same building and probably even offices, they are only a different entity now. Nothing will be better just because they are called SSG now because nothing and nobody has changed. Except for the name change. And if you want something to change, you must ask for it.
Why do we do this?
Now, Massively said this nicely and I agree… We are not hard on the studio or on the game because we have some kind of a grudge or a vendetta, but because we want this game to be great. It is because we love this game that we are writing what we feel needs to be addressed. I can understand that it is not a nice feeling to see the uproar of the people on the forums and come to work to a 20 page thread and several of those, full of angry people. But instead of letting this happen every time maybe SSG could stop one day and ask themselves “How can we deal with this?”.
But I can say that the fans of LOTRO paying just to support the game so it doesn’t shut down and paying no matter what are not really helpful here. I don’t want to offend the fans, I am one too, but it’s a very sad day when people who write passionately about this become the subject of hateful attacks and name calling when they wanted to point some things out and help build a great game. I would guess that this is also the reason we are loging in to Bullroarer and writing the bugs and in threads in the Bullroarer forum.
Somehow there is this train of tought that if you are a fan, then you will praise, defend and never criticize the game and the studio and will be OK spending money no matter what. But after some of the mistakes that have happened the feelings are a little dulled and now I think more like a consumer. What do I get for my money? And I can tell you one thing. A customer will spend more money on a product if he is satisfied with the customer service and the value a company places on a customer. I’m not overly impressed with SSG on this note.
What to do about it?
There is hardly any way out of this now. The packages have been bought, so there is no way SSG will want to lower the price and then play with refunds, there won’t be any more packages for the similar reason, so the only way to give more value is to add LOTRO points and maybe a few mithril to all packages – maybe 500, 1000 and 2000 LP and 25, 50, 100 mithril. No reason for SSG to be stingy with pixels. We could ask for the High Elf in the standard edition, but then anyone who did buy the collector edition may feel cheated out of 40 USD.
I am sad to say and come to terms with a discovery that this game has survived for this long only because of its name. Only because of LOTR and Tolkien do we tolerate the treatment we have been given for so long. Had this been Land of the Righteous nobody would be here anymore when we consider the lag, the support, filing a ticket and waiting for hours, then to log on a different character only to then receive the notice that it is closed because you were not online, all the bugs that go live and much more.
There is no curse in elvish, entish or the tongues of men for this treachery.
So, as you can see we at LOTRO Players have been running the BR and testing the game to bring you what is new and SSG what is broken. So far, so good. We’re keeping up. Some of the bugs and kinks have been noted in the following video. For your convenience you can use the time links in the description.
Other than the ones in the video there are some other issues. Usually you’re not able to aggro two different kinds or species even if they are standing next to each other. So an animal kind should only aggro if you attack its kind. But Dire-Horn aggroed even though I attacked a man. Which in the new area can be an issue, since the mobs actually hit quite hard at times and maybe you don’t want to pull too many for various reasons, be it gear, not full health bar, etc. Some quests do not tell you if you got the item or not. I’ve been killing leaders for a while untill I found this out. And Mithrandir isn’t moving at all. So it was quite annoying to ride even from the second area of Mordor – Dor Amarth – back to the front of the gate just to continue the quest or turn it in. It would be nice to get ported to him once the quest is done, at least, because while doing this I spent quite a few Mithril Coins. Once the Black Book starts it is interesting. When I found myself in Annuminas I tought it was some kind of a bug. Which is what happens in the early stages of beta. Sometimes you do not know if something is a bug or just hasn’t been built in yet or something else is happening.
The trait points have also been changed. You will now get only 3 trait points, instead of 5 – 108, 111 and 114. The reputation goes to celebrated. At level 110 and having finished all the available quests in the 2 first regions, I have 210 Silver Signets of the Thandrim. You use this for non-slotted armour recipes and essence recipes, both single use. You also use them for your muster/return skills, cosmetic items and relics. So I wouldn’t mind getting a bit more of these while questing and there will probably be some repeatable quests to get more. You will die now if you try to swim through lava, but it also has a decent reach when you are standing close to it. Which means no lava fishing for fried fish, but it also sometimes makes it a bit difficult to collect quest items needed.
And given the description you can see when handing in the quest and on the item itself, I think this item should be a bit stronger and a bit less green.
High Elf
In this build we have also received the High Elf race and we were able to test some animations. The High Elf still isn’t done and they still look very similar to men, the race movie intro is the same as for regular elves. Personally, I wasn’t impressed when my High Elf captain started with a club with a few nails in it, while he was level 110. Running is still a bit awkward, it looks like tip-toeing and kicking back. It also has something of a balerina-like jump up, but when you are jumping from a higher position then he lands in some parkour style, which I do love. Bellow you can see the High Elf intro.
Some of the High Elf racial traits are decent, but I do think they need still some work. A wider dps buff, possibly a better out of combat rez – 30 minutes is far too long for a cooldown, unless it’s in combat. But so far I am not that impressed with the High Elf that I would invest money to buy the class and time to regrind all the virtues, trait points, etc. Race alone does not give game changing bonuses and I don’t see value in cosmetic changes like looks and animations other than for devoted role players. I have most of the classes, a captain too. So High Elf without some fancy class means nothing to me and to players who have most of these classes, some even all. But if there was an option to pay for an Elf to High Elf transformation, I would probably do it in a heart beat. 5% power bonus?! Whoopty-do. I’d take a High Elf racial bonus over the Elf one any time.
Barad Dur facelift
In Beta 1 you couldn’t continue the quests in Lughash. Once Beta 2 came out, that was the first thing to check out and it worked. One of those quests takes you to Barad Dur to free the king. Seems like dwarves still didn’t fix this bridge, hopefully they get to that. Even if they don’t, just hold to your mount a bit harder and it will be fine. But what surprised me the most, and in a good way, was what happened inside. Barad Dur has actually grown. It felt like I got into the TARDIS – It’s bigger on the inside.
You get a larger map, more quests, more enemies and different ones too. And just a note, once you pick up the quest from the dwarven king he will ask you to search for something in the relic chamber. That is the chamber with the two Cargul. You need to enter it and it will say that the item is not there. I missed it in the first run through. What I also love in Barad Dur is that once you free the prisoners they do not respawn a few seconds after, making it look like you did nothing. This seems to be permanent.
What I don’t like
The players have been asking for a while now that we get the Destroy all loot button, but we didn’t get it. And still we are getting the Eorlingas recipes, random purple LI drops, green items we don’t even want to vendor… I hope this gets fixed and we get rid of this junk loot. The best hope tokens are still made with the Westemnet recipes… So the players have been asking to even get the same token, but for new materials.
I also have some concearns about the gear and rating we are going to have. We have the best planed gear to test. But as per Vastin, this is not the gear that will be available in the U21 update, it will be a part of a dot update. Which one, we don’t know. And even with that best gear, which doesn’t even have a set bonus, which is another complaint, we do not cap many of our stats. Which I find is unacceptable because we can not re-introduce older ways of gearing and playing while the mechanics of the runs stay the same. Bosses get their morale buffed, damage buffed, avoidance buffed, they deal AoE/frontal/distributed damage and we now need to choose where we want to put our essences. If this happens I do not know how it will impact the raiding and PvMP community, but I don’t expect it to be nice.
The overall statting balance has been changed with the intent of making it quite difficult to cap everything you might want to cap – you’re going to have to make choices regarding what’s really important to your build – DPS vs. mitigations vs. vitality and so forth.
Pre-mordor it was very easy to cap your primary mitigations with most classes, and then you’d classically start stacking morale or DPS mods. In Mordor you can expect there to be more tension between these decisions as it will decidedly NOT be trivial to simply cap your mitigations – only main tanks would be expected to even really try for that.
Speaking of the best gear issue here… It would be nice to know if the gear stats are close to where they intend them to be and if they didn’t intend it to have bonuses. Then we have an issue here with putting a cap on the level you can use some lower sets on. No level 75 sets and no level 115 sets. I have seen some Dome of the Stars loot has scaled, but I still didn’t see a box drop and how the armour from it looks like. But even if it scaled properly… SSG makes old content sets unavailable, only to make us run old content to get the scaled sets. This content is at least two years old.
I usually don’t intend to make my articles a rant, but if having these rant-like elements does help a bit and pushes the readers and especially the developers to reconsider some things and possibly provoke a different approach, then I’m happy I made it.