Sunday 21 February 2021

LOTROStream Q&A with Severlin and Cordovan – Friday 19 February 2021 - notes

 

LOTROStream Q&A with Severlin and Cordovan – Friday 19 February 2021 - notes

On Friday 19 February 2021 SSG Executive Producer Severlin (Rob Ciccolini) and Community Manager Cordovan (Jerry Snook) held a Q&A with the LOTRO community on Twitch.tv via the LOTROstream.

Like with the recent world building chat Scenario (Matt Elliot) did, I’ve taken some notes (less extensive this time) and you can read them below.

As usual, any errors are my own, apologies in advance.

NOTES – taken 20-21 February 2021

The chat is available on

Hosts

  • Severlin (Rob Ciccolini) - Executive Producer
  • Cordovan (Jerry Snook) - Community Manager

Working on

  • Producer’s letter
  • 2021-22 plans

Wildwood of Breeland – next update

  • Middle level content
  • Missions for end game players
  • Round out map
  • Pricing – regular quest pack, free to VIPs
  • Release? Next month some time (March 2021)

Gundabad expansion

  • Later this year – after Summer
  • Continuing main storyline

Guardian class update + tank class balance – ongoing

  • Brawler class – large piece of work
  • Brawler will be part of the pre-order for Gundabad

Content scheduled between Wildwood and Gundabad?

  • Update 30
  • End game

Communication between community and SSG team?

  • Needs improvement
  • If they can answer, they will

PVMP

  • Resources – modest amount of changes

Scrolls of Empowerment

  • Want players to be rewarded for playing content on their level
  • Want content to be challenging

Legendary items progress

  • Apologised for the situation
  • Regrets the progress
  • Need to be better
  • Large amount of engineering

Wardrobe/vault spaces

  • Sev will look into it
  • Cord – in general they want you to have as much vault space as you like, restrictions are due to other factors

Transfers from closed worlds

  • Happening in relatively near future

River Hobbits

  • After Gundabad
  • 2022

Tier 5 rewards

  • Prestige achievement
  • High difficulty content – love/hate for players
  • Should be rewarded but not so other players can’t participate in getting “cool loot”

Valar item

  • Possibly at 130 – but not going to commit

LUA API

  • No plans to put resources into expanding it

Preview on Bullroarer

  • Next week

2021 Anniversary

  • Content planned
  • Social media stream

Crafting system

  • More resources to work on crafting system
  • Not before Gundabad
  • But “cool crafting stuff for Gundabad”

Kinship revamp

  • On the list but lower priority than class revamp

EU servers

  • No plans to split server structure between US and EU

Raid before Gundabad

  • Smaller one in Update 30
  • U30 is a normal content pack

No level cap increase

  • Will not be 135 – concerns over mid level change of Ill Omens items

Normal server lag

  • Needs to be addressed

Mini-expansion

  • Learned a lot of lessons
  • Limitations to store – new
  • VIP players need better value
  • Cheaper? No promises
  • Upper bundles were good value but not great value expected from bigger expansions – needs to be addressed

War of Three Peaks

  • Pricing connected to e-commerce considerations
  • Looking into price

Stat squish?

  • Rebalance entire game

Balance of broken/need fixing vs new content?

  • More investment in systems that will fix things

SSG goal

  • Want players to have something cool to do every 13 weeks
  • Unfinished Tales – small story content between big updates
  • Like “Wildwood” (Note: Not Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales book)

Engine improvements

  • Investment into the graphics of the game

EG7 (Enad Global 7)

  • Excitement seen in a letter to investors how they wanted to invest in LOTRO

Background: Swedish gaming company EG7 announced the purchasing of Daybreak on 1 December 2020. Daybreak became the new publisher of Standing Stones Games (LOTRO & DDO) on 19 December 2016 after Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment dropped the games.

Chat connect/disconnect issues/stuck on load screens

  • Move chat server onto a different space – a master server
  • Careful rollout

LOTRO market – gifting

  • On the agenda

Working at SSG

Number of positions open (USA only):

Senior Character Artist  
Art Team, Needham, Massachusetts
Job ID: 5086244002 
https://www.daybreakgames.com/careers?job=5086244002

Senior Game Producer
Production Team, Needham, Massachusetts
Job ID: 4936752002
https://www.daybreakgames.com/careers?job=4936752002

New raid

  • There is a new raid, but no details as yet

Sale on three Minas Mogul bundles

  • Nothing at the moment – Black Friday/Holidays potentially

What gets priority in being made?

  • Data behind the scenes on what is doing well
  • How players are engaging with the game to make decisions

Next legendary server

  • In next few months

Landscape difficulty NPC

  • Not as stealthy as they should be!
  • Will allow players to have more challenge as they go through solo content
  • Deployed on a larger scale, not just PVP server

Harad or Khand

  • Would love to visit
  • Nothing to announce

Housing

  • Would love to do more housing for different race specifics
  • More housing – maybe (nothing scheduled before Gundabad)
  • Likely to be a Non-human form of housing because more human housing done recently – elf, dwarf or hobbit

LOTRO future?

  • Wil never talk about anything related to IP or legal
  • Sev – “We plan on having LOTRO going for decades and more. We want it to go on forever, so. And we don’t see anything that would prevent us from doing that.”

Branching questlines

  • Expensive
  • Need to be careful
  • When players get to that choice point – players feel they don’t have enough information – players feel bad if going to one ending and don’t like it and lost opportunity of other ending

64-bit client – make default?

  • Constantly developing to be better
  • 32-bit client a long-term choice – want to keep it

GM help

  • Tools added to GMs – capability to get more account information upfront
  • Help people when offline
  • Help more quickly

Tanks

  • Want them to feel valuable
  • Long term ongoing goal

PvMP work in 2021

  • More resources on it
  • Changes to end game
  • Scaling doesn’t work as well as they like
  • New gear can throw balance off

Character appearance

  • Hair/faces customisation in the works
  • All races to have more options
  • Before Gundabad?
  • Some extra ones in

Visual C++ at launcher installation

  • Check to Launcher deprecated by Microsoft
  • Old Service Packs can make launcher fail

Graphic improvements

  • Lot of graphical updates to add
  • To improve engine – eg Ray tracing

Skills cancelling themselves

  • Like to address
  • Linked to animation issue

Server performance

  • Change hardware
  • Chat server

Producers letter

  • Goes to translators next week
  • Expected within next month
  • Partners need to see it – there is a process

Ill Omens and Buried Treasure

  • Seen they are popular

Websites

  • Revamp to be looked at

Twitch

  • No plans to integrate Twitch API into LOTRO game client
  • Support Twitch streamers
  • Giveaways etc

More communication

  • Plan to do more Twitch chats

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