Soln

awesome -- gonna buy me some Rad gear for all my F2P characters. Or at least LI XP balls. Right?

Thanks for the article and the question at least about LFF. But nothing worth coming back for from that list for me at least. Radiance and LI grinding are fundamental design decisions that have to change.

And the lack of a dedicated container for the *dozens* of currency tokens you get -- festival tokens, skirmish tokens, Angmar armor tokens, Rivendell armor tokens, Lonelands factions tokens, Moria faction tokens, low-radiance tokens, high-radiance token, and on and on and on -- shows Turbine has really failed on managing their design. They are just creating content without any sense of long-term impact on the game. They are relying on players not playing old content and just ignoring old items in favor of the path they want you to take.

BTW, did they mention if they were going rationalize itemization any time soon? For example, will the new scalable dungeons have items scaled to the size of the group and challenge? Several of the old instances gave low level teal weapons and armor that were great before the introduction of "Legendary" items.

Sorry not sold. I would love to resub to LotRO with my family but I'm just not convinced. I don't understand their roadmap. Regardless of the F2P model there's no excuse not to improve LFG. It's great they are re-factoring their dungeons, but I'll wait to try them before declaring a success. And frankly it would have been a hell of a lot easier to just start by implementing cross-zone, cross-region LFG chat with maybe the hope of quest indexing by players. You know, real LFG. People don't seem to understand that you can't flag LFG out of zone or chat (unless via a player created channel). It seems it would've been easier and faster to start with those basic features.

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It's really depressing to see this endless cheerleading by:

1) online mags like Massively and TTH who depend on Turbine for advertising; and
2) by developers and community managers who are hoping F2P will save their careers when in fact it's the design of their games that players may be rejecting.

You Massively guys seem to have no self-reflection or ability to present even a basic alternative perspective. I mean that entry by Seraphina Brennan on how it’s the players’ responsibility to self-organize and self-police their own community, and how Turbine has no responsibility at all to support community growth in their game was ridiculous. F2P may indeed turn out to be fine in LotRO, but everyone knows F2P does foster a stronger commodity approach to game play. And that's what people are also trying to complain about.

LotRO was not WoW and WoW-style itemization was a slow introduction that a lot of the player base have opposed. F2P will increase solo-play and increase commodity based designs (e.g. tokens for armor, tokens for legendary items, for buffs) to monetize all the expected free players. I don't mean Turbine will necessarily sell items for Pay-to-Play; rather, they will increase the content for a style of play that only expects accrual and repetition.

It's an approach that was started with Radiance and Legendary Items, and it's been actively criticized by players for nearly a year and a half if not longer. Hoarding disposable tokens, for example, to grind the best (temporary) Legendary Item has been an awful design. Up there with holocrons for all in post-patch14 SWG. Going to F2P will heighten this kind of approach where all you need to do is rinse/repeat the same content endlessly.

So the concern is not a mass influx of Barrens Chat -- it's the tsunami of people rushing to the cap on purchases to grind designs the rest of the community have already long complained are stale and don't match the kind of narrative the Tolkien franchise is supposed to offer.

[last try to finish post]

Weak itemization, terrible repetitive grinds, and a failure to adjust old adjust old

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adjust old

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...adjust old

I think saying "it's up to you the LotRO community... You control what the community is like" is really missing the point. In fact, you're freeing Turbine from any responsibly as a provider for how their virtual world should grow.

The problem is not about veterans feeling confrontational to new F2P players. What's going to ruin the community is the game's current design + MT + a mass new F2P entrants. Bad designs that have already exhausted and alienated the community are going to be badly exacerbated by a huge influx of casual or curious players. Weak itemization, terrible repetitive grinds, and a failure to adjust old

conclusion:

1) F2P great for casual and new and the inevitable ADD hoppers
2) irrelevant and up to lifers for how they want to react
3) will increase population
4) will not guarantee any fixes to the end game or the massive change poor itemization has brought (disposable Legendary Items)

Basically, Turbine is focusing on their business but not their community. That was enough for my family and I to quit. Why? Because they've had 14 months to prove they know where the narrative of the game is going, but the design has been steadily worsening. They sought to follow WoW and it failed. Now they argue something like, "F2P will bring more players and thus solve the LFG problem for Vol.2 and instances" when in fact all they would have to do would be, for example:

1) add guild tools
2) add real LFG tools (cross region, cross zone indexing of quests and players)
3) fix itemization (Legendary Items)
4) fix gating (Radiance tokenization)
5) fix resists on boss and end-game mobs

They're not going to do any of that before 2011. It will more and more and MORE "Tell the Community" threads cheerleading polls of future fixes.

It literally has been more than 1 year since they claimed they would address some of the 5 problems, but they haven't. So it's great if you haven't played and want to try or just re-try, but it's disingenuous and cynical towards the active community that have stuck with the game since Beta and beyond.

I think reading the official forums and other sites people are way more upset there is no new content coming before Nov (?) and no timeline for when to change LI's and Radiance.

Consensus Translation: MT won't affect me, game is still stalled, wait for influx for MT newbs and then apply SOE-NGE rage