I man­aged to run Xfire and sit in the chat so I could post the log here. I didn’t per­son­ally par­tic­i­pate, but there were some good ques­tions asked. Unfor­tu­nately my work­load has pre­vented me from giv­ing it my full attention.

I’ll give some of my thoughts in a post later on, but in the mean­time I wanted to put these up for other peo­ple to check out if they didn’t have a chance to attend. I’ve rearranged a cou­ple of responses so this is eas­ier to read, but oth­er­wise every­thing else is intact (aside from the announce­ment of the win­ners of the 30 days of LotRO chat contest).

You can read it all after the break.

LotRO Chat Leader (officiallotro5): Hello Every­one and wel­come to the chat with the team at Tur­bine! I’ll let them intro­duce them­selves, then they’ll start tak­ing your ques­tions! Take it away guys!

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): Howdy, I’m Floon, Art Direc­tor for Lotro. I am a cranky old man.

Turbine_Sapience (tur­bine­sapi­ence): HI I’m Sapi­ence, part of the com­mu­nity team, and no you can­not have my Pew Pew! *looks at Con­stant Gardner*

Turbine_Rowan (tur­binerowan): Hello every­one, I’m Rowan — Live Pro­ducer for LotRO. and Floon is a cranky old man.

Turbine_Jalessa (jalessa): Hello, my name is Jalessa — I’m a sys­tems devel­oper here at Tur­bine. I work with Mon­ster Play and other assorted sys­tems here on LotRO.

Turbine_Amlug (tur­bineam­lug): Hello, I’m Amlug, instance designer, raid designer, and other things content…

anon11: Hello! Con­stant Gar­dener, Game Sys­tems Designer

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): Peo­ple here are typ­ing, trust me.

(n1n3mill): What new fea­tures can we look for­ward to with mylotro​.com and will there be any­way some­one can add their ingame friends list to their mylotro​.com game list?

Turbine_Sapience (tur­bine­sapi­ence): That’s a great idea! We do have a lot in store for my​.lotro​.com. In fact I was just watch­ing a demo of some of the things the team is work­ing on for our next update. I think you’ll be very happy with all of it. We just can’t tell you…yet.

Is there any chance of fix­ing pet pathing in for LM pets? I’m tired of start­ing a bat­tle only to see my pet 5 feet behind me just stand­ing there.

anon11: We’re look­ing into that right now! It’s some­thing we’ve taken to heart and QA is check­ing out hotspots with pathing even now.

Jub­jub (breadie): SPC Bur­ris [3^rd ID] (ltnight­mare): The Art is amaz­ing! How did you man­age to come up with ideas and designs for most of the armor and weaponry in the game?

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): Your ques­tion is amaz­ing! And thanks!

We do a lot of con­cept art. We read the books a lot. We pore over ency­clo­pe­dias and archi­tec­ture books and ref­er­ence books. And we do more con­cepts. When we come up with a con­cept we really love, we start build­ing out from there. Add more and more details to sup­port that ini­tial vision, and just keep going.

BaBy­BooM– Freak (baby­bodom): what is about the 3 man instances… they are fun and fast… lots of peo­ple like it… ques­tion is will there be more and if so will there be also more of instances like mid­night raid or library of steel (for leg­end weapons exp)

Turbine_Amlug (tur­bineam­lug): We like 3 man instances too! We are going to be doing more of them in the future for sure!

Shy­loren of Brandy­wine (n1n3mill): I am only into my sec­ond month of LotRO and the game is fan­tas­tic. Are you plan­ning on releas­ing retail expan­sions every year?

Turbine_Rowan (tur­binerowan): We def­i­nitely want to keep the pace of con­tent com­ing. At Tur­bine it’s not just about retail expan­sions… we pride our­selves on con­sis­tently grow­ing the world and adding more fun things for you to do. (Asheron’s Call is now approach­ing it’s 10^th year of this.)

NestorC (nestorc): Are there any mem­bers of the orig­i­nal AC/AC2 team in the LotRO dev team?

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): Yeah, there are a few folks who worked on AC and AC2. And of course the AC team sits within nerf-gun dis­tance of the lotro team.

mutraslura: What can you tell us about new raids? Will it make in book 7, and what will we see for new for the raiding?

Turbine_Amlug (tur­bineam­lug): We like raids too! There is def­i­nitely a raid com­ing for Book 7. It is a 12-person raid and hope­fully you will love it! We will con­tinue to sup­port raid­ing in the future as well.

The bur­glar is one of the stronger classes in the game, but it hasn’t seen any real changes since the beta. Do you have any plans for adding/changing of their skill sets?

anon11: All the classes are evolv­ing includ­ing the Bur­glar.

Ragter (ragters): Will we see a 24 man raid com­ing in the next book or two?

Turbine_Amlug (tur­bineam­lug): We are focused on 3-mans, 6-mans, and 12-mans right now but who knows what the mys­te­ri­ous future will hold. My magic 8-ball says “Wait and see…”

BaBy­BooM– Freak (baby­bodom): about PvMP you have done alot since moria came live, but it has never been more unrevord­ing for peeps then before… rank­ing is only for fun and no real think to get from that (par­don me)… my ques­tion is… will you add new stuff in pvMP for peeps, maby new area, or bet­ter items, new quests and way of fights… pvmp instances maby? (btw. great job on adding des­tiny points for freeps)

Turbine_Jalessa (jalessa): We’re always look­ing to do new things to keep inter­est in PvMP, and we’re def­i­nitely not stop­ping with this book. Book 7 will include updates to Glan Vraig chests (new loot, includ­ing chances for IA loot) and updates to boss loot in the Delv­ing will hope­fully entice Free Play­ers to come back out. I also hope to con­tinue to enhance the reward sys­tem in other ways (bet­ter rank items) through later books).

Astil­lius (astil­lius): See­ing as Christo­pher Tolkien won’t give up the rights to the “Sil­mar­il­lion” and “Unfin­ished Tales” books, What do you plan to do with game con­tent regard­ing those and the lore they cre­ate for LOTR?

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): We plan on not infring­ing on the rights to those works. There’s plenty to LotR yet to do, and that is enough to keep us busy.

Seren­ity (serenity777): Hav­ing jusy started play­ing less than a month ago, I am lov­ing this adven­ture! But, I was expect­ing to see a wiz­ard type class, will this ever be an option?

Turbine_Rowan (tur­binerowan): Part of the chal­lenge of devel­op­ing a game based on Tolkien’s work is the spe­cific nature of his world. Some archtypes such as “wiz­ard” are not part of this world… well at least you already know who they are. What we can do is con­tinue to find fun options for new classes that fit within this world, such as the War­den and Runekeeper.

khrain: Why no use­able camp­fires in Moria?

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): Good ques­tion. Sounds like some­thing to dis­cuss with the world team.

wickedpt (wickedpt): Any ETA on Book7? Pretty please? I have cake. *wink*

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): I like cake.

Turbine_Sapience (tur­bine­sapi­ence): Soon ™

Tac­ti­cal dam­age cur­rently does not scale well past level 40. On top of that resist rates are too high and the cur­rent sys­tem of “hit or miss” makes play­ing a tac­ti­cal dam­age class hand­i­capped. What changes can we expect to see made to the com­bat sys­tem that will allow for Rune-keepers to do the dam­age they were adver­tised to do? Will Rune-keepers ever be a viable main DPS class like Hunters and Champions?

anon11: The Rune­keeper will be get­ting some buffs shortly. Though it’s worth not­ing we didn’t make any changes to DPS form 40 – 50, they are the same as they were in SoA. As always we’re keep­ing an eye on mon­ster strength.

schneevs (schneevs67): I just love the new addtions to the game…any plans for new mon­ster classes to be added?

Turbine_Jalessa (jalessa): Not at the moment We’ve got our hands full with the warg, spi­der, orc, and uruk classes we cur­rently have.

BaBy­BooM– Freak (baby­bodom): when moria came out you made many new out­fits (for gen­eral items, not just “out­fits”) many look cool and inter­est­ing.… will there be more of those sets with difer­ent and unique style? spe­cially for light and medium armour (to look more seri­ous and not to colourfull)

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): We love mak­ing out­fits. They’re pretty time-consuming, which is why we don’t make gobs and gobs and gobs of out­fits every book. But the out­fit sys­tem has proven to be one of the most pop­u­lar addi­tions to the game, so we are always adding at least a cou­ple new out­fits every update. There’s a nice Lorien-style dress in Book 7, and some new armor tex­tures for the Lorien armor.

Gan­o­derma (gan­o­derma): I’d like an adress book for peo­ple. I keep for­get­ting what exact neigh­bor­hood or house peo­ple live in

Turbine_Jalessa (jalessa): That’s a very cool idea

Draimen (only1war): will any ear­lier instances that not many peo­ple do any­more, be Revamped to get peo­ple back into them?

Turbine_Amlug (tur­bineam­lug): This is def­i­nitely an idea that has been tossed around. Stay tuned…

(garian07): Will there be kin­ship cloaks in the near future

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): That’s hard. We don’t have the abil­ity to take on player-generated con­tent in the form of tex­tures, so that means we need to add new cloaks. We’re always adding new cloaks. But enough to keep up with all the kin­ships out there? I *do* like to leave the office and see my fam­ily on occasion.…

wickedpt (wickedpt): What do i have to do to go work at Turbine? =)

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): tur​bine​.com, we have a jobs page.

SPC Bur­ris [3^rd ID] (ltnight­mare): A lot of time was put forth in the cre­ation of the min­strel class. How did you ever find such an idea and add onto it to make it a fun and enjoy­able class to play?

anon11: Ulti­mately this is a good time to clar­ify how class cre­ation works. We’ve got a team of peo­ple that work on the classes, no one per­son is respon­si­ble for every aspect of class devel­op­ment. It’s a team effort, from art to design. We’ve got a team of peo­ple who review all the changes. The min­strel as a song­ster, was a great idea that was around before I came on the team, and it has evolved from there. It was born out of the desire of being able to “heal” play­ers with­out using “true” magic.

Thanks for the com­pli­ment, we’ll pass it along.

sage­of­saria: Newer play­ers have com­plained of the tough begin­ning to the games, and many a time give up before they get to higher lev­els; what do you plan to do about this?

Turbine_Rowan (tur­binerowan): We want the game to be approach­able and fun, espe­cially to new play­ers. This is some­thing we’ll be tak­ing a look at in the near future. Thank you for the feedback!

(boak): any plans to allow play­ers who can only wear light armor, to cos­met­i­cally equip medium or heavy armor?

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): That sounds like it would just cre­ate a weird, con­fus­ing sit­u­a­tion. Pre­serv­ing *some* dis­tinc­tion between classes seems valu­able to me.

hankt354: I still have left over tokens from the sea­sonal games. Will those ever be use­ful again?

Turbine_Jalessa (jalessa): By all means, if you have the bank space, hold on to them! The tokens are re-used when the fes­ti­vals reopen each sea­son. Keep com­ing back to spend them. We also add new things to each fes­ti­val, so it pays to come back and check out what we’ve added!

Han­ky­one (han­ky­one): Any word on the pos­si­ble “Month of the Kin­ship” men­tioned in a pre­vi­ous dev chat?

Turbine_Rowan (tur­binerowan): Patience gives me daily beat­ings for that com­ment now. As always we’re bal­anc­ing all the great ideas that are in progress for the game. It’s impor­tant to make the right trade-offs. We’re def­i­nitely toss­ing around options and ideas… until then, the beat­ings shall continue!

(tok­tic): I among many would love to have the abil­ity to cos­met­i­cally equip weapons/shields. Is this some­thing we can hope to see? Is this some­thing that needs back­ground tech changes to see [and if so, what are they]?

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): You: preacher. Me: choir. I too want this: gau­r­dians get­ting to pick the appear­ance of their shields, that seems pretty obvi­ous to me. Unfor­tu­nately, things aren’t struc­tured in such a way to let that hap­pen. Things you wear, they go through one sys­tem. Things you hold, they go through another. We did a lot of work to allow the appear­ance sys­tem for things you wear to per­mit out­fits. There is much work to do if we want to get into shields and weapons. Many folks want it, many of us want it, but it’s a big task. For now, we must com­mis­er­ate together.

(thom­pir): Who onthe team found it nec­es­sary to increase the bust size for elves and how can I get him on my Christ­mas card list? :0

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): Cards may be sent to me, c/o Turbine.

ryswald55: Are there any plans to buff Fel­low­ship Maneu­vers? They have received much neglect in recent months it seems. Dam­age didn’t scale well at all (just like the tac­ti­cal scal­ing issue ques­tion you answered ear­lier) and there is no ben­e­fit to doing a com­plex FM (like BRGYBR) over a rel­a­tively sim­ple one (GGGBB or RRRRRG).

anon11: It was a known issue, that made con­tent very sad (points at Amlug) that con­junc­tions were a bit over­pow­ered in SoA. Effec­tively expert play­ers were work­ing our poor crea­tures over and it made both casual play­ers upset (about how much bet­ter coor­di­nated groups seemed) and it made design­ing chal­leng­ing con­tent tough. So the changes here were delib­er­ate, how­ever, we are con­stantly eval­u­at­ing our changes, we want it to be reward­ing, but not game breaking-ly so.

Turbine_Amlug (tur­bineam­lug): I agree!

Ragter (ragters): Will you guys con­sider adding a vol­un­teer from the com­mu­nity to help bridge the coumm­nity to the devs… i.e. a com­mu­nity rep for each class?

Turbine_Sapience (tur­bine­sapi­ence): This is a great idea. We’re always look­ing for new ways to inter­act with our play­ers and col­lect use­ful feed­back. We have some things in mind that we hope will address this. Hypo­thet­i­cally.

Aries (ariesof­doom): Will we see mroe emotes in the future? I sure miss my /lick

Turbine_Jalessa (jalessa): We have a cou­ple com­ing! (Includ­ing a few for monsterplay!)

(uncle­cid): How awe­some is Elendilmir the Jew­elled Bell of Servers?

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): *jin­gle* *jangle*!

Turbine_Jalessa (jalessa): *jin­gle* *jangle*!

Turbine_Amlug (tur­bineam­lug): *jin­gle* *jin­gle* jin­gle* *clang*

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): Go [Jew­elled Bell]!

Turbine_Sapience (tur­bine­sapi­ence): Floon stole my Jin­gle Jangle!

(gan­o­derma): Will there be new instru­ments soon? either com­plete new or tier 6 ones because we min­strels still have to use our old, worn instruments

Turbine_Jalessa (jalessa): We will be intro­duc­ing tier 6 instru­ments with Book 7

wickedpt (wickedpt): Can you explain the un-legendary Sticky Gourd Lore–Mas­ter skill? Why is a level 60 skill worst than our level 1 skill. Lore–Mas­ters have all­ways been a very imag­i­na­tive class. Every skill usu­ally has somekind of buff/debuff/cc com­po­nent to it. But this one, our last skill in the game sim­ply seems lack­lus­ter. Can any­one com­ment on that?

anon11: Ulti­mately, we had to be very care­ful with giv­ing the LM a strong direct dam­age com­po­nent. Like many of our post 50 skills, it’s their upgrades that make them strong. (Hav­ing you seen the flam­ing pyres of goblins?)

Ragter (ragters): Will we be see­ing a new hobby com­ing in the near future?

Turbine_Rowan (tur­binerowan): We are con­sid­er­ing a few ideas. For now, I can nei­ther con­firm nor deny… but I’d be happy to hear your suggestions!

Beph­wyn (beph­wyn): When will Isen­gard be open for Appli­ca­tions again?

Turbine_Rowan (tur­binerowan): The Isen­gard pri­vate test envi­ron­ment has not gone away… it’s just been sleep­ing for a lit­tle while. When we reopen it I expect the team will post this on the forums along with noti­fy­ing folks that are already part of that com­mu­nity. Book 7 is coming!

Moir (xmoirx): Hi team and happy new year, Moria is a very dry place, we need a Place to go have a few drinks in the evening and play a few tunes, is there any plans for a bar MOM?

Turbine_Amlug (tur­bineam­lug): Who knows where the adven­tures of the Inn League will take us next. We fully intend on sup­port­ing more Inn League shananigans!

mokeymcg33k): could we see more non-quest type player inter­ac­tion? sports is a cool idea, maybe some other stuff too Hobnannigans!

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): s

Turbine_Sapience (tur­bine­sapi­ence): Hob­nan­ni­gans! *hides*

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): A lot of player-player inter­ac­tion is dif­fi­cult to syn­chro­nize between all clients and the server, so there are tech­ni­cal hur­dles to over­come to make for enjoy­able experiences.

Turbine_Rowan (tur­binerowan): Sapi­ence, go play some freeze tag.

Ban­shee (s2banshee1020): Will Min­strels see a buff to their heal­ing abil­i­ties? It is almost impos­si­ble to keep up with the dam­age mobs do in some Moria instances.

anon11: Heal­ing has def­i­nitely become harder. (Remem­ber Amlug being sad in SoA about things being easy?) Our instance loot got a big buff in Moria, and so did the chal­lenge level of those instances. Though bal­lads will begin to impact your heal­ing out­put post book 7, and the Watcher of Resolve trait line will increase the mag­ni­tude of that.

khrain: The hook sys­tem that is used in hous­ing is.…unpopular. Any plans to change to a more free-form style?

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): We’re always look­ing at ways to improve hous­ing. The hook sys­tem is what we could do for the live prod­uct, to pro­vide as much func­tion­al­ity as pos­si­ble, and make the lim­its on house dec­o­rat­ing as clear as pos­si­ble. We’re hop­ing to look at it again in the future, but (as I say a lot) it’s a Big Fea­ture, and A Lot Of Work, and we have A Lot Of Other Things To Do.

smiljan66: i really like to meet gollum

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): He’s creepy, and smells like rot­ten fish. Give him a wide berth.

Turbine_Rowan (tur­binerowan): And he’s in the Trollshaws!

sage­of­saria: Many play­ers com­plain about the new player classes being bet­ter than older play­ing classes; what do you plan to do about this?

anon11: This is in the eye of the beholder, I’ve read the Rune-keeper isn’t as good as the Hunter? Which is it? J As always we’ll look at each of the classes and make sure that they can serve in their pri­mary roles.

Ragter (ragters): Can we expect to see the rest of Lothlo­rien and per­haps beyond in bk7 or maybe even new parts of Moria?

Turbine_Amlug (tur­bineam­lug): We are open­ing up all of Lothlo­rien for Book 7. It is com­ing out really well and I think after sev­eral months of the dark­ness of Moria, you will all be very very happy with what we’ve done. But be care­ful, the elves don’t take kindly to stangers… time to make friends!

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): We’re really proud of Caras Gal­ad­hon. The artists and world builders involved have really cre­ated some­thing spe­cial. Hie thee hence.

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): Wow, the hour, she is almost gone.

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): That was fast.

Ban­shee (s2banshee1020): Who’s idea was it to add –1000 men­tor cooldown for a Min­strel leg­endary trait? It always makes me laugh when I see that.

anon11: I laugh too! But seri­ously, the dreams of Min­strel’s mak­ing thou­sands of gold using their men­tor skill cooldown items in Moria, will be sail­ing into the west shortly.

(cym­bol): Goat mounts can be used out­side of moria. Was this intended?

Turbine_Rowan (tur­binerowan): Well the lore states pretty clearly that horses wouldn’t go into Moria. This doesn’t mean that other things can’t come out.

(tok­tic): Does that mean we’ll need to earn rep­u­ta­tion with the Elves of Lothlo­rien like we did with Forochel?

Turbine_Amlug (tur­bineam­lug): Yes. We are build­ing a very nice rep­u­ta­tion sys­tem with Lorien. Our goal is to sup­port the lore of Lothlo­rien and the elves and not let every­one waltz into their sacred home but at the same time we don’t want to make the rep­u­ta­tion gates too grindy. We are work­ing on the bal­ance now and we are pretty proud of what we’ve come up with… For those who may have had deal­ings with elves of Lorien before Book 7, you may find it even eas­ier to get in…

Han­ky­one (han­ky­one): Will the new Lothlo­rien quests be Worth doing for a lvl60?

Turbine_Jalessa (jalessa): Absolutely. The quests will help you get tokens to exchange for cool new rep­u­ta­tion items (includ­ing recipes for some of those nifty new tier 6 instru­ments I hinted about ear­lier). Amlug’s dev diary (com­ing soon) will have more infor­ma­tion for you on Lothlo­riens quest and rep­u­ta­tion system.

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): OK, not answer­ing a ques­tion now, just say­ing things. Per­son­ally, I’m really look­ing for­ward to Book 7 and open­ing up Lorien to you guys. We wanted to ship with all of Lorien in the expan­sion, but when we real­ized we needed more time to do it right, we took that time. I think we’ve done it jus­tice, and can’t wait for every­one to have a look.

Turbine_Floon (floon­bee­tle): Thanks for hav­ing us for this chat. Be sure to tune in to my cranky answers to var­i­ous ques­tions in the forums.

Turbine_Amlug (tur­bineam­lug): Thank you guys for some great ques­tions and some pretty funny ones as well! We are as excited as you to play the new con­tent in Book 7 and beyond!

Turbine_Jalessa (jalessa): Thanks all! *jin­gle* *jan­gle* (I just wanted to ring the bell again)

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