I was com­pletely unaware that there was a devel­oper chat for Euro­pean play­ers of LotRO yes­ter­day. I don’t keep up enough on the hap­pen­ings on that side of the ocean, unfor­tu­nately. How­ever, Elder­ban was nice enough to post the notes on the offi­cial forums. You can read them there, but I’ve also posted them below the break.

<Sce­nario> Good evening all! My name is Matt “Sce­nario” Elliott — World Designer du jour! When I am not stamp­ing out wild fires and fight­ing caged lions, I like to dab­ble as many aspects of design as I can. I would really like to answer your World Design ques­tions — so send them along, pretty please!

<Floon> Hi, I’m Floon, and I’m the Art Direc­tor for Lotro. I am impa­tiently await­ing the start of base­ball sea­son. It’s like cricket, only more boring.

<Keth_Turbine> Hey there, I am Keth. I’m a Lead Con­tent Designer here at Tur­bine… which means I wear many hats and have my fin­gers in many pies. Ask me about my Book 7 Con­tent. I dare you.

<Sapi­ence> HI all! I’m Sapi­ence. I’m part of the Com­mu­nity team. I’m cur­rently recov­er­ing from the pain of patch notes editing.

<Rowan> Hello I’m Rowan, Live Pro­ducer for LotRO. I’m excited about Book 7, and look for­ward to your ques­tions about Lothlorien!

<Jalessa> Hi every­one! I’m Jalessa, a sys­tems designer here at Tur­bine. I hope Keth washed his fin­gers before putting them into all those pies. Oth­er­wise, that’d be a ter­ri­ble waste of pie.

<CM-Liquilla> I’m Cal­lum “Liquilla“Rowley, Com­mu­nity Man­ager for Code­mas­ters Online

<Sapi­ence> There’s lots of furi­ous typ­ing going on.

<Floon> Not from me. Soon as I see some art ques­tions, I might start typing.…

*{Ez0}Honvik* When we will see Kin­ship improv­ments like Kin­ship Vaults, Kin­ship Quests? and improv­ments to our Home­steads like Party area for host­ing par­ties etc? It is some­thing i asked over a year ago
<Keth_Turbine> It’s funny, we were talk­ing about that just the other day and we hope to have some hous­ing neigh­bor­hood spe­cific con­tent in Book 8.
<Keth_Turbine> The idea of it is that you will be help­ing out your neigh­bor­hood (or your kinship’s neigh­bor­hood) and get some hous­ing rewards.
<Keth_Turbine> But you’ll only be able to help out your neigh­bor­hood or your kinship’s, not one you don’t have a house on.

*Ata­dor* Hello. In “The Shad­ows of Angmar” we have the Helegrod-Set and The Rift-Set. I think the biggest dif­fer­ence between these sets are the set-bonuses. With Moria there is the new raid­i­ance set. Do you think it’s the right way to define the qual­ity of a set (and espe­cially the next sets) only with the raidiance-factor?
<Sapi­ence> Jalessa is typ­ing wildly. This should be good.
<Rowan> Jalessa is typ­ing… poor Jalessa, we used to tease Tens about this.
<Sce­nario> We still tease him about it
<Jalessa> Our progress in our raid sets in the future is some­thing that we are con­tin­u­ally dis­cuss and plan out. We will con­tinue to use radi­ance as a require­ment for future raids, as you have seen with our cur­rent Moria sets. We also plan to improve set bonuses and item bonus amounts.

*Flushie* Will there be any new cos­metic items & hair­cuts in the near future?
<Floon> There are always new cos­metic items in every update. In Book 7, we have some Lothlorien-themed out­fits that are pretty nice, as well as some new armor. Hair­cuts haven’t seen any updates for a while, so I’m mak­ing that a pri­or­ity to get a few done soon. Those are more expen­sive, as we can’t just do one: you have to spread the love around, so that every­one gets some­thing new.

*Gurobin* The guardian is one of my favourite classes in the game, but at the moment he´s really use­less dur­ing the fight in the vile maw. Will the guardian be able to bet­ter ful­fill his role with the new raid instance with book7?
<Rowan> There are two pieces to that… first, I think with Book 7 that you’ll find Guardian abil­ity to hold threat has greatly increased. In addi­tion, the new Lair Raid for Book 7 will be much eas­ier if you have tanks who know how to work together.

*adamo102* Can you con­sider adding option to draw your weapon and walk with weapon in hand while not being in com­bat? Would be nice to show off your leg­endary weapons. Also adds nice RP fac­tor while explor­ing dan­ger­ous areas. Thanks!
<Floon> There’s no par­tic­u­lar rea­son why we couldn’t let peo­ple walk around with weapons out of com­bat, I don’t think. It just hasn’t been high on anyone’s list around here. I’ll make a note to see if there’s any prob­lem with it.

*Hothorix* What are your plans of expan­sion in the game. Will we soon see the other side of Anduin? Will we go south straight ahead? Or will we go and see all of Rho­van­ion before we turn south to Rohan and such?
<Sce­nario> Well.. tech­ni­cally, you can get to the other side of the Andiun in Book 7. You just won’t last very long once you get there.
<Sce­nario> As for our land­scape direc­tion post Book 7, we have the road mapped out and our plans are already see­ing devel­op­ment. How­ever, we likely won’t be dis­cussing those plans until Book 7 is beyond us and Book 8 is closer to release (at the earliest).

*Fru­uto* As you surely know alot of peo­ple are crav­ing for 12man con­tent… why where the bat­tle­grounds not designed as 12man con­tent?
<Keth_Turbine> It depends on which bat­tle­grounds you are talk­ing about.
<Keth_Turbine> If you are talk­ing about the three Moria bat­tles that were part of “Mines of Moria,” it didn’t make sense to have them be 12 mans, as they were involved in the Epic quest line.
<Keth_Turbine> Get­ting a 6 man together seemed like enough of a chal­lenge to add to com­plet­ing that quest line!
<Keth_Turbine> As for upcom­ing con­tent, such as the bat­tle that is found in Book 7, we decided to keep it a 6 man, but pro­vide some new dynam­ics in it to mix it up a bit. I think they’re kinda neat, and I hope you like them.
<Keth_Turbine> In the end, the over­all deci­sion between 6 man and 12 man is deter­min­ing how much of our player base will be able to make use of our con­tent and really enjoy it.
<Keth_Turbine> Over­all, we feel there is a larger audi­ence for 6 man than 12 man con­tent.
<Keth_Turbine> How­ever, that doesn’t mean there isn’t 12 man con­tent in Book 7. (It’s just not a battleground!)

*Hothorix* Will it be pos­si­ble to have own design on kin­ship cloaks in the future or will this never be pos­si­ble?
<Floon> OK, so kin­ship cloaks. This has been a big deal on the US forums. Other games have done cus­tomiz­able cloaks, but we have have really big tex­tures, and com­posit­ing cus­tom cloaks on the fly for other play­ers would be a sig­nif­i­cant per­for­mance hit: bad hitch­ing every time a new player enters your scene. So it’s some­thing we need to be very very cau­tious about.
<Floon> When tex­tures are smaller, it’s less of a load.
<Floon> But our tex­tures are large, and cus­tomiz­ing sys­tems start get­ting very bloaty.

*Alash* The con­cept of a hard­mode and a soft­mode ver­sion of an instance seems to have catered to a broader group of play­ers than with the pre­vi­ous 1-way instances. Is this some­thing you plan to fur­ther develop in the future?
<Keth_Turbine> Yes, def­i­nitely.
<Keth_Turbine> Our goal is to sup­port those modes bet­ter in new instances such that there is more and bet­ter feed­back on them and when you fail them.

*{Ez0}Honvik* Will there be more chances to obtain Relics/Scrolls for Leg­endary items and per­haps bet­ter rewards when we decon­struct an item
<Jalessa> Absolutely, for the first part. With­out giv­ing away too much info — we’re hard at work in the next book update…

*Per­former* Would it be pos­si­ble to allow hav­ing a sec­ond Hair­style, that can then be toggeled (like the Out­fits) ? The Selec­tion should prob­a­bly depend on the first Hair­style, to keep the Length fairly equal — so you could switch unruly <> combed, or open <> pinned-up, …
<Floon> What, you can’t get a hair­cut every now and then? Bar­bers have to eat, too. Sup­port your local mer­chants. But likely no, the appear­ances aren’t struc­tured that way.

*S|r_Drunk* Lotro promises much at begin­ing of the game. But now going to be lin­eal gam­ing. all the chars must go on same road between lvl 15 and 40. You will deve­l­ope new areas? giv­ing more aten­tion to have new kind of quest becouse all quest are the same.
<Keth_Turbine> Yeah, Orion is cur­rently in the mid­dle of eval­u­at­ing our cur­rent regions and mak­ing changes such that there are mul­ti­ple regions for you to play through as you advance.
<Keth_Turbine> You’ll see the start of those changes in Book 7.
<Sce­nario> This doesn’t rule out the pos­si­bil­ity of new low-mid level regions in the future.

*SMeK* When lotro went live it already had in it a cloak with the white tree of gon­dor yet we did not have access to gon­dor. Are there any plans to cre­ate more themed cloaks for other areas and i dont just mean the big iconic areas, but ones maybe relat­ing to the shire or thorins hall, etc
<Floon> Well, we have been putting out themed cloaks for a while. There are the Moria cloaks we just put in, and there’s a Lorien cloak com­ing out in Book 7 (two, I think, actu­ally).
<Floon> We try to enhance the cul­tural appeal of the outfits.

*mandarina1* Hi all, The cap­tain com­mu­nity under­stand that IHW skill can be abused. Con­sider the out­come, if you will, of Boromir defend­ing Merry and Pip­pin with 50% effec­tive­ness. The mit­i­ga­tion of all dam­age is core to the cap­tain class. Have the devs con­sid­ered any alter­na­tives to the 50% reduc­tion?
<Rowan> We absolutely hear the feed­back, and are watch­ing the data from play expe­ri­ences very care­fully. The team has a num­ber of ideas about ways that we might enhance this class.
<Rowan> Oh, and Boromir is a Guardian. But he did a noble job with his Chal­lenge skills.

*Sko* Are there any plans about chang­ing the sys­tem of dis­trib­ut­ing leg­endary weapons? Or will it stay the way it is (ran­dom type of weapon opposed to barter item)
<Jalessa> We’ve got your feed­back on it — par­tic­u­larly for the Watcher (a lot) — and we’re review­ing it. No promises.

*[WSX]Sierandir_Aberglynen* when do we get to kill sauron?
<Keth_Turbine> Actu­ally, this con­tent is in-game already. I’m really sur­prised no one has dis­cov­ered how to access it yet.
<Keth_Turbine> Hint — It involves the Shire!
<Floon> I thought you guys did a great job on the Sauron instance…
<Sapi­ence> *hides

*Juss* Hi, why was there no hot­fix for mon­ster­play­ers. I mean as a tem­po­rary solu­tion resists/mitigations should’ve been raised to stop the slaugh­ter­fest that is going on every day in moors since moria. PPPPPP was changed in few weeks, but creeps are left alone for months?
<Jalessa> Unfor­tu­nately adjust­ing resists and mit­i­ga­tions was too large of a task for a hot­fix. The adjust­ments I made for those stats alone were about about a month’s worth of work. If I were super­woman, I could have got­ten it done faster for a hot­fix. Unfor­tu­nately I’m not

*men­e­strockx* The raid in book 7 will be a one boss raid like the watcher raid or a 7 – 8 boss raid like the Rift?
<Keth_Turbine> The final encounter con­sists of one boss, some­thing we’ve been call­ing a “Lair Raid.“
<Keth_Turbine> How­ever, access­ing the encounter will require a bit of work, from quite a few peo­ple, actually.

*San­nas* Is there any plans for kin­ship of the month or has that been aban­doned
<Sapi­ence> *Looks at Rowan*
<Rowan> It was a com­ment that I made to tease Patience at the time. It is some­thing we’d still love to do, but we need to bal­ance it with every­thing else cur­rently in the works… and we have some great ideas.

*lanorin* what was the key rea­son behind mak­ing lev­el­ing quicker in book 7, reduc­ing XP require­ments etc
<Rowan> So some­thing for the future? Absolutely. Just not some­thing I can tie a date to yet.
<Jalessa> The patch note makes it sound sim­pler than it is. The change was pri­mar­ily focused towards our low-mid level play­ers, in effort to make our early game more approach­able to the casual user.

*Flaps* I per­son­ally loved Hele­grod, the 24 man raid was alot of fun… are there any plans of adding in more tougher, longer 24 man raids in the future books?
<Keth_Turbine> For the fore­see­able future, we aren’t going to be doing any more 24 man Raids. Twelve man will be the largest encounter size prob­a­bly from here on.

*Leomer* Will there be new fes­ti­val con­tent in the near future?
<Keth_Turbine> Yes, and it’s kinda neat. We are adding some more con­tent to the Spring Fes­ti­val in Book 7.
<Keth_Turbine> In addi­tion to another Horse for you to try to win, there will be a Hedge Maze for you to try to find your way through.
<Keth_Turbine> This Hedge Maze will be instanced, so you’ll never see more than a hand­ful of peo­ple in the Maze at a time.

*Danni* Hi. Will it be pos­si­ble to hang up a flag on your house or above your door? I always wanted a flag on my house…
<Floon> Flags on houses sound like fun to me. Unfor­tu­nately, the team that would be deal­ing with adding all of that to all of the houses is busy with other world cre­ation tasks. And the artists needed to cre­ate nifty hous­ing flags are busy cre­at­ing new mon­sters and con­tent for the next updates. So it wouldn’t hap­pen very soon. But I like the idea.

*Bel­navar* Is there a new radi­ance set in Book 7, or has this been pushed back to Book 8?
<Jalessa> The new radi­ance sets are in Book 8, they will be unveiled with the instances and raid that were pushed from Book 7.

*Alash* There has been quite a bit of debat­ing about the lack of action towards remov­ing cru­cial exploits, and even though you’re fix­ing most of it with Book 7 — thumbs up, the hour is some­what late. What is in the wood­works to pre­vent a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion in the future?
<Keth_Turbine> We actu­ally do spend a lot of time try­ing to work out “unde­sired player behav­ior” in our con­tent. Some of this behav­ior is made aware to us through player reports, while oth­ers we learn about via server logs.
<Keth_Turbine> Some of this behav­ior involves play­ers drop­ping groups, restart­ing instances, etc, while other behav­ior is a bit more com­pli­cated and mali­cious.
<Keth_Turbine> I really can’t tell you specifics on how we are address­ing issues like these, though, because that tends to give peo­ple a heads up on how to work around it.

*Anran­gar* Will there be more dif­fer­ent types of Quests in future? some more puz­zling or think­ing not only killing ?
<Rowan> Our quests in Lothlo­rien are quite a change of pace. As you’re in the home­land of the Elves of Lothlo­rien, there is not much killing involved. Instead we take the time to explore the story and his­tory of Lorien. We hope you enjoy it!

*Frenya* What kind of rewards can we expect from the new lair raid?
<Rowan> Yes, one of the pri­mary things you can expect is a token for radi­ance gear. We expect this to be an alter­na­tive to the cur­rent hard mode instances and another oppor­tu­nity for kin­ships to “gear up” for the chal­lenge of the Vile Maw. This raid also has some items spe­cific to that boss.
<Jalessa> Some­thing really cute too.

*Jono* Hey, Since Boromir was a Guardian could you let us know who the Cap­tain of the fel­low­ship was! I always assumed it was Boromir, espe­cially since our Class Quests at level 45 took us too him.
<Rowan> Oops… sorry, I’m get­ting my lev­el­ing mixed up. Keth has cor­rected me. Boromir is the Cap­tain, while Sam­wise is the Guardian. I apol­o­gize to all the Cap­tains.
<Floon> Oooh, Rowan is burned…

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