Turbine’s “Tell the Com­mu­nity Team” is now on its sec­ond set of ques­tions (thanks to Tir­nel for point­ing out that EU play­ers have their own thread too):

Ques­tion 1:
You’ve been hired as a class dev for a day. You can choose 1 exist­ing class and assign it pri­mary and sec­ondary roles. Which class would you choose and what pri­mary and sec­ondary roles would you assign to it?

Ques­tion 2:
Every­body likes fluff (Chicken play, tag, fes­ti­vals). Name three (3) kinds of Fluff you’d like to see added to LotRO.

Ques­tion 3:
You’re given the oppor­tu­nity to improve the value and man­age­ment of Kin­ships in LotRO. What three(3) fea­tures would you add to the Kin­ship sys­tem to meet these goals?

I rec­om­mend that any­one that has some­thing to say make a post there. I think the team watches the forums more closely than it might seem, but this is obvi­ously a very direct chan­nel to them.

I gave my answers to these, but it’s hard to limit some of these down to three. I thought I could expand on some of my answers here and also hope­fully hear from all of you as to what you’d like to see. I’m just skip­ping Ques­tion 1 out­right, haha.

Ques­tion 2 Responses

Cos­metic Pets for All: Cur­rently, only the Lore–mas­ter can use cos­metic pets. Giv­ing access to other classes has been brought up and the main con­cern seems to be pathing issues. If that ever gets worked out to a point that they’re happy with, I hope this is reconsidered.

My thought was that per­haps Lore–mas­ters could train oth­ers in pet use much like Min­strels can train oth­ers in instru­ment use. Keep a few pets and appear­ances unique to the Lore–mas­ter so they don’t feel like they’re being cheated.

If all of this is impos­si­ble, I would at least like to see more inte­rior house pets. The bird and mouse were neat, more would be great.

More Hol­i­days: So LotRO has Fes­ti­vals and I enjoy them. I’m happy that they last a decent period of time so that many peo­ple can participate.

Still, I wish the game had more ran­dom hol­i­days. I never seri­ously played World of War­craft, but it was nice to log in and find out there was a spe­cial day or week­end where inter­est­ing things were going on.

Expand Upon Spar­ring: I’d really love if more was done with spar­ring. This aspect of the game is largely ignored because there’s not much to get out of it. At best it’s rel­e­gated to peo­ple wast­ing time while wait­ing for oth­ers to arrive for an instance or raid.

I’ve had a few ideas on how to expand this, but I think the best fit would be some sort of tour­na­ment or arena sys­tem. Set up a place where peo­ple can take place in ranked tour­na­ments for titles or prizes. These don’t have to be phe­nom­e­nal and, hon­estly, I think even a score­board for brag­ging rights would be of interest.

I think this would ease some of the PvP com­plaints because it allows good guys to fight each other with­out really break­ing any sort of lore com­po­nents. I find it hard to believe that Mid­dle Earth never had some­thing like this when the real world has had sim­i­lar con­cepts for centuries.

Maybe to mix it up there can be fights pit­ting two mem­bers of the same class against one another. Or fights with cer­tain lim­i­ta­tions on them. For exam­ple, fights with­out armour, fights now allow­ing cer­tain attack types and so forth.Something would have to be done to put sim­i­lar lev­els against each other, but I think it’d be neat.

Ques­tion 3 Responses

I’ve never been high up in a guild, nor have I spent a lot of time in one. It makes this ques­tion dif­fi­cult to answer well. I did have some sug­ges­tions, though.

Cal­en­dar: This is some­thing peo­ple have been ask­ing about for a while. A place to sched­ule events, raids and so forth that play­ers can RSVP for.

With the advent of MyLotRO, I think this could be even more use­ful. Obvi­ously MyLotRO is able to hook into game data. I don’t know that this could be per­fected, as there does seem to be a delay between the two. That said, I think it could be use­ful over­all. I’m a big fan of hav­ing things related to a game in-game as opposed to elsewhere.

Kin­ship Cloaks: Many of us are aware of the dif­fi­cul­ties this causes. Floon has been very hon­est about how a cus­tomiz­able cloak sys­tem would cre­ate a load on the servers and clients that isn’t really desir­able. That said, it does seem as though a Kin­ship Leader could assign an exist­ing cloak with a color that Kin­ship mem­bers can use to iden­tify them­selves. This would be a cos­metic thing, obvi­ously. I don’t think it’s absolutely nec­es­sary (heck, a full on uni­form would prob­a­bly be con­fus­ing in raids and instances), but I know a lot of peo­ple are inter­ested in it.

Any­way, those are my gen­eral thoughts. I could go on and on with more Fluff ideas, but three is enough. Does any­one else have an idea they’d like to share?

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