LotRO hasn’t seen a new hobby since the addi­tion of Fish­ing many months ago. Play­ers have been ask­ing what’s next, but Tur­bine has pretty much kept a lid on the sub­ject. Every so often they’ll make a com­ment about when we could expect to see a new one (gen­er­ally “after Moria”), but that’s the extent of it.

Com­ing up with hob­bies that are simul­ta­ne­ously use­ful and fun seems like a dif­fi­cult task. It’s impor­tant that they’re sim­ple, but still com­pelling and worth­while to play­ers. It’s also impor­tant that they don’t greatly affect the bal­ance of any­thing else in the game. Fish­ing was prob­a­bly the most glar­ing omis­sion from LotRO (seem­ingly every other MMORPG under the Sun has it), but since that’s been added in since launch there’s noth­ing miss­ing that’s seems quite as obvious.

For the most part, I per­son­ally expect hob­bies to mostly have cos­metic effects. While cooked fishes can be eaten, the main goal of fish­ing (aside from being a time waster) is to catch big tro­phies and hang­ing them on your wall. I imag­ine that most future hob­bies will have a sim­i­lar approach.

Read the rest of this entry »