Amlug has a blog post that I think many have been want­ing for quite a while now. It’s all about Turbine’s planned changes for how Radi­ance gear is bartered. I highly rec­om­mend read­ing the full post at its source and leav­ing some com­ments. The entire post is of inter­est, though, so I have 95% of it below as well:

Yes, we have lis­tened to your con­cerns about the Book 8 changes and the pre­vi­ous instances not being changed.  We have talked long and hard about what are the best ways to fix this sys­tem so it is works for as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble and we also ulti­mately want it to feel…wait for it…rewarding!

So we have come up with a new plan.  Meet Medal­lions — The new shiny barter token to use for bar­ter­ing for your radi­ance pieces and some extra Leg­endary Item aug­men­ta­tions!  Medal­lions will be replac­ing most of the tokens that you’ve seen since Moria.  There will be unique Medal­lions for each clus­ter of instances that we release.  Cur­rently there will be two for the live con­tent you guys are play­ing: the Medal­lion of Moria and the Medal­lion of Lothlo­rien.  The Medal­lions will drop off of every boss mon­ster in level 58+ instances.  This means that killing boss one in Forges of Khazad-Dum will drop Medal­lions for every­one in the party.  (Note: Make sure you all loot the chest!)  I’m not going to get into how many, etc. here because we are still bal­anc­ing the sys­tem.  Play­ers can use Medal­lions to trade for same things they were trad­ing for — namely the Chal­lenge sets, the other dun­geon sets, and relics and Leg­endary Item XP.

Cur­rently the Medal­lions of Moria will drop in: Grand Stairs, Forges, Six­teenth Hall, Fil Ghashan, Skum­fil, and Dark Delv­ings.  The Medal­lions of Lothlo­rien will drop in Water­works, Halls of Craft­ing, and Hall of Mir­rors.  Future instances will drop a new Medallion.

The goal here is to not force you all to grind through instances in only the way we want.  Also, play­ers will still gain ground towards gain­ing their sets even if they aren’t achiev­ing the Chal­lenges.  How­ever, doing the Chal­lenges will gain you more Medal­lions!  In addi­tion to this, we are going to be adding in some items to Chal­lenges at a very low per­cent­age drop.  This means you’ll have a chance of get­ting some­thing spe­cial. Finally, we are fix­ing it so there are new Chal­lenge quests that work while you are inside the instances only and are on a daily retry timer.  Orion has men­tioned this tech and you can read his blog for more infor­ma­tion.  Oh and if that is not enough, we have some new Leg­endary Item good­ies that you can trade for that we think you will like a lot.  (But you’ll have to wait to find out what exactly!)

“But what about my old tokens?  What do I do with them?”

No wor­ries.  There will be new npcs at the Twenty-first Hall and Caras Gal­ad­hon near the class train­ers that will exchange those old crusty tokens for new shiny medal­lions!  These Barter Exchange Traders will also hold all the Leg­endary Item good­ies.  They are your new favorite buddies.

I’m sure there is much more to talk about and we’ll be dis­cussing the new instances we are work­ing on shortly, but for now, I hope this comes as good news.

–Amlug

p.s. Radi­ance and Hope have been sep­a­rated back out again.  Radi­ance will no longer give bonuses to play­ers on land­scape, it will only be used to com­bat Gloom.

Happy? Unhappy? Indif­fer­ent? Unsure until it’s in effect? No mat­ter what your opin­ion, I think we can all agree that it’s great to see Tur­bine address­ing player con­cerns so directly. I am per­son­ally happy that they’ve taken the time to think about this rather than rush­ing some­thing out to appease some of the more vocal forum members.

I have to say, I pre­fer this blog approach some of the team mem­bers are tak­ing as of late. They can get all of their ideas out before oth­ers can inter­ject or mis­con­strue. There’s also more time to edit and be sure of what they’re say­ing before they post it. I think this goes over bet­ter in the long run, honestly.