"Of course the real trick is in interpreting what you are reading on the forums. If one plays the game it becomes much easier to sort the wheat from the chaff.

And there really is something to the argument that the forums can represent a skewed picture. You may well not hear from the 95 people who think their runekeeper is just fine but the 5 who don't might go to the forum with their grievances.

The RK dev, being too busy in his off time playing DOTA or Minecraft for LOTRO, goes to the forums for ideas and what does he find there?

But on the same token it really pays for the players to conduct themselves with maturity and grace. It drove me nuts to see players crapping all over Turbine in their posts, especially the PvMPers, as if insulting the developer was the key to getting positive results.

Devs are human beings like everyone else and don't like to be told they suck because the player's experience is not what they think it should be. I can say from experience that one gets a hell of at lot further with honey than vinager when it comes to developers.

I mean, what is a dev supposed to do with a 'this game sucks now I quit' thread? But in the end my own philosophy is that a developer needs to get in there and get personally invested in what he or she is working on. It's hard to picture a guy like Gary Grisby saying, 'playing wargames...in my spare time? Who has time for that? I'll just read the forums...' "

"Q: Do you have any idea if Turbine really, genuinely gave out video cards to "winners" during those stress tests?

Good question. I really couldn't say but I highly doubt they gave out many. Hell decent video cards of any kind were in short supply in my day.

This is probably how the card was awarded:

QA Director: Hey, Mike, your 3D card still working?

QA Guy: Sorta, sometimes.

QA Director: Great. Yank it out, they need it for a contest.

QA Guy: ..."

"Q: how did you guys pull together 12 competent players to test raids in tier 2 challenge mode? Did you pull in devs? Did you hire testers (did they know how to play their class)?


QA had a 6 member team dedicated to instance testing and they were pretty competent at their classes. I remember 12-mans being tested with an additional 6 from QA (for example I'd play hunter, Sarah would play her burg, Mark his champ, Scott on his guard, and so forth, the four of us named all played on Live, and the remaining two would be those considered capable with the needed classes).

So an all-QA testing session wasn't Keystone Kops or anything. But not comparable to a veteran raiding kin on Live, more like a fairly decent group with a few pugged slots.

At other times the instance QA team would play with 6 devs. And the devs were generally baddies. However a lot of the actual polish feedback would come from the test servers."

"After Mirkwood the design decisions were increasingly like grasping into thin air, the cooks tossing random ingredients into a pot hoping for the best. The current state of LOTRO is the aggregate of all those decisions: a game with no distinct personality or sense of design continuity, a hodge-podge of borrowed, half-realized, and abandoned systems. Basically, bloody awful. But if there are still people having fun with it, I'm glad, it would be sad to see the plug finally pulled regardless."

"So many of such changes were driven by the belief that one needed to make the game 'more accessible', convienience and all that.  Arguably, they were trying to attract a type of gamer who was just never going to stick with LOTRO anyway. 

If taking the time to ride to a certain town to do your crafting (or to a certain dungeon for a raid) was too much to ask of the player, how much more was expecting them to grind out 75, 85 to 100 levels?  As a player myself I think the only meangingul aggregate effect of the changes for accessibility were to create a sense of triviality about the whole business that has obviously turned many off."

This is probably the best thread on the site, thanks for filtering these gems yobai.

" One can-and many do-take away the lesson that failure is acceptable. A low bar is a safe bet for all hands. Take the diminishing quality of LOTRO (I'd say 'diminishing' is being subjective but the marketplace has spoken by mostly leaving.)

This is the result of a chain of ill-conceived design decisions piled one on top of the other, a landslide of crap that finally drowned Middle Earth like the great flood in the lore.

Nobody was ever fired for that directly, in fact I highly doubt anyone within the company even openly suggested that the gaping wounds in LOTRO were all self-inflicted.

Some have suggested I'm a big meanie for attacking the direction of development, just a disgruntled QA peon being vindictive and unfair. I'd say I'm a LOTRO player who's been playing games since before some of the younger devs were born and can tell the difference between shit and sugar. It is what it is.

But there are lessons there that a would-be designer could recognize and put to good use moving forward. That's the fork in the road. You've seen how a good game can go bad and why; such knowledge is a valuable asset.

Most don't start out thinking, I'm going to run this title into the ground, screw the players, I'm getting my cheddar regardless. Some of the bad ideas on LOTRO were based on reasonable enough assumptions. It can really pay off to see some of the potential pitfalls and learn from them as you say: not on my watch.

As for LOTRO, the absolute bottom line lesson: understand your core audience and work for and with them, design for the players you have, not those you don't."

"A few months after the news WB sent out an advance party to commence indoctrination.  We were summoned to a meeting room and shown a 10 or 15 minute WB promo video and welcomed into the 'WB family'. 

The duo who addressed us seemed utterly out of place in our battered, dark warehouse space and I don't doubt they were counting the seconds to the return flight to Burbank.  I hadn't lived in LA at that time and found them rather odd. 

But even more odd was learning we were then to go to paper time sheets.  I laughed out loud.  Paper time sheets?  It's the 21st Century and WB games was on paper time sheet recording.

At that moment I realized that that division was not as high speed as one might have hoped.

As for the exact figures, we were told at the time (this is going back 5 years now almost to the day) and the upfront was as I recall less than 100 million. My friends and I were privately stunned.  As I said, it felt like we were being bought out at cost."

"Exploits can be a tricky one to assign the blame for. Some absolutely should have been caught.


The QA process can tend to see exploits go unnoticed. When tackling a system like LOTRO with so many moving parts QA processes tend to be very methodical.

Test plans outline how an instance is supposed to work-at stage 1 the boss does x, at stage 2, z-and in following them testers can become tunnel visioned on what they expect to see.

Although the sterotypical description of QA implies that testers are there to find problems, in practice their role is to ensure functionality.

Exploit finding requires an entirely freeform approach: one has to think like a player (I found a few big IA bugs-by no means all-simply because I knew how I as a player would approach that system).

But as good as LOTRO QA was, such [finding exploits] was not the department's strong suit. The department had a system that was great at processing huge amounts of delivered material with exceptional efficiency but not so good at predicting unintended behaviors.

Part of it can also be a simple lack of time to spend hours monkey testing around on an instance trying to break it. And there's the whole dev-QA relationship.

I think a good QA should simply take as a given that the dev effed up and you just have to figure out how. But I don't think a lot of guys saw it that way; they looked up to and trusted the competence of the developers, a faith that served neither dev or QA well.

On the other hand, the player's objectives are clear and free of procedural or physcological impediments: find the easiest and most lucrative manner in which to complete the instance.

Part of it is human nature: the potential rewards for the player in finding exploits are much greater than the QA guys working off the test plan.

For the QA guys, an exploit bug is ultimately just another number in the data base; for the player a found exploit can mean LOTRO riches. This doesn't mean the QA guys won't do due diligence but rather that the player has more incentive (the extra underlying desire that can give the brain that extra juice) to really concentrate on breaking the instance.

If he or she is an experienced player they know the game as well if not far better than the average QAer. These factors tend to make players far better MMO exploit finders than QA as a rule.

The importance of an exploit in house tended to scale to the ease of the exploit, how widespread its use was, and how impact-full the exploit was on the wider game.

So the skirm flag bug, based on the potential impact on the game, was a big deal. A less significant exploit that just meant the instance could be completed quicker without massive rewards accruing would be considered less important.

As for blame, there wasn't a whole lot of it thrown around, at least openly. After all, if a dev said, how could QA miss this exploit, the QA could reasonably respond, how could you put the damn thing in there to begin with?"

"Shutting down the game for a hotfix is really a decision where one is balancing the known impact of the issue versus the not inconsiderable logistical burden of the process.

And after the experience of the Moria winter, where the game was constantly being brought down and in so doing was costing us subscriptions left and right (when even the CEO basically says, this downtime BS needs to stop, there's a problem) there was a reluctance to turn off the switches if we could possibly avoid it.

After all, let's say an exploit comes in and we assemble a war room, stop the presses, and bring down the game...what if a week later another issue comes in?

Generally speaking it made more sense, at least in the short term, to hold off until a proper patch that included multiple fixes could be arranged. But unquestionably the 'let it ride' approach was frustrating and in the aggregate probably cost us more player confidence then multiple down times would have."

" Q: Aylwen, do you think a LotRO 2 could ever happen? Or a better game engine for what we have now? Were either mooted in your time there?

It never came up during my time; there would have been a dozen reasons why we couldn't have done it but the experience of AC2 alone (a kind of lingering trauma for Turbine) would have been enough to put people off.

I can't really imagine a LOTRO2 in any recognizable form ever seeing the light of day. A Moors only game would be viable and interesting (and reasonably cheap) but LOTRO herself...I think we're just left with our memories."

" Infinite Crisis

Since IC was after my time, I'll relate a (slightly redacted) explanation I got from a friend at the company related to why a mutual friend-a 10 year Turbine vet-was laid off last fall.

"So, infinite crisis was costing 4mil a month to make. And they dumped all their marketing budget into a 'twitch' campaign....which is a new sorta web thing where you can watch people play games.....and unless you are Korean and playing starcraft, no one gives two fucks about. It resulted in Infinite Crisis peak concurrency being....less than 1,000 people. Hell most people had no inkling the thing even came out.

So, hemorrhaging money, total failure, we gotta make it look like we are doing something to fix the faucet of losses. So, they shifted ______ to a lead on infinite crisis....and laid him off. See, we're saving money!"

There was no way IC could have succeeded. The necessary experience, expertise, and tech wasn't there. The MOBA market is dominated by DOTA.

And when you task Monolith (the Batman guys) with making a LOTR MOBA and then have Turbine make the DC heroes one, you're just going to end up with two failures."

Alright, stole all your hard work and reposted in another site, full credit to you m8, this was a massive undertaking on your part.

NP.  It was a good read but over almost 60 pages, so I just posted the more DDO-related/generic turbine stuff.

there is a bit more LOTRO stuff that only LOTRO players would find relevant or understand.

funny how much of the forum theorizing is so close to the mark.