LOTRO Legendarium: The quiet failure of the LOTRO hobby

Last month of Lord of the Rings Online’s the process was one of the busiest months in the history of the sport. Update 41 arrived at the end of July, there was (and continues to be) an uproar among Lore-master players for their changes, new lore servers have arrived, the Famer’s Faire is is back, and the “Year of the Dragon” special. the model began to experiment.

With all of this, it’s easy to forget that the 41st update came half-baked and fell flat. The excitement earlier this year over the promise of a new hobby was apparently rushed out and turned into disappointment. Unfortunately, what happened with birding is an example of when studios promise big, deliver small, and hope to sweep things under the rug.

Before I get too far into this column, I want to say that I understand that the success or failure of birding cannot be changed. LEAD a lot. It’s a trivial, “for fun” hobby that was meant to increase immersion, provide distraction, and generate small rewards. I don’t want to file a capital case out of this.

However we need to look at this because it’s typical of how Standing Stone Games (and many other MMO studios I’d mention) work at times. At the end of the year, SSG wanted to raise player excitement for 2024 by listing some big projects in the works, and the announcement of Picture of LOTRO a second hobby added to that excitement.

The problem is that it was just an idea at the time. No details were given about this hobby because there was nothing to decide other than “we want to do something else as a hobby.” Months in a year, and LEAD the devs were kicking around several ideas without settling on one.

When the birding was finally decided, the studio broadcast it in a livestream without screenshots or demonstrations because there weren’t any. This situation grew even more concerning when Update 41 went into testing… with no outcry at all. That didn’t come until several weeks into testing, and even then, it was an incomplete process.

Honestly, I think if the title and graphics for Update 41: On the Wing hadn’t been done,​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ía > manages. Obviously that would have been the right call to make because what ended up being pushed to the servers was an empty system that garnered little attention and little excitement.

If you have never tried to catch birds, just know that fishing in the wild. You go to a random place, click on some things, and hope you get a notification saying you’ve seen a bird. The thing is – and this is a real artist – you don’t see the bird anywhere on the screen. Oh, your interface says it sees one, but there’s no signal to be seen.

So if you had any reasonable expectations that a birding hobby might involve seeing and observing birds, that’s not the case at all. It’s a case of “find something and fix it in the mail.”

And don’t take my word for it; just listen to SSG’s Orion, said, “It’s important to note that this is the first implementation. This is ~1/3 of the expected total release. We thought it best to release this first version before we continue improvement.”

Having been in this genre for a while, I don’t expect fully functional, fully polished systems in MMOs on patch day. But I think it’s reasonable to expect a lot performance, a little polished systems and not an empty skeleton frame with a vague promise of improvement down the road. Yes, birding can be fixed later, but you only get one chance to make a first impression, and this hobby was all smoke and feathers.

I really admire SSG for producing a volume of content with a holistic experience from a small team with limited resources. The state of the country is looking to be at the top, but those weaknesses are starting to hurt the game as the team tries to come up with new ideas.

Too much ambition combined with too little testing and development resulted in unforced errors last year like the jungle event, the bird hobby, and the Lore-master revamp. That’s why I don’t have much faith in the promised relationship fix coming, especially since the studio has publicly stated that it won’t do anything close to what it wants to do with this system.

To me this sounds like a pipeline problem, the result of too few devs with the passion and creativity to spend time trying to deliver as much as they can. In my opinion, it’s always better to produce a small number of fully developed objects than a lot of janky final results. Alas, with a hungry player and the demands of studio ledgers, the luxury of betting and cleaning is not something that seems to be available these days.

Every two weeks, the LOTRO Legendarium continues its adventure (horror stuff, that) through the amazing, terrifying, inspiring, and popular world of the Internet. Justin has been playing LOTRO since it started in 2007! If you have a topic for a column, send it to him at justin@massivelyop.com.