Turbine, LotRO and asorted shit

[Lhynn]

Found this thread on another forum

Its a fairly interesting read, but theres a lot of uninteresting shit there, a dude in a different forum went through the trouble of salvaging the good content and quotes from said thread. Basically butthurt veteran employee telling it like it is, i think he used to work in westwood or some shit. Anyway, great stuff for anyone thinking about getting into the gaming industry, its not just Turbine specific.

"But this is a good point to mention that WB didn't acquire Turbine for the sake of LOTRO. They wanted Turbine's technical expertise in supporting online games. LOTRO itself was just a fringe benefit.

Thus WB crammed dozens of new staff into the Needham building while keeping LOTRO bare bones, disconnected Turbine's NetOps from Turbine (and christened it WB Net), and, when I came back, had LOTRO QA testing the Batman online shooter.

But in a sense WB's disinterest in LOTRO and sheer wealth has probably spared LOTRO from being shut down. They don't care enough to kill it where a smaller company might have by now."

"A cynic might suggest that the Paizs had flat lined DDO already and when Ascherons Call's concurrency numbers are beating DDO on a nightly basis, you can only go up from there.

LOTRO was certainly ailing when they made the call to go f2p. We all assumed it would happen eventually but not so soon. In March or thereabouts in '10 an email went out from Crowley stating that LOTRO's US subs were down to around 85k (the only time specific sub numbers were ever mentioned even in-house while I was there) and could we maybe ask our friends to try the game?"

",,,in my experience, the devs tended to pick and choose what suited them on the forums-not hard since everyone on there has a different opinion or gripe and to them it's absolutely the most important thing ever. Good example was PvMP stars.

Shortly after I got to Turbine Jen removed them from the UI. Being a star hugger I charged over and asked for an explanation.

Jen: 'Players complained about all the star hugging.'

Me: 'Who?'

Jen: 'On the forums...'

So I went and checked the PvMP forums and found a single thread, at the top of the page, complaining about them (the OP incidentally was a champ...not a class known for being able to show off stars).

I realized that she had gone to the forums fishing for some easy change she could make that could be said to be addressing 'player concerns'. And that wouldn't be the last time by a long shot that I, as an active and socially connected player, would be told by a dev who didn't play LOTRO themselves 'what players want'.

So...yeah whenever I hear Turbine claiming it changed this or that based on 'feed back', I tend to roll my eyes."

"... bad news was usually couched in disingenuous terms designed to save company face. Public appearances were a major thing with the company and we were very good at maintaining an image of continued success.

Even within the industry I found that most considered LOTRO a major success and had no hint that we were in trouble. But keeping up appearances became just ingrained, inside the walls and out.

Mersky in marketing was constantly sending out company wide emails highlighting the latest nice things Ten Ton Hammer had to say about us, this online award or that...even as we, the QA and Devs, knew very well we weren't putting out the best product we could have been."

"DDO

I can say that nobody on LOTRO, especially the older hands in QA, was surprised DDO was a lame duck. As for the DDO team...Turbine was surprisingly ptovincial; there was a sense of a real rivalry between the LOTRO and DDO teams, probably because of the slender resources we were all vying for.

LOTRO tended to view DDO as a flop that was wasting resources better spent on LOTRO. DDO felt they were held back by LOTRO hogging resources.

As an aside, the Turbine/Codemasters relationship was downright acidic. We couldn't stand their often confrontational attitude and they felt we were (to put it bluntly) Yanks douching up Tolkien's vision."

"DDO was a bomb."

" Now I'm not a money guy, I don't know any more about the account books at Turbine than you do at this point. But 105 million a year would suggest LOTRO has well over 500k players paying 15 a month on average. Where are they? Now I get that some players might be 'whales'.

At Meteor Games a big chunk of our monthly revenue came from rich kids-the sons of Kuwaiti oil barons and the like-who would drop thousands of dollars a month just on Island Paradise. But LOTRO would need a lot of rich Kuwaitis running around in Bree to generate that much revenue for a game that is planning server mergers (and has practically no players on many of these servers to merge anyway).

Were that figure even remotely accurate-and it isn't-WB's acquisition of Turbine was the deal of the century. Funny though about all those layoffs...contraction is rarely a sign of great success."

"it was always a little hazy to me (I should hit up some old Turbine hands on that one) but the gist of what I heard was that the DDO team felt that WOTC was at best disinterested in DDO and provided marginal assistance in the lead-up to development (I do distinctly remember the QA director commenting that 'they really wanted nothing to do with us').

Not permitting the Forgotten Realms setting for the game was seen as undercutting the game right out of the gate. Maybe there were legal reasons for that restriction? I don't know. But for an old-timey D&D player myself (meeting Zeb Cook on ESO was a starstruck nerd moment for me), the lack of an FR setting turned me off on DDO certainly.

Also, let me say that the actual lawsuit was with Atari, not WOTC, so that should be clarified. All of that kind of blended together to me as an outsider (as a LOTRO person)."

"Based on comments from friends at the company since RoR LOTRO has been under the gun for a long time. As I mentioned elsewhere I was told over a year ago that LOTRO would be lucky to see another twelve months [counting from March 2015]and yet it remains.

But at this point the LOTRO team has been so gutted that it is hard to see how any more cuts could be made short of just pulling the plug.

When they do finally kill it I wouldn't expect much in the way of a warning: nobody is going to drop money on micro transactions for a game slated to shut down in two or three months."

"I returned to LOTRO in the fall of 2011: the company I had been working for, Meteor, in LA, abruptly folded and I got call from my old lead saying they were planning big things for PvMP and would I come back to help? I was really nostalgic for Turbine after ZOS and Meteor so said, sure-it was a big pay cut from what I'd been making since leaving the first time but that was fine.

But I found that WB's corporate influence, just barely nascent in the summer of 2010, had permeated the place. Basically all of the old headaches were still there but all the magic-the sense of family and genuine warmth you felt in Westwood-were gone. For the money offered it just wasn't worth it; I managed about four months and then put in my resignation. "

"Q: Aylwen, you said earlier that Turbine were running 3 mmos with similar staff levels of companies that only run 1 mmo. How did they manage to do that? Do you think Turbine stretched themselves too thin and should've just focused on one game?

Absolutely we stretched ourselves thin (and as previously mentioned not just with the MMOs) and I often wondered what could have been achieved if we had focused all of our energies on a single game. Needless to say, which game that should have been depended on which game one was working on! But it was almost as if it never occurred to anyone that we really shouldn't have been able to do what we did.

Three MMOs, a console project, downloader that would let you start playing before the installation was complete, LOTRO China...from a small company in a building sandwiched between a car dealership and Frugal Fanny's discount clothing...make it so!

Whatever may be said for the quality of LOTRO's development team (mixed to say the least) and leadership (or lack thereof), Turbine was blessed with some incredible talent, particularly on the technical side of things. Our NetOps guys worked wonders and by the time WB came along they had encountered every problem you could possibly experience and developed strategies to deal with them. It was hard earned wisdom that paid dividends constantly.

Once again I have to say that while as a LOTROer it was incredibly frustrating to see the quality of LOTRO diminish in large measure because we didn't have enough of the right people at the controls, on bar Turbine was an incredible operation. Note how I always say 'we' in referring to Turbine: for a long time the words 'Turbine family' weren't just an HR slogan: they really meant something."

" If a carpenter pisses off another carpenter in North Carolina and then moves to California there's little chance that will come back to haunt him.

Not so much in the game industry. And there's a very strong culture of secrecy there that becomes ingrained, especially amongst the rank and file. Forget that you're making video games that are often as not derivative rehashes of twenty other games; this is serious business!

And forget that a year from now your game will probably be pushing up daisies in the GameStop budget bin anyway. This same culture extends to marketing and community relations: never tell the truth, never admit a mistake, silence criticism, contort the facts even if it means blatantly insulting the intelligence of your customers. Release bogus screenshots of your upcoming product, happily collect the pre-orders, release a buggy unfinished product, and then sell everything you didn't get done on time as 'DLC'. But now I'm digressing a bit!

The take-it-as-you-can-get-it nature of the industry means that frequently people aren't necessarily working on the games they would ideally want to. "

"Q: You've mentioned lotro china a few times. Why was it canceled? And how different was it going to be from the western lotro?

Ah LOTRO China aka perrma-beta. They-CDC-were awful to deal with. Basically they didn't have to pay us as long as the game remained in beta. And so-surprise, surprise-every six months or so they'd come up with something they weren't happy with and needed to be fixed before they would end beta.

So for example, LOTRO had too much blood (seriously)...then too many undead (ancestor worship and all that-in fairness WoW had to address that as well)...then the lack of open world PvMP was unacceptable. So, hurting for cash, we dutifully spent a few months creating a system of rotating open world zones that would be opened for PvMP.

But in the end it was all for naught-they never paid us and all we got for our troubles were the castaway players when they shut down. Our negotiators who went over there came back with horror stories of their business practices and treatment of employees. So when the Chinese company Perfect World entered the competition to buy LOTRO it was a pretty unsettling development. "

"Whatever else may be said about Blizzard, their 'don't ship it until it's ready' philosophy has always been a cornerstone of their success in my opinion.

In the MMO business everybody was constantly trying to complete with WoW, copying their ideas, their look, even their fonts...but nobody seemed to step back and analyze how Blizzard was in a position to pull off WoW in the first place. It was like, 'here's some money guys, make us one of those wow things all the kids are playing-I want my yacht!'.

And there is a big disconnect between the executive branches of many of these companies and the development arms. Certainly the rank and file are often blissfully unaware of fires in the kitchen up until the pink slips hit their desks.

And sometimes there are good reasons for deadlines-they aren't just arbitrarily imposed by producers to make life hard for the widget makers. In fact one of the dirty secrets of the industry is worker productivity, or rather the lack thereof.

One hears about 'crunch time' constantly: the stories of poor developers being worked mercilessly around the clock, slave-driven away from their families by their heartless corporate overlords.

The truth is somewhat cloudier. Crunch is not an inevitable fact of game development. Ask a producer what it's like trying to get full productivity out of game developers and if they are feeling honest the term 'herding kittens' might approximate their response. At one company-not Turbine-we had an artist spend two weeks trying to get a bear death animation just right...ya can't make this stuff up!

In fact Turbine's crunch times were relatively mild: a benefit of being in the MMO business for years is having experienced producers who can look at the resources on hand and accordingly set milestones and triage features realistically.

In the case of Moria the product was rough at ship not because of poor productivity but rather inexperience in some quarters and a ship date that just asked too much out of the team. The following layoffs were explained to us as being a consequence of Moria's poor sales.

I didn't really buy that and I suspect that the staff reductions had been perculating for some time, perhaps to pretty up the account books as we geared up to shop ourselves around. But such is just speculation."

"I wish I had more to say about AÇ-by my day it had already faded into the background, maintained by a dev or two and a QA guy (they lost a guy with the Moria layoffs, I remember).

I couldn't have even located their nook in Westwood. As I mentioned at one point I was somewhat envious of the forgotten nature of their work, they seemed to be free to tinker with AC with no inference from Marketing or anyone else. I believe the hitherto lost AC2 code was found on Andy Gillis' old machine. His happening to have that build saved an entire game from oblivion."

"One time at Westwood I was out by an employee door having a smoke and a fellow walked up to ask where the visitor's entrance was as he was there for an interview (I don't recall which media outlet he was with). On a whim I said I'd bring him through the building to the secretary's desk and took him through the QA section, kitchen, dev pit, and so forth (Westwood was a bit of a maze).

He was obviously surprised by what he saw and commented that he had no idea how small we were. I always thought that if our fans knew what a shoestring operation we really were they'd have respected us more, not less, for what we did accomplish."

Continue in part 2

 

[Lhynn]

Part 2

"Q: Do you think Turbine regret jumping into bed with WB or was it do or die?
It was basically do or die and it was either WB or Perfect World and nobody was too keen on the latter. There was a line of thought that PW's interest was used to leverage WB to make the deal but that was certainly above my pay grade.

When Jim Crowley gathered us for a company meeting at a hotel conference room down the road (Westwood being a little small for such affairs) on a late wintery afternoon to announce the WB deal we applauded heartily. It was the end of a long period of gloom and uncertainty and a happy moment.

I think we in the rank and file were a bit naive about what becoming a subsidiary would really entail but at least Turbine-and LOTRO-would go on.

But there are many of us who were there for those Westwood days who wish we could go back. Life does go on though and we have our memories."

"I heard a great story from some friends I had working in Hunt Valley about Sid Meier. When he was designing a game, an extremely basic mock-up would be thrown together, nothing but basic functionality and MS-paint type assets. People would sit down with it and if it wasn't fun it would go right back to the drawing board.

Too often on LOTRO whether or not a system was actually fun didn't seem to matter. Or it was like an afterthought.

To be a good designer takes more than a computer science degree or some d&d campaigns under your belt; simply playing a lot of video games isn't enough qualification.

The best developers I have personally met-and they are a rare breed-are natural entertainers. It's like comedy. Watching Seinfeld or working at the Apollo does not a comedian make. It's an innate character trait. Most devs don't have it and that's fine. But if they don't they need to have the self-confidence to reach out to their QA and their colleagues to cover the difference.

But I've found that many are afraid to do that, as if they'd be revealing that, no they really don't know what the hell they are doing. Screw QA, screw the players...they aren't devs, they aren't the professionals, they aren't qualified to judge game design. They just aren't playing it right! This may sound somewhat unfair-certainly snarky-but it's a fact of life. The degree of peevishness and passive aggressiveness, the fragile egos, one encounters in the game industry is tedious indeed."

"I would comment that Turbine was not particularly open about it's tech even in-house. One of the things that amazed me at ZOS was QA's having access to all the same tools as the developers. We were in fact encouraged to play with them, build quest chains, mobs, skills, and everything else. And it was a great idea, too, as not only could QA precisely identify how something was broken, often we could actually fix the bugs ourselves and save the devs the time. Moreover any QA brought over to devside could be expected to already know the tools, saving weeks of training time. I imagine that paid ZOS a lot of dividends in the home stretch.

But such was unthinkable at Turbine. To have any influence as a QAer you really needed to forge personal friendships with the developers and even then you were fighting an uphill battle, regardless of how fully you had demonstrated your knowledge of the game. But on the same token a lot of QA are trying to work their way to devside and so quite often their priorities can be compromised in their quest for patrons.

I will say I was very loyal to my department; a good QAer has to be honest or else he/she isn't much use as QA. But honesty isn't always likely to get you on everyone's Christmas card list. Yet a QAer who really believes in their profession is a real gem for any company."

"Some devs are just awful about fixing bugs. Some are bad about reporting check-ins. Others are simply overworked. And in a company where QA isn't generally allowed access to the dev tools the bugs can pile up and snowball into so much work that it becomes impossible to fix them all. As I said earlier, ZOS allowing QA access to the dev toolkit paid big dividends.

Turbine ought perhaps to have considered doing the same.

Continued in part 3

 

[Lhynn]

"Q:So Turbine knew about the lag all the time and yet CS always blamed players computers or ISP for it on the official forums. Were they ordered to cover up or did they do it on their own initiative?

We absolutely knew about the lag and server performance issues. This is a case in point that underscores my above observations about honest and clear communication. What kind of message are you sending your customers when at one moment you tell players that Mylotro is being discontinued to improve overall game performance and then the next that their rigs and providers are to blame for lag?

It's worth taking a moment to reiterate that Customer Service and OCR, the Community Relations team, while sharing overlapping spheres as front facing departments, are distinct entities.

Neither were directly tied into the development process and both could at times be left out of the loop, with awkward consequences. CS in particular was often forgotten in the decision-making process and left to hold the bag.

The call to hold off on fixing Hechgam, as I mentioned earlier, condemned our CS guys to deal with the player fallout. And when they were forced to discontinue manually advancing the instance for players (they just didn't have the staff to spend all night addressing every plea for aid) they caught hell for that too.

Another great example is multi boxing in the Moors. The policy was basically, they pay for all those accounts, let them play.

But for the sake of a tiny minority of boxers and their subs, CS had to deal with literally thousands of irate complaints, each one a ticket that took up their time and slowed down their ability to respond to other tickets just that much.

Moreover neither the devs or the producers ever thought to give CS a head's up on upcoming instances and potential problems. So a CS guy might find themselves having to respond to issues they knew nothing about, unsure on what was by design, what was a bug, and if there was a work around.

Now our CS team was a good outfit, with some excellent people, but often through no fault of their own was the focus of player dissatisfaction. But the point is, more often then should have been the case, CS was forced to translate at times hazy or even contradictory policies and issues as best it could.
OCR, under Meg 'Patience' Rodberg, who was a warm and justly popular person with our fans, acted as the human face of the company. Her role, and she was great for it, was to make the players feel like they were extended members of the Turbine family.

But she too wasn't always kept in the loop and also had to interpret policies that may have been cloudy or (again) contradictory.

Sapience...wasn't as well suited to that role. No sense in trying to deny that. I give him a lot of respect for his charitable endeavors (I myself ponied up 400 bucks for his first children's hospital drive, best money I've spent in ages) and in person he was a likeable guy. But during his tenure the whole tone of OCR's posture changed.

No description is required here, the Sapience era is painfully well documented. OCR seemed to be the Spin Machine, enforced with the liberal application of the ban hammer. Not exactly guaranteed to improve 'community relations'. "

"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: Also adding in the move to the laggy Turbine servers, because no one believed that latency would become an issue once you're going trans-atlantic.

I'd be playing on Live at Turbine, with our data shack barely a state away, and still be lagging out!
"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: ..."

" Something I have found to be exceptional to the game industry is the almost complete lack of internal criticism. Everyone is scared of offending anyone else (well, except QA, they're open season: I haven't met a veteran QA yet who doesn't have at least one story of being treated with blatant disrespect, it just comes with the territory). Basically the thought process is, 'if I tell so-and-so his work is derivative tripe, how might that hurt me down the road?'. All in all the atmosphere isn't one likely to produce a lot of frankness.

But the other thing I'd add to my meandering goes back to one of my favorite bits from Patton, where Codman comments to Patton that sometimes his men can't tell when he is acting, to which Patton replies, 'It's not important for them to know. It's only important for me to know'. I think big problems really start when companies start believing their own spin. No question there was a fair bit of that in play at Turbine, at least below the executive level."

"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."

"I felt that to a degree I would just be confirming what a lot of people already surmised. LOTRO's community is a pretty intellectual bunch. I think some are in willing denial but obviously few of them frequent this forum.

Sparce content, recycled content, decisions that alienated many long term fans, increasingly blatant monetization (I despised the ubiquitous Turbine coin icon and the endless gratuitous references to the 'store'...just the name LOTRO Store perfectly sums up the degree of artistry in their approach), repeated layoffs, a CM out to crush any murmer of discontent...none of these things generally typify a well-helmed ship at full steam.

One can-and I always will-point to what was accomplished with so little. I'm proud to have had the opportunity to contribute in some way to LOTRO. And the sad thing is, even at our SoM sub numbers the game was still profitable.

Then LOTRO was essentially put on the corner to get pimped until the last cent could be wrung out of it, just another resource to be exploited. But the beauty of the game does at least stand as a legacy of the old Turbine magic.

"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."

 

[Lhynn]

"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.
"One thing I'd like to underscore generally (not that Danchir is saying as much) is that I was never aware personally of any deliberate attempts to mislead players (no rooms of Mr. Burns and Co. cackling about players being rubes). Mostly, when new features were discussed but didn't materialize (and long time players can doubtless recall for themselves examples, such the 'LI revamp' that has floated up about once a year since SoM) it was a case of logistical concerns intervening. And departmental communications were not always great (such being a common enough woe in any company). To say a word in defense of the front facing guys, at times they just weren't kept up to speed with development priorities. Patience became a target in the community for her 'no advantage' comments vis F2P but as far as she was told, that was the policy."

"Speaking for myself, no. I wish I hadn't gone back the second time. The reason being, having had the experience of Turbine of the Westwood days, when it really was like a family and had that old school atmosphere, it just wasn't the same at Needham. It wouldn't be entirely accurate to say that Turbine had gone totally corporate (at least as of RoI) but it definitely wasn't what it used to be. And the obviousness of where LOTRO sat in the general scheme of things was hard to accept, given that LOTRO was why I went to Turbine in the first place.

Speaking to a guy or gal interested in QA, the industry, or just in being a part of LOTRO, I would say: go for it. There are still some good people at Turbine, its name yet carries some prestige, and if you like LOTRO it's as good a place to start as anywhere, particularly if you are already in New England. The QA director is a decent guy, you'll get some good QA experience at Turbine (QA isn't what it used to be either thanks to attrition but it's still decent by industry standards), and the occasional WB swag isn't bad. Job security, however, is obviously a bit of a concern as is cost of living. I made it for a few years on the pittance I was paid at the time but easy, it was not."

"One thing I would point out to would-be Turbinites as a positive is the company's history of shipping titles. If you are looking at a career in the industry, in QA or wherever, having shipped titles on your résumé is big. As I mentioned at an earlier point, one can spend years in the business and through happenstance have no shipped products to one's credit. "

" 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."

"I've described at length how we over stretched ourselves with secondary projects and expenses but it still amazes me to think back on that time.

Put simply, Turbine ran itself into the ground. All of the spin in the world (and Turbine's spin machine is first rate) can't hide from discerning eyes the facts of the matter. DDO was a bomb, LOTRO withered on the vine as we played around with console dev kits, and we ultimately accepted vassal status to WB from a position of weakness and desperation.

From what I heard from friends higher up the food chain than myself, WB wasn't entirely happy with what they found once their own people got their teeth into our account books.

As it was WB acquired us for a song, damn near at cost, with conditional future payments being presented as part of the lump sum in the press. The whole thing was a shame and set against that backdrop individual design decisions within LOTRO take on a certain insignificance.

But I find absolutely nothing exceptional in the Turbine story in this respect. The themes if not the same scenarios have been played out in dozens of companies. Look at the incredible collapse of old Infinity Ward mere months after MW2 was one of the biggest entertainment successes of all time. Whether one is talking about an infantry company or a game company, everything stands or falls based on leadership.

That isn't to say that the leadership in a Turbine scenario is bad per se, rather that its priorities may be far removed from what the customers would like to see.

Oh I wouldn't say Turbine's leadership was good. In fact it was conspicuously lacking in many areas. But the priority for the Crowley regime was finding a buyer for the company.

It that much at least it succeeded. The investors got some return on their investment, the execs no doubt rode out with a tidy sum."

"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."

"The marketing team was very good at presenting an image of success to the world. And mostly the media accepted everything at face value. At the time I was somewhat perplexed by the strategy.

How do all these obscure gaming awards, articles on gaming sites, and media interviews sell LOTRO to a wider audience? Surely anyone who followed Massively or Ten Ton would have long since become aware of LOTRO.

But it was really about the image. The real measures of success were the sub numbers and we were a private company and under no obligation to reveal them even if we'd wanted to. 'Best MMO', 'Best Community', 'Best Expansion'...all those strongly suggest success in a vacuum of hard data.

As for bringing in new subs...well, that wasn't really their forte. Just look at the awful splash screens. As the grandson of the guy who designed the Wonder Bread package, I wouldn't describe our marketing team as a stable of ad wizards."

"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?"

"One thing that really surprised me going to Turbine as a player first was the lack of interest in the game economy.

As a player I had assumed that this was something MMO companies would assign a lot of importance to. After all, it's a facet of the game that impacts virtually all players on a daily basis and can strongly influence player behavior.

But in fact, and except in the most general of terms and usually in relation to train wrecks ala the skirm flag bug, the game economy was a complete non-issue. Obviously this isn't an easy area to track-one can't ask Bungo Chubbs at the Michel Delving AH how the markets have been trending compared to last week on Arkenstone and compared to Landy-but I imagined someone would at least have established some rough targets to work from.

Again, this is far easier said then done and verges on dev keeping track of who hates who in the Ettenmoors but as gold was a massive incentive to exploit (and really the biggest negative from exploiting as otherwise it doesn't make much difference in the big picture) I always wanted to see price ceilings. How high or low you could reasonably set a price ceiling on AH transactions would in turn be based on mean averages for player wealth."

"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."

One might step back and wonder if the level-based system a game like LOTRO uses all but guarantees a problematic end game.

It essentially works out like a pyramid: in the beginning, rolling your toon, you have a ton of content at your disposal, multiple paths to level (in Eriador you can pick and choose your way with some freedom until almost 50). But as the game progresses through multiple expansions, that content begins to taper down to a narrow path until finally 95% of all the content that the game has to offer is now obsolete in the rear view mirror.

Assuming a brisk pace, in a month you've burned through hundreds of dollars in expansions representing years of development just to end up standing in an AH in Gondor wondering what you're supposed to do next. All the unscaled instances that came before are pointless now and since scaling means generic rewards, you'll naturally just pick the easiest and spam it via IF from said AH.

Any new IC is almost like throwing out bread at a soup kitchen: they're just going to be hungry again tomorrow. And pity the new player faced with that 100 level grind just to reach that AH...9/10 will give up by level 30 having spent zero money and having had no chance to really connect to the game.

The prized 'casual' player who decides 100 levels sure doesn't seem like a casual investment."

" 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."

Jesus fuck, even copy pasting this shit was painful, all credit to some cuck named Yobai, the undertaking of rescuing all these great quotes and industry insights goes entirely to him, i merely infinitroned it.

 

[Xorphitus]

How long will it be until DDO and LOTRO join Asherons Call?

 

[Lhynn]

How long will it be until DDO and LOTRO join Asherons Call?

Not likely to happen, both games are Standing Stones livelyhood, and until they procure something else or develop it on their own they wont be shutting them down.
Getting the MMOs probably costed the crew their severance money, so im guessing they are putting all their eggs into those two baskets.

 

[Bester]

I know all this shit by heart and you can replace LOTRO with any X MMO and it'll all be true, but I still can't uncringe my face after reading this.

 

[Darth Roxor]

tldr

 

[Rahdulan]

Hey, at least they hinted at model updates in the Moria expansion for LotRO.
https://www.lotro.com/forums/showth...new-Standing-Stone-team&p=7677506#post7677506

What if I let it slip that we are looking at substantial avatar revamps for the Mordor expansion?

I think we can all agree that prospect can be both exciting and scary. Avatar preference is super subjective, and even some of the best received game revamps have a percentage of players who prefer the old look. We are looking at providing an option to use the old avatars so we are not forcing players to use newly updated models and animations if they don't want to.

Having two avatar paths then becomes a design challenge if we add new hairs or facial options; the old avatars wouldn't have an equivalent option.

These are the types of design and art challenges we are wrestling with as we work on the expansion.

Sev~

And that whole license renewal that everyone was panicking about not so long ago is apparently a "non-issue".
https://www.lotro.com/forums/showth...new-Standing-Stone-team&p=7678093#post7678093

As stated in the FAQ, the license has been renewed. Since this license is no different from every other IP license, and since it's a standard piece of behind the scenes business, it is not something we are going to provide further specifics on. Suffice it to say, the license will continue to be a non-issue for the rest of the game's life, and we expect to continue developing LOTRO for many, many years to come, with your support.

 

[Xorphitus]

How long will it be until DDO and LOTRO join Asherons Call?

Not likely to happen, both games are Standing Stones livelyhood, and until they procure something else or develop it on their own they wont be shutting them down.
Getting the MMOs probably costed the crew their severance money, so im guessing they are putting all their eggs into those two baskets.

Hopefully they can keep them going awhile longer.

 

[Gerrard]

Q:So Turbine knew about the lag all the time and yet CS always blamed players computers or ISP for it on the official forums. Were they ordered to cover up or did they do it on their own initiative?

We absolutely knew about the lag and server performance issues. This is a case in point that underscores my above observations about honest and clear communication. What kind of message are you sending your customers when at one moment you tell players that Mylotro is being discontinued to improve overall game performance and then the next that their rigs and providers are to blame for lag?

Sounds exactly like Cryptic.

 

[BaconAndEggs]

I'm gonna miss Asheron's Call, though. There wasn't an MMO like it and there hasn't been once since.

 

[v1rus]

And here I came, all excited we are a making LotRO codex guild

Oh well, quite an interesting read. Huge af tho, read the first post, the rest I'm saving for my morning coffee.


Nothing goes better with some well-deserved bad mouthing than the morning coffee.

 

[Commissar Draco]

And here I came, all excited we are a making LotRO codex guild

Oh well, quite an interesting read. Huge af tho, read the first post, the rest I'm saving for my morning coffee.


Nothing goes better with some well-deserved bad mouthing than the morning coffee.

I am playing the game Comrade now; not really into this Fellowship shit but I did played with others a few times; the beauty of this game is its plays like Single player non dumbed down Oblivion... but if you interested in this Codex Guild shit send me a pm... I do had a few places I missed cause they were a few instances too hard for even Blue Path Captain to complete.

 

[v1rus]

I am playing the game Comrade now; not really into this Fellowship shit but I did played with others a few times; the beauty of this game is its plays like Single player non dumbed down Oblivion... but if you interested in this Codex Guild shit send me a pm... I do had a few places I missed cause they were a few instances too hard for even Blue Path Captain to complete.

I have been having an MMO itch I cant scratch for quite a while, since I just cant find the game I want to play at the moment.

LotRO has been a serious contender since the itch started, but I have yet to give it a second go. Gave TOR a try an hour ago, and it seems like there is no way in hell anything can good out of that mess, so the search continues. If (when actually) I decide to try out LotRO again , Ill be letting you know

What server are you on? I have a level 50 something Lore-Master on one of EU ones, but fuck me if I can remember which. And ye, the game is completely playable solo, and looks fucking majestic.

 

[Severian Silk]

It's an MMO. Who cares.

 

[oscar]

Fun classes/races for me and an irl friend (both pretty inexperienced with MMOs) to play?

 

[Drakron]

Sounds exactly like Cryptic.

You know what is funny?

Daniel Stahl back when he was STO Executive producer once mentioned that Cryptic didnt had the money or the staff like Turbine did, now that is just humorous but its hilarious that since I read that AFTER I started playing STO that was after PWE brought Cryptic, since WB brought Turbine in 2010, naming Turbine was already in the shit when good old Stahl made that comment.

As much Perfect World is a shitty company ... at least they arent fucking Warner Bros, you just had to look at Monolith to see what would happen but hey, it was 2010 and PW was Chinese ... who's laughing now?

 

[dibens]

 

[Exar Kun]

Lotro impressed me in how good of a middle earth simulator it is and how responsive the gameplay is. Very polished and detailed game, graphics have held up, and the animations are pretty. Most big IP WoW clones (SWTOR, STO, WAR) have had clunky gameplay, unresponsive UI's and glitchy animations.

 

[Helton]

Toilet paper right by PC. Old man can still get his fap on.