The Lord of the Rings Online Developer Diary, Part One
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Originally, I planned on only allowing those with specific professions trained access to these instances (for example, only Prospectors would be able to access the two mine instances). This meant that those with a Harvesting Profession would have content specifically for them, but I found that this had the potential to greatly shrink the available player-base for the content. In the Live Environment, it is important that anything you make reaches the greatest audience possible. Because of that, I removed the Profession restriction from all instances.
Another important factor of these instances had to be replayability. Much of our content is one-time only which limits shelf-life. In contrast, I wanted to make sure these instances kept people coming back and kept them interested again and again.
Finally, this content had to be rewarding enough to compel players to run it but not so much so that it was unbalanced. With the assistance of the Game Systems team, a simple reward scheme that further emphasized the crafting-centric nature of the instances was developed.
