The Lord of the Rings Online Community Q&A #3
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Q: Monster play has been in the game for a while now and a lot of people have tested it. What has surprised you about it and how has it gone?
A: It's gone great, people love it. We've gotten a lot of comments that it was accessible to people who didn't even try PvP in any way, shape or form. That was something we've thought about, but we were not sure it was going to be a big part of this. Also, the PvE experience in the Ettenmoors itself - whether you're playing as a monster or as a player - is something that people have really, really enjoyed. So, while we're obviously pushing at the PvP aspects of the Ettenmoors, as that's the main purpose, it's clear that people really like the way we do PvE and that even on the monster play side, it's a fun thing for them to be able to do from a different perspective.
We've learned a lot about balance. About what things we need to make available to monsters to make them be able to take on players, and conversely what are the things we need to do to balance the players with the monsters. We've been further along to start with balance, because you've got player characters playing against monsters who have skills that were specifically designed, even in the PvE world, to be balanced with each other. That's one of the advantages of not having player character against player character, in that the skill-sets are really well balanced.
So, I'd say the biggest things were how much fun people were having in the PvE experience and then the specific balancing things we learned, in terms of groups of monsters and groups of players playing together. This caused us to do things like add tracking skills for the monsters so that they can more easily find players, for example, and obviously lots of tweaking of stats.
And then, just the behavior! Watching groups of player controlled wargs, which are basically wolves, exhibiting pack behavior and surrounding players is fascinating. I spent a whole afternoon watching someone try to imitate our pathing algorithm so that they could stealth their way over to our side. That was both fascinating and fun. One behavior was the player being sneaky and one was to be very strategic and both are fun. And people love playing spiders too, which is really interesting, as it's the one non-anthropomorphic creature we have.
