The Lord of the Rings Online Interview
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RPS: Has LOTRO gained the audience you'd hoped and expected?
Jeffrey Steefel: In terms of popularity, we're pretty certain we're the number two MMO out there at the moment. You couldn't ask for a better outcome than that. That was always our goal, among other things. We have a great community, and it continues to grow. In terms of the types of player, it's fascinating. We're validating to some degree what we hoped would happen, which is all different types of players in the game. It makes it a little harder for us developers, as it means we have at least three or four audiences to try and satisfy. It's good that it gives a little depth to the game. We've got hardcore roleplayers in there, we've got more casual players who are spending less time in the game but are very interested anyway. We're very happy with the way things are going right now, and the fact that we've been able to update the game the way we said we would. We've added 20+ % to the game in the last six months in land, in content, in functionality.
RPS: How do you balance the game for both hardcore and casual players?
JS: It's a combination of just how you design it in the first place. We talked a lot about chess easy to play, hard to master. So, crafting, for example there's a path for the less hardcore crafters that lets you get into in the crafting immediately, advance and get a sense of what it's like fairly easily. At the same time, there's Master Crafting, which allows you to master a certain profession and really get up to making the cool stuff. You start being able to add special ingredients and create more rare items. That's something that's going to improve over time, with some of the plans for crafting we have going forwards. It's the same with combat. You get into combat fairly simply with auto-attack, skills, fairly straightforward stuff. As you progress through the advancement path you start learning how to use combos and Fellowship manoeuvres [powers activated by working with other players]. There's an increasing level of complexity and power you can apply to combat /if you want to./ But you don't have to.
And then it comes down to how we're listening to the players on different channels. We're not just listening to the hardcore guys who are saying (man, we need a lot more high level content.) But we're answering that we just added a 12-man raid dungeon, which is /huge./ But we're also hearing from others players (hey, there's lot of really cool storytelling content that's kind of high level and I need a group to see it. Boy, it'd be great if that was more solo-able), so we're addressing that too. We look at things like playing music, which is appealing to a more casual audience, and make sure we put time and energy into making that better. We're on our third revision of music at this point.
