first of all, I’d want to tell you how glad I am that I’ve found you! In the office we have an evil proxy, which we can’t remove and it wont let us visit blog sites or forums anymore, so if the production is over, the season of pure boredom is kicking in :)

Think I’ve seen most of your names on globallff on Laurelin, so I’ve read a few posts to see, who you are and where you come from, becoz to be very honest, lotro isn’t even close to it’s old social scene nowadays. Way too many kids got MoM from Santa’s little helpers last year and even more picked an EN-RP server to start their chars on, which I really can’t understand.

What I wanted to say with all of the above is that I really like the site (I LOVE the name!!) and like the way you discover the world of lotro, which game captures the philosophy of Tolkien the best way I could ever imagine (Shadows of Angmar first of all).

But – and it’s now really “on” to this topic – don’t you think that levelling all the Rift and Helegrod instances will just take away the fun factor from lower level players and turn the game into a grind fest? If I was rolling my first char now, I would feel offended, that I’m “not allowed” to do instances until I grind myself to 60.. Like I was worthless before then..

I think the game becomes what people create from it, I did CD with a 48-50 group as my warden was only 49 and that was one of my best runs in two years in the game!

Spread the love,

IT

I’m not sure it is the best solution, but ever since then i’ve thought it would be interesting if the same could be done for the various stages of “end-game” in WoW and/or LOTRO. When MoM was released I had three characters at level 50. While some people tried to level up all of their toons to the new cap at once, I just stuck with one. There is simply no need to have multiple characters at the level cap. Many intense raiding kins even frown upon bringing along alts.

Why not let me keep my two other level 50′s stay at level 50? Cap their xp so that i can do the annuminas dailies, delve into the rift weekly, and have an actual challenge in helegrod.

WarCry: Meeko: Any chance that some of the epic instances in volumn 1 will be eased as not so many people are around to group with who are interested in doing them… or a way to hire npc’s to help complete them in future?

Orion: Funny you should ask this. Book 8 will see the first change along these lines. Chapter 11, Orthongroth is already set this way. Moving forward – post Book 8 – we are taking a different approach. My recent work has been focusing on providing both solo and group version of the Epic instances to allow players to choose the way that they want to complete the overall epic story.

WarCry: Marqlar: Do you have any plans about “scaling” old content so lvl 60s (or the new lvl capped chars) have a valid reason to go back there? Personally I find it a bit sad that a lot of the great instances/raids like the rift or the annuminas instances go unnoticed by new players. Those are in fact great instances, And I would love an incentive as a lvl capped character to go back there and do those again…

Amlug: Marqlar. We have talked about this internally with much debate. It is a very compelling and interesting idea to entertain. There are a lot of things to work out to make it work properly and not feel like a recycle of old content with nothing new to put in. This won’t be happening in the forseeable future, but it is something we have not ruled out completely either.

The rift always was an endgame raid. You got maybe one quest to go to the meeting camp solo and that was it. For the most part, the quests and rewards within the rift do not come from one, or even two runs through. They come from weeks of farming the instance. Again, it is an endgame raid, and as such should be adjusted to the current endgame.

The danger of keeping old content relevent is exactly what Khai Mann mentioned, the new content has to be better. It can be better as in more fun, or better as in better rewards (preferably both). You just don’t want the weekly raids going into the Rift for their gear 3 years down the road. Let them go in for a challenge and a good time, with some possibility of reward, but that’s it.

I do agree that the leveling instances (GB, GA, Fornost, etc.) should be left alone at their current levels

One could add more versatile skills and add other/additional equipment options. Content could be made for the same levels as before, perhaps slightly harder to accomodate added versality etc.