Before you get your hopes up, there is no big announcement for lotro. My title was misleading. This is a story about how Sapience let rumors of a huge announcement build up all week only to result in massive disappointment. It started in a thread where someone asked about the absence of developer posts about things like class balance and systems.
One poster quoted a dev saying:
Originally Posted by Jalessa View Post
We’re currently focusing all of our efforts on the upcoming new additions and changes. There’s a lot of them, and they’re fairly big (for example – a huge revision to the legendary item system!).We have not been able to work up responses with LOTRO Systems in the meantime. We have been reading threads, taking feedback in…and there have been times where someone asks a question here that we cannot answer, because things will be changing and our answer will be outdated.
Hopefully we’ll have concrete info for you later on, but please be patient with us all while we have our noses to the grindstone.
That poster complained that he hated being teased with promises of a big announcement.
Sapience responded to this poster saying,
Wow, then you’re about to hate me.
Keep an eye on the announcements forum this week. We’re going to address the OP.
That was the beginning of all the rumors. Someone posts a quote where a dev uses words like “fairly big” “huge revision” and “additions and changes”, and Sapience says “Keep an eye on the announcements forum this week.”
People on all servers, both US and EU were speculating in circles about the big announcement. There were entire threads by the middle of the week filled with speculation and posters comparing how many times per day they refreshed the announcement page. Even my husband was refreshing daily. Isn’t it time for a Rohan announcement? Or maybe it’s the Legendary Item system revamp? Screenshots of book 9?
It’s so sad to look back on those threads now, and see posters so very happy and pumped up.
Somewhere around Wednesday, Sapience poked into one of the speculation threads and said:
Re: Anyone else checking the Announcements section every few hours???
wow, I must have missed an awesome game of telephone!My comment was that there is something coming this week that directly addresses the OP’s comments about answers to player questions.
Sometimes, there isn’t anything between the lines to read.
But it was too late. By this time, the hype had already reached critical mass. You can’t just reply to a thread literally titled “anyone else checking the announcement section every few hours???” with “don’t read between the lines, I was talking to the original poster, not the guy I quoted”.
They announced you’ll soon be able to email your questions to a developer, and they will chose some to answer. It blew up in their faces. They saw the community had it’s hopes up, and they let those hopes stay high. I wonder why an email inbox for questions took a week to set up after the teaser. Or why it required a “watch the announcement” teaser at all. You could blame the community for getting excited about nothing, but I don’t. Sapience just messed up.
“Keep an eye on the announcements forum this week. We’re going to address the OP. ”
Community manager tells us exactly what to expect and Turbine delivers! Fools react negatively on internet forums and blogs! Film at 11!
This is the perfect counterpoint to Syp’s article last week asking for more transparency from developers. This is why that does not happen, because people will hear what they want to hear, then they will be disappointed when it turns out their inflated expectations weren’t met.
Poor Sapience mismanaged expectations somewhat, but yeah, if people are actually getting angry about this, they need to leave the house and get some fresh air.
Doh, I was all excited about an expansion annoucement or something :) Seems like ages since the last one.
Hmm, it took me a couple reads to figure out what the problem was. Its unfortunate that people jump to conclusions. The dev post read fairly clear to me… that their would be an announcement concerning the absence of dev posts.
I agree though, the mistake looks to be the use of the word “big”… as setting up an email box for the devs doesnt seem that “big” to me.
This was handled in typical Turbine fashion. Look at the last year of DDO for a perfect example of how expectations are handled by their online community managers. “Vast and Mysterious”, “Super Secret” and “Soon”. They do nothing to put out the fires, just heighten them, and then give a big spin when things don’t go the way people expected.
That said, hopefully the launch of their new FtP DDO:U works out well for them.
So if I send an e-mail to my wife, let’s say, something like:
“Hon, I’m working on getting you that 200-million diamond necklace you wanted, your very own sports car and that date you wanted with Antonio Banderas. Hang in there.
Oh, and also I’m trying to figure out dinner tonight.”
… then I mention I have good news about what I sent her earlier, it’d be very fair to say she would think the good news are really about all that good stuff in the first paragraph… not that I finally settled on Mexican for tonight.
Come on now. Can’t side with Turbine on this one. You gotta have some common sense sometimes.