DocHoliday's MMO Saloon
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon - LOTRO, Secret World, & Rift with an End-Game View
Kate Paiz today released her first Producer’s letter in a while but there’s not a whole lot of new information there. It is a pretty quick read and I appreciate that Turbine is putting out things like this in addition to similar efforts from Aaron “Rowan” Campbell.
However, I have to admit there really isn’t much content here, any specifics, or things that we hadn’t already heard from Aaron or the Dev Chat. But there are a couple decent nuggets:
- The new landmass has a name – WIldermore
- There will be some sort of content (landmass) update this spring
- However, we don’t know if that’s the previously announced and hinted at Update 11
The big piece that’s truly new in this letter is the “Player’s Council” and I’ll have to admit I’m pretty skeptical about this. Call me jaded, but I’m just not sure what this will accomplish. Many of the community sites (myself, CSTM, and Syp from Massively) have stated that we’re frustrated trying to talk to Turbine because they won’t open up and have meaningful conversations. Even when Turbine does open up we get two completely different answers to the same question (yes I’m talking about mounted combat). Couple that with the lack of change or responses to beta feedback in the past few events and I just don’t see this going anywhere. How is this program going to be unique and separate from the various other programs Turbine already has? Before I believe this new program will actually change anything in the game (or even benefit new content) I’ll wait for Turbine to let us know how the players will be chosen, what interaction they’ll have with the dev team, and how the rest of the community will have insight and input into the whole process. Sapience has posted some comments on this topic, but really just saying it is a work in progress.
To me this “Player’s Council” seems like a number of other things currently going on with LOTRO in that instead of utilizing or leveraging what’s currently out there (or even understanding that) they go and do something completely different. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see it work out, but if anything, we’ve seen Turbine going the exact opposite direction with their communication.
