I am labelling this number one only because there may be more some day. I cannot think that I will write of any other problem tomorrow, as tomorrow I will begin working on solutions to the problem put forth in this little blog.

We have a problem. We have this glorious epic storyline that takes you throughout Eriador but requires you, at various points, to find others to assist you. This is all well and good when you are a newer game and the majority of the populace is roughly the same level and progressing at roughly the same rate. However, when you are 2+ years removed from launch and looking at the trends and notice that more and more players are abandoning that rich - focal - part of your narrative game, then there is a problem.

First and foremost we are a game driven by story. Your place in that story. How you deal with elements of that story and interact with the story. Our epic is clearly one of the most important facets of our game. Now, few people are continuing on with it post Volume 1, Book 1 and this means that we have a problem that needs a solution.

The Solution? Moments of inspiration. These are the moments when your character digs deep into their reserves and finds something more. Whether this is drawn from the people around them or from their own sense of purpose these are the moments inspiring greatness.

Starting with Volume 1, Book 2 - completely revamped and restructured in the upcoming release on December 1st, the Epic Book series will be getting treatment to identify key moments in your character’s life. These types of moments will allow your character to don the mantle or heroism and fight against far greater odds.

Inspired Greatness does the following for a player:

Increases morale and power significantly, increases in-combat and out-of-combat morale and power regeneration, increases damage output from melee, ranged and tactical sources, increases healing output for all healing skills.

Through this we will be able address the problem highlighted above and apply the solution to all the Books comprising Volume 1 of the story of The Lord of the Rings Online.

Faction/Reputation, whichever moniker you choose the result is the same: a standing with a group of people with which you have or have no previous interactions. We have several of these in the game right now and all indications point to their inclusion in the future. We added this system a little later than usual and as a result it suffered from a little less love than it possibly could have received.

As many of you know, I have been working on revisions to the game for the better part of a year now. The latest effort, the Lone-lands (full pass including the Epic Story and Garth Agarwen brings the area to level 22-32 and I threw in a dash of level 55+ for good measure), showed me that there was something missing in the game and through the assistance of beta testers I was able to cobble together the early stages of another undertaking - growing the Reputation system.

I have been spending some cycles working out ways that we can make our Reputation/Faction system a little more robust and also finding ways to make the goal of kindred more appealing. To that end there are some minor additions coming to the Lone-lands’ new faction The Eglain, when the Siege of Mirkwood drop happens. Rather than holding this back, I figured I would get this out there now and get some feedback, figure out if this direction scratches an itch and explain how I arrived at this destination. Like all issues that come up for designers this one was laden with some red herrings and murky waters.

The Issue…

There is no incentive to grind through reputation. - paraphrased statement from LotRO players.

Okay, we get that, the perception clearly is that the reputation system is light. The reality is…the reputation system is light. It started out rather fluffy and kind and grew into a system that is now used heavily in new areas and as a result, the inconsistencies and shortcomings are more apparent. We are aware of that fact. We dislike that fact and it is now a personal crusade to alleviate that issue and address concerns by providing something more with the reputation system.

Now, to accomplish this goal I needed to establish a benchmark. Something that would serve as the new template upon which all future reputation will be built or revised. That began with The Eglain in the Lone-lands.

The average player moving through the Lone-lands and following the quests there will find that they achieve acquaintance level with the Eglain quickly - the same is also true of any player who previously completed all quests in the Lone-lands. This design was important as the Eglain rep, story-wise, is now a gate for Book 2. (Don’t freak out! Really, it is easy to get to Acquaintance.) At each stage thereafter, I wanted to properly incentivize folks to stick with the reputation and continue growing. At acquaintance, players can see that there are rewards just out of reach, rewards that are relevant to their level and will have an impact moving forward. I also wanted to provide players with a different way of handling the advancement other than specialized recipes only used by the rep faction and so I developed a quest for every production crafting skill. These quests are available at acquaintance level and though they are not the simplest way to get to Kindred, they should help alleviate the issues of that grind and have an avenue that does not involve hunting, instances, etc…

Average players completing the remainder of the quests tied to the Eglain will reach friend - or thereabouts, those who previously completed the Lone-lands will be very close to friend when they log in on the update day. This puts folks at the first reward tier. An initial piece of a jewelry set. This is a specialized set to one of three stances - tactical, defensive and offensive melee. They are somewhat costly - but likely worth the expenditure.

At Kindred, players can purchase a tailored pocket item. I say tailored because it is built specifically for your class and usable only by your class. All items are rare and usable at 28, 30 and 32 (subject to change). The set bonus is a pretty nice and focuses on morale and class functionality over more stats. Those are reserved for the items.

Placing this up on the test realm for the Beta received some interesting feedback; immediately a level 60 stated that they could only reach ally through questing and I responded with the following:

“At level 60, is there really a reason to grind for this faction? There is no way to rocket players into the ally tier without also increasing the faction for players going through this area fresh. At the moment, I like the progression. I just need to make the items in there go from friend to kindred.” - Orion <- That’s me.

Now, I admit, the timbre of that statement makes me sound like I was being dimwitted or narrow-minded; but, my intention was not to provide a level 60 with a reputation that they could use. My intent was to create the template for future reputation implementation. A few more posts transpired and player’s dug in and then I dug in getting so adamant and uncommunicative as to say:

“Lastly, an area meant for levels 22-32 is not going to have a reward schema implemented to support level 60-65 players.” - Orion

Wow, really? Did I say that? You bet I did, I had my underlying goal of building that template and was hyper-focused on that and that alone; then something cool happened. A follow-up post came in:

“I wasn’t expecting to see rep items available that would be of any use to level-capped players. I guess what I meant was something - a title, a cosmetic, something “fluff” like that - that would stay with the player past level 32. I know it’s not realistic to expect something like this for book 9, just a thought for down the road as to how the lower level faction grinds can provide something that stays with the character.” - Beta player who knows who they are but needs to remain nameless for the moment because of NDA.

Suddenly, there was an epiphany - not really a huge one mind you, but an epiphany nonetheless. From that, I cobbled together a new document highlighting all the changes that I wanted to make to the reputation system in an effort to make it fully realized and complimentary to the game. By the end of that day I had the new doc hammered out with a list of things that I could do in the short-term. When I came home that night I wrote up a bundle of ideas for the long-term.

This is a snapshot of the process. We started this a long time ago and there have been some clear posts on what people wanted to see the reputation system be - but, honestly, many posts are filled with requests that, in the interest of balance, are just not feasible. We overlook some of the gems sometimes, we sometimes sweep the complaints into a pile and say that we will look at them later. Sometimes later never happens. In this case, it did.

The Solution…

From this conversation, where we cut out telephone, we were able to discern a legitimate gripe that was easily handled, something that should go a long way in realizing the potential of the reputation system. Like all things in LotRO development, this will happen in tiers and begins in only one area with only one Rep Faction - The Eglain. Though it will only happen here for Book 9, the hope is to carry this through as the new template of the future:

1. At Acquaintance players will earn a title indicative of their standing with the group and gain access to items to improve standing or relevant level rewards.
2. At Friend players will earn a title indicative of their standing with the group, gain access to further rewards and receive a 10% discount on all stable-masters associated with the rep faction (Ost-guruth has one stable-master), this bonus will stack with the travel reward given out earlier this year to “elder” players.
3. At Ally players will earn a title indicative of their standing with the group, gain access to further rewards and receive a 5% discount on all vendors associated with the group. This bonus should extend to repair costs as well.
4. At Kindred players will earn the last title for the group, gain access to further rewards and receive a travel skill - sharing a cool down with all racial-based travel in the game that will take the player to the group’s chosen home. This travel skill will require the use of a travel ration. We are aware that this will likely cause crossover into player skills, but the time investiture into these reputations is significant and we feel that this is a legitimate reward to offer.

Again all these are implemented for The Eglain faction and The Eglain reputation faction only. As time allows and as I move forward with revisions, other reputations will see inclusion and the same enhancements. These were the low-hanging fruit bits.

Now for something that we rarely do - a glimpse of the future. The earliest that any of this will be seen is in 2010, likely later spring or early summer and could get pushed out further than that timetable. My primary reason for offering these up is for feedback and to inform you of where my head is at this time.

• Deeds for completing multiple reputations - with titles and possibly specialized rewards.
• Kindred cosmetic rewards to display individual factions as cloaks.
• Kindred mount rewards (yes, we have some of these already - this would be revisiting those that do not)
• Ally and Kindred recipes for production crafting skills that are unique and have broader appeal: These might include; cosmetic items, food recipes serving multiple people at once, bind on acquire gear, class specific gear (rep clothes for your banner-bearers, unique looks for your summoned pets, special instruments, etc…), housing items (functional and non-functional) - all recipes would be and produce level appropriate on all accounts where the item would have gameplay impact.
• Swift travel routes to areas of importance to the group or relevant relation.

There are other ideas percolating, but they require more explanation than I can give at the moment, so I must cut myself short here.

Ultimately, reputation is another crusade being undertaken and one that I believe will be improved significantly.

Closing this blog out, I want to invite people to ask questions here. If I can answer them, I will. After all, we are in this together.

O

By now, many of you have seen Amlug’s post and for those that have not, check it out http://my.lotro.com/amlug/2009/08/13/upcoming-radiance-barter-changes/ then come back here and read this one.

(Insert - Muzak version of ‘The girl from Ipanema’)

Now that you are all back, welcome! It’s Friday and there have been a lot of questions since Amlug posted on the changes to the acquisition of Radiance gear. I am pleased that he was able to get this out there as I didn’t want to be the only one talking and ultimately, radiance is not really in the purview of my revisions. Still, this is the plan that we were working that I mentioned in previous blogs and now you have it for general consumption and you have some questions so I decided to pop-in and answer some of those questions before the, now meager, reveal of the new tech that I kept mentioning as I wound down my blogs on the revisions to Garth Agarwen.

When are the changes to Radiance coming?

We are currently working on the changes and should have them ready for the Book 9 release. No clear promises yet, but that is the plan.

Will radiance overwrite the gloom incurred on defeat?

No, radiance will not overwrite gloom incurred on defeat.

When fighting SOA mobs/bosses that give dread, will the radiance set still counteract the dread as it does now?

(Edit) The answer is no. Dread will need Hope to counteract the effects. Radiance will only cancel Gloom.

Does this mean that you can get a full set of +10 radiance gear without ever setting foot in (Insert name of undesirable instance here)?

Yes.

Can we barter for the items from The Watcher too?

If I am not correct on this answer I will edit it later - my understanding of the changes leaves the acquisition of the items that you get from The Watcher as is. You will still need to get them from The Watcher.

What are these challenge quests you speak of, how do they work?

I will answer that at the end of this post. If you need to know right now jump down to the heading New Tech Revealed.

You took away our radiance bonus on landscape - are you revising the sets to make up for this?

No, the decision and implementation of the changes to the way that radiance worked outside of raids was made before we began the adjustments to the distribution. It was a necessary decision for the long-term health of the game.

Why did it take so long to get here?

As I stated in my previously blogs the hardest part of coming to solutions like this (mind you, this is an iteration on a previous plan that we had and still not the optimal solution that we all wanted and no, I cannot talk about that but I like making you wonder so I put it in my posts anyway) is identifying the problem first. We had multiple symptoms but it took a while to drill through the symptoms to identify the core problems and then find a solution that would do the least damage to the various aspects of the player base.

As you can see from the responses here: http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?t=285446 this is not going to be universally hailed as the greatest thing since the Internet. We have to weigh solutions carefully and do our best to ensure that we make the right decisions when it comes to hot button issues like this. Whether this choice is ultimately the best one remains to be seen as there are still a lot of concerns with the balance of it all.

Why not make exclusive instance barter drops so that people have to run the specific instances to get the specific items?

I am going answer this one by first asking another question. Is there a concern that players will focus on one or two instances and only do those to access their radiance gear? Fear? No. Expectation, sure. Our challenge is to now create some other incentive for those harder instances. There has to be a reason for players to go into those spaces or they will become even less popular than they are now. Will it be easy? No. Will it have something to do with gear? Very likely. Will it have something to do with deeds? Possibly.

Why not make the drops instance dependent? We identified one of the symptoms of the system being the instances themselves, not everyone enjoys every instance that we design and if our goal is to make a system more accessible to folks, then placing another restriction that would drive them into spaces that they dislike would be viewed as a negative. Thus, we remove the restrictions and let players choose their own adventure through the spaces to acquire the gear. Choices.

How will players be prepared for the Watcher and DN? How long before these spaces are made easier?

Some players may not be prepared for The Watcher and DN raids. Raids are going to remain the pinnacle of difficulty and we have no current intention to change this. Access to the raids so that players can attempt them and learn them at their own rate is our goal with these changes.

Can we buy 1st Age Weapons with these new tokens?

No.

Tell us about the expansion?

Not yet.

Okay, questions answered is now in the done column, let’s move on to the real reason for my blog this morning. (drum roll on a little toy drum)

New Tech Revealed

*sound of one hand clapping and a single party favor blowing*

Making mountains out of molehills is fun! See, I am not certain that this tech is going to make all of you as happy as it makes me. I have been a gamer for a very long time and like most gamers, I like options. I like the option to do something unique in a space. I like challenges and variety in challenges. I like puzzles and exploring and learning more and more about a game until I break it down into the ones and zeroes that form the game and…well you get the point. Since I have been designing I have been very interested in making as many options as possible for folks. I also really like to make things clear for folks.

With this new tech we can do a host of wonderful things for players in instances. I have been trying to write this out for about ten minutes now and finding that there is no way to make this sound super cool. Thus, I will provide you with examples.

A fellowship of four enters the new Garth Agarwen - Arboretum instance for the first time today. As they enter, they all notice something strange pop into their quest tracker:

Amlug sees:

Optional Objective: Wights (Daily)

Challenge: Grimbark (Daily)

Orion sees:

Optional Objective: Locations (Daily)

Challenge: Grimbark (Daily)

Floon sees:

Optional Objective: Bog-lurkers (Daily)

Challenge: Grimbark (Daily)

Scenario sees:

Optional Objective: Darkwater (Daily)

Challenge: Grimbark (Daily)

As with all quests, there is some level of reward for doing these. For the Garth Agarwen cluster - Eglain faction is the featured reward. Faction will likely be a mainstay moving forward through the remainder of the instances as it makes the most sense. With the challenges we can distribute the barter tokens that will be used to obtain some manner of gear for the efforts put into these.

Challenges

A challenge is something difficult that once completed nets rewards. Those rewards will typically come in the form of some token in addition to whatever the other rewards in the space may be (faction, coin, etc…). They will communicate, clearly, the reasons behind the challenge and the manner in which the challenge is achieved. It is no wonder then that this will replace the clunky and, personally, hated terminology for hard-modes.

Optional Objectives

This is where I see the greatest enhancement with this tech. We can put a little incentive into the instances to complete optional objectives and increase the reasons to play them. We can tie new deeds into the game for completing all the objectives and target classes, races, heck even vocations inside of these spaces with a variety of quests!

It may not seem like much, but this is something that I have been looking forward to getting into the game for a very long time. Now, it is here and with it, we hope to continue providing players with an even wider variety of opportunities than they have ever had before!

Happy Friday!

Today was the last day of the sprint. Which means that tomorrow I start to polish the spaces that I just finished. Interesting, no? There is a saying that I think, all too often, is adhered to and never really broken - “Finish, don’t polish.” I hate the term and so does MadeofLions. Ironically, finishing is what I am most pleased about at this time. Not because the space is done - clearly it is not - but, that I have something solid to work with and polish to a fine sheen.

The space ended up pretty much as I expected it would. There will be those that hate the changes because I made each wing’s direct drive to the final boss last between 15-30 minutes. There will be those that love the new spaces because the experience is between 15-30 minutes. Those numbers come up a lot around here and for good reason. Data suggests that the average play time is a lot higher than we expected from a casual player base. Of course, data also suggests that a casual player base turns hard core fairly quickly and challenges the assumption that we make as designers early on about what makes a casual player.

It’s difficult to define the casual player, so I’m just going to go with the tried and true generalizations that may or may not be true of any given part of the player base: Casual players are those that value play time at a premium rather than a given; their time is precious and spent in many areas and as a result is parcelled in ways that make sense for their lifestyle, play style and life commitments. Casual players would prefer to have a fun bite-sized experience that is entertaining and challenging, but fits within schedule demands that other persons may not necessarily be beholden too. Casual players are not looking for the easiest path to fun, they just want a path to fun.

How’s that?

That is the goal of these changes. Make something that is entertaining and challenging. The spaces are cleaner and hopefully self-explanatory. For those with more time on their hands, there is something in there for you. For those with less, go on and complete the objectives that you have in the time that you have it, don’t expect it to be a walk through a feel of marshmallow peeps that jump into your mouth for their sugary goodness, because it will be hard - not tedious.

So yeah, 15-30 minute direct runs to the main bosses. Arboretum is a tad easier than the barrows with an optional “boss” that drops a shard - formerly the rare spawn in the instance for bog lurkers. The barrows has a small encounter “very minor boss” that opens the way to Ivar and a completely optional quest - if you have not already completed the quest and need to and of course the Ivar fight. Lastly the Red-maid has one encounter that is wildly different but gates access to the Red-maid, another sub-boss encounter and then the Red-maid and two completely optional bosses both dropping shards, or driving story!

A little for everyone, I hope.

I want to talk about the Edan and Esyld fight - but, I won’t. I want to talk about the Dúnlang encounter, but I won’t. I’m going to let the instance speak for itself when it gets in front of you all some day in the future and then you can give me honest opinions of the changes.

What I will talk about is the course of this last day of development.

That new tech that I have been hinting at works like a charm. I verified it about twenty minutes ago and I was very pleased to see it in action. I get to add a little more to the game because of it, but hey that is what I do. I add more. I created the new quests, finalized the new skills, effects, and all of the supporting bits that will go into the fights inside the Garth Agarwen - Fortress space. It took all day.

Many skills, assigning the different animations, the different effects and damages and then building the AI. Testing the AI, seeing that it was not exactly what I wanted, but I had to be content to finish - not polish at this point. The polishing begins soon. Soon, as in Monday. Tomorrow I will be working on a new suite of rewards that are tied to the Challenges within the Garth Agarwen space. In addition to this, I will be putting in alternative reputation advancement for the Eglain. Tomorrow will be a pretty good day.

You win some; you really do.

Here it is the second to last day and I am able to report that the instances are complete on first pass. This does not mean that the skills are 100% functional, but the body of the fights are there and ready to roll. This is good news. Tomorrow will be spent smoothing out the skills and getting them onto the bosses as well as creating the final five quests for the new version of the fortress.

In running through the fortress to test the red-maid changes I was able to figure out the length to get to the Red-maid. It’s short; very, very short - likely a group of players can handle this space in under 30 minutes, maybe even 15 if they only do main path.

The Fortress now boasts the following:

Level: 32

Fellowship Size: Full

Encounters: 3 Main path + 2 Optional

Quests: 5 (Two challenges and 3 other quests)

It also boasts three revamped fights that I am kind of excited about. It’s strange; I never expected that in re-working this space I would find much joy in dismantling and remaking some of the things that I had done what seems to be ages ago. As I was finally able to close the book on the Red-maid today, I realized that these three fights were using tricks that I have learned along the way and that they should feel more fun. Testing will give me a far better understanding if I succeeded or failed at this, of course, and that will begin some time next week.

That’s a good thing. I already know that there are some significant bits of polish to add within the instances, and the sooner that I get eyes on these re-vamps the better I will feel. I am really looking forward to hearing how they are working.

Honestly, today was all about the rinse and repeat nature of iteration and then slogging through a bunch of AI creation. AI creation sounds a heck of a lot more interesting than it is. It’s painstaking sometimes. Knowing how to set up our skills so that they function correctly can be very, very difficult and we actually have folks who are dedicated to just working on AI. I’ve been around a long time so I have no fear of potentially breaking the game, even this close to another branch. If I break it, I fix it…take my lumps and move on.

The boring stuff is hopefully not why folks are reading this. Hopefully folks are reading this to peer into the mind of a designer and see exactly what it is that makes them tick on a daily basis. I’m a simple creature with simple needs.

One of those needs is feedback. Now, to many of you, this may be a strange topic of discussion - maybe not, I am really not certain. I have spent a good deal of time on “Live” teams here at Turbine. I started on Asheron’s Call and moved to DDO - first production experience, then to LotRO:SoA production - Live, MoM and now Live again. That makes 8+ years working in this space, at this company on these teams. More than half is on Live.

I used to think, when I was first on Live, that production was a better place. There were longer deadlines and a perception of more time, we could polish, get things to a better state and make wiser decisions. It turns out that was a “grass is greener” type of thought. Those deadlines float and move just as much as they do in live and the demands are just as real. Crunch seems longer - is longer?

Live is not all roses, certainly, but it has something that production does not - feedback. I can build something, polish it as best I can and get it in a state that is ready for launch. I create my deadline, create my workload by signing on to do what I can within the time allotted. Granted, I typically put more on my plate than I should, but it is just an extra hour or two here or there. Still, I have a very finite window of development to reach and then…we let folks see it.

I get to see, on a relatively quick turnaround, what works, what doesn’t, where I made a mistake in judgment, where I made a great choice. I get feedback from players who tell me almost immediately what they like and dislike and this can influence my next undertakings. That is an amazing feeling.

Those of you who have been to our gatherings in the past have likely heard me say that before. It still holds true. There is nothing better than hearing from players; be the information good or otherwise. Knowing that you have reached out and done something that someone else found interesting - even for a moment - is such a great feeling to me. When I get it right, that feels great. When I get it wrong, I learn how to fix it.

This experience in sharing the re-design of a space in the game has really done a lot for me in this regard. I was able to see player thoughts and feelings toward what I am working on and I have come to really enjoy the responses. It’s drawing to a close now, but I wanted to take the time and thank all of you who have been here, vigilantly, to read this blog day after day.

It may be that this has bloated my ego. I’d like to think that it did not. In fact, I would like to think that it has made me more humble. I’ll be posting another blog tomorrow as we conclude this design - then I will be letting you all know about the tech that I have kept hinting at over the past week.

There are a lot of details needed for that one, but I think that it will be something worth talking about. I feel rambly…so I will close. Thanks again for being here folks, I hope that you have enjoyed this as much as I.

Until tomorrow.

Allan

Day 12, crunch time. I’ve had the good fortune of getting 4 extra days to work on this as is and I am beginning to think, for the first time, that I might slip or leave some egregious bugs in the first offering and this makes me angry. It seems that there are some very angry bugs in this world that want me to suffer some before I get this instance out the door and I really do need to get the skills working correctly still.

Today is spent on the Red-maid fight…again. I am looking at the space, at the scripting and the logic in the fight and nothing is jumping out as being incorrect. I am standing in the space and watching as the red-maid does this little round about dance. She is running in circles around the first patrol that she should reach and I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why. It has to be something with her pathing, but that should not matter. I am telling her to walk to a specific location. On top of this, her sacrifices are not walking to their locations and what’s more they are not following their scripting.

I enter the world building tool and start digging through code. Nothing, nope, not there either…hrm…well this could be something, let’s make this tweak and see what happens. Build data, load client look in game. Same deal. This time I rip out some of the scripting that I had constructed and focus on rebuilding this with a little more simplicity. After re-assembling the fight I go through the process again - build, update, log in and…crap…

I decide that I should step away for a while, there is nothing going to come of this in the state that is in and the mental state that I am. I focus on getting some skills built for the Red-maid. Actually effects, not skills. These are built quickly, tested and verified in the build and checked into the tree. That was easy enough and I accomplished something - which is better than where I was. Time to get back to the Red-maid.

I look in the world building tool again and notice two possible issues that I had not noticed before. They should not matter, in fact, they will not matter once I go through the process again. After ten to fifteen more tries I am beginning to lose hope. The day feels wasted and I am no closer to getting the fight up and running. Either I am doing something horribly wrong and just not recognizing this or I am trying to do something that is just not possible.

I know a way that I can accomplish my goals, but it lessens a little of the objective, not too much, just a little. I need to verify that this will work, but that will need to wait until tomorrow. Skills, skills must also be built tomorrow and the scrum ends Wednesday. I have got to be on my game tomorrow.

On to some brighter topics. After reviewing a lot of the comments here I am going to be changing the number of players that can enter the early 3-man instances to a max of 4. The instances are still intended for small fellowships and 4 is smaller than 6. New tech is online for the super secret new stuff we can do with instances. I am really blowing this up much larger than it truly is, but it is pretty neat on my end of things and will be a boon for players too, so I get to be a little pleased with the changes.

Not much else to talk about today. Back to rinsing and repeating. Until tomorrow!

It’s Sunday morning and the memory of Friday’s work is, pretty much, supplanted by the terror of watching the red Sox slip farther and farther behind the Yankees; stupid Yankees! Still, I made a promise and I would rahter be late in delivering that promise than failing to deliver it at all.

Friday was an interesting day. I slowly dismantled the red-maid fight. It was a lattice of scriptlinks and paths and monsters. It was the worst looking fight in the instance from a tech stand point and one that I was happy to remove. The only issue with a removing a fight like this is the danger of breaking the wrong link. Correction, the danger is in removing aspects of a fight while trying to keep other aspects of the fight whole. This is the case with the Red-maid.

The fight is changing, for the better I think, I hope. There will no longer be 20+ adds during the fight. It will be a straight up fight with the Red-maid. She will still enter her invulnerable state and have additional folk nearby, but these monsters will be there for one reason - to die. These Rhudauran servants will serve their master, giving her strength but also serving as the last sacrifices she will ever receive or be killed by your hands and drive her deeper into her madness. It’s a change that should make this fight closer to a fun experience and less of a frenetic and confusing one.

We start by gutting, as always. The old monsters are removed. Then we move to the new placement. We pose the monsters as we want them. We write out new script instructions tie and make certain that they will follow their pathing correctly. We give them their preliminary drama and speeches to make it seem all the more important. Then we need to look at the Red-maid.

That is when the brakes get applied to my work. I realize that I need to add some existing tech to the space to make this work and something is just not clicking today. I go work on bugs to get through the day.

See, some days you have it and everything works so well…others, you truck along smoothly and then just run out of gas. That was Friday. I ran out of gas on the Red-maid and decided that I needed to take a break from the place.

I wonder if it is the color scheme - I mentioned it before, but the space has such a draining color to it that I wonder if being in there for prolonged periods is what drives people out. I know that it has been mentioned…

Hrm…

Until Monday!

Thursday. I hate this day so much more then Wednesday. You are closer to the weekend, but still far enough that you cannot really prepare for the relaxation that you have earned. That said, Thursdays are a day without meetings. (Let me check the calendar again - that one is optional and the scrum stand-up doesn’t really count except that it pulls you out of the zone.) Yeah, no meetings.

I make my way into the final leg of Garth Agarwen and start gutting the space of monsters. Later in the day, I will recount the number of monsters in the space to one of our engineers - he weeps openly…not really - he is grateful that I have fixed this and warns me about Fornost. Note taken.

The new entranceway into the Garth Agarwen Fortress is interesting. I wonder how many people have come down into this area before and seen the little scenes that were crafted. I carefully replace a score of creatures as they have to be replaced to accommodate the option boss fight in the Créoth portion of the ruin and I break for lunch. Best friend. He is one of our Program Managers, we barely see each other since I moved out in April - he is a buying a house, we chat, share and have good eats then return to work.

Movement is harder in this space, there is a lot of vertical transition in here and the color scheme of the instance makes most of the monsters blend in with the background. I am trying to be careful about placement, giving players the ability to see where the monsters are, but I am still not convinced that this is going to be the only change in the space. I may need to add some extra lighting to highlight the locations of some monsters. Edan and Esyld get to stay where they are. They will have a day where I pass over their skills and alter their fight logic and script tomorrow or Monday. The placement is tedious and I am nitpicking.

Six man is a little harder. You need better placement and more moments of “possibility”. (It’s possible to pull 4 or 5 if you pull at the wrong time, or it is possible to separate the groups in an intelligent manner.) An hour or so later I am in the Créoth area. There were so many monsters in here, I am saddened. I rip them out and switch it down to a new model. The space is meant to be optional and there is a challenge objective here. I am looking forward to making this fight the most out of any of them because it is going to be a very different kind of fight.

I get movement into the space, solo patrols that if pulled poorly can grab a bundle of mobs and make an easy situation tense. I cut the number at each placed camp and make sure that the mobs are not standing still. This is even more tedious. It is necessary.

I finally get to the location of the fight. Crafting the early version is necessity. I want to verify the scripting and logic before I build the skills. Unlike other fights, I am doing this on the fly. This is a bad idea. I should really write it out first, verify that I am correct in my assumptions, but this is a first pass on the space so, while I feel bad, it is not a huge deal. It takes about two hours to get the monsters set up correctly, the dialogue written and the scripting/logic put in place.

On to the last section before the Red-maid. This is much easier. Pull the host of monsters out of the space. Lower the total count by two dozen, make the journey cleaner, on to Vatar. Hello, Vatar. Look at you in your little chair. Nope, I am not doing anything to you. The frenetic fight beyond you requires too much attention.

I look over my spec. I am having reservations. I want to change this fight a lot. It is so frenetic it looks like a Benny Hill skit where everyone is chasing one character. It is a combination of no skill support when first implemented and not having a full game at your disposal - bad practices thrown in to boot. I am really hesitant now. Time to visit our resident game players and get their take on my proposed revisions.

After about 30 minutes of bouncing my ideas off of the various people who are intimate with the fight, I am feeling better, the direction has changed and I am going to need to re-write the spec some, but the fight will need less balancing and still be fresh when it is implemented.

Time to go, gotta write the blog.

Until tomorrow.

It was a good day.

Though it seems like there was not much progress I was able to finish off the entire Barrows space. Quests are working, new “boss” is working, Sara moves a little faster and only shows up if someone in the fellowship needs the quest. Ivar has new skills and combat calls. The space has its little gimmick, not as cool as the Arboretum, but yay for something nonetheless and I am ready to now move over to the Fortress.

The interesting part of today was in the iterative process. This is a fancy way to say trial and error. I told you all that I wrote out the flow of the fights in a detailed spec. That spec serves as my template for creating the encounters within the spaces and it serves me well. It provides a backbone for the fight and a way to make certain that I have at least one concrete example when I move into the space. Today, I got to prove my theory on the Ivar fight and learned that the fight would simply not work as designed.

Some exposition is needed here.

Ivar has few special skills as he is one of our first bosses. In fact, the majority of the skills developed for the Gauntmen first came from our pal Ivar. So one of the first things that I needed to do was establish a set of skills that Ivar would use.

He had the following: a skill to knock players to their knees that couples with his pet’s abilties, a skill to drain nearby Dead of their health to regain his, a double strike ability, a summon. I wanted to provide these new skills: a skill to knock players away and then follow with his drain skill, reactive skills to enrage, and a shadow aoe damage skill.

The trouble starts almost immediately. I make the skill to knock players back and then attempt the chain to the heal - no go. I attempt it a second way - no go. I can make this work within the bounds of our restrictions but as I test this in server there are some significant oddities that are resulting. Ivar is twitching and dancing as he tries to figure out what I am asking him to do. Interesting. I know what the issue is and I can fix this, but I start to think about it more and notice another problem the health returned is far too great for players to overcome. That needs to get lowered. I also comb through the skill libraries for players and note that at 32, when players can do this, certain fellowship builds will have a very hard time dealing with this skill breakout. Scrapped! The chain knockback to heal is dead. Now they share a cooldown.

The enrage bit is easier, but relies on deeper code to handle the reactive ability - this is a concern. It could cause AI cycles to hiccup and become dormant breaking the boss. This must be added to the spec to keep a constant application of enrage on the monster during the fight. If this proves to break the AI - which is about a 60% chance right now then I need to come up with another solution. There is one, but it strains the boundaries that we have and I am loathe to do so at this moment.

I enter the space and try to fight Ivar, until now I have been fighting him in a test area. He is not in the instance. Hrm. I open the worldbuilding tool and note that he is there, just on a different layer, silly me forgot to set his layer dependency - actually on his generator and this instances knows nothing about him. Whoopsie.

I refresh my addled brain on yesterday’s notes while waiting for the tool. I need to adjust the level of a monster, I need to adjust the appearance of several wights, I need to adjust the  stat modifiers (elite, signature, normal) of some creatures in the space and I need to look through my bug queue. I also need to attend two meetings and start compiling a list of quests in the Lone-lands that need rewards.

Busy day ahead, the tool is taking its time so I check out bugs. Hmm, the list has no more blockers and only a few criticals, they can wait - hello…Barad Gularan. Players leave the instance on defeat. Blast it!!! Check out the files, fix them and sit them in my check-in queue, gotta check that before I am done for the day.

Tool is ready. I change generator stats. I then sweep through all the generators in the instance. Interesting. I flunked hard on this instance. There are many generators that are not labeled. A little more information for you readers: when we are building instances we try to utilize”best practices”. This is a list of helpful hints that we can leave our future selves in the event of a tragic bussening, act of the heavens, nature or man made event, or anything that prevents the owner of the area to not be able to adjust the space. When I say label generators I mean just that, we name the generators and any other code objects that we use inside the space so that someone who is visiting for the first time can, without referencing the spec, see what our intentions were. Some of us drill far enough down to label our scriptlinks. This is part of the busy work of design, but trust me, it is very helpful at a later date.

I finish this pass and know that I have a meeting lurking. An hour passes, seems like wasted time. I return to my desk. Skills are fixed, time for testing. Ivar uses all his skills and I note that I have removed the suite of poisons, diseases, fear and wound skills that he previously used. I found them annoying, but now the fight is flat. I have to add a few skills into the mix and do so. Iterative work…meeting time, drat, waits to be tested.

I return and see a note from the engineer who just yesterday was so excited. He seems down. He explains that he did all this work in the wrong place. As he explains more it becomes apparent that he just had a discussion with another engineer who misinterpreted everything that was discussed and now my request is looking like it will not happen. Parachuting for the win! I do my best to explain why he did the work in the correct place and by the end of our discussion everything is back to being happy and exciting. Later on, I will talk with him again and there will be a smaller snag, one that is really a nifty polishing bit but hey, if it looks good we should do it. Side note, earlier in the day at yet another meeting (scrum stand-up) another designer hears about the tech that this engineer and I are working on and seems genuinely pleased. Score one for the team - it was an extrapolation of a bit that this designer was working on in the first place so it makes it even cooler to him.

Okay, back to work, testing…the new skills seem okay. I am concerned about the adds in this fight. Without a fear against evil this is going to be tough. Then again, players can do this…I know they can. I will hand this off to our QA Team and have them run a qualitative run through the space before general consumption on our Isengard program. If it passes through them, things are good.

Quests are working. One is very lame…I am considering changing the space a little to make it more meaningful and long. By the end of the day, I am ready for home and ready to move to the Fortress. 5 days left in the scrum. I think I can pull this off.

Until tomorrow.

Some days, things simply do not go as planned. I woke up today with the intention of finishing the Garth Agarwen Barrows instance. Not much left to do on it really; new skills for Ivar and then testing for functionality, but the day had other plans - as these things sometimes do.

Yesterday, I checked my bug queue and discovered that I had a few blocking bugs. This is never a good thing. So I decided that I would knock those out before I started on the instance today. Unfortunately, there were also meetings, a review actually of other areas that I have already revamped and updated for the Lone-lands revision.

This means that there was a great deal of time eaten up by meetings, data adding and revision work. All making for a difficult implementation day for the poor instance. Drat!

So, what caused all this to fall apart today?

Bugs. 8 of them. All of them blockers. Blockers, in this sense mean that players cannot complete a quest, gain access to a location, use an item or other such blocking issue that makes the content that I created, busted. I start peeking through the code to find where I broke the data and discover that some of these are related to items that I am removing from the game in the interest of streamlining the content path for groups of players.

This refers to the artifacts quest that formerly went into Garth Agarwen proper. This quest no longers points into that space and the original design of this quest utilized tech that has long since been replace. I know that I made the new items. I know that they work as I tested them with the quest, oh gods, we branched. Now we have my first problem of the day, not a major one of course, but an issue that needs to be dealt with.

Branching causes all sorts of problems and being out the day of branch causes even more. The branch happened and took my old data with it. The new data was on my machine waiting to be checked in on the day of branch, but I was out. This means that it missed the branch and now the content appears to be ery broken. I notice this and find the files that I never checked in…when looking at different lists you sometimes get those numbers lost amongst the files that you never want to change. Poor practice, bad habits all that wonderful jazz can be spewed to reprimand me for this oversight.

I add the data to the game one more time, check it out and know that this bug is fixed. On to the second bug. Hrm, this one is tougher. Same issue, I just need to make some serious adjustments to the items. I have yet to replace the items with the new tech and they are acting very strangely because of new flags that I set upon them. This leads to the quest items to not flash, and suddenly become unusable. Hrm, I will have to tackle this after the review.

Reviews are interesting. You have your immediate bosses, some tertiary members of the team that comes to see what you are working on and in my case today - the VP of production shows up. Not a big deal, he’s a good guy and he is interested to see what I am doing.

I am at Ost Guruth. I am showing off the new flow of the area and how we start you by going west into the spider camp, dealing with all of those quests at one time. We then move south to the orcs, through their camp, the wargs and into the southern part of the Red Swamp to deal with the middle parts of the Epic Book. (Did I say middle part? You bet I did, the Red-maid Book is now 16 glorious chapters long - more on that later.) After completing these we are vectored to a new camp at Dol Vaeg. New quests are exposed and the nods start around the room.

Questions get asked and people are curious about how I am handling the dreaded boar stomach quest. I have all the answers and I get to show them as we run through the content. Resolution of quests is at different locations and we are moving through the zone in a fluid manner. After going east we head to the Earth-kin; again there are new quests and there are some audible chuckles when folks see that the troll camp in the southern bog is actually going to get used now.

There is actual laughter when everyone sees Cook Hosehead (Hosehead is just a name that will be replaced at a later time, beats TBD). Hosehead has three new bounties. There are more quests pointing to the wight camp in the southern bog and suddenly people are seeing that the Lone-lands revamp is really coming together. Time is up after an hour, but there are more questions. Interesting questions. Good questions and I answer them all in the manner of a designer - I defend my decisions and explain the thought process behind each.

It turns out being a good review, but the day is burning quickly. I need to get back to bugs.

The remaining bugs are just time consuming. They are not hard, but some of them require multiple adds and testing. This sucks up more time that I want to use up and I am suddenly, finally, checking in but it is near the end of my day. Sad-panda time. I figure I can get something done for the instance today and focus on getting the quests done.

Suddenly, the day brightens as the engineer working on of my request sends me this:

Engineer: This is exciting stuff, Allan. Testing the changes, now.  Works in the simple case.

Me: Is it really that exciting?

Engineer: Yeah, that was my first time running the game since I started writing it and it worked

Me: Excellent!

Engineer: Well, I still have a bunch of work with some aspects, but good pace so far  should be almost done if not done tomorrow

Me: I thought it was exciting because of what it will allow us to do

Engineer: yeah, that is exciting, too

It’s really not a super huge piece of tech, I guess. It will, however, help us get more information to you in a way that we haven’t before. It also does some nifty things for us in the future. Actually, Garth Agarwen will once again be something of a prototype for this tech. I am excited about it. It’s good to feel this way.

I finish the new quests and start to blog.

Until tomorrow!