Lord Of The Rings Online: Ettenmoors Update: Shores of Evendim

Orion stopped by the official Monster Play forums today and answered several questions about the upcoming content update and how it will affect Monster Play:

Soon enough, the Shore of Evendim will arrive on our servers and there are some new enhancements coming to the Ettenmoors. I want to take a moment and speak on a couple of the issues that I have read and received via private messages over the last several weeks.

General

Keeps and holdings throughout the Ettenmoors will hold their state regardless of server outages. This means that positions will change hands only when one side is organized enough to wrest control from the other. When the Shores of Evendim update is added to the game, the keeps and other holdings will change to their initial form one final time and from that point forward the battle is in the hands of the players and monster players.

The cost to enter monster play is greatly reduced for players. There are more incentives for players being introduced with the Shores of Evendim update and even more planned for the future.

Balance will be an ongoing process that we will continue on the monster side of the fence. Remember, monster players will remain behind the players until they achieve higher ranks and then you will begin to see a change.

There are no fewer than fifteen new quests available in the Ettenmoors. There are a few more that are planned for an update beyond Shores of Evendim.

Spiders

Spiders, likely our weakest and most under-represented monster play class, have seen a large revamp that changes the classes nature. Spiders now have many skills that they can perfrom while at range. This should increase their overall effectiveness in the field and viability as both PvE and PvM fighting choices.

Major changes to other classes are earmarked for later in development. Minor changes will be called out with our update notes.

Future Tech

It's a great show on the history channel, what you research after completing the tech trees in Civilization 1-4 and something that I want to speak to very briefly. The reason I want to speak to it very briefly is that many changes are not slated for the Shores of Evendim, rather they are slated for a future update that focuses on enhancement to the Ettenmoors.

Rest assured there are a bundle of enhancements coming based on feedback that we have received from our players and monster players as well as personal projects that we all want to get into the area. The first time that you will see a very large number of these changes will be after the Shores of Evendim update.

On Requests

I get a lot of these on a daily/weekly basis. This is a good thing, because it means that you are all enjoying the game enough that you want to make it better. Awesome! Though I cannot answer all of the messages that I get I can tell you that a fair number of features that I have seen requested are planned for the near future. (The term near future is one that you will see from time to time, don't read into it so much. Major changes to game systems will only happen with updates.)

If I do not respond, it does not means that I am ignoring you. We are busy, but there are very few developers here that do not read their private messages to read your feedback. At the end of the day, we are making this game for you.

There are changes in the works and we will speak on them more clearly in the near future.

With that I want to let you know that I will keep this thread open for a week to take questions and answer them as I can. Some questions, I will not be able to answer directly as the mercurial nature of design may dictate that some proposed changes will not make it into a future update. Rest assured however, the Ettenmoors is very much alive and well in our minds.