Layanor and Cari talk about PvMP, shrews, and cosmetic pets. We also talk about the new slotted gear coming out and possible PVMP areas mentioned by the devs.

Layanor

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• 33.42% moors
  
• Whent on Landroval and leveled. Draculetta helped me out.
  

Cari

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• I got a shrew pet in the festival, and a beer mug from fence walking.
  

Eldar won Taking the Hobbits to Isengard

They get a festival of their choice turned on for a week.

Eldar 46m 06s 0 Deaths

LOTRO Community Update

http://youtu.be/w9TXQbhCXi0

Dev Roundtable Incoming

Extra Life

$100K Sapience Gets a Tattoo

Update 14 coming to Bullroarer in the next couple of weeks.

Taking the Hobbits To Isengard

https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?539143-Hobbits-to-Isengard-Q-A-with-Sapience-notes-on-what-was-said

Will you be expanding on the /cpet commands for cosmetic pets

Yes, they will be. The /cpet command was put in solely as a temporary measure so that players would have the ability to rename their pets while a proper UI is being worked on. There are a lot of plans for cosmetic pets. It’s pretty cool and very interesting and he thinks we will like it a lot.

Question about Osgiliath being considered for a PvMP zone

He cautions that they consider a LOT of things. Do not ever mistake that for “We promise it’s coming.†They are being honest when they say they’ve discussed it, but what comes of it remains to be seen. It’s possible nothing will come of it.

Discussion about Dwarves in Moria runs, how will he get to level 50

The Gift of the Valar. Starting tomorrow, the Gift will return to the LotRO store, and will be 25% off for about a week. Moria will also be on sale for 20% off. The Moria runs will start the following week. It will be from the entrance of Moria to the gates of Caras Galadhon.

Reminder that he promised he’d have Hobnanigans news for this run

Yes, Hobnanigans will be coming back on the weekend of June 6th. The bugfixes won’t be coming until U14, but we can still play the game and have some fun with it.

Rowan – He introduces himself, says that he’s working on disrupting the things HoarseDev is working on, and adding new things (laughs). Says right now it’s all about U14 and getting the new spaces put together. Working on some limited but cool group content – small fellowship content that can go onto the landscape, and new attention and thought around U14 toward the end of the year.

Questions in the chat about slotted gear

HoarseDev – It’s been done before in other games, and for LotRO it’s a pretty big step in terms of letting players customize their own armour. It’s not going to be nearly as crazy or involved or grindy as legendary items, but it will allow us to choose, on certain pieces of armour, exactly which stats we want. So for example if we wanted more crit rating but we didn’t really care about vitality (he thinks that’s probably a bad example), we could just choose to slot what they’re calling essences – which are just the pure stats into the gear as we want to. There will be some tie-in to crafting, though not completely – there will be certain things that we can craft with the system, across all the professions, but they’ll also be dropping all sorts of nuggets of this system into skirmishes, into end game content, into big battles, even into festivals – little one-off things. We might be able to find something in the Treasure hunt, even just landscape kills.

Question about how many updates we are getting this year

Rowan – In terms of major new regions, they have U14 and U15. Both of those are in Gondor. And they’re also going to do an interlude between the two that is going to take us into the Dead Marshes.

Question about whether people will be able to make multiple Beornings

Rowan – Believes you can make as many Beornings as you have character slots for.

HoarseDev – Says that’s right, and they’re also investigating if they can pop open a few character slots as part of a bundle deal with picking up the new class.

Question about Dead Marshes

Rowan – Current status for the Dead Marshes is that it’s going to be an epic book, mostly session play. If there is any region play in there, it’s very small, because there’s not a lot to do in the Dead Marshes. It’s about as close to a barren area as they’ve got.

Will the Beorning be a store offer

HoarseDev – He’s nearly certain it will be. They’re not tying it, as far as he knows, to any other big bundle or purchase type thing, but as far as he knows, it will be a store offer.

Any more cosmetic pets in the works

HoarseDev – Yeah, they want to see how they function on live and get their fair share of bugs worked out, but they are absolutely working on more of them. He knows for Sapience specifically they are probably going to cook him up a couple special ones for his dark purposes, so they’re working on those next. They seem like a lot of fun, people have been having a hoot, so he sees no reason not to make more cosmetic pets.

HoarseDev asks Rowan if he wants to talk about Osgiliath

Rowan – Says it’s totally speculative, and Jinjaah isn’t next to HoarseDev to slap him.

HoarseDev – Says they’re good at speculation.

Rowan – (Laughs)

HoarseDev – They definitely want to go to Osgiliath. He’s seen some posts here and there and they’ve teased that they may try to do something PvMP-related with it, but one thing that he’d like to make pretty darn clear because it immediately gets to some people – it’s a pretty important place for them to go. If, purely speculatively speaking, they did something PvMP there, that would not be the only thing there. They would handle it with instancing or other layers so that it would give a PvE experience, which would be much more conducive to the storytelling they like to do, but if they did get out in front and try to do something PvMP, that IN THEORY would be a fun place to do it.

Rowan – Thinks part of the balance there is about quest flow and crossing over and so on. We know that when we go up the Anduin, basically we are going to have Minas Tirith staring us in the face, so a big part of prototyping is making sure that part of the experience is very cool and looks great, and then getting the feeling of it right. The armies of the orcs, things are kind of overrun. There’s a lot of danger out there.

Sapience pops in to address a question about whether people will have to pay to unlock the Beorning class

Sapience – Traditionally new classes, extra classes, tend to have a cost associated with them.

Rowan – That is correct.

How about letting pets do flips when we do and such

HoarseDev – They are working on hopefully getting some pet tricks in and such. It may not flip when we flip, but if it knows how to flip it will be able to flip. One of the most fun things is being able to have a funny little sidekick that can do humorous stuff, so it’s presently being worked on. He doesn’t think it’s for U14, but it might slide in. He doesn’t have the actual schedule in front of him, but people are working on it.

Does the game need more money sinks

HoarseDev – Yeah, it sure does. It sure does. He would also argue that they need to sink some marks. They are looking at ways to do that that actually make a lot of sense (points out the terrible pun). It’s something they have to be very delicate with. They do know how much money everyone has, and there are some people rolling around with a ton, and some rolling around with not too much, so they are looking at some additional sinks, but probably U15 for that as opposed to U14. For the time being, he spends a lot of time thinking about the game economy and they’re hoping to breathe a little bit of life into crafting with the new item type, and that in and of itself naturally sinks money with things being auctioned and moved around. But they might be looking at a few more concrete things for 15.

Could we get more space please, if socket gear is going to take up more inventory space

HoarseDev – That’s part of the updates that they did to the inventory system that they did – to sort of ease their ability to add more space as it makes sense. More space on each character does mean something for the server, so as they have the green light to do that, they add more space. He’s pretty sure there’s more planned for this year so they’ll see how that goes.

Strategic Hobbit Initiative to Evacuate Lost Dwarves or the The Bridge of Hobbit Doom Runs

https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?549511-TTHTI-Was-just-the-start-Strategic-Hobbit-Initiative-to-Evacuate-Lost-Dwarves

Hobnanigans Back the Weekend of June 6

Cithryth “as usualâ€

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prD1Wwaruk4&list=UUQXQ-JKGv4jX2GQuSK9hhOA

3-Mans

Monday’s at 9PST 12 EST.

Will be on youtube and twitch replay.

Starting up Next Week

The Weatherstock Pre-Concerts are going on now

http://lotroartists.com/calendar/action~month/cat_ids~226/

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Cari  Twitter: @thecarimac

Layanor  Twitter: @Layanor