22:09:51
I'm appalled.
For years, I've been pointing out to people that even though we have our arguments in the LOTRO forums, that the maturity level there has always been maintained at a much higher level then in the forums of other games I've been involved with, and most particularly, have never devolved to the depths seen in the World of Warcraft forums. WoW attracted a much younger crowd of gamers, probably because of Blizzard.net, then most MMORPGs seem to. And you can see it in the forums. Baseless rants, demands to change aspects if the game with no explanations of the perceived problem, calling the devs names - there's an effect way to encourage them to look into your problem, and broad, sweeping generalizations were rampant.
All of this is starting to rear it's head in LOTRO - and all because of a few *trivial* glitches. I hear the inrushing of breath right now, because I belittled your favorite glitch, but open your mind. This game has been up and running now for 24 months with *no major downtime* - no widespread rollbacks, no login server problems, no need to reboot them on a weekly basis. At this point in time even a 48 hour downtime is trivial when you run the numbers - 17,280 hours after launch, a 48 hour straight downtime would amount to 0.27% downtime. I know companies that pay sysadmins $25,000 bonuses for keeping downtime below 2%. That's considered exceptional.
One extremist tells me, "Half the game is broken since MoM!" It is? Geez ... I must have been playing only the unbroken half, since November. I questioned him on this, and do you know, he could only come up with about 3 minor issues. Yes, it's true that the raid locks for the new raid in Book 7 weren't functioning correctly. We might have to wait all the way to the next repair patch to see a fix. Horrors. Yes, it's also true that the festival horserace had a glitch and had to be deactivated. I bet they extend the festival so anyone that really wants the horse can get it. We just might have to wait a few days. Horrors.
My absolute favorite was the guy that responded to a positive post by telling the poster that there opinion couldn't possibly be valid, since their account was only a year old, and they start off by saying "long time no see," so that must mean they took a break...so they can't have played the game long enough to have valid opinions.
Oh my.
You *know* I had to get into this one. There aren't many people around anymore that have followed this game as long, or intently, then I have. There are even fewer that have posted more then the reams of text I've fired off, from arguments about points of lore, to reason to disinclude "duelling" in the game, to outright plots against the existance of any form of PVP in the game, I've been around. I've been in both alpha's and beta's for SoA and MoM. I'm more aware than most forum posters just how well Turbine listens to their customers. I've seen it in action. For some little pissant to compare his 200 days subscription time to the hours I've put in both playing and helping to test this game for *his* benefit really had me on the floor. He hasn't even been around long enough to know who he was comparing himself to. Ah well, live and learn.
The other thing that's been floating about is this statement that "all the original devs have left..." Wrong. I'm sure Hakai, Orion, Kehleyr, Scenario, Mithlin, Fantus, Amlug, Zombie Columbus and Jalessa will be surprised to hear that - grapevine tells me that they're all hard at work on Book 8. I guess they're just confused. It's also not true that "they laid off all the QA staff." While it's true that there was a layoff at the end of the MoM development cycle, and that most of those were QA, they were QA brought on *specifically* for MoM. They didn't have anything at all to do with content updates, or any other aspect of the game's QA.
I think I'll leave this at that point. Just had to debunk a few rumours. :-)
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