Score one for MOP’s Justin: He noted this morning that SSG has been systematically counting down through Lord of the Rings Online’s updates on Twitter, leading to speculation over whether the Legendary server might be launching this week after all. (You’ll recall that Standing Stone originally announced it for November 6th, then walked back that date entirely.)
Anyway, it turns out that Justin was quite right: The new server will be launching at noon EST on November 8th. In fact, it now has a name: Anor.
We are pleased to announce that our first-ever Legendary server for Lord of the Rings Online will open to the public at Noon Eastern (-5 GMT) on Thursday, November 8th. We are also announcing the server's name: Anor! For more information visit https://t.co/V8vaUvwFGG. #LOTRO pic.twitter.com/3HWi4rEZWq
— LOTRO (@lotro) November 5, 2018
Meanwhile, if you’ve ever listened to the devs of an old MMO talk about the biggest difficulties they face, you’ve probably heard two words: spaghetti code, old tweaks and systems that you build on until it’s a confusing mess tied in knots. One Lord of the Rings Online developer addressed just that in a thread on the official forums last week in which players lamented the unintended buggy consequences of new balance changes.
“We’re attempting to tie a huge number (many thousands) of older progressions in the game into a core set of progressions that can manage them all,” Standing Stone Games’ Vastin explains. “This tie in is being handled formulaically, and there was a major bug introduced to one of the core formula references a little while back that caused an number of these older progressions to go off kilter.” But it’s more than just a one-off bug: The whole system needs a full reboot to clean it all up. Here’s Vastin again.
“Ultimately we need to actually GET RID OF most of these thousands of old value sets, because they are what make it nearly impossible to maintain and update the game systems and they are completely unnecessary, but in the meantime the shift to at least make them manageable is proving to be a steep climb. Statistically, most of our early game has been trivial for years now, as none of our old content even remotely kept up with the skill and trait power creep that inevitably defines MMO development – it was simply impossible to re-balance the early game to react to changes that rolled backwards through the game – so I’m hoping another week or two of broken-ness won’t be too painful. <sigh>”
