If Standing Stone Games hoped that it was going to get Lord of the Rings Online’s Update 43 quietly out the door before next week’s server transfers, those hopes crashed and sunk on the rocky shores of player reception.
The contentious changes involved overhauls and redesigns to the deed (achievement) log and Elf models. The deed log in particular received fierce pushback since Thursday’s patch, with some of the community complaining that the redesign wastes screen real estate, is visually hard on the eyes, lacks the lore tooltips, doesn’t close upon hitting ESC, and is actually less functional than the old version.
“The new one is huge, unresizable, painful to look at. I mean it literally, my eyes hurt when I look at it,” one player said. Another responded by saying, “The thing that irritates me the most is that pretty much every feedback we give on [the test server] was ignored. There was a several pages thread about the new deed log there. Not a single reply from a developer.”
It should be noted that players can elect to go back to the old deed log — for now — by hitting CTRL-L.
If the aesthetics and functionality weren’t bad enough, it turns out that the update (and use of the deed log in particular) have been tied to a number of hard crashes to desktop. SSG said that it’s received reports of these and is investigating.
