Over the last month, most of the information we’ve been getting out of Lord of the Rings Online has been coming from forum posts and Discord clips and occasionally videos too, as the obviously beleaguered Standing Stone Games developer team has struggled to make the new 64-bit servers, transfers, and housing go brrrr.
And now we’re getting a long-form letter from the team, though it’s less about the last month and more about the look ahead. Allan “Orion” Maki basically lays out what players can expect from the next six months. Let’s sum up:
- The 18th anniversary is en route in April and will be the first festival that’s getting the festival-revision treatment from SSG, with mission scaling, new rewards, and Delvings.
- Update 44 is also coming this month; it includes the new Crown of Hamat content pack with “new story quests, missions, and a 6-player instance” for level 150 toons. It will not include the originally planned raid; that’s been bumped off. “[R]eleasing the current Temple of Utug-bûr raid took longer than anticipated, and we no longer have the time to deliver another raid in this window,” Orion says.
- Update 44 also includes the reputation perk for sub players that actually covers most of the reps; it basically allows alts to earn rep faster as long as another account toon has higher standing than the alt.
- SSG is apparently expanding the housing system with new Homesteading currency, which replaces premium writs; players will be able to use the new currency to buy special house decor. Yes, you can convert writs to the new currency. That’s slotted for Q2, so in the next couple of months.
- The traveling vendors are going to be set up in Laila’s shop (temporarily).
- In Q3, expect update 45, Hunter and Burglar updates, additions to birding and fishing, the Farmer’s Faire upgrade, and improvements to monster play.
- The 2025 expansion is slated for Q4; it will have a raid, four new zones, and the level cap bump to 160.
- The Midsummer Festival is also being revised this summer with a “new festival island with new quests, experiences, and rewards.”
Finally, Orion says the kinship overhaul is still on deck for Q2.
“Bringing the kinship system up to modern standards to allow advancement, deeds, calendars, management of information and filtering tools, banks, kinship traits, boons, and so much more is rooted first in getting the management of the data right,” he writes. “Our Kinship management is older than the game and has seen few updates over the decades. As a result, our first order of business is to modernize the storage and management of data.”
“Changes outlined above increase the amount of data we need to store, and without refinement, Kinship updates will degrade performance and be detrimental to the game. Our engineering team is hard at work on solving this problem, taking special care to ensure the transition to the new storage model is seamless and uneventful. The social bonds we construct in Kinship are incredibly important, and we want to ensure nothing impedes or threatens a Kinship when these updates go live. This first step, while not something you will see directly, unlocks the future and allows us to start working through the list of potential enhancements outlined above. We would be remiss if we did not mention that we are working on a player-facing aspect to validate, test, and then refine Kinship Data Storage. We are hoping to start teasing this feature shortly after the launch of Update 44. If all goes well, we want to provide the feature to all kinships before the release of Update 45.”
There’s nothing about compensation for the last month of issues, nor a new set of dates for transfers from the dark worlds, which were originally meant to begin in March.
