A time for honesty

[MrJackdaw]

Originally Posted by Digital_Utopia

No matter how much I like Tolkien's world, and how much Turbine has done it justice, in the end, it boiled down to a comparison of the features and content I enjoyed. In that regard, WoW was the clear winner. It just had gotten to the point where I felt that I had some kind of obligation to continue playing...

Funnily enough, I just tried WoW again and really hated it compared to lotro! I went through the exact opposite of your predicament a few years ago - feeling like I was obligated to play WoW but wanted to play lotro, then made the switch. Funny how things work ain't it?

NOTE: Not trying to start a "Lotro is better than WoW" or vice-versa flame war!

[Uthboth]

Going to miss you Digital Utopia as Palantir has been the bread and butter for me since it first came out. I've pointed a few others to it that have fallen in love with it, but there is still so much more potential if Turbine would just open up more of the API to the users. There have been other projects of yours that I have enjoyed as well. You will be missed, but I do understand why it's time to step away.

I myself have been playing Lotro on the side. Right now Firefall and World of Tanks has been my main game while waiting for content in Lotro. I've steped away from working on my plugin as it was starting to turn into work fixing changes they made. The ui is easier to work on then LUA, but it's still a chore if you don't fully understand everything. Not much of a coder, but if I have something to follow I do alright.

Take care and I wish you the best with school. As parting I shall leave you with this.

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.

Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known.

Wiki Link

[K1R4D3L]

Adding my voice to the "sorry to see you go" mantra. Our recent discussion about LotROMaps is really just a perfect example of your frustration, and I obviously share it. The limitations/frustrations I read about and experience as a plugin consumer are the primary reason I haven't done any authoring myself...full of ideas, but no patience to deal with a sub-par API. Sad to see so much potential wasted...too bad there aren't any good community-developed game engine projects - the gaming community could really get behind something like that. Maybe an Elder Scrolls MMO will get it right....

I still love the game, and given my play style I still have plenty of game left to keep me engaged for quite some time yet, but knowing what's possible interface-wise in games like WoW and what should be possible with modern technology (multiple monitors, meaningful mobile device tie-ins, etc.), it does get rather disappointing to see Turbine seemingly focused entirely on selling more of the same content, rather than updating the engine and ecosystem.

Best of luck to you, and maybe one day Turbine will get the message and convince you that it's time to come back.

[Dwamur]

I'll play advocatus diaboli. Turbine is unlikely to devote a full fte, or even half one, to the api. Lotro does not compete with wow, nowhere close. Last figure I saw put lotro active players at 100k. Old data, but unless turbine feel like releasing more its all we have. That makes lotro a niche mmo. To increase retention, bring back old players, attract new ones, where are your ftes best deployed? Api is going to be low on that list.

I see a steadily improving labor of love by the devs, within the constraints of the content work that has to be the 'day job'. No complaints from me.

Soooo - volunteers to take on palantir maintenance? I love that hud.

[K1R4D3L]

Certainly understand the argument, and agree to some extent. As I said I've still got plenty of content ahead of me to keep me engaged, and the game has steadily improved to a large degree over the years. However, Digital isn't the first active player and community member that we've lost recently. The growing sentiment I hear is that the content additions just aren't enough to keep people engaged anymore.

I say spend one dev cycle enhancing and stabilizing the API to allow the devoted fan community to enhance the game ourselves, then go back to content, content, content. So many of us are willing to do the work for them, we just need the API to make it possible. I think that's a pretty reasonable strategy for them from a business perspective.

*shrug* Just a game though...I'll play until I get bored, dev if I ever get inspired, and eventually I'll move on.

[Dwamur]

Kiradel,

I hear your argument. You're saying "take one dev, or half a dev, and devote her to API improvement until U7. We'll take it from there."

Okay. That's a good argument. Now - let me take this seriously and ask: How can something come of it? Is the plugin author community coherent enough to act on this vision?

One possible action would be a marketing drive. Create a website, with content created by plugin authors, that acts as marketing. "Here is what we have done. Isn't it cool? Here's what we could do. It's even better! We'll do it for free. We need you, Turbine, to do this" (and "this" should link to a page with highly detailed, highly technical action items that a manager can give to a dev to implement immediately).

Then, once the site has been up for a while and has good, engaging content, including humorous videos - keep in mind, this would be a marketing effort, so it has to be light-hearted and positive - set a day during which plugin authors will advertise in-game. Plugins will already have been coded to display a message in chat when they start on that day, and every hour thereafter (details TBD, provided you can get date/time from the API and the community doesn't come up with something better), to the effect of "we are ready to make this game even funner and more full of bacon, for free! Turbine, do your part and enable us to do this. www.moarbacon.org".

How about it, plugin authors? Is this a bunch of trollshaw lynxes that cannot be herded under any circumstances, or can the authoring community rally behind a marketing push?

[Renegade-Rivers]

Just wanted to say that I have appreciated your work on Palantir and it has become over the months an interface I used faithfully. I just hope that someone will pick up the dev. on it.

As for your decision to go back to WoW, i don't envy you a bit. I played Wow for over four years, and it became a grind. How ever I remember a time when frustration ran high in WoW as well, especially when all of the accounts were getting hacked, which happened to me, and was why I gave up on it. Hopefully their security is better at this point.

As for LOTRO, I can understand your discontent, but I do believe that down the road we will see some improvements, because it is going to have to happen in order for Turbine to keep their product fresh. RoR may help bring back some players, and add some new ones at the same time. I look for a big recruitment drive about the time of the release of RoR. Hopefully it will be done in a way that will excite returning players, and encourage new ones to try LOTRO.

There is no doubt that their is a lot of things that could be improved in LOTRO and make it a much better, and more powerful game. Whether Turbine will have the foresight to see this, or whether they will attempt to continue to use LOTRO as a "cash cow" remains to be seen.

There are many interface improvements that I would love to see made, and of course in many cases, the materials to work with need to be supplied by Turbine, and LOTRO, but whether that will be done or not remains to be seen. I keep hoping that there will be a solution that will make it possible to make an efficient auction interface, and one for crafting projects as well, however those are only wishes.

Once again I wish you the very best in your game play, and hope that you find the joy and relaxation you are looking for going back to WoW. We will miss you being a part of the LOTRO community, and of course you have all of our best wishes. Until we met again, may all your paths be safe, and may all your wishes be granted.

[moebius92]

Originally Posted by Dwamur

Kiradel,

I hear your argument. You're saying "take one dev, or half a dev, and devote her to API improvement until U7. We'll take it from there."

Okay. That's a good argument. Now - let me take this seriously and ask: How can something come of it? Is the plugin author community coherent enough to act on this vision?

One possible action would be a marketing drive. Create a website, with content created by plugin authors, that acts as marketing. "Here is what we have done. Isn't it cool? Here's what we could do. It's even better! We'll do it for free. We need you, Turbine, to do this" (and "this" should link to a page with highly detailed, highly technical action items that a manager can give to a dev to implement immediately).

Then, once the site has been up for a while and has good, engaging content, including humorous videos - keep in mind, this would be a marketing effort, so it has to be light-hearted and positive - set a day during which plugin authors will advertise in-game. Plugins will already have been coded to display a message in chat when they start on that day, and every hour thereafter (details TBD, provided you can get date/time from the API and the community doesn't come up with something better), to the effect of "we are ready to make this game even funner and more full of bacon, for free! Turbine, do your part and enable us to do this. www.moarbacon.org".

How about it, plugin authors? Is this a bunch of trollshaw lynxes that cannot be herded under any circumstances, or can the authoring community rally behind a marketing push?

I'm probably biased, since I've only had limited experience with modding communities (mostly WoW, and some single player games), but one thing that struck me about the WoW plugin community (when I briefly rejoined WoW at the start of Cataclysm) was a bunch of plugins saying, "we no longer use the incoming healing library" or "we no longer use the threat library" - and the reason was, Blizzard had finally gotten around to adding that functionality to the API. But the plugin authors weren't waiting around for Blizzard to add the functionality, they went off and hacked it in, and people would use the tools even if they were crude or weren't perfectly accurate. And it wouldn't surprise me if that was the sort of signal to the UI devs that you're looking for - that, there's this crude tool, and it's horrible and inaccurate, but people are using it because they really want the functionality, and they'll grab at anything that provides it, no matter how badly it works.

So, I think the challenge to us, as plugin authors, is - use the functionality they've provided to the fullest (I mean, there's my plugin handling fellowship/raid vitals, and that's it. And it's being written by someone that doesn't understand the design philosophy behind what's probably the most popular set of WoW raid vitals in existence - which is kind of funny from my end, but probably less funny from the user's end). Go off and write something that the API doesn't explicitly support. Or better yet, write something that people are going to say, "you can't write a plugin that does X" - write a threat meter, write an equipment manger, write a skill cooldown tracker. And if you do that? ...well, at the very least, it'll give the devs a signal of what unimplemented features there's a demand for. At the best? Incentive - "that's what people who are willing to put the effort in wnat, and if I implement this, I can give it to them", inspiration - "imagine what they could do if they had more access, had a more expansive API?", and satisfaction - "look at what they've done with the things I've added to the API."

I mean, I'm too lazy to do that, because quite frankly, it sounds like work and effort and bunch of other tedious stuff, but if you want to send a signal to the devs - that's how I'd go about it.