LotRO Dev Admits "We Were Wrong" About Radiance

[vansau]

LotRO Dev Admits "We Were Wrong" About Radiance

Radiance is considered by many people to be on of the biggest mistakes in Lord of the Rings Online. Here's a clue about why it failed: Even the developers hated it.

The <a href=http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/Radiance>Radiance mechanic is widely considered by players to be one of the biggest development backfires in the history of Lord of the Rings Online. The game's developers have been aware of this for a while (which is why they literally mentioned running the feature over with a train); now that it's about to be removed from the game, they're willing to discuss just what went wrong.

In a new dev diary, developer Allan Maki was saddled with addressing the awkward elephant in the room. "Sometimes it's difficult to shine the interrogation lamp on yourself and find out what exactly went wrong," he said. "Radiance was not a bad idea. In fact, many of us still feel that if it had been designed correctly it would have been successful. As it turned out, however, we created nothing more than an arbitrary gating mechanic that forced players to get 'keys' in order to enter raids."

Of course, the biggest nail in the mechanic's coffin was player reception:

You, the players, hated Radiance. In fact, there has never been such a polarizing and definitively poorly received implementation as Radiance. We struggled to find a way to make this system, which we wanted to rely upon for future raids and content development, work for us. Yet, many issues surrounded our implementation. The benefits it offered proved to be too good, Radiance gear proved to be too easy or too hard to acquire, and exploits plagued of the early days of the Moria instances. (Some still have issues!) Radiance was flailing.

The diary makes for an interesting read, mainly because it shows how things went wrong even though the project began with the best of intentions. Still, at least the developers are aware of the fact that they messed up and are now willing to openly admit it.

Source: Massively

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[phoenix352]

since they or you didn't explain what exactly radiance is ill assume they put a system where you need to physically pay for a key to enter a raid?

id call that a pain in the ass....
i mean who would of wanted to pay for a subscription that still makes you get curtain keys for feature.

however if its just some kind of fetch the key quest then its still a bad idea ....

 

[sooperman]

It's a bit strange to think that people would hate the mechanic so much. Having never played the game myself, it would seem that Radiance is just a neat bonus to have that can't really get in the way. According to the link in the article, Radiance is a good thing.

Perhaps I'm thinking about it wrong; that people actually dislike the Gloom that Radiance is supposed to counteract, but even that sounds like a minor inconvenience. Curious.

 

[Zechnophobe]

LotRO Dev Admits "We Were Wrong" About Radiance

Radiance is considered by many people to be on of the biggest mistakes in Lord of the Rings Online. Here's a clue about why it failed: Even the developers hated it.

The <a href=http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/Radiance>Radiance mechanic is widely considered by players to be one of the biggest development backfires in the history of Lord of the Rings Online. The game's developers have been aware of this for a while (which is why they literally mentioned running the feature over with a train); now that it's about to be removed from the game, they're willing to discuss just went wrong.

In a new dev diary, developer Allan Maki was saddled with addressing the awkward elephant in the room. "Sometimes it's difficult to shine the interrogation lamp on yourself and find out what exactly went wrong," he said. "Radiance was not a bad idea. In fact, many of us still feel that if it had been designed correctly it would have been successful. As it turned out, however, we created nothing more than an arbitrary gating mechanic that forced players to get 'keys' in order to enter raids."

Of course, the biggest nail in the mechanic's coffin was player reception:

You, the players, hated Radiance. In fact, there has never been such a polarizing and definitively poorly received implementation as Radiance. We struggled to find a way to make this system, which we wanted to rely upon for future raids and content development, work for us. Yet, many issues surrounded our implementation. The benefits it offered proved to be too good, Radiance gear proved to be too easy or too hard to acquire, and exploits plagued of the early days of the Moria instances. (Some still have issues!) Radiance was flailing.

The diary makes for an interesting read, mainly because it shows how things went wrong even though the project began with the best of intentions. Still, at least the developers are aware of the fact that they messed up and are now willing to openly admit it.

Source: Massively

Permalink

Uh, Mike? Bud? Pal? Wanna clue us in on what Radiance is? Or did you sorta expect everyone to just go in and read the article with actual information and skip yours?

 

[mstieler]

since they or you didn't explain what exactly radiance is ill assume they put a system where you need to physically pay for a key to enter a raid?

id call that a pain in the ass....
i mean who would of wanted to pay for a subscription that still makes you get curtain keys for feature.

however if its just some kind of fetch the key quest then its still a bad idea ....

From the linked LOTRO Lorebook page:

Radiance is a mechanic in the LotRO game. It is found on some armour pieces and is used to combat gloom in certain instances. Gloom is given by some instance bosses and adds up to dread, which debuffs a person and (when they are effectively 8 levels lower) can make a person cower for a short time. Radiance directly counteracts boss gloom -- there is no benefit to having more radiance than the amount of gloom a boss produces. Contrariwise, there is no penalty for having "more than enough" radiance.

For example:

* 50 gloom + 80 radiance = no gloom and no benefit.
* 80 gloom + 50 radiance = 30 gloom, so 3 skill levels lower and other nerfs will also be applied.

 

[Novania]

From the "Radiance mechanic" tab, it seems just like an "anti-debuff" stat you can find on armor.

I don't really see why everyone got so pissed off about it.

 

[dancinginfernal]

I read the lorebook entry, but I still don't necessarily get it.

Anybody want to help a brudda out?

 

[vansau]

Uh, Mike? Bud? Pal? Wanna clue us in on what Radiance is? Or did you sorta expect everyone to just go in and read the article with actual information and skip yours?

Honestly, I debated on that a bit. I linked to the LotRO Lorebook because it explained the system better than I could, since it seemed kinda convoluted, I haven't played the game in a few years (and thus never experienced it) and didn't want to explain it incorrectly.

 

[Brainst0rm]

This sounds more like a balancing issue than straight-up bad design. But who knows? Someone. Not me. I played LotRO for about a week when it first went f2p - I was impressed with the class and profession design, but it just bored me.

Also: TAKE NOTES, JAGEX!

<-- longtime embittered RuneScape player.

 

[sooperman]

I read the lorebook entry, but I still don't necessarily get it.

Anybody want to help a brudda out?

From what I gather, it's a defense against Gloom, a de-buff that bosses use. The more Radiance you have, the more Gloom you can take without loosing the levels that it would normally de-buff you.

Better?

 

[samsonguy920]

From what @mstieler shared here, Radiance sounds like a good idea for a game like LotRO. But if it ended up broken to the point of player raging, then I applaud the devs taking it out. If they still want the mechanic in as they hoped it would be, I am hoping they put it through some tough testing before putting it back into the main game.
Test, test, test, and test some more. Then test it one more time. The white glove test applies to this principal as well.

 

[SaintWaldo]

They deserve credit for the openess now, the Epimethean urge. They call it, "an elephant in the room." They couldn't be more right.

The thing is, there's another elephant in the room still, and it's bigger. The real elephant is that they are shining honesty as after thought and they won't admit what made them lie to themselves about what was good and true in the first place, and made their attempt to create a pastime into an act of prostitution: RENT that was due NOW.

If you are going to meditate, go all the way down. If you didn't go far enough this time, which these guys definitely did not do, improve your lungs. Try singing, but no matter what, always broadcast the truth.

 

[dancinginfernal]

I read the lorebook entry, but I still don't necessarily get it.

Anybody want to help a brudda out?

From what I gather, it's a defense against Gloom, a de-buff that bosses use. The more Radiance you have, the more Gloom you can take without loosing the levels that it would normally de-buff you.

Better?

Yup. Thanks brah.

 

[thisbymaster]

From what I read from in the first link it sounds like there were forcing people to get different gear for boss fights from the gear that could be used on regular fights. I don't know how the itemization works in lotr online but if it is anything like wow, most classes carry around two groups of items, this would force it up to four sets of armor. It sounds like if they started making bosses do tons of aoe magic damage and only had small amounts of armor with resists on it. Lotr online should have learned Wow's lesson when they tried to do with the Molten Core years ago, they forced players to go out and get fire resist gear.

 

[Xeorm]

The mechanic reminds me a lot of hit rating from wow...except far worse. Especially if there's no way to adjust how much you have on you except to switch out gear pieces...

 

[Scrythe]

Uh, Mike? Bud? Pal? Wanna clue us in on what Radiance is? Or did you sorta expect everyone to just go in and read the article with actual information and skip yours?

Honestly, I debated on that a bit. I linked to the LotRO Lorebook because it explained the system better than I could, since it seemed kinda convoluted, I haven't played the game in a few years (and thus never experienced it) and didn't want to explain it incorrectly.

We should call Shamus down here. Maybe he'll be able to translate this into Common for us all.

 

[Zechnophobe]

So, at a glance It is hard to figure out what the problem is, Can you Lotro people explain it? It looks like Boss has Debuff aura of value X, it subtracts from your power in one way or another. You can counter it with radiance of values up to X to negate it. Radiance does nothing but counter it.

Was it a really big pain to deal with this debuff? Were radiance items so rare you had to go grinding before you could actually fight these bosses? Where they mainly a For Pay way to F over the players? It is hard to really internalize this. In many games bosses have powerful abilities that require special tactics to get passed. Why is this one different?

(These are honest questions, I'm hoping if they get answered it will make this all more understandable to non lotro fans).

 

[StriderShinryu]

An introduction to Radiance:

Shortly after it was introduced, Radiance was a number stat attached to select pieces of armour. This stat did two things:

- It counteracted "Gloom", which is a general debuff that all characters who entered certain raid instances and/or fought certain bosses experienced. Too much Gloom and not enough Radiance and your character essentially played as if they lost experience levels (up to, I believe, the equivalent of -4 levels.. or the equivalent of a non expiring death penalty). If you went even further below the Gloom threshold your character would stand in place cowering and would only be sporadically controllable. Beating these instances at -4 levels was generally very tough but doable, especially if only a couple members of your group were that low. Beating anything while cowering was, as I'm sure you can imagine, impossible.

- It gave you a "Hope" buff everywhere in the game world. Hope increases all of your stats (in a sense, the opposite of a death penalty to the point where you are, in essence, gaining levels over the level cap). As I'm sure you can imagine, anyone who did not have Radiance was exponentially weaker than those who did, making the game too easy for Rad haves and overly tough for Rad have nots.

Eventually, the LOTRO devs decided to remove the second aspect of Radiance and left it as what amounted to a hard gating mechanism in a game that had never had any sort of gating mechanism. All of the raids that existed before Moria (and the introduction of Rad) could be entered by any player of any level. Sure they would likely be instantly squashed if they were too weak, but the only gate that existed was one of decent gear, appropriate XP level and your ability to learn the instance.

The acquisition of Rad gear, both in it's early and later iterations, required repeatedly grinding non Rad requiring instances so that you could collect the associated piece of Rad gear. This gave you access to "level 2" set of instances that did require some level of Rad to even have a shot of success at.. and you had to grind these repeatedly until you had their Rad reward gear.. at which point you could finally enter the "level 3" instance.

It was claimed by some that this tiering process was a good thing as it forced players to get some competence at high level grouping in certain challenges before being allowed to move onto the next tier. It was still a huge pain but at least it made sense.. until changes were made such that anyone could just grind the same easy and fast non rad instances by keyboard face rolling to acquire enough Rad to advance. Thus totally negating Rad's one saving grace as a sort of competency gauge.

On top of all of this is, potentially, the biggest issue with Radiance: It and it alone is the only way you can even enter high level raids. Any other armour choice in the game was rendered completely useless by this need to have a single specific set of arbitrary gear. In one fell swoop, high level itemization in LOTRO was virtually killed by a single mechanic.

TLDR: Radiance is a hard gating mechanism that forced repetitive grinding where there had never been forced repetitive grinding before. It also killed itemization at higher levels because gear with Radiance on it was literally the only gear you could wear in higher level instances/raids.

Hope that helps. If anyone else has further questions, feel free to ask.

 

[wsmieszek]

Missed a word here ->

now that it's about to be removed from the game, they're willing to discuss just (...) went wrong.

?