LotRO Dev Admits "We Were Wrong" About Radiance
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From what I've read, not only is Radiance kind of a dumb game mechanic, but Gloom sounds just as awfully bad. I mean, what's the point in leveling up if its guaranteed that you'll be debuffed down a few levels? I don't play LOTRO, so I may be misunderstanding this.
Basically, it's a cheap and easy way of balancing and gating content. If you have enough Radiance, you counteract the Gloom so you don't lose any levels.. if you don't have enough Radiance (particularly if you're really short on it) you won't be able to do the content no matter how good you are or how hard you try.zehydra said:
It's also a good cheese mechanic for bosses and other so called difficult content. Instead of actually creating an interesting challenge or inventing a cool new fight mechanic it's easier to just make the fight/instance harder by ramping up the Gloom levels... in fact this is specifically how some of the late game boss fights are "balanced" now. You don't really die because the boss beats you, you die because you didn't kill it before the Gloom rised to the point where all of your team becomes cowering useless idiots.
I play the game, albeit as a very casual player who has arrived since the launch of 'free to play' which introduced me to an amazing MMO that I hadn't really taken a second glance at in the past, but has gorgeous outdoor environments, insanely well-written and deep quest lines, as well as some overall fun solo and group gameplay.
I've not experienced radiance directly, but plenty of people in my guild have been waiting for this happy day to come. As it's been noted in the previous posts, it's a stat that you had on various forms of high level armor, but it wasn't a stat that did -anything- other than, well, give you radiance points. They might as well have called it Grindage, and you needed x amount of Grindage to tackle a raid. It's not like you might miss more, or not do enough damage, you simply couldn't survive the massive debuff.
Part of it goes along with the otherwise clever dread/gloom mechanics that they use in LotRO, showing how you're facing enemies that make you quail and fear for your very life to such a point that they're all but defeating you before you even face them. Trying to work in a fear/sanity sort of effect, but as you can see, it just wasn't implemented correctly here. If you needed a certain radiance level to enter a raid, that's what you focused on, and that's all you cared about, just so you could get into that raid, and it gimped itemization all to hell and back, and was just a really frustrating way of locking the content.
I think they've made a huge step in the right direction, even as someone who might never see a raid that required Radiance. This, as well as other design decisions, show that they're very much still tweaking, tuning and developing LotRO, even after it's been shifted into Free to Play.
I've not experienced radiance directly, but plenty of people in my guild have been waiting for this happy day to come. As it's been noted in the previous posts, it's a stat that you had on various forms of high level armor, but it wasn't a stat that did -anything- other than, well, give you radiance points. They might as well have called it Grindage, and you needed x amount of Grindage to tackle a raid. It's not like you might miss more, or not do enough damage, you simply couldn't survive the massive debuff.
Part of it goes along with the otherwise clever dread/gloom mechanics that they use in LotRO, showing how you're facing enemies that make you quail and fear for your very life to such a point that they're all but defeating you before you even face them. Trying to work in a fear/sanity sort of effect, but as you can see, it just wasn't implemented correctly here. If you needed a certain radiance level to enter a raid, that's what you focused on, and that's all you cared about, just so you could get into that raid, and it gimped itemization all to hell and back, and was just a really frustrating way of locking the content.
I think they've made a huge step in the right direction, even as someone who might never see a raid that required Radiance. This, as well as other design decisions, show that they're very much still tweaking, tuning and developing LotRO, even after it's been shifted into Free to Play.
I absolutely care, thank you for asking.daemon37 said:
These guys are "making an amends" for how much Radiance, well, sucked, for lack of better words. That's a good thing to do. However, they are not being completely honest if they don't talk about WHY they would release something incomplete. My sense is that it is most likely because they didn't have the time, and because time ran out on their idea and they had to pay RENT, they chose not truth, but a fast and false release so they could shear the sheep for the landlord. That's a certain type of person and we have names for them. They need to self apply the correct names.
If your principle is being honest with yourself and your work, meaning you don't release something broken for money, and you trade that exact principle away for coin to pay rent, that makes you something different than a pleasure worker. That's what they should ALSO be admitting.
To not admit this is to aid the Devil in his always recurring self-disappearing act.
Have a great day, thanks for asking me to clarify, and I hope I've provided you a little light.
I dont understand the hate. What it basicly is is a way of tiering armor. You do the first tier of instances to get +10 radiance per armor peice which gives you enough over all radiance to tackle the T2 instances. The gear you get there gives you enough radiance to get into the T3 instances/raids and so on.
Removing it will just mean you have people in T1 armor going into the T3 dungeons. Getting killed alot. Complaining on the forums its to hard and demanding its made easier.
Find it really silly that a topic about radiance has ended up having the ftp rant dragged into it. You get about half the game free to play. Fine its more like an extended demo but its more than enough to know if you want to pay to play. If you dont like the game enough to pay by that point then dont play it. If you do then pay the monthly fee (its not that expensive) and you'll get all the content with it.
Removing it will just mean you have people in T1 armor going into the T3 dungeons. Getting killed alot. Complaining on the forums its to hard and demanding its made easier.
Find it really silly that a topic about radiance has ended up having the ftp rant dragged into it. You get about half the game free to play. Fine its more like an extended demo but its more than enough to know if you want to pay to play. If you dont like the game enough to pay by that point then dont play it. If you do then pay the monthly fee (its not that expensive) and you'll get all the content with it.
It was a cheap way of breaking apart and gating raids. So before you could raid you had to complete 6 different instances and then fight with 5 other people over the radiance coin.
So basically it was an endless grind of the same instances waiting for a lucky roll of the dice.
Then to make it even more fun, you had to get lucky on the raid to make it into the next raid.
The Radiance Grind literally tore kinships apart, they should of gotten rid of the mechanic ages ago.
So basically it was an endless grind of the same instances waiting for a lucky roll of the dice.
Then to make it even more fun, you had to get lucky on the raid to make it into the next raid.
The Radiance Grind literally tore kinships apart, they should of gotten rid of the mechanic ages ago.
Pity DDO devs (another F2P Turbine game) did not pay attention to avoid this mistake, instead of creating an even worse version of a 'raid gate'.vansau said:
In DDO the highest level raid (Tower of Dispair) requires a set of boots.
If you do not have these boots the raid boss can 'banish' you from the raid (eject your character from the raid instance) and you can not re-enter (so no XP, loot or 'completion').
You need to make these boots for each character, which requires 4 very rare random drops from a series of 6 hard quests.
So you have to grind the same 6 quests, on every character, for an item that is useless in any other quest, but essential in one raid.
Ouch.. but to be fair to the DDO devs, the LOTRO team has been sitting on this little mistake of theirs for over 2 years now. The only new part of it is that they are admitting it was a mistake and that they were just ignoring how much the players have hated it since day 1.TechNoFear said:
The road to Mordor is paved with the best of intentions.
Good on them for admitting that their idea was flawed/implemented poorly. If only more devs would be more readily willing to say stuff like that. You'd have a much happier player base and maybe (but not likely) less angry forums-users.
Good on them for admitting that their idea was flawed/implemented poorly. If only more devs would be more readily willing to say stuff like that. You'd have a much happier player base and maybe (but not likely) less angry forums-users.
That's always the sticking point with admissions like this. It's great that the developers finally admitted that, at least in this case, the players were right all along.. but it can be dangerous to make the more vocal of the player base feel like loud and repetitive screaming is what it takes for them to get their way.Panayjon said:
The Tower of Dispair has been out for well over a year.StriderShinryu said:
The devs have increased the drop rate of the 4 items and added them to 2 other quests since then (in response to complaints).
But the devs also increased the range of the banishment to get everybody in the area (ie healers standing at teh back), as originally only characters actually fighting the boss needed boots (and now everybody does).
Because it was an arbitrary debuff applied to all characters unless they had access to sufficient gear to combat the problem. Depending upon the class in question, the gear was either very easy to acquire or damn near impossible. It acted as a gate on high level play and did not reinforce the concept of team play as no action by team members could effectively combat gloom save the radiance stat.Novania said:
Basically, gloom is the problem and radiance was a ham handed solution to gloom but most people didn't care for it.
Maybe it's because the vast majority of my MMO background comes from the monolith that is WoW but this sort of mechanic has been around for eons and can be done very badly or can be done very effectively, this largely comes down to achieving the goal in a positive manner rather than a negative one. I'd put this more in the category of a badly executed design rather than a flaw with the design itself.
Back in the days of Vanilla WoW things like attunements and resistance gear were highly negative forms of gating much like this system seems to be. Better the game that that says;
"You must be this tall to go on this ride...... but you can jump to get there"
(this is a poor metaphor I guess but I like to think of it as the best balance in the "skill > gear" argument that pervades MMOs), rather than the game that makes it near impossible to become tall enough in the first place.
Back in the days of Vanilla WoW things like attunements and resistance gear were highly negative forms of gating much like this system seems to be. Better the game that that says;
"You must be this tall to go on this ride...... but you can jump to get there"
(this is a poor metaphor I guess but I like to think of it as the best balance in the "skill > gear" argument that pervades MMOs), rather than the game that makes it near impossible to become tall enough in the first place.
Looks like they took the Runescape approach. I left Runescape forever after they removed free trade. I was thinking about forgiving them and going back now that free trade is back, until I saw that they had the audacity to sell T-shirts that said, "I Brought Back Free Trade." I felt it disgusting for them to try and make a profit off of fixing such a diservice to the community. The best thing for LotRO to do right now is fix it and pretend it never happened. If they must address it, they should do so in the form of some game-wide gift.
Yeah, in the end that's what it turned out to be. Supposedly initial plans were a lot grander and less of a simple grab from WoW but, for some unexplained reason (beyond excusing it as "miscommunication") that's all it ended up as. Of course, to many LOTRO players just the fact that it closely mirrored an aspect of WoW would be enough for them to hate it even if it worked perfectly. Heheboholikeu said:
That and Gloom already existed in the form of Dread. Heck, they really basically function exactly the same just with different programmed sources. If further tricks within the same vein were desired, they could have been handled through intelligent use of the existing dread mechanic.. except they wanted something new just so they could created a new counter stat to it.Eclectic Dreck said: