Lord of the Rings Online dev diary tells of creating Mirkwood
by Rubi Bayer 
Nov 6th 2009 at 11:00AM
Filed under: Fantasy, Lord of the Rings Online, Expansions, News items
Jesse "Vastin" Kings writes about the fun the team had getting to play with new areas, monsters, and quests, and the challenge of balancing those plans with the available resources. Working with the original Lord of the Rings story line posed another challenge sometimes when it came to filling in the game and still remaining true to Tolkien.
Of course, not everything was on the showy, fun, creative side: "...it might interest you to know that the single largest share of all the time I've spent working on Mirkwood was in trying to figure out and implement ways to keep our servers from being reduced to piles of smoking slag within hours of Siege of Mirkwood going live and all of you hurling yourselves at it at once."
The full entry can be read here.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
aurickle said on 1:21PM 11-06-2009
Wow, talk about old news. This came out a couple weeks ago.
I'm surprised you haven't done much about the ongoing dev diary series about the new skirmishes system. Part 6 was just posted today and can be read at http://www.lotro.com/gameinfo/devdiaries/522-developer-diary-som-skirmishes-accessibility
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John said on 4:23PM 11-06-2009
I'm surprised the servers would continue to be a challenge this many years after the release...don't they eventually figure out how to handle the increase in population? I'm sure there will be some problems at launch but by now I would expect them to be fairly standard. Guess that's why I'm not a game developer...I know NOTHING!!!! lol
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Sam said on 9:37PM 11-06-2009
generally server stability isn't a problem most of the time, there's two things/weak points they'd be worried about:
1: what happens when everyone clusters into one zone - you can see hints of it in Dalaran in WoW (only hints, because they're managed pretty well), where the server is dealing with so many connections on the one node. This causes major lag for anyone in zone, and also manifests as loot not appearing, mobs teleporting, etc. Any expansion release this is a likely occurance, as everyone floods into the new content.
2: the download servers - if everyone wants to download a patch at once, say the patch is 800mb - there's gonna be a point there where MANY MANY people are downloading it at once - meaning horribly slow download speeds, possible patcher timeouts, etc - all things likely to annoy players.
Neurotic said on 3:37AM 11-09-2009
I don't usually follow dev diaries and things, but I looked at this one for fun, and found it to be well-written and interesting, so thanks for that Massively
"In retrospect, we might have reduced the scope of the Mirkwood region in order to focus our resources more and go for a somewhat shorter experience with more color and depth, knowing that the Skirmish system was going to help fill in for quite a bit of hack-and-slash game play."
I for one would rather have a fuller Mirkwood experience than a more detailed Skirmish system; the latter doesn't interest me nearly as much as the former.
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