We attended the dev chat with the members of the LotRO dev team hosted by mmorpg.com. You can find the transcript here:
http://www.lotrolife.com/dev_chat_4_12_07/
Here are some more interesting stuff discussed:
Beorhtigall "will you expand and surprise us with upgrades to areas we already have? new quests and more areas to enter from the books?"
[LOTRO]Annuvin Well, it's funny you should mention that. We completely revisited a region of the game for Book 12, and it plays wildly differently. As for more places/areas from the books, I think it is safe to say that you will be pleased with 2008... oh yes... you will be quite, quite, happy.
TheBob "What are Turbines plans to minimize game-wide outages such as those that affected LoTRO and DDO last week?"
[LOTRO]Patience Hi Bob - you had to remind me. I was trying to block that out. 😀 Monday's outage was caused by a problem with our SAN following an upgrade, and yesterday's outage was a hardware failure; also in the SAN, but unrelated to Monday's outage. In both cases we are evaluating our response and recovery procedures to minimize impact on the customers when the unexpected occurs.
[LOTRO]Patience I think most of our players will agree that we take downtime very seriously and will continue to do everything in our power to prevent it, and if it does occur, we'll do our best to make sure we're communicating every step of the way with our players until we're back up.
Verderuso "Yourquestionhere Hello, I wanted to know if we are getting new hairsyles or new faces in book 12. Thanks :)"
[LOTRO]Annuvin Book 12 is all about customization... and what fun would we have without the "moh-ullet", a vintage Middle-Earth haircut? (punk in the front, party in the back)
[LOTRO]Annuvin So... yes, there will be more haircuts in the future. 😉
Daesan "I'm curious if we'll be seeing any other large areas like Evendim opening up in further updates, or if the next few updates will only consist of adding small areas with instances. I could assume that Rohan will most likely be released as part of an expansion, but what about Moria?"
[LOTRO]Ringleader You will absolutely see new regions/areas added to LOTRO during upcoming updates. In fact we are working on such a region as we speak.
[LOTRO]Ringleader To your other question, Moria is someyyrow985-243876-2kndvjali6]n[uwbvgc;xoir7y1-yfvbnaskjhvbhla
[LOTRO]Ringleader [Our sincere apologies - this message has been altered by Turbine MarketBots]
And my favorites:
deth2munkies[LoSS] "Are all the responses that start with "Funny you should ask" prewritten? :P"
[LOTRO]Annuvin Funny you should ask
[LOTRO]Patience Funny you should ask...
[LOTRO]Ringleader Funny U should ask!
[LOTRO]Patience No, they're not 😀 We're just glad you asked, lol
Dordrac "Any new zones being released in books 13, 14 or 15? And what about any small instances in book 12?"
[LOTRO]Annuvin Funny you should ask..
[LOTRO]Patience Funny you should ask...
[LOTRO]Ringleader Funny you should ask!
[LOTRO]Ringleader YES!
