Warner Bros. Buys Turbine

I hope that this somehow works for the best in the form of more long term financial security for the company or something like that. I also hope someone high up at WB is a hardcore LOTRO player and says “Moria blows… let’s fix it.”

Or else I need to become that hardcore LOTRO player at WB in the next week so I can be the one who says that.

I think one thing that gives me a little confidence, maybe entirely unfounded, is that it seems like one of the first things I heard getting announced where it was clearly a WB LOTRO combo was War In The North. A co-op RPG developed by Snowblind. Now I know a lot of Middle Earth nerds would soil themselves if someone made Dark Alliance 2 Mirkwood, but I was glad to see the RPG genre and co-op gameplay getting first mention. Maybe WB gets what a lot of LOTR gamers hope for, RPGs and grouping with friends.

I give a lot of credit to Jeff Anderson for convincing multiple VCs to do multiple rounds of investment. I don’t think he was all that good a CEO in terms of managing the company, but he was great at managing investors. Of course, he had nothing to do with this WB acquisition, but I think many other CEOs wouldn’t have managed to get the money to make LOTRO in the first place, especially after the Asheron’s Call 2 botch.

How much is WB paying per share?

They tried! Here in Rochester, at least, there was a large organized response against them, and they ended up bleeding so many customers to the local DSL provider, they ended up having to call it off. The local DSL provider isn’t a whole lot better, mind you… man, we really need Google Fiber to come here. :(

That’s kind of an interesting point that you raise, though. Broadband Internet provider that desperately wants to charge users by the minute buys… an MMO company! Hmm…

Nah, we just need congress and the FCC to make broadband adhere to the same non-bundle open-access rules they had with analog POTS phone lines. They did that with phone service, and it meant we had like THOUSANDS of dial-up ISPs competing for better service and rates. The rest of the world followed, only they didn’t back out of that for broadband the way we did. So now you can get DSL with a WiFi router, unlimited telephone, and HDTV for like 30 Euros a month in France.

We’re getting totally hosed because the telcos and cable companies don’t have to open their broadband lines the way they had to open the POTS lines, and our govt. is too spineless (or on take from those companies, take your pick) to do anything about it.

But no, I’m not bitter.

Well said, Jason.

Comparing what one division is doing compared to another…I’ve worked under this umbrella before, and WB never ever got in our pool to tell us what to do. Granted that was television, but they were about as hands off as they could be.
I’ve worked for other mega corps too,(Thomson) and what say, Magnavox was doing had no bearing whatsoever how my group did business (Grass Valley).
TWB internet practices are not going to have jack shit of an influence on how Turbine operates. What it might give Turbine, is placement on say, TWB cable commercial rotations,website placement exc. But I doubt TWB will throttle anyone who isn’t playing LOTRO…

I’m very intrigued to see what will happen with the Warner Tolkien license portfolio. Could this possibly mean that a bunch of movie-based depictions get folded in time for blu-ray launch tie-in? In the long term does this mean that Turbine gets to do a Hobbit-related expansion? Subtle item-text in-jokes for the next festival?

This is the first time that all licensing rights for Tolkien have been under one roof.
Who knows what will happen.

Maybe they’ll have the resources to fix the goddamn AH now.

Gee, maybe they’ll add some content to the game. The last ‘installment’ took all of a week to finish. 5 months ago.

Well, what would you fix people?
Me:
Combat.
Animations
AH
IA’s
Newbie Experience.
Monster Play
Add Evil playable side.

That would be my wish list.

Combat animations would be a big one for me. The ones in LOTRO have a wooden, disconnected feel to them. I really wish all of the fantasy MMOs (LOTRO, WoW, EQ2, etc.) would drop auto-attacks altogether.

I never used the AH enough to really comment on how well it does or doesn’t work.

More variety in the models and better models. You meet Amdir early on then you meet him again and again as you discover his face is just a generic one used for many NPCs. Most of the hair choices are pretty bad-looking and what’s up with female human faces? They all have this weird pouty/peeved look that no adjusting of the sliders can fix.

More customization of your avatar would be nice, too.

Ease up on the class/race restrictions. The lore can probably be bent enough to allow this.

A complete revamp of the UI. The game’s icons are muddy and indistinct and having the UI scale by simply blowing it up and making it fuzzier is not a good solution. In fact, the UI is probably the main thing that keeps me coming back to the game. The best ones blend into the background, while LOTRO’s actively annoyed me.

Hire Ian McKellan to redo all the voice work of Gandalf.

I don’t miss not being able to play an evil side. I’d rather they spend their time working on the existing one. :)

That’s about all off the top of my head.

Yeah, the avatar graphics could use improvement. I think the outdoor vistas in LotRO are fantastic, but my choices for character faces suck. They’re all variations on the same big, lumpy-faced theme, with absolutely horrid hair choices. I mean, who thought these big rigid bells of hair piled five inches high on top of people’s heads would look good? It’s like the modellers never heard of transparency mapping, or they’re not allowed to use it.

Out of curiosity, Solomon, what is it about the new player experience that you’d like to see improved? I thought LotRO was one of the better MMOs in this regard.

Lee.
I could write a paper on what needs to be fixed. But, this is because I’ve stared at a ton of data that shows that people just don’t get it from a game standpoint and leave before level 10. It is not that they don’t like it, but they don’t understand whole systems in the game.Or how to attack. Or what the UI is showing them. Or what the hell do all these numbers mean. Hell, i don’t know what some of the numbers mean, so how can i make an informed decision about equipment or a skill? And I’m level 65.

Skills? How do i use fellowship maneuvers?
Or Tricks? How do I remove a trick?

I agree it is fine for the hardcore audience. This is move, attack blah blah, tool tips and whatnot, but for fresh users…yeah there are parts of the game that are counter intuitive to casual players…including things like click thing on bar that makes you attack. Sooooooo many people click on the monster and click the mouse like Diablo. That is a simple example. It becomes even more interesting with some of the complex systems.
And Tooltips? I’m sorry so 20th century. Give me voice over logs like Doom 3 did. Click and listen if you wish, and you can still go about your business.
Where is the tutorial for advanced systems? Why do games never do this?
Especially things like Raiding, IA, the Auction house, even housing. They should be optional, but Legendary items is a pretty easy system to fuck yourself over with.