F2P LotRO Interview: Absolutely Balance for Free Players

Turbine Recently Announced that Lord of the Rings Online Will Be Going Free By Michael Fuchs Michael Fuchs has been playing MMOs for over 8 years. He has a strong passion for the competitive side of video games. Besides video games, his passions include reading, writing, and roleplaying. He currently attends the University of Wisconsin - Waukesha for a degree in Communications.

Turbine Inc. recently announced the Lord of the Rings Online, will be going free-to-play. Adam Mersky, Director of Communications, and Kate Paiz, Executive Producer, were kind enough to join us in an interview about the change. For those who wish to listen to the interview, instead of reading the transcription, that can be found below.

Free to Play The Lord of the Rings Online - Interview

Michael Fuchs: Turbine Recently Announced that Lord of the Rings Online Will Be Going Free-To-Play. What spurred this decision?

Kate Paiz: Well, we looked deeply at the DDO transition last year, and the benefits that it brought to the game and the way the community in DDO responded to it. And we felt that it was a very strategic move for LOTRO to go ahead and open the game up to millions of new players, and we've gotten a lot of feedback in LOTRO as well that "I love the game, but I don't love the cost". There is just something about having a subscription that just turns off some players. They just like the notion of having a recurring cost on their credit card every month. And we analyzed the game, and what we could do, and we felt that it was it was very good for our community and the experience of general gameplay to say "You know, you're right. There's a lot of this game that you can have for free, and it's yours." And now we expect to have the same success with it that DDO has had.

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Michael Fuchs: Excellent! In the announcement it was stated that players will have the ability to buy expansion packs, premium content, additional character slots, potions, character customization, and more. What are some examples of these and how much would you imagine they cost?

Kate Paiz: Well, of course it is something that we are definitely going to be through a lot in beta and testing different price points and understand that better, but preliminarily, it will be the kind of thing you can expect that consumables and other one-time use items will vary from a couple of pennies to maybe a couple of dollars for the high-end, most beneficial ones – something like a potion that brings you back to life will sort of be on the higher end of that. Perhaps a speed boost or a low level health potion would be on the lower end. Content packs themselves, again, we're talking about a pack in which the content model in LOTRO is very different from DDO in that we're handling it differently. The entire world from the Shire all the way to the Misty Mountains is going to be traversable for free. You can walk anywhere. Obviously if the monsters are too high leveled the monsters may kill you. But you can walk anywhere and hunt monsters on the landscape. But occasionally you'll run into an NPC that has a locked icon over their head, and if you buy, through the interface, you'll be able to buy a region that comes with eighty to two-hundred quests in it, and then that was going to be in the price point of, again, varying from feedback in beta, but most likely in the price ranged of five to ten dollars.

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Michael Fuchs: Will any of the premium content give paying players an advantage over free to play players?

Kate Paiz: Well…that's hard to answer because it's a different kind of concept. All of the core story, the story that tells the experiences of the Fellowship and allows you to interact in the story of the main book is going to be free. And the free players are going to have the opportunity to roam the landscape without limits in the pre-Moria area. And the game is to play the epic story. Players are going to have the opportunity to earn Turbine points through gameplay. So it's the players who really want to experience every bit of content in the game. There is the possibility of for those Turbine Points and finding a way to make a choice between the time you put in and the money option, if you chose to go that way. I would say that there isn't a strong difference between the experience of a regular VIP player and someone who plays for free. Someone who's free can decide to put in the time, but, if we're talking moment to moment, it depends on how you're playing your character. Does that make sense? It's a little complicated the way we set it up.

Michael Fuchs: No, that makes sense. It's good.

Kate Paiz: Okay.

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Michael Fuchs: For Dungeons and Dragons Online, players earn Turbine Points by completing the higher difficulty levels for the quests. How will players earn Turbine Points in Lord of the Rings Online?

Kate Paiz: It's through Deeds. So, we give you deeds for exploration or for killing monsters or for a variety of other things, such as surviving. And now many of the deeds have Turbine Points as rewards. So, as you go through the game and finish quests, you can check the deeds panel to see what you need to do to get the points. There will also be some normal quests that give Turbine Point rewards and that will clearly be explained in the quest panel when you take it.

Michael Fuchs: How will Turbine deal with accounts that have already purchased a life-time membership?

Kate Paiz: Well, you know, life-time subscribers in the past have become life-time VIPs. They'll get all of the content that we release, in the same way that they have previously. There really isn't a change in their experience, with the exception of now they get 500 points per month, which is part of their life-time subscription (just as recurring paying VIPs do.)

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Michael Fuchs: Will this change bring any gameplay changes to Lord of the Rings Online? Or is it purely in how players pay for the game?

Kate Paiz: We certainly haven't done anything like making the game harder or reduced drops of potions in vendors, or things like that. We've kept the game as much the same as possible. Certainly we had to make some choices around the cost of running the service and carrying the load of all these free players. So, probably, the little things around auction access or inventory space have changed for the free players. But we've worked really hard to make sure that that's not going to make the free players feel like they have less in gameplay, and certainly one of the main purposes of our beta over the next several months is to validate that the game is very fun, very engaging, and is absolutely balanced for free players.

Adam Mersky: And you asked about content coming along with this update?

Michael Fuchs: Correct

Adam Mersky: So, not just the changes there, but we also have a new region…

Kate Paiz: Right, so we have a new region that's going to continue the story that we started at the beginning of the year. Players, after level 65, will be able to help the rangers as they move south to go meet Strider as he goes into Rohan and that completes a lot of the 2nd book of the Two Towers content.

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Michael Fuchs: Is there anything else you'd like to tell your players or our readers?

Adam Mersky: We, first of all, want to encourage everyone to come signup for the new beta. That'll be starting in about 2 to 3 weeks. This has been a huge success for us as a company, for our players in DDO; it's really changed the game. I think that anyone who is concerned about how this will affect them, they can just look at that and see what a positive impact that's had. We've been providing players with the choice of how to play the game and how to pay for it, and that's the future. It was such a huge success, beyond anything we ever projected with DDO. We envision that it will not only be a huge success for LOTRO but that it's going to work in all of the future games that we bring out. We just encourage players to come and check out the beta and stay tuned all summer as we bring more updates about the new content coming and that also, as well, we're going to be watching this fall.

We would like to thank Turbine for joining us in the interview, and we eagerly look forward to the upcoming beta!