LotRO Dev Admits "We Were Wrong" About Radiance

[StriderShinryu]

snip

So essentially it's a poorly balanced version of Wow's hit rating.

Seems like they could have tweaked it a bit more rather than outright removing it, but I guess if this many people hated it it's just easier to remove the stat.

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. Hehe

 

[StriderShinryu]

From the "Radiance mechanic" tab, it seems just like an "anti-debuff" stat you can find on armor.

I don't really see why everyone got so pissed off about it.

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.

Basically, gloom is the problem and radiance was a ham handed solution to gloom but most people didn't care for it.

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.

 

[Lt. Vinciti]

since they or you didn't explain what exactly radiance is ill assume they put a system where you need to physically pay for a key to enter a raid?

id call that a pain in the ass....
i mean who would of wanted to pay for a subscription that still makes you get curtain keys for feature.

however if its just some kind of fetch the key quest then its still a bad idea ....

From the linked LOTRO Lorebook page:

Radiance is a mechanic in the LotRO game. It is found on some armour pieces and is used to combat gloom in certain instances. Gloom is given by some instance bosses and adds up to dread, which debuffs a person and (when they are effectively 8 levels lower) can make a person cower for a short time. Radiance directly counteracts boss gloom -- there is no benefit to having more radiance than the amount of gloom a boss produces. Contrariwise, there is no penalty for having "more than enough" radiance.

For example:

* 50 gloom + 80 radiance = no gloom and no benefit.
* 80 gloom + 50 radiance = 30 gloom, so 3 skill levels lower and other nerfs will also be applied.

I got lost....

It started to sound like Attunement @ the end of that badly written article...

So...If I get Gloom'd I....lose?

 

[Toranilor]

I played LotRO for over 2 years, and I really liked the radiance mechanic. Stopped playing when it went f2p though.

 

[Narcogen]

The <a href=http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/Radiance>Radiance mechanic is widely considered by players to be one of the biggest development backfires in the history of Lord of the Rings Online.

If only the game had allowed groups of players to pool their radiance... into some sort of... pool of radiance.

Then it might have worked.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

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.

But it isn't the only lock out in LotRo; Craftmanship required levels in Warrior, half daily respawns, and untradeable items. That's why I left because it forced you to level before you could cook, stitch or whittle. And the walk to each from the trading depot was just a total timesink - within a lagbomb.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

The <a href=http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/Radiance>Radiance mechanic is widely considered by players to be one of the biggest development backfires in the history of Lord of the Rings Online.

If only the game had allowed groups of players to pool their radiance... into some sort of... pool of radiance.

Then it might have worked.

*throws rotten fruit* Get out!

 

[LawlessSquirrel]

I've played the game, but only the start. It doesn't sound like a bad idea to me. In theory, it sounds very nice. In theory. In practice, there's a lot of things that could go wrong there. And evidently have.

 

[Firehound]

From the "Radiance mechanic" tab, it seems just like an "anti-debuff" stat you can find on armor.

I don't really see why everyone got so pissed off about it.

The reason it is so unliked, is that it is incredibly difficult to get. Do you want to go through a raid to go in the room and watch your party turn into statues because you don't have a high enough radiance? Or better yet, DO you want to have to eschew your better gear so you can even fight a boss? How about wearing a special set of armor that you would rather not wear just so you can kill the boss of an instance without your character cowering. Radiance would of been interesting- had it been a less hamfistedly implemented mechanic. Your only hope if you didn't have radiance, was that you had enough hope that your dread would balance out.

I would say it could be salvaged if radience was added in as a buff for some abilities for classes that should have it. (I.E. Captain, ministrel).

 

[Starke]

It sounds like this really could have worked if it had been added to armor retroactively across the board, given to some classes as an innate AoE effect and then set it up to pool somewhat around characters, encouraging them to stay close together, else they'd be lost in the gloom...

 

[Therumancer]

I'm a lifetime subscriber to LOTRO and kind of regret it to be honest, I felt the game never lived up to it's potential. Between this, Champions Online, and simply having limited funds I am wary of such deals because even games with potential never seem to meet that potential if they have lifetime subscriptions attached for some reason.

At any rate from a design perspective Radiance was a mechanic put into the game in order to slow people's progression through the content. Obtaining the gear to counter the debuff of a dungeon or raid is sort of like pursueing the keys or attunement needed in things like Everquest or old school WoW. The gear drops turning out sort of like how people would run UBRS a bunch of times to get Drakk's blood (which could only be grabbed by so many people each run).

There are both good and bad aspects to this, because by backing down the developers are ultimatly letting people blow through the content faster, and accelerating the time it will take for them to leave due to boredom, this hurts when dealing with the players who are paying subscriptions. With the free to play transition however things are now a little differant.

I think that the rate at which some MMOs allow players to progress through content is part of the problem, but at the same time that level of expected progression is also what is hurting MMOs, since most of them simply don't launch with the content to ensure long term play. Replace raciance with any mechanic that functionally does the same thing and your going to see the same complaints with differant specifics.

 

[Zom-B]

They deserve credit for the openess now, the Epimethean urge. They call it, "an elephant in the room." They couldn't be more right.

The thing is, there's another elephant in the room still, and it's bigger. The real elephant is that they are shining honesty as after thought and they won't admit what made them lie to themselves about what was good and true in the first place, and made their attempt to create a pastime into an act of prostitution: RENT that was due NOW.

If you are going to meditate, go all the way down. If you didn't go far enough this time, which these guys definitely did not do, improve your lungs. Try singing, but no matter what, always broadcast the truth.

in english?

I absolutely care, thank you for asking.

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.

oh. wait. what? seriously, why do you have to attribute negative or nefarious reasons to this? it may be as simple as the devs introducing a new game mechanic that was poorly implemented or poorly designed. things happen, mistakes are made.

your thinly veiled proselytization is both out of place and unwelcome in a discussion on gaming.

 

[Zechnophobe]

An introduction to Radiance:

Shortly after it was introduced, Radiance was a number stat attached to select pieces of armour. This stat did two things:

- It counteracted "Gloom", which is a general debuff that all characters who entered certain raid instances and/or fought certain bosses experienced. Too much Gloom and not enough Radiance and your character essentially played as if they lost experience levels (up to, I believe, the equivalent of -4 levels.. or the equivalent of a non expiring death penalty). If you went even further below the Gloom threshold your character would stand in place cowering and would only be sporadically controllable. Beating these instances at -4 levels was generally very tough but doable, especially if only a couple members of your group were that low. Beating anything while cowering was, as I'm sure you can imagine, impossible.

- It gave you a "Hope" buff everywhere in the game world. Hope increases all of your stats (in a sense, the opposite of a death penalty to the point where you are, in essence, gaining levels over the level cap). As I'm sure you can imagine, anyone who did not have Radiance was exponentially weaker than those who did, making the game too easy for Rad haves and overly tough for Rad have nots.

Eventually, the LOTRO devs decided to remove the second aspect of Radiance and left it as what amounted to a hard gating mechanism in a game that had never had any sort of gating mechanism. All of the raids that existed before Moria (and the introduction of Rad) could be entered by any player of any level. Sure they would likely be instantly squashed if they were too weak, but the only gate that existed was one of decent gear, appropriate XP level and your ability to learn the instance.

The acquisition of Rad gear, both in it's early and later iterations, required repeatedly grinding non Rad requiring instances so that you could collect the associated piece of Rad gear. This gave you access to "level 2" set of instances that did require some level of Rad to even have a shot of success at.. and you had to grind these repeatedly until you had their Rad reward gear.. at which point you could finally enter the "level 3" instance.

It was claimed by some that this tiering process was a good thing as it forced players to get some competence at high level grouping in certain challenges before being allowed to move onto the next tier. It was still a huge pain but at least it made sense.. until changes were made such that anyone could just grind the same easy and fast non rad instances by keyboard face rolling to acquire enough Rad to advance. Thus totally negating Rad's one saving grace as a sort of competency gauge.

On top of all of this is, potentially, the biggest issue with Radiance: It and it alone is the only way you can even enter high level raids. Any other armour choice in the game was rendered completely useless by this need to have a single specific set of arbitrary gear. In one fell swoop, high level itemization in LOTRO was virtually killed by a single mechanic.

TLDR: Radiance is a hard gating mechanism that forced repetitive grinding where there had never been forced repetitive grinding before. It also killed itemization at higher levels because gear with Radiance on it was literally the only gear you could wear in higher level instances/raids.

Hope that helps. If anyone else has further questions, feel free to ask.

I feel the need to quote this so more people will read it. Thanks so much for the writeup!

This is sorta what I was thinking may be occurring. The comparison to 'attunement' or 'resistance' gear is not apt here, as others say, because radiance is ALWAYS going to be the one thing you need, it will not change per dungeon. How annoying. And being forced to grind in an MMO for a specific bit of gear is terrible!

I can kinda see what they were going for though, they probably just needed to have a slightly different way of radiating. Instead of just gear that gave radiance, maybe just give all items a 'level' and have the item level fight the gloom. That way you just need 'good gear' to deal with the bosses, and not 'specific good gear'.

 

[Zechnophobe]

Five words: Listen to your beta testers.

This is such a fallacy. I mean, yes listen to your testers, but the assumption that they aren't listen to is so... wrong.

As someone with experience, I will tell you that even in the best case, only 75% of your beta testers will agree on any given issue. If you go with them each and every time, the 25% will also pipe up when the 75% were wrong and claim that they weren't listened too. And in fact, often the 75% will just sorta not comment much on that particular issue.

This creates a constant system where 25% of the beta testers are always complaining about not being heard on any given issue, and give the impression that the testers in general were not listened to. It is utter crap.

 

[alfrodul]

LOTRO's been my main MMO since I started playing it a few months after it went live. I still go back to WoW, AO, DDO, and a few others occasionally but LOTRO has been my main for about 3.5 years now. This is what I posted in response to the Dev Diary:

--------:--------:--------

Looking at what Radiance should have been:
* tie it into skills
* tie it into deed paths.
* provide players with more character customization and differentiation
* remove strict gear dependencies
* provide a more encompassing and meaningful statistic for characters.
* large and inclusive statistic that provided players with something functional and inherently desirable to their character.

All I can say is, wow. Radiance must have been even more of a disappointment for the Devs than it was for us. It achieved absolutely nothing of those stated goals and served only as a gating mechanic. (A gating mechanic that was a horrible failure, which replaced previous gating mechanics which had functioned largely without complaint since release.)

Radiance had no relation to skills or to deeds. It resulted in absolutely no customization and differentiation between characters, it was LOTRO's "WoW" moment, a land of cookie-cutter gingerbread men. It enforced strict gear dependencies that killed a number of kins that were straddling the fence between "casual" and "raiding." It was a meaningless stat in all circumstances except within raid instances (and epeen waving)*. And finally, it was an exclusive stat that was of limited functionality and rather than being desirable was seen as a necessary evil.

Ouch.

Reading this Dev Diary, I would have liked to see what that version of Radiance would have been like. It sounds cool. The one we got sucked rotten eggs since day one. But the idea that got the ball rolling sounded so cool.

Since this Dev Diary came out, I really hope this means that (combined with what sound to be really nice changes to the LI system) the behind-the-scenes processes are being looked at to see how ideas which are awesome on paper can go so horribly wrong.

*Not that there's anything wrong with that. My kin is pretty positive about epeens waving about. Behind closed doors and among consenting adults of varying races at least.

--------:--------:--------

As a final note. Radiance had *NOTHING* to do with skill. Any idiot with enough free time to just face-roll through the instances over and over again until they won the roll could max out their Radiance. Later, all they had to do was just grind enough tokens from easy mode runs. Which was easy but it took ages. Whereas other players who didn't have enough time to grind out all those tokens on all of their alts went from raiding regularly in Angmar (vanilla LOTRO), to being locked out of raiding in Moria and Mirkwood.

In Angmar, raiding was about skill, knowing your class well, and performing well as part of a raid. In Moria and Mirkwood, the only thing that mattered was having the free-time to grind out endless stacks of tokens on each of your characters before any one of them could join your friends on the raid. Hopefully this heralds a return to Angmar-style skill-based gating.

 

[SaintWaldo]

You need to learn how the world works.
#1 - People have deadlines. So they have to make the game as good as they can by that point and then meet their release date.

#2 - People can be wrong. What seems like a good mechanic, can have unforeseen consequences later on.

#3 - I would imagine that most game artists, as with other artists, want to put out the best product they can. Your idea that they're deliberately trying to deceive people is a little insulting to say the least.


Also I would venture that any MMO is by its very nature a work in progress. Mechanics are constantly being changed, and so forth. The question is whether the launched product is functional and works okay in its own right.

Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs, Gollum.

#1: Yeah, but if that's the actual reason for why one made this suck, they are faking an admission if that's not what they tell people is the reason. You're hooting because you're a monkey who read the truth he's afraid to see, by the way.

#2: Yeah, but he's also saying they KNEW it was wrong before release and they STILL sold it to people. Apologizing for the rip -off means nothing if you haven't reflected enough to actually know the real reason you did it, to actually BEST never do it again. They didn't complete the reflection, IMO.

#3. Not a little insulting. As maximally insulting as I can get, because they prostituted any artistry they had to a lie so they could make rent. It's the lying and prostitution that you keep trying to disappear for them. Stop it. That's devil's work and they can take any pain that comes from WORDS, if they are REAL artists in the first place.

Read my stuff again. I'm not being mean, just maybe rude. More that that though, I'm being way more honest about all this than those guys. Words aren't punches, quit pretending hurt feelings are bleeding anything out but cleansing tears.

 

[SaintWaldo]

in english?

That was English, joker. Are you sure you speak it, Brad? You just proved you don't read it, so I'm asking to be polite because I don't want to make mouth noises to a monkey who hoots at letters he pretended to even read, let alone understand.

I absolutely care, thank you for asking.

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.

oh. wait. what? seriously, why do you have to attribute negative or nefarious reasons to this? it may be as simple as the devs introducing a new game mechanic that was poorly implemented or poorly designed. things happen, mistakes are made.

your thinly veiled proselytization is both out of place and unwelcome in a discussion on gaming.

I am serious. And I'm joking. Can you ever do the two at the same time?

I'm only saying they aren't being completely honest, and they should try to. You're just afraid of the whole truth, as I see it, it seems.

If I'm proselytizing, what am I proselytizing for? You sure don't want to warn people about that, do you?

As an aside, the correct term for what I'm doing isn't actually "proselytizing", because I don't want followers, I'm not recruiting, and this kind of truth doesn't convert anyone to a cause they didn't already take up. I'm "professing", because here, I speak what I feel and see as truth.

 

[SaintWaldo]

No, I'm telling because I work in a related field and as such I can relate to their position.

So did I. Why do you think I know the real reasons? I've prostituted myself the EXACT same way. The only difference is that I ADMIT IT. That's what honesty looks like, sir or ma'am.

Refer#1
DEADLINES buddy. Sometimes a mechanic isn't good, but you have to go with it anyway because there's no time to change it.

To quote Alfred Hitchcock "Movies aren't finished, they're abandoned"

The same principle applies to any artistic field, games included.

Right. And how many works did Leonardo paint over because he wasn't paying rent on them? Who gets to decide if THAT was a waste? Why is it that the MOST valuable tool of a TRUE artist is THE WASTE BASKET?

It's so he doesn't turn his gifts into prostitution for rent. One day, you might see the truth in that. Until then, I forgive you, for you know not what you do. By the way, I'm a complete atheist. And I'll still say that to you and mean it.

Read your own stuff again "I'm not being mean" "As maximally insulting as I can get"

Yeah. You just don't understand the difference between "rude" and "mean". One uses words, the other uses a shove with a hand. And I'm not crying about rudeness. I'm responding to your challenges with more truth. Because I trust you, and you seem to be able to handle it. Or at least, you seem to think you can. Which is all it takes to get me to tell my version of the truth.

Keep 'em coming.