Lord Of The Rings Online Outlines Planned Crafting Changes Coming This Year
Crafting isn’t exactly one of Lord of the Rings Online’s strongest suits, a fact that Standing Stone Games is well aware of and is hoping to remedy this year. In a recent post on the official forums, Lead Designer Allan “Orion” Maki outlined the team’s plans to improve the classic MMORPG’s crafting system to make it more worthwhile and allow for easier updates in the future.
One of the more significant changes that the developers have planned is the removal of vocations to give players freedom to choose the crafting skills that work best for them. Players will be able to choose up to four crafting skills, which the team feels is the sweet spot that will allow the game economy and social interactions to thrive via the crafting system.
Orion also touched on plans to add new crafting recipes, introduce more specialized crafting drops, and make crafted gear more valuable so that they’re better than quest drops and will be able to serve as stepping stones between key instances. The team is also apparently looking into adding more housing-related recipes as well as hooked items.
One of the more contentious points from the post are plans to make crafting guilds easier to level up but have guild standing decay over time. “We know that the length of time needed in order to increase standing with guilds is prohibitive,” Orion explained. “We want to address that by making enrollment in the guild a more active experience where you will be able to maintain your membership and access by continued activity or it will decay slowly over time.”
As expected, the community wasn’t happy with the idea that they could lose their hard-earned standing with the respective crafting guilds. Orion later scrapped the idea and deleted the offending line from the post, saying that, “Already enough consternation about what was deleted from here that we will not discuss it further. […] There is enough vitriol toward this that it will not be considered. We can move on.”
Hopefully, the developers leave it at that and don’t end up suddenly slipping it in at some point in the future.
If you’re a big-time crafter, or even if you occasionally dabble in the art of creating gear, the extensive eight-page discussion on the matter is well worth the read.
Read more about our plans for The Lord of the Rings Online in 2023! Find our new Letter to the Players on https://t.co/Kc31if2MLz: https://t.co/E333lK9l9z #LOTRO pic.twitter.com/kgcpMgfzyx
— LOTRO (@lotro) January 19, 2023
