A supposed employee of Turbine is now revealing internal information about his work on the MMO The Lord of the Rings Online in a forum.
This is likely the dream of many players: to be a fly on the wall and hear what is really going on behind the scenes in their favorite MMO, what is happening in the hallowed halls. Normally, you never find out. It’s rare for someone like Marc Jacobs to speak plainly after the end of Warhammer Online.
In the story regarding The Lord of the Rings Online, there is currently no evidence that everything played out as a forum user named “Aylwen” describes. However, what he says is credible and he posts numerous images from a former life as a QA employee at Turbine, where he was responsible for quality assurance.
Deal with Warner Brothers was a pact with the devil
The key statements Aylwen makes revolve around the deal with Warner Brothers, which sent LOTRO down the free-to-play path. The team did not like this at all. It was described as a “pact with the devil.” However, it was desperately needed as The Lord of the Rings Online, although it seemed outwardly successful, was struggling significantly as a subscription MMO. They reportedly had dropped to 85,000 subscribers in the USA by March 2010 before switching models.
LOTRO was certainly ailing when they made the call to go f2p. We all assumed it would happen eventually but not so soon. In March or thereabouts in ’10 an email went out from Crowley stating that LOTRO’s US subs were down to around 85k (the only time specific sub numbers were ever mentioned even in-house while I was there) and could we maybe ask our friends to try the game? But nobody wanted the f2p thing. It basically said, yeah our game sucks so bad we won’t even ask you to pay for it. We knew our community was the best thing we had going for us and knew we were going to substantially lose that when the f2p floodgates were thrown open.
After that, Turbine cut costs wherever possible, resulting in the loss of many talents. Later, Turbine got sidetracked: they attempted to develop a Harry Potter MMO that they wanted to make appealing to WB (who holds the rights) and briefly developed LOTRO for consoles. Neither worked out and it cost manpower and millions.
Turbine’s biggest asset was its crazy bold ambition: we had less than 200 people in reconverted warehouse space behind a car dealership putting out 3 MMOs when ZOS, where I worked for a year, could barely put out one with far more money and resources. But it was also its biggest downfall. We tried to do too much with too little, attempting the LOTRO console game, building a proprietary downloader (Propel), mock ups of a Harry Potter MMO to woo WB…all of which soaked up bodies and millions and came to nothing.
Later, “Infinite Crisis” then, the attempt to enter the MOBA market, caused further high costs and dealt what Aylwen sees as the death blow to Turbine, because it was insanely expensive to develop and the MOBA market was already saturated. Additionally, they relied on a campaign on Twitch, which also went nowhere. Aylwen claims to have heard this from a colleague; he himself was no longer working at Turbine:
So, infinite crisis was costing 4mil a month to make. And they dumped all their marketing budget into a ‘twitch’ campaign….which is a new sorta web thing where you can watch people play games…..and unless you are Korean and playing starcraft, no one gives two fucks about. It resulted in Infinite Crisis peak concurrency being….less than 1,000 people. Hell most people had no inkling the thing even came out.
In a series of forum posts, Aylwen also airs dirty laundry. He is especially unhappy with the “management” and the “content designers,” while he praises some of his colleagues. Aylwen’s pet project was, by the way, the Ettenmoors, the special PvP of The Lord of the Rings Online. However, even at its peak, it only interested at most 7% of the players, making it difficult to justify allocating further resources for it. He also provides a reason as to why no new PvE content like raids is coming now, stating that this has nothing to do with player will, but simply that there are not enough resources left to manage it.
Then there’s the old (to use the Aussie expression) baffle with bullshit strategy: rather than just admit, ‘we simply don’t have the resources to make new raids/revamp pvmp/etc’, they hold up metrics data and say, ‘well nobody raids anyway, so it isn’t a priority…we’re just reacting to player trends!’
Blizzard as a terror of the MMO scene
According to the insider, some at Turbine also believed that Blizzard had a bit of a grudge against them. The major WoW patches coincided with updates for LOTRO, and internally, they suspected a mole.
Something not widely recognized about Blizzard outside the industry is their ferociously competitive nature. No competitor is too seemingly small to be ignored. We ourselves found that constantly WoW would schedule their periodic updates to coincide with our own. This occurred with such regularity that it was absolutely believed within the company that we had a leak passing along information. One might dismiss this as being rather akin to self-flattery on our parts but Blizzard’s crush all comers philosophy was generally accepted fact in my experience.
And he also has something to say about The Elder Scrolls Online
In the meantime, Aylwen shares that he also worked for Zenimax on ESO. This was initially planned for spring 2012. But at that time, they didn’t even have anything remotely resembling it.
This is what happens when half the team thinks they are working on a single-player game and the other believes they are making the next WoW, as he says.
My MMO thinks: The statements appear plausible, the photos support credibility. However, even if he is who he claims to be, this is of course a single opinion and does not necessarily correspond to the thin concept we call “truth”. So please take these statements with caution.
The fight for Middle-earth in a new dimension - the free MMORPG 'The Lord of the Rings Online' transports players into the fantasy world created by J. R. R. Tol...
