Turbine developer Joe Barry has penned the first in a series of developer diaries on the official Lord of the Rings Online site. In this first installment, Barry talks about the skirmish system and how its popularity has influenced developers to take a hard look at scaling instances.

Turbine looked at a variety of factors with regard to bringing skirmish system components into instances: Accessibility, Scaling, and Questing.

Developers have altered the 'skirmish join' panel that players can open. The panel will include a 'classic' tab which allows players to join any replayable instance included in the game.

This includes all instances from Shadows of Angmar through Mines of Moria and Siege of Mirkwood. There are 39 entries in all (there’s a list at the end of the series of articles), ranging from Garth Agarwen, to Carn Dûm, to the Vile Maw, to Sammath Gûl and dozens more. Every 3, 6, and 12-man replayable instance in the game is now accessible through Instance Join.

In the next developer diary, Barry will take on rewards, stat tracking and quality.

Read the entire developer diary here.