Admittedly, it's been a while since I played even though I'm a Lifetime Founder.

 I still log in every few weeks or so and make sure rent is paid on our Kinship House and my own house, but I pretty much put LotRO on hold shortly before the Mirkwood expansion was released.  Even though I completed most of the Mines of Moria, I did not enjoy nor did I complete non-Book Group instances for "special" rewards in the mines.  They seemed so cookie cutter one-trick pony that required the group to followed specific instructions -- it was quite annoying.

Other issues with instances were about the only reason to do them in the first place -- the rewards.  While some of the rewards were significant, problems often arose around what fell and who got it.  There were also plenty of relatively worthless waste-of-time instances prior to the Mines as well -- Annuminas comes to mind -- where the rewards were pretty much a running joke.

If the new instances system delineated by Joe Barry in this article is polished, it could go a long way in bringing people like me back to the game.  If it's too complicated and too difficult to get our arms around, we might just continue to watch from the sidelines.

Lol the scalable instances will have loot removed and replaced with skimish marks.  How will that bring anybody in.  It just another skimirsh added to the system.

Not cool especially when skimishes is what made you quit playing in the first place.

I think this is the perfect way to address the loot issue in MMO's. Rather than spending a whole day and possibly not obtaining anything you can always be sure that your time isn't wasted.

Excellent... I might just re-sub after knowing this.

Seriously, I was thinking about resubbing recently, but what the hell they are doing to the game? They are slowly destroying what was fun, and adding this silly skirmish system and tokens everywhere. Scaling instances my ass, I'm playing RPG for the feeling I'm improving my character, not to face the same constant difficulty wherever I go.

I agree with Thillian...they are sucking all the fun out of these games.  I like to come online and improve my charactor...not get one of many useless tokens to eventually get something if I do the same thing over and over...nor do I enjoy wiping over and over as proof that the "challenge" level is hgh enough.

I've been playing these games for 15 years and n ppast games, we  wiped once or twice, maybe 3 times if we weren't paying attention....now these instances are being designed so wiping 10 times is considered normal until everyone learns to do exact steps in exact order with no hesitation...with no immediate usable reward when you finally do everything according to the secret script.

That's not a game, that's boot camp.

You're not doing the same thng over and over if every zone scales and lets you use the same skirmish marks... That actually opens up variety, since you don't need to grind a specific zone for the specific item that you want... You could do every single instance and just turn in skirmish marks for the item... No more of this losing the roll a hundred times grinding a zone 300 times nonsense...

Still, they do need to keep unique items in the zones and the level range a zone was meant for should remain the same, it makes sense if they only put skirmish marks in the scaled up and down versions but let the correct level range continue to play it as it was...