The last Cord of the Rings stream for The Lord of the Rings Online team has come and gone last Friday, and community manager Jerry "Cordovan" Snook touched on some interesting topics, from hardcore servers to a business meeting with publisher Daybreak.
The latest stream saw Community Manager Jerry "Cordovan" Snook detail some of the goings on right in The Lord of the Rings Online, which saw the release of its Corsairs of Umbar expansion last month. Early highlights included the recent release of Umbar crafting guilds, which dropped last week, bringing new recipes and more to high-level crafters in the endgame. Additionally, we got an idea of when to expect some upcoming events in the early new year, with the Ill Omens event kicking off on January 11th and running through January 31st. Additionally, the Combe Forester Event will be back in January as well as February of 2024, which Cord reminds players that it'll be on a rotation.
Cordovan confirmed that the recent Update 38.1 will be the last update of the year, though downtime will still continue to happen over the course of the next two weeks while the Standing Stone Games team takes its much-deserved holiday break. Update 38.2 is guesstimated to come sometime in mid-January, though no exact date was given as the calendar is still somewhat in flux it seems.
The stream also touched on the Legendary servers in The Lord of the Rings Online, which operate much like progression servers. The chat asked whether or not the team would be interested in implementing a "hardcore" style "perma-death" server for LotRO like we've seen gain success in other games, notably World of Warcraft Classic and Standing Stone Games' other MMO, Dungeons & Dragons Online.
Cordovan spends some time explaining how the hardcore server idea works over on DDO, being something the SSG team implemented based on the community sentiment. Characters who die get yeeted to the Land of Lost Souls and are "done on that server for that season," with 90-day seasons the norm.
Apparently, this idea has "long come up" on the LotRO side of things, with Cordovan saying that the team has "kicked around quite a few ideas over the years."
"I can't announce anything today, but the thought of having one of the Legendary worlds or some event system or something like that that could be an optional hardcore experience if that's what you're looking for, has certainly crossed our mind because it's pretty successful over on the DDO side. People really dig it."
However, using the feedback the team has received from the "Eye of Sauron" system, the mixed reception to an optional mode seems to leave the SSG wondering just whether an optional hardcore server would do well with the LotRO community at large. But Cordovan welcomes players to provide some feedback on the forums and other forms of conversation with the team to see how the community would feel about such a mode.
Interestingly, Cordovan mentions he spent last week in San Diego visiting publisher Daybreak Games to look back on 2023 as well as ahead of 2024's marketing plans. Snook mentions that 2024 should be "quite a bit smoother" due to the planning with the publisher.
"Our 2024, fingers crossed, is going to be quite a bit smoother as a result, hopefully," he says around the 25-minute mark of the YouTube archive. "At least we're pretty well planned for it, so things are looking really good there. [...] It wasn't a 'Let's go out to dinner and pretend we're doing marketing; it was an actual series of business meetings in California."
"It took all week, but gosh am I glad we did it."
A major callout by Cordovan from the meetings is the fact that the team will be looking at how it can better support its content creator community in 2024, including better ways to support and communicate with streamers and creators over the year. Additionally, the team is looking to boost its social presence in 2024.
You can check out the full stream in the embed above. We spoke to Cordovan as part of our Building an Expansion series, highlighting Corsairs of Umbar, where the community manager spoke about his approach to messaging, cultivating LotRO's streaming presence, and more.
