Lord of the Rings Online dev explains why MMOs are so much easier now

If you’ve been around in the MMORPG space since the turn of the century and have the opinion that these games are a whole lot easier than they used to be, you’re not wrong. Lord of the Rings Online Senior World Designer Matt Elliott addressed this while answering a question about how the default difficulty in the game seems too easy.

Play LOTRO for free“[The] short answer — the market changed,” Elliott wrote. “What players of MMOs (and gaming in general) expected for average effort to defeat mobs in combat changed and as a result, by not meeting that expectation, players left. LOTRO launched in a very transitional time for the genre and in gaming. Gaming just a couple of years prior was considered a ‘hardcore’ hobby — only the nerdiest of the nerdiest would dare to tackle endgame content. During that time in gaming culture, the tolerance for a more generally challenging or time consuming experience was higher. As gaming became more mainstream, the tolerance for that kind of difficulty or time-to-defeat dropped significantly.”

In other LOTRO news, the second beta for Update 49.6 with the new neighbor system and UI scaling support in Lua plugins currently is underway. A kind member of the community also posted full notes from the recent Wolves of Mordor developer livestream, in case you want brief rundown.

Source: LOTRO, 2