Sunday 5 December 2010

RADIANCE: GOING, GOING...

From the latest Turbine news release, this: "Radiance & its removal in Q1 – We’ve received a lot of feedback on Radiance gating since its introduction and are pleased to announce that Radiance gear will no longer be a requirement for any of our instances or raids. In fact, with the release of our Q1 update next year, we will be removing Radiance from the game entirely. It will not be present in the new Instance Cluster or Epic Book and will be removed from all current instances. You should get your first look at a Radiance-free LOTRO on Bullroarer in early February of next year."

You have to love corporate double-talk. A solid year's firestorm of complaint, grumbling, reasoned argument against, violent objection and outright abuse, reduced to a nicely bland "we’ve received a lot of feedback". I'll say you have... Corporations are like governments; they would rather die the death of a thousand cuts than ever, ever have to admit, in so many words, that they were wrong. Given sufficient outrage in the population, they may eventually take action ("we will be removing Radiance from the game entirely"), but god forbid they should admit to error.

Oh well, never mind. The main thing is that the issue has been conceded and that there is to be an unqualified retreat. I can't help wondering, though, what the actual mechanics of removing radiance will be. Obviously, the simplest way of dealing with it is just to remove that particular parameter from the game, so that armour no longer has a radiance rating. The problem with that approach, however, is that it will introduce a serious imbalance: the two rarest and hardest to acquire armour sets, Dar Narbugud and Barad Guldur, are notoriously poor in everything but radiance. Remove radiance, and at a stroke you will have completely devalued the game's most valuable assets. Perhaps the designers will compensate by increasing or adding stats to these items - but economic history teaches us that devaluation is never pain-free...

6 comments:

Lothirieth said...

The current raid pieces becoming useless is what I'm most worried about. I just got my 4th BG piece and if it ends up being utter trash, no good for anything other than cosmetics, I'm going to be a tad bit disappointed to say the least!

Clifford said...

U still have class bonuses. And... There will be new raid with 'only this armor is good'. Clod

Anonymous said...

The set bonuses on the DN set are not that bad for some classes. They might still be worth it. I'm not sure about the BG set, though.

Anonymous said...

Some of the BG sets are quite good because of the set bonuses. The champion set from BG is the best in the game, and the mini set is pretty decent. Both my 65 toons will likely keep the sets from BG for the set bonuses. Obviously, if the new raid has armor with better set bonuses they will switch to that.

What I am interested to see is all the undergeared players who have hit 65 go into the new raid and get annihilated, then call for a nerf to the raid. Its not like getting rad takes any work as it stands right now, and I don't think it will change anything for most players, or allow players who didn't previously raid to raid successfully.

Kairos said...

Anon is quite right to point out that since F2P, radiance gating has become almost irrelevant: a determined player can collect six items of +25 radiance armour for a total of +150 in a couple of weeks or less. That's enough for a serious visit to the Lieutenant of Dol Guldur. In practice, it's probably not quite as simple as "OK,we've got the armour, so it's heigh-ho for BG and the Loot", given the very steep learning curve for the raid. Which means that newly geared-up players who plan to pit themselves against the current end-game content will be kept busy for some time to come yet...

Elanora said...

I think its gonna be great with Radiance out of the picture, it will ease all the grinding and the stuff I hated about the Moria expansion!