LET NOT THY LEFT HAND KNOW WHAT THY RIGHT HAND DOTH...

Well, it turns out that the Great Bounty Quest Bonanza is, indeed, the result of a miscalculation by the developers. Responding to complaints on the US forums about overcrowding at the bounty sites, Vastin, a member of Turbine’s online team, admitted as much: “It might surprise you to know that rewards are handled separately from quest design. Our content team designs quests, estimates how long they'll take, and then the systems guys designate the rewards that they will give out. In this case we overestimated how long the quests would take to run, and our systems folks overshot the reward a bit, and both factors combined to provide a hefty dose of IXP love for you folks”.

Whoops. Nice to know just how these things happen, plus it’s a relief to discover that the devs will cheerfully admit to the occasional all-too-human cock-up.

What next? Still according to Vastin, “I'm considering various fixes to reduce the crush at them. The easiest and most logical short term fix would be to increase the length of the quest timers on them to 3 days or so, so that's the front runner at the moment. […]We don't have another patch scheduled for a while yet, so it'll likely stay as-is for a time”.

So gather ye rosebuds whilst ye may. Personally, I would much prefer the other solution Vastin proposed, namely upgrading the two group quest targets to massive, Arch-Nemesis-on-Steroids class, but I think that was tongue-in-cheek. Too bad.

BEGINNING OF THE END FOR LEGENDARIES?

The five new Bounty quests available in Esteldin can be repeated daily; between them, they give a total of 465,000 item experience points each and every day. That’s a hell of a lot of of ixp - enough to take a legendary item to l.60 in under a week…

Three of the quests are easily soloable by any competent l.60 player, and the other two represent a mild challenge to any combination of no more than two l.60s; undertaken in any group of three or more, including a Hunter to provide transport, all five can be completed in just over thirty minutes. In other words, you can take two legendary items from zero to sixty within a grand total of six hours playing time.

The bounty quest ixp represents the equivalent of flooding a real-world economy with bad money by printing shoals of banknotes, and results in rampant inflation. All other forms of gaining ixp, including in-combat ixp and the extra quests for the Moria instances have suddenly been rendered utterly irrelevant – at this point, who will care a fig for the measly 180 ixp awarded for killing a l.60 orc?

I admit to being baffled by this development; at a single stroke, the devs have effectively killed off one third of their legendary item strategy. This used to have three prongs: acquiring a LI, levelling it up, and gambling for legacies and settings. The second prong of that strategy has now had its heart ripped out. How much longer before the other two go as well? Is this the beginning of the end for LIs – and would that be a bad thing?