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since they or you didn't explain what exactly radiance is ill assume they put a system where you need to physically pay for a key to enter a raid? id call that a pain in the ass.... however if its just some kind of fetch the key quest then its still a bad idea .... | |
It's a bit strange to think that people would hate the mechanic so much. Having never played the game myself, it would seem that Radiance is just a neat bonus to have that can't really get in the way. According to the link in the article, Radiance is a good thing. Perhaps I'm thinking about it wrong; that people actually dislike the Gloom that Radiance is supposed to counteract, but even that sounds like a minor inconvenience. Curious. | |
Uh, Mike? Bud? Pal? Wanna clue us in on what Radiance is? Or did you sorta expect everyone to just go in and read the article with actual information and skip yours? | |
From the linked LOTRO Lorebook page:
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From the "Radiance mechanic" tab, it seems just like an "anti-debuff" stat you can find on armor. I don't really see why everyone got so pissed off about it. | |
I read the lorebook entry, but I still don't necessarily get it. Anybody want to help a brudda out? | |
Honestly, I debated on that a bit. I linked to the LotRO Lorebook because it explained the system better than I could, since it seemed kinda convoluted, I haven't played the game in a few years (and thus never experienced it) and didn't want to explain it incorrectly. | |
This sounds more like a balancing issue than straight-up bad design. But who knows? Someone. Not me. I played LotRO for about a week when it first went f2p - I was impressed with the class and profession design, but it just bored me. Also: TAKE NOTES, JAGEX! <-- longtime embittered RuneScape player. | |
From what I gather, it's a defense against Gloom, a de-buff that bosses use. The more Radiance you have, the more Gloom you can take without loosing the levels that it would normally de-buff you. Better? | |
From what @mstieler shared here, Radiance sounds like a good idea for a game like LotRO. But if it ended up broken to the point of player raging, then I applaud the devs taking it out. If they still want the mechanic in as they hoped it would be, I am hoping they put it through some tough testing before putting it back into the main game. | |
They deserve credit for the openess now, the Epimethean urge. They call it, "an elephant in the room." They couldn't be more right. The thing is, there's another elephant in the room still, and it's bigger. The real elephant is that they are shining honesty as after thought and they won't admit what made them lie to themselves about what was good and true in the first place, and made their attempt to create a pastime into an act of prostitution: RENT that was due NOW. If you are going to meditate, go all the way down. If you didn't go far enough this time, which these guys definitely did not do, improve your lungs. Try singing, but no matter what, always broadcast the truth. | |
Yup. Thanks brah. | |
From what I read from in the first link it sounds like there were forcing people to get different gear for boss fights from the gear that could be used on regular fights. I don't know how the itemization works in lotr online but if it is anything like wow, most classes carry around two groups of items, this would force it up to four sets of armor. It sounds like if they started making bosses do tons of aoe magic damage and only had small amounts of armor with resists on it. Lotr online should have learned Wow's lesson when they tried to do with the Molten Core years ago, they forced players to go out and get fire resist gear. | |
The mechanic reminds me a lot of hit rating from wow...except far worse. Especially if there's no way to adjust how much you have on you except to switch out gear pieces... | |
We should call Shamus down here. Maybe he'll be able to translate this into Common for us all. | |
It was a stat. The more you had, the more difficult the boss you could kill. Easy as that. Obviously, since it only counted for boss monsters, people weren't too enthralled with stacking a stat that was otherwise pointless. | |
So, at a glance It is hard to figure out what the problem is, Can you Lotro people explain it? It looks like Boss has Debuff aura of value X, it subtracts from your power in one way or another. You can counter it with radiance of values up to X to negate it. Radiance does nothing but counter it. Was it a really big pain to deal with this debuff? Were radiance items so rare you had to go grinding before you could actually fight these bosses? Where they mainly a For Pay way to F over the players? It is hard to really internalize this. In many games bosses have powerful abilities that require special tactics to get passed. Why is this one different? (These are honest questions, I'm hoping if they get answered it will make this all more understandable to non lotro fans). | |
An introduction to Radiance: Shortly after it was introduced, Radiance was a number stat attached to select pieces of armour. This stat did two things: - It counteracted "Gloom", which is a general debuff that all characters who entered certain raid instances and/or fought certain bosses experienced. Too much Gloom and not enough Radiance and your character essentially played as if they lost experience levels (up to, I believe, the equivalent of -4 levels.. or the equivalent of a non expiring death penalty). If you went even further below the Gloom threshold your character would stand in place cowering and would only be sporadically controllable. Beating these instances at -4 levels was generally very tough but doable, especially if only a couple members of your group were that low. Beating anything while cowering was, as I'm sure you can imagine, impossible. - It gave you a "Hope" buff everywhere in the game world. Hope increases all of your stats (in a sense, the opposite of a death penalty to the point where you are, in essence, gaining levels over the level cap). As I'm sure you can imagine, anyone who did not have Radiance was exponentially weaker than those who did, making the game too easy for Rad haves and overly tough for Rad have nots. Eventually, the LOTRO devs decided to remove the second aspect of Radiance and left it as what amounted to a hard gating mechanism in a game that had never had any sort of gating mechanism. All of the raids that existed before Moria (and the introduction of Rad) could be entered by any player of any level. Sure they would likely be instantly squashed if they were too weak, but the only gate that existed was one of decent gear, appropriate XP level and your ability to learn the instance. The acquisition of Rad gear, both in it's early and later iterations, required repeatedly grinding non Rad requiring instances so that you could collect the associated piece of Rad gear. This gave you access to "level 2" set of instances that did require some level of Rad to even have a shot of success at.. and you had to grind these repeatedly until you had their Rad reward gear.. at which point you could finally enter the "level 3" instance. It was claimed by some that this tiering process was a good thing as it forced players to get some competence at high level grouping in certain challenges before being allowed to move onto the next tier. It was still a huge pain but at least it made sense.. until changes were made such that anyone could just grind the same easy and fast non rad instances by keyboard face rolling to acquire enough Rad to advance. Thus totally negating Rad's one saving grace as a sort of competency gauge. On top of all of this is, potentially, the biggest issue with Radiance: It and it alone is the only way you can even enter high level raids. Any other armour choice in the game was rendered completely useless by this need to have a single specific set of arbitrary gear. In one fell swoop, high level itemization in LOTRO was virtually killed by a single mechanic. TLDR: Radiance is a hard gating mechanism that forced repetitive grinding where there had never been forced repetitive grinding before. It also killed itemization at higher levels because gear with Radiance on it was literally the only gear you could wear in higher level instances/raids. Hope that helps. If anyone else has further questions, feel free to ask. :) | |
Missed a word here ->
? :) | |
wut is this? I don't even. Care to clarify your point here? | |
At least they manned up and admited it was a flawed system. Kudos for them. | |
I find it sad that it doesn't seem anyone who has actually played the game have commented on this yet. This doesn't really go into much detail about why this mechanic was so hated. And before you jump to conclusions, yes I did read the description in the link provided. It just doesn't seem to me that such a mechanic could warrant this level of venom, although I can see how it would have been annoying to searching for a buff just to be able to fight bosses. | |
From what I've read, not only is Radiance kind of a dumb game mechanic, but Gloom sounds just as awfully bad. I mean, what's the point in leveling up if its guaranteed that you'll be debuffed down a few levels? I don't play LOTRO, so I may be misunderstanding this. | |
Ummm, hi there... *waves and points upward in the thread* | |
Basically, it's a cheap and easy way of balancing and gating content. If you have enough Radiance, you counteract the Gloom so you don't lose any levels.. if you don't have enough Radiance (particularly if you're really short on it) you won't be able to do the content no matter how good you are or how hard you try. It's also a good cheese mechanic for bosses and other so called difficult content. Instead of actually creating an interesting challenge or inventing a cool new fight mechanic it's easier to just make the fight/instance harder by ramping up the Gloom levels... in fact this is specifically how some of the late game boss fights are "balanced" now. You don't really die because the boss beats you, you die because you didn't kill it before the Gloom rised to the point where all of your team becomes cowering useless idiots. | |
I play the game, albeit as a very casual player who has arrived since the launch of 'free to play' which introduced me to an amazing MMO that I hadn't really taken a second glance at in the past, but has gorgeous outdoor environments, insanely well-written and deep quest lines, as well as some overall fun solo and group gameplay. I've not experienced radiance directly, but plenty of people in my guild have been waiting for this happy day to come. As it's been noted in the previous posts, it's a stat that you had on various forms of high level armor, but it wasn't a stat that did -anything- other than, well, give you radiance points. They might as well have called it Grindage, and you needed x amount of Grindage to tackle a raid. It's not like you might miss more, or not do enough damage, you simply couldn't survive the massive debuff. Part of it goes along with the otherwise clever dread/gloom mechanics that they use in LotRO, showing how you're facing enemies that make you quail and fear for your very life to such a point that they're all but defeating you before you even face them. Trying to work in a fear/sanity sort of effect, but as you can see, it just wasn't implemented correctly here. If you needed a certain radiance level to enter a raid, that's what you focused on, and that's all you cared about, just so you could get into that raid, and it gimped itemization all to hell and back, and was just a really frustrating way of locking the content. I think they've made a huge step in the right direction, even as someone who might never see a raid that required Radiance. This, as well as other design decisions, show that they're very much still tweaking, tuning and developing LotRO, even after it's been shifted into Free to Play. | |
I absolutely care, thank you for asking. These guys are "making an amends" for how much Radiance, well, sucked, for lack of better words. That's a good thing to do. However, they are not being completely honest if they don't talk about WHY they would release something incomplete. My sense is that it is most likely because they didn't have the time, and because time ran out on their idea and they had to pay RENT, they chose not truth, but a fast and false release so they could shear the sheep for the landlord. That's a certain type of person and we have names for them. They need to self apply the correct names. If your principle is being honest with yourself and your work, meaning you don't release something broken for money, and you trade that exact principle away for coin to pay rent, that makes you something different than a pleasure worker. That's what they should ALSO be admitting. To not admit this is to aid the Devil in his always recurring self-disappearing act. Have a great day, thanks for asking me to clarify, and I hope I've provided you a little light. | |
I dont understand the hate. What it basicly is is a way of tiering armor. You do the first tier of instances to get +10 radiance per armor peice which gives you enough over all radiance to tackle the T2 instances. The gear you get there gives you enough radiance to get into the T3 instances/raids and so on. Removing it will just mean you have people in T1 armor going into the T3 dungeons. Getting killed alot. Complaining on the forums its to hard and demanding its made easier. Find it really silly that a topic about radiance has ended up having the ftp rant dragged into it. You get about half the game free to play. Fine its more like an extended demo but its more than enough to know if you want to pay to play. If you dont like the game enough to pay by that point then dont play it. If you do then pay the monthly fee (its not that expensive) and you'll get all the content with it. | |
It was a cheap way of breaking apart and gating raids. So before you could raid you had to complete 6 different instances and then fight with 5 other people over the radiance coin. So basically it was an endless grind of the same instances waiting for a lucky roll of the dice. Then to make it even more fun, you had to get lucky on the raid to make it into the next raid. The Radiance Grind literally tore kinships apart, they should of gotten rid of the mechanic ages ago. | |
Pity DDO devs (another F2P Turbine game) did not pay attention to avoid this mistake, instead of creating an even worse version of a 'raid gate'. In DDO the highest level raid (Tower of Dispair) requires a set of boots. If you do not have these boots the raid boss can 'banish' you from the raid (eject your character from the raid instance) and you can not re-enter (so no XP, loot or 'completion'). You need to make these boots for each character, which requires 4 very rare random drops from a series of 6 hard quests. So you have to grind the same 6 quests, on every character, for an item that is useless in any other quest, but essential in one raid. | |
Ouch.. but to be fair to the DDO devs, the LOTRO team has been sitting on this little mistake of theirs for over 2 years now. The only new part of it is that they are admitting it was a mistake and that they were just ignoring how much the players have hated it since day 1. | |
The road to Mordor is paved with the best of intentions. Good on them for admitting that their idea was flawed/implemented poorly. If only more devs would be more readily willing to say stuff like that. You'd have a much happier player base and maybe (but not likely) less angry forums-users. | |
That's always the sticking point with admissions like this. It's great that the developers finally admitted that, at least in this case, the players were right all along.. but it can be dangerous to make the more vocal of the player base feel like loud and repetitive screaming is what it takes for them to get their way. | |
The Tower of Dispair has been out for well over a year. The devs have increased the drop rate of the 4 items and added them to 2 other quests since then (in response to complaints). But the devs also increased the range of the banishment to get everybody in the area (ie healers standing at teh back), as originally only characters actually fighting the boss needed boots (and now everybody does). | |
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LotRO Dev Admits "We Were Wrong" About Radiance
Radiance is considered by many people to be on of the biggest mistakes in Lord of the Rings Online. Here's a clue about why it failed: Even the developers hated it.
The Radiance mechanic is widely considered by players to be one of the biggest development backfires in the history of Lord of the Rings Online. The game's developers have been aware of this for a while (which is why they literally mentioned running the feature over with a train); now that it's about to be removed from the game, they're willing to discuss just what went wrong.
In a new dev diary, developer Allan Maki was saddled with addressing the awkward elephant in the room. "Sometimes it's difficult to shine the interrogation lamp on yourself and find out what exactly went wrong," he said. "Radiance was not a bad idea. In fact, many of us still feel that if it had been designed correctly it would have been successful. As it turned out, however, we created nothing more than an arbitrary gating mechanic that forced players to get 'keys' in order to enter raids."
Of course, the biggest nail in the mechanic's coffin was player reception:
The diary makes for an interesting read, mainly because it shows how things went wrong even though the project began with the best of intentions. Still, at least the developers are aware of the fact that they messed up and are now willing to openly admit it.
Source: LotRO via Massively
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