The Future of the System

Looking at the combat system as it has grown over the last year, the Systems team has learned a lot from player behaviors, playstyles, and how they interact with all the different types of monsters in The Lord of the Rings Online™.

Our data has shown that on the whole, the core player base interacts with our system in expected ways. Heroes of Middle-earth large and small are winning the war in Eriador against the servants of the Witch-king of Angmar.

When the game began, we aimed at making it as understandable as possible to the average player. One thing that meant was trying to keep the numbers as simple as possible. Nothing is simpler then percentages: if you have 100% of a pie and you eat 50%, you are left with half, right? It’s easy to understand. Well, the funny thing about trading simplicity for extensibility is that it becomes a tricky thing to navigate in a successful MMO. Why is it tricky? We’ll get to that later on in the article.

So how do you create a system that is easy to understand, but flexible enough to support long-term advancement? For Mines of Moria™, ultimately, we chose a hybrid system of scaling ratings. These ratings, which are nice, whole numbers, now apply to your avoidance chances, resistances, and mitigations. As you go through the system, you’ll find more and more equipment that will enable your character’s rating to increase; the higher the rating, the better the adjustment to your character. Why is it a hybrid system? Ultimately, you can still reveal the percentages (based on characters level) by just mousing over the rating level on your character panel. This way, players can still view their character’s effective avoidances, mitigations, and resistances in the percentages they’ve been accustomed to.