A Letter from Orion – March 2025

Good morrow, and welcome from The Lord of the Rings Online Team. We hope the early part of 2025 is treating you well and that the bounty and sunshine of Spring have you all as happy as we are for the rest of the year to come! As stated in the letter to the players at the end of 2024, we are delivering an update on game development and direction for the next six months.

We are nearing another milestone for The Lord of the Rings Online, our 18th anniversary, and we hope to see at least 93 more. Update 44 arrives in April with a new content pack featuring new story quests, missions, and a 6-player instance. The content-pack targets players of level 150 and continues the story of the people of Shagâna. The raid announced in the previous letter for Update 44 has been removed from the schedule. Sadly, releasing the current Temple of Utug-bûr raid took longer than anticipated, and we no longer have the time to deliver another raid in this window. Rest assured there will be a new raid in our expansion later this year.

Update 44 also adds the VIP-only Favoured Standing Reputation enhancement extended to nearly all the Reputations throughout the game. Introduced as a feature only accessible to VIP players who purchased The Legacy of Morgoth expansion, this feature will soon be accessible to all VIP players across the game, starting with the earliest reputations in The Shire, Ered Luin, or Bree-land and extending through The Legacy of Morgoth. This enhancement allows alternate characters on an account to earn reputation with the myriad reputation factions at an accelerated rate, provided one of their characters has greater standing with the faction.

Festivals and events are getting a more focused and extensive treatment this year. The Anniversary event, coming free to all players with the release of Update 44, is the first considerable revision and inclusion of this treatment. The 18th Anniversary event will provide new missions scaling from 20 to 150 with new rewards and the ability to experience these missions as Delvings. Later, the Midsummer Festival adds a new festival island with new quests, experiences, and rewards!

Lalia is adding a wing to her market to preview all of the new housing decorations she is making available to the community! New housing items are available for sale using a new currency -- Homesteading Coins. The current cost of Premium Housing Writs restricted our ability to provide flexible spending on housing options and decorations. When we moved housing decor and options to Laila's market, we also decided to sunset Premium Housing Writs for a more flexible currency. Homesteading Coins will replace Premium Housing Writs. Now, instead of not knowing what to do with a pile of writs, you can convert those writs into Homesteading Coins used to purchase housing, housing decorations, music, walls, and more.

As part of the re-organizing effort underway in Laila's market, you will find convenient repair and consumable vendors. In the future, traveling limited-time vendors - Filbert Fig, Rowan Raspberry, and Myrtle Mint - will also set up shop in the market in addition to their usual haunts.

We also want to provide an update on the progress of our long-discussed Kinship Refresh, highlighting the current development status and reasoning behind the changes we are making. First, let us give the traditional disclaimer about future work. Everything is fluid and subject to change. This is a collection of ideas we are investigating and making efforts to achieve inspired by you.

Bringing the kinship system up to modern standards to allow advancement, deeds, calendars, management of information and filtering tools, banks, kinship traits, boons, and so much more is rooted first in getting the management of the data right. Our Kinship management is older than the game and has seen few updates over the decades. As a result, our first order of business is to modernize the storage and management of data.

Changes outlined above increase the amount of data we need to store, and without refinement, Kinship updates will degrade performance and be detrimental to the game. Our engineering team is hard at work on solving this problem, taking special care to ensure the transition to the new storage model is seamless and uneventful. The social bonds we construct in Kinship are incredibly important, and we want to ensure nothing impedes or threatens a Kinship when these updates go live. This first step, while not something you will see directly, unlocks the future and allows us to start working through the list of potential enhancements outlined above. We would be remiss if we did not mention that we are working on a player-facing aspect to validate, test, and then refine Kinship Data Storage. We are hoping to start teasing this feature shortly after the launch of Update 44. If all goes well, we want to provide the feature to all kinships before the release of Update 45.

Speaking of Update 45, our third update of the year in the summer is starting to take shape. While the details will need to wait until our June update, we want to provide a sneak peek of some relevant updates we are planning. For this, we are including a snapshot of our updated roadmap.

As you can see, the middle part of the year is jam-packed with updates, changes, and improvements. There is also a lot more planned we are not highlighting yet as the timing is subject to change, and we are erring on the side of caution rather than oversharing.

You can expect to see some of our planned changes for the summer earlier than usual on our Bullroarer public preview server, including potentially our work on PvMP, Burglar, and Hunter. We want to ensure the functionality and balance of the new pieces before we move them to the live service. Our current schedule and output should provide some staggered testing on the different aspects of the summer release and provide a preview of the new Kinship feature before it arrives on the live server.

We hope you enjoyed this update for quarters two and three. The information here should give you something to digest for the coming days and weeks. Our next update should be available before the end of June. Dates for the Bullroarer before the release of Update 45 will be communicated through the forums and through our new Discord - if you have not joined yet, you should really consider doing so.

Until then, we want to thank you for your continued support and love of the game.

As always, I remain Orion.