We have a dev diary released by Mara "Aubergine" Patton discussing the changes to the Yule Festival which is live starting today!
There were some significant changes to this year’s festival including:
- New tiered deeds that will unlock special rewards called “More the Merrier”
- Quests are limited to dailies but can be reset for a Festival Tickets (purchasable in the LOTRO Store)
- Currency changed to Festival Tokens
- Horse Race quests and documents of mount ownership not required to earn this year’s festival steed.
- XP added to all quests
CSTM will have a new Yule Festival guide for all this year’s changes available for you as soon as we can!
December 17, 2012 at 3:38 pm
Wow, they finally got rid of the race quest needed for the mount. Thank you. As someone that usually plays on a crappy connection they are beyond frustrating when one is laggy.
December 17, 2012 at 3:55 pm
They got rid of the race requirement but replaced it with a nice, annoying grind fest instead! I usually look forward to the festivals but this doesn’t sound like fun at all.
December 17, 2012 at 4:18 pm
It’s interesting to contrast this year’s dev diary with the goals stated in the Yule Festival dev diary from 2010.
http://archive.lotro.com/gameinfo/devdiaries/939-developer-diary-2010-yule-festival
Specificially, “The Snowball Fight came first. It was simple, and I thought it would be a fun diversion. It will serve as a way to fill up this big region and give players a reason to hang around when they were done with their daily quests. It is an alternate way to acquire barter tokens and ramp up deeds in Frostbluff.”
December 17, 2012 at 6:12 pm
snowball fields are usually empty of another soul to complete it on. they should make the quest giver there a targetable npc.
December 17, 2012 at 7:18 pm
I will miss racing – I was rather good at it. What will become of the race track now? Will it turn into another unused football field in Bree?
December 17, 2012 at 8:12 pm
wait… being forced to log in and run all the available quests *EVERY* day for the duration of the festival in order to get the war-steed cosmetics is… intentional? that’s by design? are you fucking kidding me?
i really like the festivals, but, i’ve got a life damnit… i only play on the weekends because that’s the only time i have free for things like this. you’re seriously going to punish me (and forcing me to by reset-tokens with real money sure FEELS like a punishment) for only being able to log in a couple times a week? seriously?
December 17, 2012 at 8:18 pm
maybe i just read that wrong and i’m knee-jerking here. someone tell me that’s the case. i LOVE my warsteed and i really want the cosmetics for it… surely there’s a way for me to do this without having to log in every single day, or paying turbine points for it….
December 17, 2012 at 8:26 pm
You need to do 9 days worth of quests over 16 days. (Including BOTH snowball fights, the first table of eating, both helping and shewing the poor, and sitting through a performance in the play)
December 17, 2012 at 10:58 pm
ugh… that’s… not going to be easy. that’s more than half of the duration, but i guess it could be worse, it could be literally EVERY day. still: dangit.
i’m hearing that you can only participate in ONE snowball fight per day. that after choosing either easy or hard, it goes on cooldown.
can anyone confirm that?
December 17, 2012 at 11:07 pm
That is true.
December 17, 2012 at 11:19 pm
Well… the quests were pretty much all dailies anyway with the exception of the eating quests. Bit of a bummer tht those will be dailies too – they were a nice way to stock up on tokens, as were the shrew quests in spring. I can’t remember what the quick-turnover ones are in autumn but there must be something….oh that’s right, it was the hourly-repeatable picking.
I’ve always rather enjoyed the festivals because they’re (generally) light hearted fun where you can get some nice rewards for doing things in a short time. I do feel that somehow this new deed system will penalise the casual player. It remains to be seen whether these rewards will be BoA. I don’t fancy having to do repeat ALL the quests to get ALL the deeds to get something on more than one character.
And I miss the race. It could be frustrating at times but I actually still miss the days when it was an actual RACE rather than ‘jump over all these obstacles’.
December 18, 2012 at 9:21 am
It’s a shame they got rid of the race, granted it could be laggy as hell and very easy to miss a jump as a result but it made sense. I’ve not looked but something tells me it’s been removed in favour of more grindy tokens.
Festivals should be fun and festive. People should be able to go and do stuff that they want to do within their time limits and be able to walk away with something nice.
Last festival I looked at was the broken farmers one, I heard that it got fixed but by that time I’d lost any interest in the grindy nature thats been brought in. Still wondering if they’ll ever fix shire region chat to cover the “festival” regions outside that 2 week window.
Think I’ll be boycotting this one as well.
December 18, 2012 at 10:00 am
The horse race you mean? It’s not removed, just not required to earn the horse. It will still grant 3 Festival Tokens when you complete it at both locations.
December 18, 2012 at 12:04 pm
I just like the association of having to do something related to the end result rather than just making it part of the generic token grind.