The world of game development is quite a bit more byzantine than you might imagine at times. For example, it might interest you to know that the single largest share of all the time I’ve spent working on Mirkwood was in trying to figure out and implement ways to keep our servers from being reduced to piles of smoking slag within hours of Siege of Mirkwood going live and all of you hurling yourselves at it at once. This is a surprisingly intractable problem, against which a wide range of technology, engineering, and design have been thrown. Hopefully it’ll work, and your entry to Mirkwood will be smooth and mostly free of lag or server downtime.

We’ve also been trying out a number of new quest formats (patrols, point defense, and a few others) that we have previously used rarely or not at all. These are always tricky. There are hundreds of different formats of quests we could produce with our existing tools, but it turns out that the vast majority are just not workable - mostly because they end up being terribly confusing to you the player, some because they just aren’t fun, and a few because they take far too long to make to be worthwhile, or are too delicate and breakable. Finding new quest formats that actually work is always kind of exciting because it means that we’ve got another trick in our box of content tools to make the game better.