I hope you've enjoyed these developer diaries and gained some insight into the Skirmish system over the past few weeks.  The large collection of diaries on the subject of Skirmishes (this is the seventh in the series!) might be more information than some are looking for, so to help with that, I present the short, short version of Skirmishes!

Skirmishes are short, repeatable instances that can be joined from most places in the world.  They have a number of randomized elements in them to keep gameplay fresh, as well as the ability to scale to different levels and group sizes.  Skirmishes are military fights against the enemy, allowing you to bring a custom trained Soldier to assist you.

 Playing Skirmishes nets you Skirmish Marks, which can be redeemed for the rewards of your choice from options including; arms and armour, legendary items, crafting, reputation and Skirmish traits.  With the scalability, ease of entry and personalized rewards, Skirmishes fit nicely into the rest of LOTRO and can compliment any gameplay style.

This is what we envisioned Skirmishes to be, and what we hope you experience as we've tried to bring that vision to life.  We are all very excited to see how players participate in the system, what parts of it they like and don't like, and what kind of feedback we get.  There were many grand ideas at the beginning of the project which were refined over time into the system launching in Siege of Mirkwood™.  We've already begun musing about what we can add next to streamline the experience and add more content and rewards.

Of the Project:
My previous large project at Turbine was the Rune-keeper, and was a largely solo effort. The Skirmishes system has been my first real collaborative project; tt started as a  little idea, and grew and grew until it became larger than one person could manage.  The transition was slightly rocky as it became obvious that Skirmishes were going to be a key component of the expansion, and an important part of LOTRO in the future.  I think it is only fitting that the many people who worked together to make Skirmishes happen all get a shout-out!

Shout-outs!

 

JWbarry - Our content guy to say the very least.  He was a driving force in the design of the project. He extended our tools to add in scaling, created the control point system and encounter system, and designed and implemented all of the Skirmishes.

 

SomeEngineer - Our primary engineer, Some implemented many of the back-end systems that make Skirmishes tick.  Working with him was a treat, as he understood what we were trying to do with Skirmishes and gave us the support and insight we needed.

 

Fantus - Fantus has a very... special reputation at Turbine.  Part of that reputation is to do consistently good world-building work, and he delivered.

 

Gamma - Gamma is the engineer who built Skirmish-join nearly from scratch and polished it right up.  His focus on that massive system freed SomeEngineer to hit the rest of the workload.  Gamma moved on to other projects afterward, but was always on call, helping us with any problems we had.

 

Sleepy - Our QA liaison, Sleepy ended up being a tremendous resource, who contributed to a lot of design decisions that made it into the final version of Skirmishes.

 

Tim "Raskolnikov" Lang - Raskolnikov brought his monster skills on to implement and enhance Lieutenants and bosses, as well as help with many bugs and polish tasks.

 

Zyrca - While Zyrca joined our team later in the project, she engineered a number of necessary systems and spent a lot of time adding a strong level of polish in many areas.

 

Samera - I don’t think we could have asked for a better manager.

 

Rhidden - My roommate, who sparked a lot of the original design discussions with me.

 

Turbine - NOTHING gets done without a whole lot of support from outside your immediate team, but there are too many to name.  Read the Credits when Siege of Mirkwood launches and you'll know who we are thanking!

 

Isengard/Bullroar - To all our beta testers for the help.

 

And to you, the LOTRO fans!

Yeah, that last one was a bit on the hokey side.  But knowing people are playing and enjoying a game that we made is a big part of what keeps us all going.
 
ZC, and the Skirmish Team.