This is my take: it was a gimmick, cooked up by Rick I'm sure. Now Rick was an alright guy but he fell into the same 'celebrity' trap that (imo) Steefel did as execprod and whereas Meg and later Andy C genuinely identified and respected the community he never seemed to do so-in his own mind he was a big wheel. He was also trying to stay relevant.

The whole Council thing imo, for all practical purposes, is as said a gimmick. A well-meaning gimmick but silly in a lot of respects.

I can say that nobody on LOTRO, especially the older hands in QA, was surprised DDO was a lame duck. As for the DDO team...Turbine was surprisingly ptovincial; there was a sense of a real rivalry between the LOTRO and DDO teams, probably because of the slender resources we were all vying for. LOTRO tended to view DDO as a flop that was wasting resources better spent on LOTRO. DDO felt they were held back by LOTRO hogging resources. As an aside, the Turbine/Codemasters relationship was downright acidic. We couldn't stand their often confrontational attitude and they felt we were (to put it bluntly) Yanks douching up Tolkien's vision

As a raider, it's terribly sad to see the fellowships being broken apart the way that had with lack of grouping, lack of legitimate end game, poor scaling, loot rewards not being commensurate with difficulty, massive dps boost, trait trees dumbing down the classes and encouraging mindless button mashing for the win,  and solo-centric playstyle highly encouraged.

The trend towards easymode gameplay was really more of a reaction to the problem of low new player retention than specific player complaints. We found that many new players would play through the trial period or until maybe level 20 and then fade away. So the thinking generally was, if we speed along new players further into the game, they'll consequently become more invested and stick around. It didn't seem to matter to anyone that even WoW had a massive new player turnover rate. In fact their average player 'lifespan' according to a study done around 2010 was six months-three months less than LOTRO and a full year less than City of Heroes (those CoH players loved their game!)
Looking back on the whole MMO scene in that era, WoW's mass success really distorted the picture. While the lure of WoW riches brought in the investors you needed to make the games in the first place...they were going to expect a return before long and 40 or 50 or 60 million dollar development costs take a while to earn back. So you end up in a situation that comes dangerously close to being a ponzi scheme...using new investor capital to pay off your old investors. And the company execs are going to be pretty darn anxious to see revenue coming in, no matter what market reality suggested. That anxiety is going to be kicked down the ladder: get those numbers up.

But sometimes devs cater to players simply to be seen as doing something for them whether necessary or not and it's easy enough to pull up the forums and fish for cheap ways to do that.

As for new raids and instances, I certainly think they would have at least retained many of the old core players. In a game whose revenue stream is strongly dependant on micotransactions, the diehards are a big potential source of income. I said elsewhere that a big chunk of the monthly revenue from FB games like the late Island Paradise came from a relatively small-in fact very small-group of customers who absolutely loved the games. It makes perfect sense too. If you have been playing LOTRO for years it isn't a hard call to dump some cash into it. What's an extra 20 or 30 bucks here and there (or even more) for a hobby that you have devoted so much time to? But by not giving those veteran players any incentive to stick around-no new end game content, head-smack PvMP changes, etc-you will start to lose them. Then your revenue depends on casuals who, statistically, are extremely unlikely to play longer than a few months and will pay very little while they do.

The Class Revamp-for all the reasons already given. It nuked what little individuality LOTRO had left for no gain in gameplay and simply alienated older players who were perfectly content with the system they had been using for over half a decade. And if anyone at Turbine believed skill trees would bring in new players...you know that saying about people being promoted to their level of incompetence?

Also:
http://i601.photobucket.com/albums/tt91/Fwseal/739914_185770818230535_1335666012...

Sometimes it takes a picture of a shitty workplace to realize just how nice you have it. Yeesh.

But goddamn those cubes are fucking miserable. Not even an ounce of privacy. Dayum.

Cubes?!? Those are long flat bench's with side partitions every 4 feet.

I've seen better working facilities in an Indian call center.

Been to several call centers (even UPS in Ca and Tx) that looked pretty much like this and behind you would be the glass offices where management could see everyone but the workers wouldn't be looking at managers - unless they weren't doing their job.

This is pretty much how I envisioned the Turbine site. I have seen worse. Much worse.

I usually visited high tech campus sites (Bay area such as Google, EBay, Cisco), but I have also been to the the WB and EA campus for briefings and got to walk around and see the working conditions (although that was YEARS ago). The idea that they were setting up a West Coast building but didn't have it staffed was no suprise as the cost of living in Ca is way more than Ma. Turbine could hire 3 people for the cost of 1 body in Ca - not to mention the operating costs per sq. ft.