When the calendar flips over to June 2023, it will have been two full years since SSG released a new legendary world (i.e., progression server). The first two went live in 2018 (and went offline in 2021 and 2022, respectively), with the other two activating in 2021. We anticipate the third server, Shadowfax, to be deactivated and characters transferred this summer. And this is, of course, not counting that short-lived wonky PvP server that was live for about six minutes.
So by summer, we’ll be down to a single, two-year-old progression shard — and that’s it for special servers. What I’m most curious about is why SSG hasn’t opened up any new ones or even announced plans for them in its 2023 roadmap. Sure, there might be one lurking as a surprise for later this year, but I’m dubious. Considering that SSG parent Daybreak opens up new progression servers pretty frequently for the EverQuest franchise, I thought we’d see more than this in LOTRO by now.
Maybe this is a failed experiment that the studio doesn’t wish to invest any more time in handling. I could see that. All of the servers — save Shadowfax — were very popular upon launch and even catapulted LOTRO into more mainstream video game coverage. And all of them — including Shadowfax — saw a significant dip of population by the second and third expansion unlock. It’s kind of the nature of the beast of progression servers, that the hype wears off and fewer people want to sign up as the crowd moves further and further from the starting point.
But it’s not an experiment that should be written off, I say. Players love a good fresh start, especially coming into a game at a late stage, and the publicity is good for the game as a whole. Even if progression servers end up feeding the live ones, so what? You’ve hopefully netted some new converts and grown the game as a whole.
On top of that, the last round of legendary worlds showed that SSG was open to tinkering with the ruleset and pace of unlocks. Faster progression, slower progression, landscape difficulty sliders… these are promising developments and sparks the imagination as to what could be done with a different type of server. I don’t think that the hardware is good enough to try to get a hardcore server going, but the LOTRO community has shown that it adores a stiff challenge. Maybe play to that?
Bio Break 