About a week and a half back we got an updated roadmap from SSG that covered their LOTRO plans for Q3 and Q4 of 2025 as well as a peek into Q1 of 2026.

Not a lot there, really.  I mean, yes, it has been fleshed out a bit with some details relative to the April roadmap update we got.

Version 2 of the LOTRO 2025 Roadmap

And, of course, if we’re going to compare things, we might as well go back to the original 2025 roadmap they put out in December of 2024.  I know that precision comes with proximity, but that remains a pretty sparse picture… and not for lack of things to put on it.

LOTRO Plans for 2025

I still marvel at the fact that the whole 64-bit server transfers event and the eventual closure of ALL 32-bit servers was somehow not important enough to be granted a spot on the roadmap.  I mentioned that at the time and remain flummoxed by their decision making process.

In fact, I would argue that mentioning something as almost an afterthought in the producer’s updates and not putting it on the roadmap something that would not only impact literally almost every player in the game but would go so awry at points and often feel like the only thing the team and the community were focused on, was a bit more than a mere burying of the lede.  That is something more in the range of marking and communications malpractice.

And SSG is still at it.  The most recent roadmap was delivered nearly a month AFTER SSG announced that all 32-bit servers would be shut down and that anybody who failed to transfer to one of the new 64-bit worlds would find their characters locked and inaccessible on a “dark world” with transfers becoming available at some future date, after which all data would be wiped, as happened with the previous set of dark worlds.

I am sure the update to birding was deemed more important that maybe putting in all capital bold red letters, “Transfer now or regret your choices!” on the roadmap.

I noted in my previous post about legendary items that SSG clearly does not care about lapsed players returning, and if you thought I was just being sarcastic, I was not.  They demonstrate this again and again.

Anyway, that is my pet peeve.  SSG isn’t going to change at this point.  They’re just going to make dull looking roadmaps that omit critical items.

Briefly, I do want to look at how they have done on the rather minimal set of things they promised for 2025.  Not that an expansion is a small thing… but also, we know they’re now on the Q4 expansion track with EverQuest and EverQuest II, so neither is it much of a surprise.

For complete misses I suspect that the updated deed log is the prime suspect.  I mean, they did deliver the new deed log, and it did have some good features… though it need some improvements.   The main drawback was that whole “if you open the deed log your game client would crash in the next few minutes” thing that got SSG put pull it out to deal with at some unspecified future date.

There are a couple items on the list that are vague enough that I cannot tell if they happened.  Bug fixes?  Quality of life update?  I am sure something happened that qualified.

The update to the birding hobby was moved out by a quarter.  These things happen.  But otherwise, they seem to have hit the mark.

Did we get the two raids promised back in December?  I can’t remember and am too lazy to look, preferring just to remember back in 2014 when Turbine said that raiders and monster play together added up to less than 10% of the player population, with raiders being the smaller of the two, so that the company wasn’t going to be spending as much time on that content.

Flash forward to 2025 and it is raids and monster play on the roadmap.  And class updates.  Always class updates.

Rolling up to the Q3 panel on the roadmaps, yesterday saw the big Q3 update that included reworks of the hunger and burglar classes.

I cannot really speak to burglars, not having played one in the last decade, but I did just run a fresh hunter from creation to level 110, which means I might have some opinions.

Well, maybe.  As a casual as long as I can press a few buttons and make mobs dead in overland content I am pretty happy.  And, since SSG has gone back on the raids and instances train, where you need to actually put some effort into being good, the baseline for most classes out in the open world is enough to get by.

Still, I did find some amusing items in their, like the elimination of stances.  Their observation, with which I fully agree, is that players tended to pick a stance (usually Precision or Strength) and then never changed.  I totally went with Strength and never changed after about level 20.

The response to this was not “well, maybe we need to make stances a more interesting choice,” it was “okay, let’s just get rid of stances!”  And, frankly, I am on board with that rather than having some dev who plays some other class taking second hand knowledge to try and make stances a more critical choice.  Simplicity wins.

I will have to see what my hunter looks like with the update.  The red line hunter, the Bowmaster, doesn’t seem to have a lot of objections in the forums, so far that I have seen… but the thread is also many pages deep and I don’t have the patience.

The blue line, the Huntsmans, had monster play people worked up for a while as some of the initial changes as it seemed to sacrificing them in order to appease raiders.  Not sure if that was adjusted… the forum post was update back in June and there is not before/after… but I am sure people will be angry no matter what.

Meanwhile, the update seems to have had some issues.  Downtime was initially scheduled to run from 6:00 EDT to 10:00 EDT, then was extended to 14:00 EDT, then again to “no earlier than” 18:00 EDT, and eventually went live just shy of 22:00 EDT, about 12 hours late.  But still delivered.

At some point I’ll go back and see if my hunter can still survive… though I might wait a bit as there will no doubt be the inevitable adjustment period as the problems with the update get worked out.

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