Over the past several years the return of Legacy, or Classic, servers have been on the rise. In the case of Lord of the Rings Online in a response to a thread looking for an alternative LOTRO experience was responded to by a developer questioning whether players truly wanted an experience of the past, bugs and all.
Nostalgia is certainly a powerful drug, and players of todays versions of popular MMOs still pine for the days when everything was new, and game designs were starkly different than what they’ve mutated into over the years. For some players of Lord of the Rings Online this nostalgia holds true. The developers, on the other hand, remember the classic LOTRO experience very differently.
As a response to the post, Standing Stone Games team member MadeOfLions responded:
“As for the 'give us an old version of LOTRO' thing - my answer is the same as always: why unfix all those bugs? You think it was perfect back then, but I remember our bug queues at the time and I can assure you it was not. Thirteen years of bug-fixes just disappearing? Yikes!”
While it is hard to doubt that LOTRO had its fair share of problems at launch, many responses rebutted that a classic version without the bugs could potentially be the way to go. Is this just a case of remembering the “good old days” from players, or has LOTRO actually grown into something that some players no longer identify with? LOTRO recently released a new patch after a stint of prolonged downtime that ended with some modest compensation, which had mixed results.
