Link to the first of many Aylwen posts.
If the general gist, and even some of the exact details were news to you, you haven’t been reading this blog long have you?
Still, it’s nice to have someone ‘officially’ confirm what I’ve been saying about not just LotRO itself, but F2P when it comes to Turbine for years now. Bonus points to Aylwen for the line about the poster with the “millions of others” tag line; still stands as such a great example of Turbine’s goals vs reality.
Maybe I’ll go look through my LotRO-tagged posts and see who was doubting me and what they had to say. Guessing I’ll find at least a few gems.
Hardcore Casual 
That post has next to nothing to do with F2P and miles to say about really bad management. Which is a story across multiple devs.
I’m guessing you could fill a book from Aventurine on the exact same topic.
That post didn’t, but his other posts did, did you read those as well?
Good read. I used to love PvMP but it was always clear that it would never be a priority for Turbine.
Fascinating read – Lotro was the game that introduced me to MMOs in a big way, and the vanilla game (Shadows of Angmar) will always be special to me. Most people seem to hold the first expansion (Mines of Moria) in high regard, but I maintain that they broke the game right there. Or at least the part that made Lotro special.
Vanilla Lotro end-game was very social friendly, the reason being that good players could carry weaker ones. Whether it was a Rift raid or freep-creep PvP, casual tourists could participate and contribute while the stronger player carried the team. This meant that kins (clans) were made up of players of varying skill and activity levels, but who actually liked playing together (gasp!).
Moria changed all that with radiance gating and a general focus on gear and linear dungeons. Suddenly clans broke apart as the casuals couldn’t contribute to high level play, and the whole social aspect that kept things together started falling apart. Kins separated into “raiding” and “casual”, which was contrary to what made Lotro unique and special in the first place.
My favorite quote from later in the thread
“But nobody wanted the f2p thing. It basically said, yeah our game sucks so bad we won’t even ask you to pay for it. We knew our community was the best thing we had going for us and knew we were going to substantially lose that when the f2p floodgates were thrown open.”