Thallian and Anton's MMO and Random Rambles Blog

Skirmishes are neat! I'm beginning to get excited. Here's some details you may have missed.

• You can begin a skirmish starting at level 30 (LotRO Team forum post)
• You create a skirmish from your UI (Massively)
• You can set your party size (3, 6, 12 although IGN listed a party of 1 in their write up)
• You can invite your friends to said skirmish
• You can select a difficult for the skirmish (easy, medium, hard according to Massively)
• Each player is accompanied by a customizable solider
• Customizations include appearance and performance (with skills that you can rank with points)
• Skirmishes last around 30-40 minutes (IGN)
• When your skirmish is over you pop up from where ever you were when you left
• Skirmishes reward experience points, skirmish points, and loot drops (Massively)
• Skirmishes are PvE and skirmishes are not session play (LotRO Team forum post)
• Skirmish accomplishments will be tracked via MyLotro

stolen from (http://www.examiner.com/x-5942-Oklahoma-City-MMORPG-Examiner~y2009m9d8-Details-on-skirmishes-in-Lord-of-the-Rings-SoM)

Potential issues: Skirmishes might become more fun or more played than the rest of the game like WAR's battleground thingies. (I forget their name.. its been a while)

Skirmishes might suck on the other hand and just be something nice that they tried but aren't really compelling. A lot will hang on the fun level and the reward tuning. It needs to be on par with instances for fun level and slightly below them for rewards because instances are harder to arrange a party for and harder to lead and yadda yadda. Still the rewards need to be better than for the silly Angmar thingies they did which were quite hard yet had no significant rewards compared to the instances.

Last but not least.. they need to copy Champions Online and do skirmishes with pvmp mixed in. That is all.