A while back Syp wrote a blog post over on his personal website Bio Break, in which he discussed how The Lord of the Rings Online had avoided the “complexity trap” he feels affects other MMORPGs over time. It’s a sentiment I broadly concur with. The 12-year-old game has now reached a point where it has a fixed set of systems. Developers Standing Stone Games continue to produce regular PVE content in the form of quests, instances and raids. But they haven’t added a major new component to the game since the introductions of Epic Battles. Instead they have refined and fine-tuned existing facets of the game. Consider the recent overhaul of the Virtue Trait system. The basic functionality remains but the way a player advances their chosen virtues has been streamlined and now provides more tangible benefits. Overall, LOTRO has settled into a comfortable niche. New content is forthcoming but is very much a case of “same meat, different gravy”.