User blog comment:Ronshol The Black/My thoughts on Public Beta 24/@comment-25101089-20150713041203

Thank you, things like this are fun to read.

As to why the Hillmen are not their own faction, because I foresaw lots of people would ask this. If they were a separate faction, their alliances and enemies and alignment would still be exactly the same as Angmar's. So, why bother making two factions which work in exactly the same way? Especially when there are already loads of factions to cycle through, and several more will still come. There's no point in cluttering the factions list with lots of small factions that function in exactly the same way as each other. Better to make fewer, but make them bigger and distinct.

And they are basically a faction in every way except for the name on the alignment bar - they have their own hiring NPCs, and miniquests, and invasions, and if there was anything to craft to make it worthwhile, they could even have their own table (like Dol Amroth do).

Might I ask why you wanted them to be a separate faction except for the 'coolness' of having a new alignment bar to look at?

Oh and also, Mount Doom is a geographical feature, not a structure like Sammath Naur (^;