Board Thread:General Mod Discussion/@comment-28201943-20161231215134/@comment-28153737-20170101185534

LOTRMod wrote: RedLagoooN wrote: Gen. Grievous1138 wrote: Angmar exists for balance. I'll see if I can find the thread, but Mevans wrote a long explanation of why it's in the mod.

Gen. Grievous1138 (LOTR Mod Wiki Admin) comlink 04:16, January 1, 2017 (UTC) man im confused some ppl here dont even think about balance just lore, while some actually want the game to be fun for everyone. Whatever we are designing in the mod is always a tenuous balance between several factors: Gameplay, Lore Accuracy, Programming Feasbility, Community Expectations, Realism... And there is not always a strict precedence. For example, we may make the Orcs more effective against Men and Elves than the lore would suggest, because if we did otherwise, nobody would ever play with Orcs. We may invent new peoples for the South and East rather than have them lie empty or scattered with uninteresting tribes. But then, we may also disable important parts of the vanilla game to come closer to the workings of Middle-earth. And we may give the 'evil factions' sympathetic speechbanks and portray them as ordinary folk, instead of entire peoples of 'darkness' who are full of hatred and anger and warmongering and savagery. But we may not wish to make the world as realistic as possible, because then the gameplay would be tedious and limiting. And, most importantly, we may change our mind on any of this at any time.

Ultimately, if we strove to make a mod that was fully lore-accurate, it would be rubbish to play, and also completely impossible to do in this game. If we based it on gameplay and realism, it would be overwrought and lacking that comfy feeling of Middle-earth magic, and just as stressful as real life. And if we based it on community expectations, everything would be disorganised and chaotic, lacking the overall sense of consistency that many people have complimented us on, and full of non-canonical 'cool stuff'.

About disabling some vanilla stuff, Could you make a config to disable nether portals like morgul and elven portals? I would have made a suggestion on the forums, but i know one of the mods would shut it down. The reason i ask, is on my server (and i assume others too), we have the overworld disabled/banned. The player-made portals are disabled, and the ring portal is broken, with worldspawn in middle earth. Im not able to make a nether portal in middle earth (i think youre not able to build them there), but i have found one that an unknown player made that people were using to go to overworld and get stuff like redstone and diamonds, stuff that is the reason i blocked off the overworld.