HOUSING CONTROL FREAKERY

Everyone bitches about LOTRO's inane housing system, which only allows you to place certain items in certain well-defined spots around your house, known as hooks. Since these are very limited in number, all LOTRO housing tends to look as though it has recently been visited by bailiff trolls who walked off with 90% of the household items. The limited number of hooks is bad enough, but what makes it worse is the daft design decision to classify all housing and decorative items as large/small/thin furniture, large/small wall items and the like, which can of course only be placed into the equivalent pre-designated slots. Note that while, logically enough, perhaps, large items of furniture cannot be placed into 'small furniture' slots, you're not allowed to do the opposite, either - that space may be large enough to take a billiard table, but you can't place a stool there!

Most irritating of all is the fact that the large/small designations are not dependent on the overall dimensions of an object, but appear to be entirely arbitrary. The image above is of the raised dais in a Breeland kinhouse, representing about half the total floor area of the main hall. Looks empty, doesn't it? That's because apart from items on the walls, you are only allowed to place two items of furniture on an area the size of a small ballroom. Furthermore, these two slots are earmarked for (wait for it!), 'special furniture'. What, you ask, is special furniture? So far, the game includes just three such items: a breakfast table, a map table and a reflecting pool. But the point is that if you try and place a normal large table of the same dimensions as the map table into one of these slots, it won't go in. LOTRO's designers have taken it upon themselves to dictate that your very expensive (to buy and run) kinhouse can sport a frog pond in its great hall - but not a dinner table. How far can control freakery go?

(Oh, and by the way, experiments have shown that just one of every LOTRO trophy available to date represents more items than a kinhouse can accommodate - never mind your average hovel. Nice going.)