LOTRO Chronicles

CHINESE SLAVE LABOUR USED BY GOLD FARMERS

2011-05-26T11:35:00.000+03:00

Almost two years ago, I made a post in this blog pointing out that gold trading was far from being a victimless crime, since gold farmers were almost always responsible for hacked accounts: part the virtual gold you buy online has been stolen from your fellow players. Now, according to the Guardian, it turns out that there is something far, far nastier behind the gold farming rackets:

As a prisoner at the Jixi labour camp, Liu Dali would slog through tough days breaking rocks and digging trenches in the open cast coalmines of north-east China. By night, he would slay demons, battle goblins and cast spells. Liu says he was one of scores of prisoners forced to play online games to build up credits that prison guards would then trade for real money. The 54-year-old, a former prison guard who was jailed for three years in 2004 for "illegally petitioning" the central government about corruption in his hometown, reckons the operation was even more lucrative than the physical labour that prisoners were also forced to do. "Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour," Liu told the Guardian. "There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn't see any of the money. The computers were never turned off."

Memories from his detention at Jixi re-education-through-labour camp in Heilongjiang province from 2004 still haunt Liu. As well as backbreaking mining toil, he carved chopsticks and toothpicks out of planks of wood until his hands were raw and assembled car seat covers that the prison exported to South Korea and Japan. He was also made to memorise communist literature to pay off his debt to society.
But it was the forced online gaming that was the most surreal part of his imprisonment. The hard slog may have been virtual, but the punishment for falling behind was real. "If I couldn't complete my work quota, they would punish me physically. They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things," he said. It is known as "gold farming", the practice of building up credits and online value through the monotonous repetition of basic tasks in online games such as World of Warcraft. The trade in virtual assets is very real, and outside the control of the games' makers. Millions of gamers around the world are prepared to pay real money for such online credits, which they can use to progress in the online games.

Now we know what lies behind them, I should like to think that no LOTRO player will ever again be crass enough to make use of the services of gold farmers.

FLEEING TO VIRTUAL WORLDS

2010-12-19T17:17:00.000+02:00

I like to think that some of my readers are interested in what goes on behind, and beyond, games such as LOTRO, and I'd like to point those readers at a fascinating online essay by Edward Castranova, who teaches telecommunications at Indiana University. Entitled "An Exodus Recession", it's posted here, on Castranova's equally highly recommended blog, "Terra Nova: A Blog about Virtual Worlds". It's a relatively long text, so I'll just quote the opening paragraph:

"The economy continues to move slowly and economists seem as uncertain as ever about the causes and what to do. Months ago, I began to wonder – could this possibly be the first “exodus recession”? In my first book I sketched out the idea. Suppose economic activity moves from the real world into the virtual world. Human happiness is unaffected or even goes up, however, the goods that produce the happiness are now produced and consumed in a virtual environment rather than the real one. Measurements of economic activity, being all based in the real economy, would begin to show weakness. I argued that contemporary political and economic control systems do not tolerate much weakness, thus, there might well be some sort of crisis in the real world, for no good reason, simply because production and consumption was going “off the books” and into virtual environments. One term for this would be an "exodus recession" - an economic downturn caused by the movement of human attention and energy into virtual environments. Are we in an exodus recession right now?"

"The movement of human attention and energy into virtual environments" - ring any bells? Read the rest of the essay.

RADIANCE: GOING, GOING...

2010-12-05T08:52:00.001+02:00

From the latest Turbine news release, this: "Radiance & its removal in Q1 – We’ve received a lot of feedback on Radiance gating since its introduction and are pleased to announce that Radiance gear will no longer be a requirement for any of our instances or raids. In fact, with the release of our Q1 update next year, we will be removing Radiance from the game entirely. It will not be present in the new Instance Cluster or Epic Book and will be removed from all current instances. You should get your first look at a Radiance-free LOTRO on Bullroarer in early February of next year."

You have to love corporate double-talk. A solid year's firestorm of complaint, grumbling, reasoned argument against, violent objection and outright abuse, reduced to a nicely bland "we’ve received a lot of feedback". I'll say you have... Corporations are like governments; they would rather die the death of a thousand cuts than ever, ever have to admit, in so many words, that they were wrong. Given sufficient outrage in the population, they may eventually take action ("we will be removing Radiance from the game entirely"), but god forbid they should admit to error.

Oh well, never mind. The main thing is that the issue has been conceded and that there is to be an unqualified retreat. I can't help wondering, though, what the actual mechanics of removing radiance will be. Obviously, the simplest way of dealing with it is just to remove that particular parameter from the game, so that armour no longer has a radiance rating. The problem with that approach, however, is that it will introduce a serious imbalance: the two rarest and hardest to acquire armour sets, Dar Narbugud and Barad Guldur, are notoriously poor in everything but radiance. Remove radiance, and at a stroke you will have completely devalued the game's most valuable assets. Perhaps the designers will compensate by increasing or adding stats to these items - but economic history teaches us that devaluation is never pain-free...

MYSTERIES OF ENEDWAITH, 1

2010-11-29T18:52:00.000+02:00

At the southernmost tip of Enedwaith, on the border between Lich Bluffs and the Mournshaws, lies an inaccessible castle. You can find your way to the enormous front gates, but no further. Inside the gate skeletons patrol. The architecture seems dwarven; four huge statues of oversized dwarven ancestor figures dominate the front courtyard. The structure is vast, even allowing for the fact that only the northern exposure can be seen. At the western edge of the outer wall is a small tented encampment, currently empty, and just beyond that a small gap in the rock face through which it is just possible to slip. This leads to a small, circumscribed area by the eastern wall with no other exit. Could the castle be the site of LOTRO's next major raid, apparently due early in the new year?

HACKED ACCOUNTS

2010-11-28T09:30:00.001+02:00

If you are a European LOTRO player, and you haven't already done so, head straight for the Codemasters forum and sign this petition. Started two days ago by UK player CarolineP, it is a politely worded request to CM to give serious consideration to restoring hacked accounts, as other MMOs, includingBlizzard, already do. In her own words, "We recognise that this involves time & cost to yourselves. We would accept a reasonable charge being levied, as this would have the dual benefit of stopping frivolous claims too. We also accept that it would be reasonable to limit the frequency in which this allowed. Perhaps only once per membership year, or similar? But we most urgently ask you to change your policy, especially as the game becomes much bigger and F2P potentially opens up opportunities to scammers and other unpleasant type".

Apart from putting forward an eminently sensible proposal, one which perhaps is now more urgent than ever, this forum thread is probably unique in that it hasn't generated a single objection, rant, cynical comment or even debate: there is absolute player unanimity on this critical subject, which is of course as it should be.

And another first: within 24-hours, CM Community Relations Director Satine (someone, incidentally, who by dint of personality has done more than anyone to blunt some of CM's more egregious PR disasters in the past) had responded with a positive post: "As it happens we do have a new policy for hacked accounts which will be coming into effect soon. (Sorry to use the word "soon" but I know it should be before Christmas though it depends on if any critical problems arise before then). Hopefully it will make life a little easier for those that have been hacked. We'll give the details on what it entails once we're ready to launch it".

So there you have it. Community action can sometimes be beneficial. But don't let Satine's very welcome news put you off signing that petition!

REALISM, TRAVEL AND GEOGRAPHICAL SCALE

2010-11-06T09:21:00.000+02:00

One of the issues which crop up in the design of virtual worlds is the degree of associated realism. Some early RPGs included the requirement to buy and consume "food" on a regular basis, otherwise characters would rapidly lose abilities and wither away. That was just about acceptable if a bit tedious, but imagine a RPG in which characters in the wild had to track down, kill, skin and roast animals on a daily basis just to keep going - it would be virtually unplayable (unless, of course, it happened to be specifically a survival simulation). Similarly, everyone is aware of, and ignores, the fact that severe injuries can take weeks to heal, that even a superficial wound can get infected and cause death in a matter of days, and that nobody ever wore plate mail on the march, let alone carried two or three spare sets in a backpack.

Which brings me to the latest (and very welcome) LOTRO update. The new chapters of the epic quest involve riding south into the new region of Enedwaith with the Dunedain with a view to eventually linking up with Aragorn. It's a nicely designed addition to the story of the One Ring, but very early on players find out that, disappointingly, they won't actually get the chance to ride stirrup by stirrup with the rangers; instead, they are invited to make their own way to the next staging point. Granted that soon enough the unfolding plot will require them to ride off at all sort of tangents on associated quests, an actual gallop, in company, over hill and dale for at least a few of the early stages would have been great fun. As it is, what will almost certainly happen is that players will mutter "sod it!" and port to the next convenient location.

The standard response to this and associated grumbles (for example, that fact that many instances can now be entered with the click off the keyboard) is "well, if you'd rather walk, go right ahead" - but the point is, if an alternative method of travel is available, even hardened RPGers will sooner or later give in and make use of it. The rest of us will do so without a second's thought, though we might feel vaguely dissatisfied about doing so.

The issue of scale in games like LOTRO is indeed a tricky one. Even scaled-down massively, game equivalents of the journey times suggested in Tolkien's narrative would be difficult (and certainly unpopular) to implement. On the other hand, I tend to agree with those who feel that the epic quality of the game's geography is compromised by the over-abundance of instant travel options. It's hard not to feel just a little uncomfortable when two or three jumps will take you from the far end of Forochel to the southernmost tip of Enedwaith. The designers had got the balance more or less right in Shadows of Angmar, which really did offer a sense of vastness, with some journeys (notably the perilous initial overland foray to the Rift of Nurz Gashu) being truly memorable. I can't help feeling that the game has now swung too far in the direction of instant gratification, most of all perhaps where travel is concerned.

A WHISTLE-BLOWER IN ELFLAND

2010-10-18T20:06:00.002+03:00

A member of my kinship alerted us to this thread, which will repay study by anybody interested in the reality of the sausage factories behind the games we play. The meat of it consists of some very angry whistle-blowing by an about-to-be sidelined employee of Electronic Arts - touching on, amongst other things, the reasons behind the poor performances of Warhammer and Age of Conan, and some pessimistic predictions about SWTOR. I can't judge his criticism about specific individuals, but I do have some first-hand knowledge of the disasters which can follow on the takeover by a rich but badly-run company of an poor and efficient one, and a lot of what EA Louse (the original poster) has to say rings true.

On a slight tangent, while reading though the thread, I was struck by the following comment which may well have some relevance to the recent content slowdown in LOTRO. And no, I don't mean the F2P delay on the European side, which I'm still convinced is due to legal shenanigans, but to the shortage of serious new story content which tends to show through all the glitzy bells and whistles which will accompany the eventual arrival of F2P.

"Do you think they have enough story content to last months or a year? Even the non immersive, non cinematic content takes a long time to produce and just hours or days to play through for a dedicated player. It takes BW a few years to develop a high quality single player RPG and those rarely have more than a couple dozen hours worth of good storylines. [...]Voiced, well made story content just isn’t enough in an MMO and that kind of content is very slow and expensive to develop. Even a minor setback can slow the amount of story content being developed for the game to a crawl. The point is, that while the story content will be a good thing, the game won’t survive on it no matter how good it is. It is the bait to get people to try out the game for a month or two and get hooked by the normal MMO activities."

No doubt time will tell...

AT LONG LAST, SOME NEW INPUT!

2010-10-12T11:37:00.000+03:00

This, from the "News & Announcements" section of the Codemasters forum. Are you ready for it? Is the excitement proving unbearable? Are you jumping up and down with glee at the prospect of finally accessing some brand new material? Well, then...

There we go. Feeling better about things now?

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

2010-09-29T15:45:00.000+03:00

As every reader of this blog surely knows, twenty long days have passed since F2P was due to launch in Europe, and we still seem no closer to a resolution. Codemasters is maintaining the kind of total, sweaty silence characteristic of a wounded WWII submarine lying in shallow waters with a couple of destroyers cutting capers just above it on the surface. Meanwhile, the forums are staggering under the weight of concerned, miserable or frantic players pleading, screaming, roaring, threatening or just plain doing their best to start a reasonable, sophisticated man-to-corporate-entity-type dialogue. That last gambit doesn't work, and I suspect it never will.

Why not? Well, I believe it's pretty clear by this time that there is no insurmountable technical problem stopping the launch. The basic code is obviously reasonably solid (OK, OK, I said reasonably, not perfectly), or otherwise the stateside servers would have collapsed. I also no longer think it can be a specifically Turbine-to-Codemasters transfer problem such as different accounting systems and their interface with the in-game shop, because that would have been fixed by now (unless the entire technical staff of CM is permanently on drugs, which I beg leave to doubt). Also, CM representatives, on their increasingly rare appearances on the forums, are limiting themselves to making gagging noises and jerking their heads back at the front office; translation, "I can't say a word about this or my employment prospects will do a China Syndrome".

What all this spells to my experienced and cynical mind is one word only: lawyers! I have no shred of evidence, of course, but the only reasonable explanation I can think of for this ongoing and open-ended delay, a delay with inevitably serious (maybe even disastrous) financial consequences over time for both CM and Turbine, is serious legal problems of some kind. Maybe it's between the two companies, or perhaps it's something to do with some unsuspected pitfall of European law; perhaps the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg has decided it wants to levy purchase tax on in-game transactions, or else F2P contravenes some article of the European Union legislation on the free movement of goods and services. Perhaps. All I can say is that if this supposition is true, it could be bad news. Because geological time and the slow shifting of tectonic plates are as sheet lightning compared to the average speed of corporate lawyers...

PROTECTIONISM IN LOTHLORIEN?

2010-08-18T18:06:00.001+03:00

In the days before the Mirkwood expansion, if you tried to swim across the Anduin from the western shore in Lothlórien, you could usually get to about a hundred meters or so from the eastern shore before a Felarrow orcish archer one-shotted you: "Aaargh! Glug!"... Some us would try and sneak past them, and a few players actually managed to set foot on the forbidden shore long before they were supposed to. Come the expansion, of course, those cany elves set up a water-taxi to get us across, and the Felarrows were redeployed in North Mirkwood.

A couple of days ago, feeling the need for some cooling exercise, I set of on a leisurely swim across the Anduin from the point on the western shore where the abandoned boat has been pulled up the bank. Imagine my surprise when, about halfway across, I suddenly and unconditionally died: "Aaargh! Glug!", and not a Felarrow in sight. Instant death by game designer fiat, and no option to withdraw. What the hell? I was swimming from friendly territory to recently reconquered (and fully explored) territory. Why the bolt from heaven? And if for some reason you musn't now swim across the Anduin at a point where you were once perfectly able to do so, what's wrong with a good old invisible wall, or a sudden rapid?

Personally, I suspect old-fashioned protectionism; this is clearly a move to restrict lawful trade and protect the Lothlórien river-crossing monopoly. Will the IMF please investigate?

SKIRMISH POINTS TO REWARD CLASSIC INSTANCES

2010-07-30T10:11:00.001+03:00

Back in March, I had been wondering what the future of skirmish points was likely to be, and whether they would be worth anything in days to come. Now the latest Developer Diary has come up with a partial answer:

"Classic instances will use the Skirmish reward system with some modifications and additions. What does this all mean in plain English? Classic instances will use the Skirmish reward system. All normal item drops from monsters and bosses have been replaced by Skirmish marks. Any spaces, like Annúminas or Helegrod, that had barter systems in place have had their item drops and barter NPCs removed. However, have no fear – many of the unique items that could be acquired from all instances have been added to a new Skirmish camp vendor: the Classic vendor. New unique tokens are also awarded for Classic quests and Challenge mode. In addition, we’ve put Legendary Item jackpots on end bosses, and even small chances to drop Tomes that permanently increase your character’s base stats! To sum up, Classic instances will give you everything they did before, except now they share a unified reward system."

So skirmish points will not only continue to be with us, but are to acquire additional purchasing power. What this doesn't answer is my original question, namely whether Scrolls of Empowerment will continue to be available in exchange for SPs, and at what cost. This is more than a minor quibble, for one simple reason: for those of us at l.65, with characters almost fully maxed out in every possible way (since we've had little else to do for the last eight months!), the odds are that few of the rewards for Classic instances will be of much interest. Since the basic stat Tomes mentioned above are to be drops rather than purchasable rewards, Scrolls of Empowerment, hopefully usable on a new tier of Legendaries, still look like being the only really useful investment for an end-game player.

And isn't it about time we got a separate currency and reward item menu, if only to make some space in bags, chests and other storage modules?

RUNNING FREE

2010-06-10T11:03:00.001+03:00

So, LOTRO is going Free to Play in the autumn. I can't say this came as a surprise; given how hard Turbine and Warner have been pushing F2P and micro-transactions in Dungeons & Dragons Online, it was pretty much inevitable they would hit LOTRO sooner or later. The big question is, how will this affect the core group of dedicated players? There have been some outraged responses on the forums, but to be honest, I'm inclined to see this as a positive development.

Why? Well, for one thing, there is the inescapable fact that for the last seven months, there has been a marked decline in the game which no amount of obfuscation can hide: on the one hand, the almost total lack of any new input since Mirkwood (I still refuse to take Vol.III/Book 1 in any way seriously), and on the other, the news that key Turbine developers were taken off LOTRO and put to work on other projects. It became obvious that LOTRO was being starved of funds, and risked dying a slow death by a thousand cuts. Something had to be done, and that something turns out to be going F2P.

Will this have a negative effect on existing players? Not in any way that I can see. Lifetime subscribers will acquire VIP status, and will continue to play free on a day-to-day basis. While it's not entirely clear how major new expansions will be paid for, that's hardly an issue: whether we buy major expansions, as we've done so far, or purchase them from the LOTRO store, really makes no difference. As for micro-transactions in actual items, I honestly don't think this will make the slightest difference to existing players, since apart from some starter kits of low-grade weapons and armour, the items available for sale will have no effect on performance. If the store goes on to do a booming business in summer hats and wet fish, it's no skin off my nose...

At least this way we will finally be getting new content. Reports from DDO players are almost entirely positive about the rejuvenating effect of going F2P, and apparently a respectable amount of new content has indeed been forthcoming. One possible downside which has been commented on has been the possible influx of "WoW-type mindless idiots", but this strikes me as a wild exaggeration. For one thing, basic F2P access will be strictly limited to certain areas, so that much of the time we wouldn't even see any of these rumoured barbarian hordes. For another, why would such players flock to LOTRO in the first place, rather that the Other Game itself? That said, I wouldn't be averse to making the RP servers in Europe (and in the States, if Turbine decide to set one up) VIP only.

What I am less happy about, though, is that this development clearly means we won't see any additional content until F2P is launched in the autumn (September? October?). It's going to be a long summer. Hope you all have a good time fighting your way up to the Lieutenant...

STUCK IN THE DOLDRUMS

2010-06-02T13:47:00.000+03:00

It's June 2nd today, exactly six months - half a year - since Siege of Mirkwood was released on December 1st. That's a long, long time to go without any updates (ignoring the ridiculous Oath of the Rangers which came out on March 1st), and with no word of anything to come other than vague mutterings about some announcement which might or might not be made at E3.

Inevitably, I haven't been spending much time ingame, other than to lead kinship raids into Barad Guldur twice a week (we are just getting to grips with the Lieutenant). Given that the BG raid is really all that's available for end-game players - of whom there's an awful lot by this time, less of course those who've left the game in sheer frustration - I've been wondering just why BG is still on a weekly reset. If it were reset twice weekly, as I seem to remember Nornúan used to be, we old-timers could at least get in a few extra cracks at doing something halfway interesting. It shouldn't take Turbine more than a few minutes worth of programming, is unlikely to cause offense to anybody, and might even reduce the overall volume of grumbling for a short while...

SWINGS & ROUNDABOUTS

2010-04-29T16:03:00.000+03:00

With mounting worries about the LOTRO’s future after the Warner Bros buyout, allied to speculation about Turbine’s financial health (WB wouldn’t have bought it if it wasn’t profitable or it wouldn’t have been sold if it was in good health – take your pick!), there has been a marked tendency for observers, educated and otherwise, to ascribe the apparent decline in the game’s quality over the last year to the lifetime subscription experiment. While conceding the value of the original financial shot in the arm during LOTRO’s early days, the argument goes, we lifetime subscribers are now parasitic on the game, contributing nothing to development. Indeed, some forum posts have suggested, lifetime subscribers are largely responsible for the current doldrums. By the same token, many lifetimers moan that for these reasons, Turbine regards them as less that the dust on its feet, and completely fails to take their interests to heart – the not illogical implication here being that this particular group of players is more likely to be picky and demanding.

I say that’s rubbish. It’s true that lifetimers no longer pay a monthly subscription; on the other hand, this scenario completely ignores the crucial fact that lifetime subscribers actually represent a large and essentially captive pool of customers for paid expansions. Let me put it this way: say that a monthly subscriber, cheesed off by the paucity of content since Vol. III/Book 1 was released earlier this year, decides to cancel his subscription on 1 May. From this point on, both the lapsed subscriber and a lifetime subscriber are contributing the same amount to Turbine’s kitty, namely nothing. However, let’s be optimistic and say that on 1 November, Turbine release a wonderful new boxed expansion, with a new landmass and even (as long as we’re dreaming) a fully revised LI system, retailing for about 30 euros. My guess is that at that point, the vast majority of lifetime subscribers, even those who perhaps haven’t logged on since early summer, will fork out for the expansion – after all, the game hasn’t cost them anything for over half a year, and what’s more, there is little or no hassle involved. However, what are the chances that lapsed monthly subscribers will do the same, given that just buying the box won’t be enough – they’ll also have to go to the trouble and expense of re-subscribing?

Lifetime subscriptions may or may not have been a good thing for Turbine from an actuarial point of view; that depends very much on the specifics of the company’s financing and accounting. But I don’t believe that ongoing financial problems, if any, can be ascribed to the existence of lifetime subscribers; if we don’t pay for the swings, we pay for the roundabouts, and we mostly do so quite happily.

TURBINE PRIORITIES

2010-04-23T11:26:00.001+03:00

On 16 April, players on Codemasters forum were asked to respond to the the following in the Talk to the Community Team thread: "You are given the opportunity to move two items to the top of our priority list. Choose two of the following items and assign them either first priority or secondary priority: Radiance, Legendary items, Housing, Kinships, PvMP, General itemization (loot, rewards), New Skirmishes, New Raids, Revamping old Raids/instances, Trait/deed revamp".

By the morning of the 23rd, 139 players had responded with the following choices:

• 89: PvMP

• 52: Legendary Items

• 22: New raids and skirmishes

• 20: Radiance

• 19: Trait/Deed revamp

• 16: General itemisation

• 14: Revamping old raids/instances

• 10: Housing

• 9: Kinships

That's a huge majority (of those responding, obviously) in favour of improved PvMP; many of those selecting PvMP didn't even bother to make a second choice. Next came Legendary Items, with dozens of different suggestions; the gist of these was "either improve the system or scrap it!". I was mildly astonished to see new raids come in a relatively lowly third with just 22 votes, but if you add the 14 votes for revamping old raids, it becomes clear that many players are unsatisfied with the level and quality of raids currently available. Those picking radiance as an item to be fixed were brief and almost unanimous: "scrap it".

Will this affect Turbine's plans in any way? I'm inclined to think that it will, given how bluntly the question was put: not "what would you like to see done", but the much more direct "move two items to the top of our priority list". It would be foolish of Turbine to be so upfront about soliciting input, only to ignore it.

EVALUATING LOTRO'S RAIDS

2010-04-11T20:46:00.002+03:00

A week or so ago, I posted a poll on the Codemasters forum asking people to say which of ten raids (including a raid-like instance) their current kinship had completed, the requirements being that all the bosses had been killed at least once, and that at least 80% of the participants belonged to the kinship. The raids included Ferndúr the Virulent, Master of Imlad Balchorth; Helegrod; Udunion the Rogmul; Bogbereth; The Rift of Nurz-Gashu; The Watcher in the Vile Maw; Nornúan the Turtle; Dar Narbugud; and Barad Gularan in both Easy and Hard modes. Despite the obvious methodological flaws (survey limited to forum readers, inadmissibility of PUGs, etc.), I was hoping to get some sense of both the difficulty and popularity of the LOTRO raids to date.

In practice, the biggest problem was that the relative inflexibility of the CM poll mechanics made it impossible to avoid multiple postings by different members of the same kinship; this means that absolute numbers cannot be trusted - for example, 34 people claimed that their kinship has completed Barad Guldur in easy mode, but does this mean that 34 separate European kinships have done so? It's obviously impossible to say. On the other hand, there should be little or no distortion due to boasting, since kinship names were not posted. It was also questioned whether the survey ought not to distinguish between raids completed on level, and those completed later (i.e., was a raid completed with l.50 or l.65 players?). My gut feeling here is that in general, even semi-serious raiding kinships would be most likely to complete a raid on or near level. In any case, over a period of about a week, 103 people took part in the poll. What follow are the results in some detail, running from the highest to the lowest completion rate.

1. Nornúan the Turtle: 96.12 %
With the highest success rate (only four kinships did not list him), Nornúan is also the easiest and quickest raid in the game, with an average completion time of under 5 minutes. Though technically a raid, in some ways it's a bit silly to compare Nornúan to, say, a raid like the Rift which, when done at level, can take a competent kinship two evenings to complete.

2. The Rift of Nurz-Gashu: 92.23 %
Everybody's favourite: difficult, demanding, well-designed, with good rewards. Not surprisingly, the second-highest completion rate, despite being vastly more demanding than the nominal first.

3. Bogbereth: 86.41 %
Another quick and simple raid, easily accessed, it was in fact designed as a "learner" raid and could be farmed by a much smaller group even at l.50.

4. The Watcher in the Vile Maw: 79.61 %
The first radiance-gated raid. Despite being quite easy of access and containing a single boss with no trash mobs, the exact tactics required are tricky, and many kinships struggled to learn the fight, particularly as the designers made several changes to the combat mechanics over time. The fact that even at this relatively late date, 20% of the kinships represented in the poll have not completed this raid is indicative of the problems raised by radiance gating.

5. Helegrod: 78.64 %
I was surprised to see Helegrod achieve this percentage, since almost every kinship would struggle to field a 24-man force over the two evenings necessary to complete this very, very long raid. My guess is that there has been some gentle cheating here, and that some of the raids were perhaps nowhere near 80% single-kinship participation.

6. Udunion the Rogmul: 78.64 %
Technically not a raid, but a very hard fight which required a fellowship to defeat several bosses before reaching Uduniuon. The relatively lower completion rate is almost certainly due to the difficulty of access; at level, reaching Barad Gularan was a feat in itself, and a wipe meant that the entire journey had to be repeated again.

7. Dar Narbugud: 73.79 %
The second radiance-gated raid, with the success rate dropping to just under three-quarters of the kinships polling. Most people dislike DN, with its heavy trash mob population and unimaginative graphic design.

8. Ferndúr the Virulent: 70.87 %
It's not surprising that Ferndur has the lowest completion rate of all the early raids, as many people don't even know of his existence; you only find out about him after competing a long string of quests. The raid is non-instanced, however, so you might just stumble across him if you travel far enough into Imlad Balchorth.

9. Barad Guldur (Easy Mode): 33.01 %
Barad Guldur is the third and most heavily gated raid; you cannot realistically even attempt it without +120 radiance, and the deeper into it you go, the more radiance you will need. There are only three bosses, but each needs to be defeated in both easy and hard modes, making it in effect two raids. The biggest obstacles to success in Barad Guldur are the nightmarish so-called trash mobs fights which precede each boss; not only are they difficult and time-consuming, but unless the boss is defeated, they reset in under an hour. This last and utterly inane detail makes learning a boss fight almost impossible, since you normally get no more than two chances before the lead-in fight resets and you have to spend anything up to another hour fighting your way back in order to try again. Frankly, very few kins other than hard-core raiding kinships can devote the enthusiasm and time necessary to overcome such handicaps, so it comes as no surprise to find the success rate crashing to 33%.

10. Barad Guldur (Hard Mode): 12.62 %
For hard mode, the completion rate drops again by two thirds from the easy mode rate. And remember, that's 12.62 % of what we can assume to be the moderately serious to hard-core group of raiding kinships, not of all the kinships on the server. Overall, I am prepared to guess that less than 2% of all kinships, and maybe 1% of all players, will ever complete Barad Guldur in hard mode. While that might be acceptable if it were due to a fiendishly designed and tricky raid, it is unacceptable as the result of a) the radiance gating system, and b) the glaring chicanery of trash mob fights which reset after almost every wipe.

Conclusion: While this admittedly rather superficial survey probably tells us nothing we didn't already suspect, it's still good to get confirmation. Using the information gathered, I plan to look into ways of hopefully performing a more elaborate and accurate survey, perhaps by means of questionaires addressed to kinship leaders or kinship raid officers.

THE DREADED NINJA

2010-04-05T17:35:00.000+03:00

In case it's not immediately obvious, the fragment of an ingame log, above, posted on Codemasters forum yesterday and immediately copied onto a number of private forums, refers to something which took place on the Laurelin server. The player identified as Denwyn was leading a fellowship in the Sammath Gul instance, where the rare Symbol of Celebrimbor dropped after the group successfully took down Gorothul. All six players rolled for the item, with the leader scoring a lowly 7; immediately after the roll, the leader assigned the item to himself and left the fellowship. In game parlance, to acquire loot items by fraud of any kind is to ninja them.

The player concerned, a Hunter once known as Deniro, promptly changed his name once again to "Alitis", arguing a certain amount of premeditation (whether he knows it or not, by the way, his new name is the Greek word for "thug"). Now, Codemasters have rules about naming and shaming which forbid the outing of bad player behaviour on their forums, which means that by the time you look for it, the thread may have been deleted. CM Gamemasters are also under strict instructions not to take any action over player v. player complaints of things like ninja looting. I can see where they are coming from, of course - to do otherwise would almost certainly lead to a flood of trivial or even malicious complaints, quickly swamping the system. However, it strikes me that in a few serious, well-documented cases, or those where the same player has consistently been reported for abusing the rules and/or disruptive behaviour, there is every justification for GM intervention leading to a partial or total ban. The proof is easily available in the form of game logs like the one above, and I believe there are catch-all rules about harassing and inappropriate activity which could certainly be made to cover blatant ninja looting. And it's in nobody's interest to have thugs running around ingame - not even, or perhaps particularly not even the publisher's.

WHEN NO NEWS IS... NO NEWS

2010-03-29T20:16:00.003+03:00

Feeling mildly curious about whether Turbine had revealed anything about its future plans for LOTRO at PAX East, I just now did a Google search and came up with what looked like an interesting link to a site called The No News ("Where no news, is gaming news!"). What follows is the complete extent of the information provided:

Next we moved onto Turbine who are the creators of Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online. Something I didn't know was that they are actually from here in Boston and were pumped that their hometown was finally hosting the expo. He discussed the new content in LOTRO and D&D Online and were actually giving away free copies of LOTRO and I believe there were members of Turbine signing the copies they were giving away.

He (who he?) discussed the new content in LOTRO, did he? That's fascinating. And, umm.... could we, like, share same? No? Well, never mind, I'm really happy about your free signed copy.

Late edit:

Eric Musco of The No News has added a comment to the effect that the real interview with Adam Mersky of Turbine can be found here; it seemed only fair to add his link to the original post...

SKIRMISH POINTS: WHAT WILL THEY BE WORTH TOMORROW?

2010-03-26T14:12:00.002+02:00

Every form of barter currency appearing to date in LOTRO has turned out to be, in effect, non-transferable. Vile Coins, Rift-iron Coins, Battered Annuminas Armour, Marks of Triumph... Remember those? All water under the bridge by now, or just rubbish cluttering up chests. Medallions of Moria and Medallions of Lothlórien, collected with so much effort, are worth little or nothing to players currently at l.65.

Will we see the same thing happening with skirmish points? A lot of people will be upset if it does. By the end-game, unless you spend them on upgrading your soldier, the only really valuable item you can barter for skirmish points is the Scroll of Empowerment, which costs 1,950 SP and will upgrade a LI legacy by one tier - but, at the moment, it only works on l.65 LIs. Now a lot of players, myself included, have already upgraded as many legacies as we care to on our current LIs, and are simply collecting SPs in view of the inevitable next upgrade, or even the eventual appearence of First-Age LIs. We are assuming (gambling, if you prefer), that Scrolls of Empowerment suitable for the next lot of LIs, whatever they turn out to be, will still be available in exchange for our accumulated SPs. Should this prove not to be the case, we will find ourselves in the same position as holders of Imperial Russian government bonds the day after the Bolsheviks seized power...

On the other hand, if skirmish points continue to be valuable after the next upgrade, albeit perhaps hit by inflation (i.e., scrolls may have doubled in price), LOTRO will have taken the first welcome steps towards the goal of a reliable, long-term barter currency.

THE KAIROS CONJECTURE & THE BELEGWE EQUATION

2010-03-21T09:30:00.001+02:00

Readers may remember that last week, I posted my belief that "it should be possible to come up with a reliable formula to indicate what the chances of any PUG completing a particular instance or raid will be". This Holy Grail of scientific LOTRO studies is now within the grasp of serious students and analysts thanks to the efforts of my esteemed colleague, Master Belegwe, to whom we owe the following remarkable formula and its explanation:

The symbols are as follows:

C - the chance of success, expressed as a percentage
R - the relevance of rewards from a given instance expressed as a percentage of the proportion of the group the reward is relevant to
P - the number of players present
G - the gating requirement, expressed as an integer, with each piece of required equipment equalling 1
D - the difficulty of the instance expressed as an integer from a scale I created (The Belegwe Scale) with values ranging from 1 to 4, 1 being the easiest and 4 being the most difficult
A - the age of the instance expressed as an integer with each month (rounding to the nearest month) equalling 1
P(al) - the average level of all the players present expressed as an integer
I(l) - the level of the instance expressed as an integer
P(n) - the number of players present who have never been to the instance before expressed as an integer
P(e) - the number of players present who have been to the instance before expressed as an integer
K - the Kairos constant with a value of 9.0171

The equation can be expressed more simply, and I think more elegantly, as:

C- this remains the same as above
X - the product of the first set of curved brackets
Y - the product of the second set of curved brackets
Z - the age of the instance expressed as an integer
K - the Kairos Constant
Alpha - the product of the New Player equation
Beta - the product of the Experienced Player equation

It should now be child's play for anybody contemplating joining a PUG to gather some basic information from his potential fellow questers and enter the numbers into the Belegwe equation before deciding whether to proceed; more importantly, his or her decision will have been taken on the basis of firm scientific evidence rather than mere prejudice and conjecture. A new age of rationalism dawns on Middle-Earth!

CHOKING THE ECONOMY

2010-03-20T09:58:00.001+02:00

The LOTRO economy is currently in the equivalent of a deep recession, at least in the sense that economic activity is virtually frozen. Why? Because most l.65 players are awash with money, and have nothing to spend it on. The one single item that players might still be willing to shell out for is the Symbol of Celebrimbor, the essential ingredient for the forging of l.65 Second-Age items. It doesn't come up often in the AH, and when it does, the asking price ranges from 60G to 150G - though I seriously doubt that it actually sells for much over a hundred. However, the drop rate in Sammath Gul is said to be improving, and more to the point, given the depressingly limited shelf life of LIs, many people are beginning to wonder whether investing that kind of money in a weapon which will almost certainly be superannuated two months or so down the road is a smart move. LOTRO's economic czar has clearly screwed things up here, if the entire economic model is teetering, so to speak, upon the demand for one single product (and a rapidly crumbling demand, at that).

QUANTIFYING PUGS

2010-03-14T10:20:00.003+02:00

A PUG, or Pick-Up Group, is what you join if you are looking for company on a quest, instance or raid; in other words, a casual assemblage of players of varying degrees of skill and experience for the completion of a specific goal. A group of people who regularly quest together, even if they belong to different kinships, is therefore by definition not a PUG.

Obviously, you’re taking pot-luck in joining or starting a PUG; there are some seriously bad and/or annoying players out there, and you won’t usually know ahead of time. Prior familiarity aside, the only clues to ability will be a player’s kinship (assuming some knowledge of the relative standing of kinships) and a gear inspection (I would turn down anyone anonymous without a second’s thought). This last will at least tell you whether the player has the necessary basic equipment, and will give some idea of previous experience (they’re unlikely to be completely hopeless if they have, say, the DN +20 radiance leggings which drop from the Blind One).

Even if you end up with a competent group, it still won't be as effective as a well-honed kinship group, if only for the reason that members of a random PUG don’t share the crucial experience of having fought together and of knowing each other’s tricks and mannerisms. Inevitably, therefore, PUGs have a mixed reputation at best, and everybody has horror stories of PUGs they’ve joined in which healers thought they were tanks, hunters pulled everything in sight and leaders ran off with the loot…

In my experience, PUGs are most effective in the case of older instances which most good players will pretty much know by heart and for which they can slot into their roles almost automatically. On the other hand, given the much greater complexity of raids in general, I would normally steer clear of a PUG raid other than for purposes of scouting. The one exception is Helegrod, where the virtual impossibility of assembling 24 players from a single kinship makes a mixed group inevitable – but the rule here has tended to be that in each server, one or two freelance raid leaders emerge who enjoy organising Helegrod runs and, rather like raid leaders in the Ettenmoors, have become familiar with the ability of most applicants.

Though largely bereft of mathematical ability myself, I can’t help feeling that it should be possible to come up with a reliable formula to indicate what the chances of any PUG completing a particular instance or raid will be. The following parameters would have to be considered and balanced: how old the instance is (the older, the more likely it is that more players have experienced it); how many players are needed (the more, the higher the chance of including an incompetent player); the value of the rewards on an arbitrary scale (poor rewards attract fewer players); the relative difficulty, again on an arbitrary scale; and of course, gating requirements.

Given these parameters, I think it’s a virtual certainty that you would be wasting your time trying to run Barad Guldur, the latest 12-man raid, with a PUG. The gating and gear requirements are very high, the rewards are surprisingly poor, few kinships have completed it as yet (and their members are very unlikely to be joining PUGs), and the learning curve extremely steep. Six months from now, if you're really lucky, you may find a PUG that just happens to be made up of players with solid prior experience of BG. But for now, all you'll find is players who've been unlucky with their kinships, who are kinless, or who are just plain out of touch with reality; in any case, players with insufficient experience of what is a very difficult and unforgiving raid.

DISCUSSING TACTICS

2010-03-12T09:37:00.002+02:00

It hadn't really occurred to me before, but I was struck recently by a huge difference between the European (Codemasters) and Stateside (Turbine) forums: there is almost no discussion of tactics on the CM forums. Which is quite strange, when you come to think of it.

By far the most popular sub-forum on the Turbine forums is the one called "Instances and Raids". Though it shelters a certain amount of grumbling and nit-picking, it also includes a lot of careful and serious debate about the strategy and tactics of the principal raids. Currently, there are several well-established threads about the Barad Guldur 12-man raid; one of them, "BG Strategy - Gauntlet and Boss 1 (Durchest)" includes 133 posts, many providing either detailed tactical proposals or feedback on possible changes since the latest patch. For a characteristic example of a recent post, see the illustration, above.

There are no remotely similar threads on the CM forums, whether for Barad Guldur or any other raid. When I did an advanced, post-by-post search for "Dürchest"on CM, the only posts of any interest which turned up were under the Warden sub-forum. Admittedly, a substantial thread was started recently about increased resistances since Volume III which includes some useful feedback, but nothing much more.

I'm curious about why this should be. Obviously the fact that Codemasters don't provide a tactics and raids sub-forum is one factor, but that can hardly be more than contributory. Are European players less interested in end-content raiding and/or less determined (or, of course, obsessive)? Are they less prepared to share experiences, preferring to hoard what might be regarded as hard-earned information? Or is it simply a general lack of interest in debate and discussion of matters tactical?

ZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

2010-03-04T18:29:00.002+02:00

ZOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

- What was that?

- That was your new content...

- Oh. Do I get any more?

- No. Sorry.

With apologies to Basil Fawlty, that was more or less how most of us felt after checking out the latest free LOTRO content, a.k.a. Volume III, Book 1: Oath of the Rangers. I'm not one of those players who hit l.65 twelve hours after Siege of Mirkwood came out, and I like to take my time over the epic quests and enjoy the plot. So I was seriously disappointed to find that it took me slightly less than four hours to complete all of Vol.III/Bk.1. That's right, all nine chapters. Including the new instance. After which - zilch. I had just exhausted the new content...

This was, without any doubt, the thinnest update ever from Turbine. Other than the aforementioned mini-book and instance, we get some new recipes, some cosmetic loot from the Rift instance, an upgrade on a class skill and very little else. I wouldn't mind too much - after all, there's still the very tricky Barad Guldur 12-man raid to be completed - if it wasn't for the fact that a brilliant opportunity was needlessly blown by the epic quest chain. The basic idea of revisiting different regions of Eriador for the purpose of recruiting Rangers to the Grey Company of the Dunedain, leading in each case to a quest or instance, was a clever one; unfortunately, in terms of plot and narrative design the quests themselves proved unbelievably lame and superficial, as though they had been cobbled together in a spare half-hour on the back of an envelope. The saddest part is that a couple of instances, like the Annuminas tombs in the illustration above, were graphically excellent - but all the hard work of the graphics team was gratuitously wasted by whoever was in charge of writing the story. Also completely wasted was the boss mob of the Rift instance, who could have proved a tough and tenacious opponent under different circumstances, but can here be knocked over by a hobbit granny wielding a feather duster. Report: "Must do better".

THE TWO NAZGUL

2010-02-27T09:58:00.008+02:00

You have fought you way into the evil Necromancer's castle of Dol Guldur, battled orcs and fouls spirits until you break into the vast hall of Gorothul, chief sorceror of Barad Guldur and sole possessor (when he remembers) of the priceless Symbol of Celebrimbor. Gorothul's voice is softly sinister, and he conjures up legions of spirits and animated corpses to destroy you, though the fact that he looks the spitting image of Ming the Merciless does give you pause for a second.

As you fight for your life (and a slim chance of acquiring the aforementioned Symbol of Celebrimbor, an artifact of immense value), you ears are battered by a steady beating sound. Glancing up for a second you see, through the dim glass of the vast windows rising up either side of the dread altar, two Nazgûl riding the great fell beasts whose flapping wings echo through the hall. When, with luck, Gorothul finally goes down to his just reward and you have discovered that once again the priceless Symbol of Celebrimbor has failed to drop, your attention may be caught by a strange discrepancy: while the fell beast seen through the south window is beating his wings energetically, rising and falling as he does, his fellow to the north is doing - well, nothing very much. He is in fact barely holding position right at the bottom of the window, listlessly twitching his wings now and again.

Is the second fell beast on strike? Tired from a long voyage to the Shire and back? Suffering from mange? The answer may well affect the whole outcome of the War of the Ring, and I for one really think we should be told...

RUNNING THE GAUNTLET

2010-02-19T15:32:00.004+02:00

Siege of Mirkwood has been out for some time now, but with the exception of a few hardcore raiding kinships in Europe and the States, the culminating 12-man Barad Guldur raid that came with it has yet to be cracked by most kins - or even seriously dented. Hard numbers are of course always impossible to come by, but I haven't just plucked this suggestion out of thin air. It's based on a number of facts: on first-hand knowledge about the how things stand with various kins on my server, on the frequency (or paucity) of mentions on GLFF, on the almost complete absence of extensive debate about the tactics of taking down anything but the first boss on any of the forums, on the fact that except for the odd member of the aforementioned handful of hardcore kins, you almost never catch sight of +30 armour, and of course on input from quite a large cross-section of active and competent players.

Of course, Barad Guldur is a tough and unforgiving raid, and that's pretty much as it should be. Nor is radiance that much of a problem these days; if you really want to raid, you can get +120 radiance from the three +15 and three +25 armour items, all of them available in exchange for medallions. All six items cost 120 Mirkwood medallions in total, which can be assembled in about a week or less - not too massive a grind. No, the main problem with BG appears to be the Gauntlet. The Gauntlet (as it's come to be known) is a running fight with Uruks, wargs and goblins all the way up the stairway which leads from the entrance of the tower to the room of Dûrchest, the first boss. It's a tricky fight, because adds are constantly arriving as you leapfrog your way up from one landing to another, and if you take too long, you get swamped by reinforcements. Personally, I think it's a brilliant test of raiders' ability to think on their feet, and I'm all for it, except that it's in the wrong place. In other words, it's a long fight, as hard to master as any boss fight and tougher than most - and it's still only a prequel.

Worse, much worse, is the fact that the whole thing resets entirely within a very short space of time; in fact, if you wipe on Dûrchest, you just about have enough time for one more attempt before it resets. This last bit is frankly idiotic; the fact that to take another crack at what is still only the first boss you have to run the Gauntlet again, no matter how good you've become at it, is a huge morale stripper. In fact, it may well be the main reason why, unless changes are made, Barad Guldur could end up being the most under-exploited raid since Helegrod. I don't think the Gauntlet should be removed, and I wouldn't want to see it go - though if asked in the planning stages, I would have suggested it be placed at the end rather than the beginning of the raid. But there's a simple, obvious solution which would be extremely easy to implement: treat the Gauntlet as another boss fight, and give it a lock: once you've run it successfully, that's the last you see of it till the next general reset. Here's hoping...

LEGENDARY ITEM SYSTEM: HAVE YOUR SAY!

2010-02-13T16:01:00.004+02:00

I was about to write a post about the current state of Legendary Items, when my attention was grabbed by the fact that the "Tell the Community" feature on both the Turbine (Stateside) and Codemasters (Europe) forums are asking for players' views on, of all things, the Legendary Item System!

This feature of the forums isn't all that familiar, and some of the people who do know about it have sometimes been dismissive in the past; understandable, in a way, given the inanity of at least some of the questions. However, the point is that unlike unsolicited player comments in forums and blogs, the responses to questions posted in these threads are very specifically those which the developers and publishers want to receive - so the odds are that such responses will at least be read, and very likely taken into consideration where it counts.

The relevant questions here are:
1. You are given the opportunity to make two changes to the Legendary Item System. What are the two most important changes you would make? Please limit your answer to only two changes.
2. Name two things about the Legendary Item System you enjoy the most.

I would urge everybody who has ever complained loudly about the LI system to take advantage of this opportunity and make their views known. Needless to say, this involves thinking a little about the questions and coming up with succinct and intelligent answers; snappy comments along the lines of "The LI system stinks!" or two-thousand word rants are unlikely to make a big impression... I'll post my own response here in a day or two.

HEAVY METAL GLOVES

2010-02-09T18:21:00.005+02:00

Illustrated above, Rochben gloves are perhaps the screwiest item drop in the current expansion, Siege of Mirkwood. They drop from the fourth and last boss of Sammath Gul, the fell spirit Demafaer, who is only accessible in hard mode; they give +25 radiance; and they are drop very often - perhaps as much as 40% of the time. And they only come in one flavour: Heavy.

Why are they weird? Well, first of all, they represent the one and only example in the game of a radiance item (and a major one at that) simply dropping as normal loot - every other item requires you to either kill a major raid boss and then win a 1:12 roll, or else gather a number of medallions. Rochben just drop, and by this time, they are being treated as vendor trash by many kinships. Secondly, there are no equivalent items anywhere in the game for medium and light armour wearers; the Dar Narbugud set gloves which are exchangeable for the Greater Elf-stone of Hand dropped by Zholuga have +20 radiance, and the Moria instance gloves only +15. Thirdly, they are the only teal radiance item in Siege of Mirkwood.

Were they left in by mistake after beta? Are they an example of whimsy on the part of the loot devs? Whatever, they're untidy. And unfair to all us non-heavy metal wearers...

MISS PIGGY TO THE RESCUE

2010-02-05T09:57:00.003+02:00

OK, OK, I admit it. This post is definitely puerile, and almost certainly cartoonist, or blimpist, but I couldn’t resist it. I mean, isn’t that that Miss Piggy in a natty suit of plate armour, about to gallop off in all directions in search of Rangers?

On a marginally more serious note, have you noticed how often loading screen and announcement artwork falls far short of LOTRO’s usually very high standards? Think of the dreadful Rivendell loading screen, with its club-handed or fingerless Legolas (I’ve mentioned this before), or, worst of all, the hideous loading screen illustrating last autumn’s harvest festival, which included a number of ugly stick figures clustered around a festive table. Some of the worst appear to be the result of over-enlarging and distorting an ingame screenshot – the harvest festival one certainly did. Seems a shame…

STUMBLING THROUGH THE MURK IN MIRKWOOD

2010-02-04T15:08:00.006+02:00

I've spent the last few weeks exploring Mirkwood, leveling up my main character, replacing old legendary items, collecting new ixp runes, acquiring the +25 radiance armour pieces, running skirmishes and pioneering the new Barad Guldur 12-man raid with my kinship. In other words, it's been busy, and in that time I've sampled pretty much everything that's available in Siege of Mirkwood. So? Personally, I think this has been the best expansion since before Mines of Moria - in fact, the best expansion since the one which brought us the Rift - and I believe it vindicates those of us who insisted that the game would eventually get its act together again.  

First of all, the visual design is absolutely brilliant. The various regions of south Mirkwood are all different in interesting ways, both visually and in terms of content, but they all share a common eeriness. I was particularly impressed by the way that the woods are, well, murky... In other words, they're not pitch-black, causing you to keep walking off cliffs, but actually communicate the feeling that something could be lurking in the gloom just a few yards away from you - as, in fact, it probably is. Actually depicting gloom rather than darkness is no mean feat, graphically, so congratulations yet again to the landmass designers at Turbine.  

The skirmishes are fun. They are quite fun to run solo, but they can be a real hoot in groups of six or more. The devs, wisely to my mind, effectively decided to make skirmishes largely irrelevant to a character's progress in the game, so that the skirmish marks you accumulate are largely employed in increasing your soldier's abilities. There are two exceptions to this rule. One is that skirmish marks can be exchanged for class quest items, some of them once extremely rare and valuable; I'm not entirely certain I approve of this, as it obviously tends to devalue wonderful old locations like Carn Dum, but I can also see how this could come as a relief to new players who may be having a hard time getting fellowships together for the tougher mid-level instances. The other exception, which some players may not have cottoned onto and which is a very good reason for high-level players to keep running instances, is that 1,950 skirmish points will buy you a Scroll of Empowerment with which you can upgrade any legacy on a l.65 legendary item by one tier. This makes it possible, and even feasible, to boost all your legacies to the maximum.  

The three and six-man instances in Barad Guldur are well-designed and intelligently plotted, and have considerable replay value. They are also very different from one another, meaning they don't necessarily all appeal to the same player. The least popular appears to be the Dungeons instance, which involves a considerable amount of trickery and sneaking about, plus a hefty dose of luck, but it makes a good pendant to Sword Hall, a fast, purely combat-oriented instance. Judging by looking for fellowship requests, the six-man Sammath Gul instance is by far the most popular, partly of course because the major boss fight here is the game's only source of the rare Symbol of Celebrimbor, without which no Second-Age l.65 legendary can be crafted.

Ah, those legendaries again... Well, the facts are straightforward: to begin with, your old, much cherished l.60 First-Age weapon is pretty nearly useless, as in DPS terms it can be trumped by any new l.65 Third-Ager. So break it up, and dry your tears. Next, while Third-Age LIs are pretty easy to find or buy, Second-Agers no longer drop from anywhere and are now genuinely rare. They can only be crafted, and crafting requires the aforementioned Symbol of Celbrimbor, whose drop rate seems to be very roughly 1:10 - so even at this point in time, not many players have even one Second-Age l.65 item, let alone two. On the plus side, your chances of getting good legacies from the start have increased dramatically - it's still a gamble, but no longer a virtually hopeless one. More interestingly, you can now effect changes to your LIs yourself; Scrolls of Delving will increase an item by ten levels, to l.70, and as noted above, Scrolls of Empowerment will upgrade one tier. You can also choose to replace a single legacy with a new one which will increase a basic ability.

As for the new 12-man raid, I can confirm that it is difficult - very difficult for the average kinship and, I would say, not even worth trying with a PUG. This is not so much a matter of design trickery, just that even after you have learned the tactics (and there seems, mercifully, to be more than one ideal tactic for each fight), it calls for considerable precision, speed and accuracy - Barad Guldur is very unforgiving. Need I mention that in the first boss fight, every player death gives Dûrchest a 17.5% melee damage buff, and that after he reaches 130k morale, every death heals him for 190k morale?

BACK!

2010-02-04T13:32:00.002+02:00

Well, I've been taking a holiday from the blog, but not from the game. This was partly due to the need for a break of sorts, but also because with the new year, some weird bug wouldn't let me log into blogger.com at all, claiming that Firefox wasn't accepting cookies. It was one of those ridiculous computer standoffs, where the idiot machine claims that black is white, and refuses to listen to reason. Anyway, I finally gave in and did a whole lot of re-installing from scratch, so here we are again...

SCHADENFREUDE

2009-12-02T09:16:00.003+02:00

Schadenfreude can be defined as malicious or gleeful pleasure at the misfortunes of others. Honestly, no malice is involved here, but I couldn't resist giggling at what came up this morning when I did a search for "Mirkwood" on the Lorebook forums. Here is a selection of thread titles from the first two pages of results, all from the last 24 hours:

• I'm so mad
• SoM not on account page
• Unable to start game after Mirkwood expansion
• Lag Galore!!!
• Stuck on "Cleaning Up Old Connection"
• Rubber banding!
• Server issues???
• Stuck on Loading Screen
• Cannot access any new areas
• Help me fast! 1 hr reconnect time!

In other words, the usual feedback from the first day or so of any expansion... Coming your way soon. I recommend going away for a couple of days till the dust settles, or perhaps hauling that old Monopoly set out of the basement and playing that instead; 90% of early glitches have to do with server overload, and with a bit of luck the other 10% will have been fixed by the time you get back online.

SoM PRE-PATCH FOR EUROPE NOW ACTIVE!

2009-11-30T17:31:00.004+02:00

We in Europe have often had occasion to grumble, not without reason, about the imbalance between what Turbine does for its subscribers Stateside, and what we get from Codemasters in Europe. Well, Codemasters have gone some way to redeeming themselves today, with the release in torrent form of a Siege of Mirkwood pre-patch. I'm not normally a great fan of torrents, and the speed currently (Monday afternoon) is averaging no more than about 25-30 kb/s, which means it will take a bit more than 24 hours to download the whole 1GB, but what the hell... we won't be able to use it till Thursday anyway, and anything that helps bypass the projected server log-jam is more than welcome. Now, if we could only have a look at the patch notes...

ONLY IN IT FOR THE LOOT?

2009-11-26T19:05:00.005+02:00

Back on the Stateside forums, a vicious little argument erupted on 17 November over the top-end raid loot in Siege of Mirkwood, namely the armour set dropping from the Dol Guldur instance, and raged for two days until the thread was closed. The title given to the thread by the original poster says it all: “If you value raid loot, Mirkwood is NOT for you...”. Well, we already knew (see previous post!) that DG armour will be a visual disaster, but it seems that it’s going to be distinctly poor in terms of stats as well – some posters felt it will be barely better than the full Watcher set. And to add insult to injury, it turns out to be (oh, the shame!) purple rather than teal.

At the same time – and I’m definitely confused as to the thinking behind this - it seems the new SoM legendary weapons will only come in Second-Age flavours. No First-Agers at all. So will a l.60 First-Ager be better or worse than a l.65 Second-Ager? I would guess worse, but who knows?

However, yesterday’s DevChat included a couple of interesting comments about both these issues. In response to a question about the purple DG armour set, dev ZombieColumbus (no, really) responded: “In the past, we have gotten burned by giving out the best possible gear our game could generate with the initial release. This immediately makes itemizing further instances impossible. The advantage of holding back like this, is that the jump between our subsequent raid sets will be more noticeable”.

Dev Jalessa comes in for some very bitter criticism in the forum thread; according to the original poster, “the fault lies not with the instance designers, but with the LOTRO Systems Team, led by Jalessa, which intentionally made the loot weak, ignoring all of the mountains of player feedback begging for desirable raid loot throughout beta”. However, when asked whether “we are to see Teal Armour sets and First-Age weapons in the next book update?”, Jalessa responds with “… level 65 First-Age legendaries will not be available immediately with launch of Siege of Mirkwood. We plan on introducing them in a future update”.

The obvious implication of these two comments seems to be that top-end armour sets and First-Age LIs will both come available later, though still before the next volume – in other words, as part of a Mirkwood expansion. Whether this implies that there will be yet another 12-man raid in the region remains unclear. I rather doubt it, though, given that the one currently implemented ends with the death of the resident Nazgul; I mean to say, how could you top that? On the other hand, will a second (teal) armour set start dropping from the same raid? That sounds equally unlikely. Baffling…

DOL GULDUR FASHIONS

2009-11-20T14:26:00.003+02:00

Despite appearances, the personage depicted above is not a fashion victim with more money than sense, a colour-blind circus barker, a tourist at the Venice carnival or an actor in an Elizabethan masque. No. It is, gods above help us, a young lady sporting the latest in LOTRO action wear for archers, namely the complete +30 radiance Hunter set which will drop from the Dol Guldur 12-man instance. Or, in other words, the mightiest and most advanced Hunter armour set to date.

What's that you said? She looks like an utter twit? I couldn't agree more. But that, nevertheless, is what Turbine's fashion designers have decreed for the winter '09 collections. Never mind that nobody in their right mind is going to want to be seen dead in a ditch wearing that clown suit. True, it does have the distinction of being the ugliest bit of LOTRO armour since those dreadful purple things some lunatic devised for the Ettenmoors, but still...

It remains a puzzle to me how the design team which came up with some of the most brilliant environments and landscapes I have ever seen in a computer game can be so amazingly lame where clothing and armour are concerned. What makes it worse is that they are obviously baffled by the whole concept of Hunters. They can just about fudge it with the heavies (give'em lots of plate mail, then add more bits on top of that) and with Lore-masters (robes, robes, robes), but it's quite obvious, looking at earlier efforts such as the Lady's Favour set from Dar Narbugud, that they don't have a clue what a Hunter might want to look like.

These hideous rococco creations might be just about tolerable if there was one plain, serviceable, campaign-style set of Hunter armour in the entire game which could at least be worn cosmetically. Something along the lines of plain boots, leather leggings and simple chain mail in muted earth colours would be nice - but there isn't. Lore-masters at least get a chance of acquiring the sober, unadorned, simple black Robe of Viisaus which is the reward for completing Vol I/Bk 13/Ch 4 ; judging by the number of these I've seen recently, there's a real demand out there for unfancy gear. But no, there's nothing like that in medium armour.

As for weapons - don't get me started on the neon glow, radioactive, three-sizes-too-large rejects from a drunken WoW design session we've been seeing lately...

GONE FISHIN'

2009-11-14T10:09:00.005+02:00

It's the doldrums again in LOTRO, as we all wait upon the arrival of Siege of Mirkwood. Book 8, The Scourge of Khazad-dum, ultimately proved to be thin fare indeed. The three +15 radiance instances (Mirror Halls of Lumul-Nar, Water Wheels and Halls of Crafting) were interesting and well designed, but had limited repeatability; by the time one had run them enough times to gather all the elf-stones, plus several extra to help kinsmen out, the shine had definitely worn off. As for the 12-man instance, Dar Narbugud, even those with sufficient radiance to attempt it (rather less than a third of the player base, I would judge) feel that it is definitely no second Rift of Nûrz Ghâshu. For one thing, it is nowhere near as difficult as the Rift; the Blind One, the penultimate boss, is admittedly tricky, but not a patch on Thaurlach the Balrog. For another, unlike the richness and variety of the Rift, Dar Narbugud's landscape is a dispiriting succession of red, vaguely organic caverns and passages, like a proctologist's nightmare...

What many players have been feeling the lack of for a very long time has been something new and meaty to explore. The last really satisfying area we got to roam around in was Eregion; the subterranean twists and turns of Moria and the static quality of Lothlorien somehow failed to satisfy the urge. So expectations for Mirkwood are high: a new area to discover, even if it turns out to be a bit smaller than expected, a new and hopefully varied 12-man raid, and of course the skirmishes, which sound as though they really will have a serious element of replayability. In the meantime, for all us jaded old-timers, there's really not very much else to do but mark time and go fishing...

LATEST LOTRO DEVCHAT FROM WARCRY

2009-11-12T15:16:00.008+02:00

WarCry Network had a chance to chat with Turbine's developers on 11 November. The full transcript is available on their site. Nothing earthshaking was revealed, and in fact most of the responses were either disappointing or else offered nothing new.

Dev Orion clarified the new development he calls 'Inspired by Greatness', a mode which will enable players to solo Epic Quests by temporarily increasing stats: "In the current implementation, the buff increases your statistics to allow you to readily handle the foes present within instance spaces. What that means, in the short term, is that a player deciding to take the solo version of an epic quest that contains an instance will be bumped up to the approximate level of an Elite creature. This also includes some bonuses to regen that make it possible for players to survive against multiple opponents".

One of the most eagerly awaited elements of Siege of Mirkwood is the new multi-boss raid in Dol Guldur. In answer to a question about how many bosses this would include, dev jwbarry replied "The raid at the end of the cluster features multiple boss fights, it's a full raid not a lair raid. There will also be at least 8 skirmish raids launching. These are designed for 12 players and have been balanced as such, including custom built bosses for each" - so nothing really new, there.

Little of interest was said about legendary items, other than Graal reiterating "The addition of scrolls that allow legacy tier upgrades and various other improvements to Legendary items allows players to continue to upgrade their Legendary Items far beyond what is currently available. Initial ranks of legacies will be somewhat lower in Mirkwood to make room for these upgrades".

More fuel was added to the debate about whether Wardens make good main tanks by Belechannas' question: "A Warden who is defeated and then revived (with their threat reset to zero) lacks any aggro catch-up skill similar to Engage/Rising Ire. Is it intended that Wardens are the only class unable to function in their primary role after being revived in a long fight?". To which Graal responded, rather discouragingly for Wardens, "The lack of an instant threat catch up skill is one of the differences in tanking between Wardens and Guardians, just like Wardens dont have a easily used forced taunt. It is unlikely, but not impossible that this will change. Bottom line...Dont die".

To questions about the availability of new skills in SoM, Jalessa disappointingly responded "With Siege of Mirkwood, each class will get one skill upgrade at level 62", and "There are no class quests added in Siege of Mirkwood". So with five new experience levels, we get just one new skill - confirmation that current policy is for improvements to come largely through the acquisition of new gear. Unfortunately for those who aren't into raiding, or hate the radiance gating system, Jalessa also pointed out that "we're not looking to add radiance to crafted gear at this time".

jwbarry reassured a questioner that Skirmish rewards would be available to all, even those who were unable to take part in 3, 6 or 12-man skirmishes: "All items will be available for purchase for all players. Small Tokens come from and 3 man skirmishes. Large Tokens come from 6 and 12 man skirmishes. Some rewards require Small Tokens and some require Large Tokens, in addition to an amount of Skirmish Marks. Large Tokens can be downgraded into Small Tokens with no additional cost. Small Tokens can be upgraded into Large Tokens with an additional amount of Skirmish Marks. The goal is that with enough time, everyone, regardless of playstyle or preferred group size will be able to get all the rewards they are striving for".

Champions have been particularly worried about the loss of their Fervor stance legacies with the new SoM legendary weapons. According to Graal, "The Champion legacies were worked over the most of any of the classes due primarily to the reduction and consolidation of Stance based legacies. Champions gain several legacies that give damage bonus to individual skills, a critical magnitude legacy and several more utility type legacies. In addition all of the Ardour/Glory legacies have been combined to affect both stances".

Finally, to my mind the most interesting new feature revealed here (I may have missed an earlier announcement, however) was the "Immediate" skill execution type. Graal described this as "a new skill execution type that will absolutely interrupt whatever you are doing and execute the skill. We use this for interrupt type skills like Clobber".

EARLY MIRKWOOD BRIDGEHEAD ESTABLISHED!

2009-11-10T12:35:00.004+02:00

At last it can be revealed! Astonishing photograph documents the first (non-beta) raid and hostile landing on the shores of Mirkwood, weeks before the official release of SoM. LOTRO Cronicles is proud to release this undoctored image of history in the making, as elements of the Western Alliance raiding forces establish an early bridgehead on the east bank of the Anduin, well in advance of the main Free Peoples' invasion.

I WAS A KING ONCE... NOW, I AM NAZGUL!

2009-11-05T16:42:00.005+02:00

Turbine's publicity has always tended to be somehow unimpressively flat, as though they had some terrific material at their disposal but didn't quite know what to make of it. Now, however, they have just released the second Siege of Mirkwood pre-publication trailer, and it's first-rate. For once, they've made good use of all the elements at their disposal - mythos, background, epic quality - with genuinely impressive results. Oh, and congratulations to whoever did the voice-over for the Lieutenant of Dol Guldur, Lord of the Necromancer's Keep; I hope we'll be hearing lots more from him in-game.

WHITHER LEGENDARIES? WHO KNOWS...

2009-10-30T18:38:00.007+02:00

Well, as anyone who was in the least bit interested will have realised by now, Turbine lied - I mean, was economical with the vérité - both implicitly and explicitly when they implied, or even in one notorious case claimed outright, that our legendary items would be with us forever, increasing in potency as we increased in level. So by next month, or a bit later, it's bye-bye l.60 First-Age Bow...

Despite the great number of leaks, official releases, forum posts and dev diaries, there is still much that is unclear or obscure about the future of Legendary Items post-Siege of Mirkwood. One question (or possibly hot potato) which as far as I know nobody has yet addressed, is what will happen to our hard-earned Bright Emblems of Nimrodel, otherwise known as First-Age tokens. It is just conceivably possible that come next month, it will prove possible to trade them in for the new SoM LIs, or perhaps exchange them for whatever barter currency will replace them - but if you believe that, you probably also believe in the Easter Bunny. Turbine has never, in the past, provided an upgrade system for outdated barter currencies, and I don't think they're about to; I mean, how many of us still have chests cluttered up with now thoroughly useless Vile Coins, Rift-iron Coins, Marks of Triumph and the like?

No. If you want my advice, take those Emblems of Nimrodel and run, don't walk, to your nearest class trader and hand them in for whatever level of First-Age LI you can afford, then waste no time shoving it into the Auction House for whatever insane price you can think of. Even though l.59 and 60 First-Agers now have a well-defined sell-by date, there will always be somebody who will pay good gold for them. You'd be surprised. And when you enter Mirkwood with a rapidly ageing First-Age weapon, you'll at least take comfort in also carrying a well-filled purse.

WARNING: The management take no responsibility for the consequences of following financial advice made public in this blog. Gondor's Financial Watchdog says: "The value of your investments can go down as well as up".

TOUGHEST BOSS OF THEM ALL?

2009-10-14T20:23:00.003+03:00

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, and there are certainly more strange and terrible things in LOTRO than ever see the light of day. Or, to be more precise, not everything in Beta eventually finds its way to the final release. In a recent thread on the Codemasters forum, Steelskin posted the following highly intriguing snippet: “There are quite a few mobs used in beta which make it into the final client but are not used, I remember a "Squirrel-King" but it apparently got deleted at some point”.

A piss-take? Quite possibly, though if it was, fellow poster Ganoderma must also have been on it, since he weighed in with “Ah, the good old squirrel king: see http://lorebook.lotro.com. Official entry is gone, page still exist though”. Well, Ganoderma is quite right; the page referenced is there but empty. However, a quick bit of detective work on the net eventually traced the original Lorebook entry, above. The full entry runs as follows:

"Ever since regaining access to Moria the dwarves have been trembling. The Watcher is not the only creature lurking in the depths and catacombs of the previously great palace. Far beneath the pool where the Watcher hides lies a hidden cavern, patrolled by NeekerBreekers and squealing spider queens lies the most fearful monster, surpassing even Balrog. Laying under the Mithril Mines for Aeons this creature lay trapped until the Balrog, released by the greedy (and hairy) dwarves tripped over a rock and broke through... releasing the Squirrel King.

Be aware that your average level 60 raid party has no hope of bringing down this Uber-Nemesis Level 70 boss who uses acorns to bring down even the strongest and most able warrior. Later in the year though the level cap will be lifted and you can leave turtle soup and calamari behind to get kicked in the nuts by this boss of bosses."

So did the dread Squirrel-King enjoy a ghostly existence in Beta? All one can say for certain is that Turbine, for reasons best known to itself alone, saw fit to delete every trace of its brief existence… Did I hear the muttered words “conspiracy theory”?

THE ADVENTURER'S PACK

2009-10-01T00:36:00.006+03:00

There appears to be some confusion at the moment over what exactly the new Adventurer's Pack which is being released in North America at the same time as the Siege of Mirkwood will include. Apart from the two extra character slots, interest has focused largely on the promise of "shared storage" between characters on the same account. Unfortunately, expectations that this means all storage will be common to all characters must be dashed; according to the official Turbine publicity posting "Answer the Call of War", shared storage will consist of nothing more than "a storage space capable of storing 20 items accessible by all your characters on the same LOTRO server/world".

The obvious implication is that this will consist of an extra storage module of limited capacity over and above what is currently available - my guess would be an additional chest. And it's virtually certain not to accept bound items, including those quite unnecessarily BoA decorative items. Not really all that much help, then, in terms of housekeeping; you might store a small range of potions there, or perhaps a few crafting materials... Better than a kick in the pants, of course, but far from earth-shaking.

SOME DEATHS: AN OCCASIONAL SERIES

2009-09-29T10:24:00.005+03:00

Library of Steel, Moria

Annuminas

Mordor's sentient servants are gifted with the power of speech; indeed, sometimes it's almost impossible to get them to shut up, other than by skewering them or blasting them with mage-fire or its LOTRO equivalent. Many of them also have their very own dying words, final messages of despair or defiance. This ongoing occasional series will record some of these utterances from the brink of extinction...

ENTERING THE NECROMANCER'S CASTLE

2009-09-17T10:39:00.000+03:00

The Siege of Mirkwood, we have been given to understand by Turbine’s carefully calculated press releases, will culminate in a multi-boss 12-man raid on the fortress of Dol Guldur. This is something all LOTRO raiders have been waiting for, hoping passionately that in terms of variety, interest and replayability, it will turn out to be a Rift of Nurz-gashu, Mk II. This is particularly so in view of the fact that the latest and much-heralded multi-boss raid, Dar Narbugud in the depths of Moria, is just a tiny bit disappointing.

The million-dollar question is just how severely it will be gated – in other words, what the minimum radiance level will be in order to avoid cowering. The maximum possible would be +120 radiance, representing in effect a full set of Dar Narbugud tier 2 armour, each piece of which is worth +20 radiance (as, of course, are also the tier 1 helm and shoulders which drop from the Watcher) – but I don’t for a moment think the developers will set it that high.

At the moment, minimum radiance for the Vile Maw is +50, and for Dar Narbugud +70 (which means you can enter with +65, as it rounds up). My guess is be that you will need +85 radiance (down from +90 thanks to rounding up) for Dol Guldur, making a neat progression of +50, +70, +90 for the three 12-man raids. Currently, this could be achieved with one tier 2 item, all three tier 1.5 items and two tier 1 items - but the expansion will also offer other, new opportunities to build up radiance. It looks as though radiance, like death and taxes, will be with us for a while yet…

THE SIEGE OF MIRKWOOD

2009-09-10T13:58:00.004+03:00

There's a number of sites where you can find a consolidation of all the currently available information on LOTRO's forthcoming expansion, The Siege of Mirkwood, so I won't bother recapitulating it all here (MMeOw has a good one). It's interesting to note that unlike the previous paid-for expansion (Mines of Moria), this one does not introduce a new volume, but "only" an new book (Book 9) of Volume II. It is to be a digital expansion costing around twenty dollars US, though I would guess it will soon be followed by a boxed edition for the retail market. Significant features include a level cap raise to 65, a legendary item cap raise to 60, a new runic slot for LIs, the eagerly expected Skirmishes, an apparently very large new area to explore and, above all, a new multi-boss raid culminating, it seems, in a battle with the Lieutenant of Dol Guldur. All good stuff...

Since this will not, after all, be a new volume, there has been some grumbling about having to pay for new content, but surprisingly less than might have been expected; most people, I think, realise that the content on offer in SoM will be considerably greater than we would normally have received from a free update. And to be honest, as one of the many players who paid for a lifetime subscription, I don't mind making an occasional contribution to Turbine's revenue stream, thereby ensuring that they continue to lavish time and attention on the game.

I TAPE-WORM MANY FRIENDS

2009-09-02T22:15:00.008+03:00

In a lighter vein than some recent posts, I couldn't resist passing on the following wonderful communication gleaned from the Codemasters forum:

"Hello escrivo to expose what happens to me I am in the server evernight go 2 years in etten am rank 10 with my guardian a hobbit always I went to all the raid and tape-worm many friends until a few months ago I come a very big clan descendants of andurin, and one of his(her,your) members arcane harasses me non-stop(steadily) expels me without motive says lies of my and the last thing that it(he,she) made arcane is to get about myself tell to scare saying things like that Arcaned: I wish to KILL FRODO AND EAT HIS EYEBALLS Arcaned: Devils Arcane> arcane Cucuracha Rodin . he(she) hates me for that he(she) hates Frodo and Samsagaz and says that every deve of burning in the flames of sauron arcane it looks like to me a sick player and already not that to do before this harassment pardon for my bad(wrong) Englishman".

The exchange which followed had something to do with feuding and bad blood in the Ettenmoors (yawn), but the debate was of minor interest compared to the original glorious piece of prose - which may owe some of its surrealist splendour to the intervention of an online translator. The last word remained with Satine, CM director of community relations, who sensibly concluded "[Thread] closed before anyone hurts themselves" last Tuesday.

LET NOT THY LEFT HAND KNOW WHAT THY RIGHT HAND DOTH...

2009-08-27T11:53:00.002+03:00

Well, it turns out that the Great Bounty Quest Bonanza is, indeed, the result of a miscalculation by the developers. Responding to complaints on the US forums about overcrowding at the bounty sites, Vastin, a member of Turbine’s online team, admitted as much: “It might surprise you to know that rewards are handled separately from quest design. Our content team designs quests, estimates how long they'll take, and then the systems guys designate the rewards that they will give out. In this case we overestimated how long the quests would take to run, and our systems folks overshot the reward a bit, and both factors combined to provide a hefty dose of IXP love for you folks”.

Whoops. Nice to know just how these things happen, plus it’s a relief to discover that the devs will cheerfully admit to the occasional all-too-human cock-up.

What next? Still according to Vastin, “I'm considering various fixes to reduce the crush at them. The easiest and most logical short term fix would be to increase the length of the quest timers on them to 3 days or so, so that's the front runner at the moment. […]We don't have another patch scheduled for a while yet, so it'll likely stay as-is for a time”.

So gather ye rosebuds whilst ye may. Personally, I would much prefer the other solution Vastin proposed, namely upgrading the two group quest targets to massive, Arch-Nemesis-on-Steroids class, but I think that was tongue-in-cheek. Too bad.

BEGINNING OF THE END FOR LEGENDARIES?

2009-08-25T14:12:00.005+03:00

The five new Bounty quests available in Esteldin can be repeated daily; between them, they give a total of 465,000 item experience points each and every day. That’s a hell of a lot of of ixp - enough to take a legendary item to l.60 in under a week…

Three of the quests are easily soloable by any competent l.60 player, and the other two represent a mild challenge to any combination of no more than two l.60s; undertaken in any group of three or more, including a Hunter to provide transport, all five can be completed in just over thirty minutes. In other words, you can take two legendary items from zero to sixty within a grand total of six hours playing time.

The bounty quest ixp represents the equivalent of flooding a real-world economy with bad money by printing shoals of banknotes, and results in rampant inflation. All other forms of gaining ixp, including in-combat ixp and the extra quests for the Moria instances have suddenly been rendered utterly irrelevant – at this point, who will care a fig for the measly 180 ixp awarded for killing a l.60 orc?

I admit to being baffled by this development; at a single stroke, the devs have effectively killed off one third of their legendary item strategy. This used to have three prongs: acquiring a LI, levelling it up, and gambling for legacies and settings. The second prong of that strategy has now had its heart ripped out. How much longer before the other two go as well? Is this the beginning of the end for LIs – and would that be a bad thing?

A MODEST PROPOSAL

2009-08-11T17:29:00.005+03:00

Richard Bartle, a British writer and game designer, was the co-author of MUD, the first multi-user dungeon and according to Wikipedia, “one of the pioneers of the massively multiplayer online game industry”. He is also the designer of the Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology, which uses a series of about 30 questions to determine the preferences of games players. Depending on their answers, player preferences are divided between the roles of Achiever, Explorer, Socialiser and Killer, with the score ranking indicating the principal thrust of a player’s interest. As an example, a pure non-consensual PvP game such as the recent Darkfall is clearly designed to appeal primarily (indeed, probably exclusively) to the Killer type of player.

A fascinating recent post in Pearls of Unwisdom argues that the current radiance gating debate in LOTRO reflects a long-standing conflict of interest between Achievers and Explorers: “Achievers and Explorers have been knocking heads together for a while now, especially with regards to gating of content […] Achiever types traditionally thrive in content gating situations […] Explorers [are] forced either to join the numbing grind, or to hang up their hiking boots and call it a day.” The post concludes by asking “given that Achievers and Explorers both seem to enjoy raiding, can they both coexist peacefully? Or is there a fundamental conflict between what they both want from the experience?”.

It must first of all be said that the Bartle test does not really fit in very well with a game like LOTRO, which has minimal PvP content – I tried the test, but kept being faced with questions which really had no application to the LOTRO experience, particularly as regards killing fellow players… More germane to this discussion is the fact that I can see a substantial overlap between Achievers and Explorer goals. However, what I found particularly illuminating was the recasting of Raiders as Achievers. The official Bartle definition of a pure Achiever goes like this: “Best, first and most are the favorite adjectives of the Achiever. They love comparison not only against others, but also with themselves. They enjoy setting goals, surpassing previous performances and hitting new milestones. They tend to have lots of high scores, badges, trophies and other concrete evidence of their successful endeavors”.

If the argument in favour of a very narrow gateway to end-content raiding, and therefore to the highest-quality gear, is that there must always be some concrete, strutting-around, high-status evidence of a player’s ability to eventually beat the hardest challenge thrown at him by the developers, there’s an easy way to achieve this without depriving everybody else (i.e., Explorers and Socialisers) from experiencing environments and challenges such as the Rift and Dar Narbugud.

Simple. Widen access to the big, multi-boss instances which everyone wants to experience, not by making the fights easier, but by providing several pathways into the instances: forget radiance gating, and offer alternatives such as crafted armour, drops from several different kinds of quests, and epic book rewards. At the same time, provide another 12-man raid which need not have more than one or two bosses, and which will not require spectacular new settings (scenery is for wimps!), but make it fiendishly, almost impossibly difficult. The rewards for completing this instance should be impressive, even flashy. They should immediately stand out in a crowd, offering instant status for those who crave it, but (and this is important) they must not be in any way functionally superior to the top rewards for finishing the other end-content raid.

Result? Genuinely rare, high-status display items for the Achievers, satisfaction for frustrated Explorers and Socialisers, and, at the end of the day, a level playing field for all.

RADIANCE: MORE FROM ORION

2009-08-05T15:00:00.003+03:00

The following quote is lifted from Turbine designer Orion's blog of 4 August. There really isn't much that can usefully be added to it, apart from noting that the issue is obviously being taken seriously at a high level. As the man says, wheels are in motion...

"I am looking at the generators, resets and other scripting bits that make up the Grimbark fight when I am asked to come to a meeting on Radiance Gear. Being that I wrote a spec on how to deal with the issue, I am being asked for input on the solution. Now, I cannot go into great detail - because it is still not in implementation and I would rather let Amlug discuss this with all of you; unless of course he asks me to do so. I will say this, the changes are going to be for the better.

The meeting includes Avon, myself, Amlug and Raskolnikov. We banter back and forth, each of us expresses our understanding of the core issues with the system. They have been at it for a while when I come in the room and there is a split on the best course of action to rectify, refit and make an attempt to satisfy the issue. We know that we are dancing on a very thin line. On one hand, we need to do something to rekindle Hope to the casual player base (pun intended) in the other we still need to provide enough bragging rights for achievers. We continue the discussion until everyone has their say. The solution is on the board with some minor tweaks being added as we draw the meeting to a close and realize that it’s not the elegant solution that we each desire, rather it is an amalgam of what can be done and what we all reason can be accomplish in the time frame we have with the tools and technology at our disposal. The past and the decisions made by those who are not us haunt us ever forward. Still, we have a solution, one that dances on that fine blade and only time, concrete specs, implementation, testing and player feedback will answer if we got the solution right, partly right, mostly right, right enough, nowhere near right or some mix of all of the previous.

If I can convince Amlug to blog about the system or get his leave to explain the solution in the coming weeks I will. For now, know that wheels are in motion and the world is turning, that is the sunlight you feel on your face. We know that this is an issue and are dedicated to doing something about it. Period."

NOW WHAT DID HE MEAN BY THAT?

2009-08-01T14:59:00.003+03:00

According to The Telegraph newspaper, addiction therapists are creating their own avatars in online fantasy games such as World of Warcraft in the hope of treating youngsters addicted to virtual worlds.

“We will be launching this project by the end of the year”, said Dr Graham, a consultant psychiatrist at the Tavistock Centre in London. “I think it’s already clear that psychiatrists will have to stay within the parameters of the game. They certainly wouldn’t be wandering around the game in white coats and would have to use the same characters available to other players. Of course one problem we’re going to have to overcome is that while a psychiatrist may excel in what they do in the real world, they’re probably not going to be very good at playing World of Warcraft. We may have to work at that if we are going to get through to those who play this game for hours at end.”

The mind gently boggles. As I drifted off, the following dialogue played itself out on the GLFF channel of my mind…

[GLFF] Shatterhand: 9/12 for Watcher, looking for mincer, dps and experienced champ.
[GLFF] Lacan: Well, hi there, Shatterhand! Want to talk a bit?
[GLFF] Shatterhand: What class?
[GLFF] Lacan: Well, you could think of me as a healer.
[GLFF] Shatterhand: Mincer, cool. What rad? Must have +50 min.
[GLFF] Lacan: How nice. Minimum 50 what, exactly?
[GLFF] Shatterhand: Radiance, man. +50 or you cower when we go for suchi.
[GLFF] Lacan: To be honest, I’m not that fond of Japanese food myself, but hey, it takes all sorts… I’d like to talk to you about cowering, though. Why do you think you have to cower?
[GLFF] Shatterhand: ???
[GLFF] Lacan: Do you think it might be because your social skills are a little, let us say, rusty? How many hours a day do you stay online, hmmm?
[GLFF] Shatterhand: One sec, inspecting… You noob, you’re l.5 and your pointy stick only does 1-3 damage!
[GLFF] Lacan: Now, what leads you to express yourself in those terms?
[GLFF] Shatterhand: *&%£@!?X!
[GLFF] Lacan: Oh, too bad, he’s gone. Never mind, I’m sure I must have helped him to a better understanding of himself…

THANK YOU FOR LISTENING

2009-07-31T19:07:00.005+03:00

Responding to my post about radiance gating a few days ago, unwize pointed me at a comment in Orion's Belt, an ongoing blog by the senior Turbine developer of that name. The blog, well worth following by anybody interested in the nuts and bolts of how a games designer tackles a specific job, is essentially about Orion's ongoing redesign of Garth Agarwen; on 24 July, however, he had the following to say about the radiance controversy:

When you deal with a mass of people all spouting opinions and everyone keeps harping on one point or another it can be very difficult to drill through to the core of the issue. This has been the case with Radiance Gear. At first, it appeared that radiance gating was the only part of the issue because that was the breadth of the complaints. After drilling deeper and reading more and more from folks it became apparent that there were many symptoms to the problem.

Radiance gear is now required to enter raids.
The only way to acquire radiance gear is to complete hard modes.
Hard modes objectives are obtuse.

All good points, all taken to heart and all actively in the pipe for some form of retrofit to address the core issues. No time frame yet. Just and admission that we hear you, we understand you and we are committed to rectifying the issue.

It was, needless to say, heartening to read this, as it's the very first time anybody at Turbine has so much as conceded that there might be a problem. Of course, Orion's comment shows that he has very slightly missed the point: it's not that people object to completing hard mode instances, it's having to complete them over and over and over again that they hate - that, and the fact that the only pathway to the new instances is the radiance pathway. Nevertheless, his blog demonstrates that the message has registered with at least one person in the right quarters. "No time frame yet" casts a slight chill, but on the other hand, "we are committed to rectifying the issue" is pretty clear-cut. Let's hope a retrofit will indeed be applied before too long; in the meantime, thank you for listening, sir.

RADIANCE GATING: THE ISSUE THAT WON'T GO AWAY

2009-07-25T12:41:00.005+03:00

I mentioned in my previous post that I considered radiance gating (i.e., making raids accessible only to those who have acquired radiance gear) a very poor design decision, and added "it’s no secret most players feel the same way". That was, actually, a bit of an understatement... Gating has provoked perhaps the most extensive debate ever on the LOTRO forums, and has met with almost universal disapprobation. The "Petition against the new Raid/Radiance system" started by Cuilion on the CM forums way back in February has achieved an astonishing 32,591 views and garnered 650 replies, virtually every last one supporting the petition. This is no simple storm in a teacup.

Cuilion started his petition in response to an uncompromising official announcement from Turbine to the effect that "Radiance will continue to be an important gameplay mechanic going forward for Raids. In other words, given the amount of time and energy gone into making the Radiance system it's safe to assume Radiance gear will be required for future Raids." Well, there's certainly no ambiguity there. Problem is, everyone hates radiance gating, and this includes dedicated end-content raiders (of which I suppose I am one, albeit not an obsessive example of the species). The question here is to what extent do, or should, the developers of an ongoing game like LOTRO pay attention to the wishes and preferences of their client base? OK, it's obvious you can't please everyone, and that whatever the developers do or don't do, some categories of players will always be outraged; the minor storms which break out after every adjustment of class skills (necessitated by a sensible desire to provide a level playing field) are a classic example. Every class of player will defend their territory to the death, and complain accordingly - that's only to be expected. The same goes for many of the lore-breaking design decisions: to coin a clumsy phrase, you simply cannot make a MMORPG omelette without breaking lore eggs.

What we have here, though, is very different from the usual forum whine-fest. Players who are serious about the game, who are experienced gamers, who wish LOTRO and Turbine the very best and who have given considerable thought to the subject have expressed their opposition clearly and unambiguously: they believe radiance gating to be a design error, a one-way-street which will harm the game and its prospects in the medium to long-term. They have done so, by and large, in a restrained fashion, explaining exactly why they believe this to be the case. Unfortunately, there has not been the slightest indication from Turbine that this wave of sober criticism is regarded as anything more than a minor irritant.

Politics teaches us that when a substantial (and vocal) percentage of any population has a serious beef which is consistently ignored by the powers that be, conspiracy theories will spring up like weeds to explain an apparently irrational situation: "If They won't even admit there's a problem, then something is rotten in the state of Denmark...". A recent post by player Mai Hon encapsulates this view perfectly: "I had two accounts, I waited for some sign that someone at Turbine was listening to the outcry against radiance, but its someone's favourite child, someone who would rather see the game damaged by the division it causes than admit it was a mistake."

And in view of Turbine's deafening silence, who's to say that Mai Hon is wrong?

ACHIEVING MINIMUM RADIANCE IN BOOK 8

2009-07-22T18:26:00.011+03:00

As everybody knows, the two end-game 12-man instances at the moment are gated – that is, you need a certain minimum level of radiance in order to even enter them. Personally, I think this is a poor design approach, and it’s no secret that most players feel the same way. However, we’re stuck with this situation for the foreseeable future.

Fortunately, Book 8 introduced some new paths to achieving the minimum requirements, which are currently +50 radiance for the Vile Maw (the Watcher), and +70 radiance for Dar Narbugud. What follows are some suggestions as to how this can be achieved as expeditiously as possible. Keep in mind that raiding is a cooperative affair, and that in order to get anywhere you’ll need to join a Kinship, or at least find a reasonably steady group of players - solo play doesn't enter into the debate at all.

To quickest way of achieving the +50 radiance necessary for the Vile Maw is to complete the first two (and easiest) of the 6-man instances which drop a single BoA coin when completed in Hard Mode. These are the Grand Stairs (dropping a Platinum Coin of Courage, exchangeable for Boots) and Forges (Platinum Coin of Strength, for Chest). Each of these armour items gives +10 radiance, for a total of +20.

The two new 3-man instances each drop three Glistening Elf-stones every time they are completed; four of these can be exchanged for tier 1.5 radiance armour items, each of which has +15 radiance. Completing the Mirror Halls of Lumul-Nar and the Water Wheels of Nalad-Dum four times each will net you Gloves and Leggings respectively, for a total of +30 radiance. Add these to the Boots and Chest from the earlier 6-man instances, and you have the +50 radiance needed to enter the Vile Maw.

Achieving +70, however, is harder. You will need to either complete the two toughest 6-man instances of the tier 1 series, namely 16th Hall (Iron Coin of Fortitude, exchangeable for the non-set Shoulders) and Dark Delvings (Iron Coin of Knowledge, for the non-set Helm), each worth +10 radiance, or acquire either of the two tier 1 set armour items which drop from the Watcher (Helm or Shoulders, each worth +20 radiance). Note that with the exception of the Dar Narbugud bosses, Gurvand, final boss of the Dark Delvings, is reckoned to be the toughest fight in LOTRO to date.

One further short-cut is to complete the Filikul instance (Nornúan the Turtle) as often as possible, since he sometimes drops Platinum coins exchangeable for tier 1 armour pieces. Nornúan is something of a pushover, and can easily be downed by even a halfway competent PUG (pick-up group).

Finally, it must be emphasised that +50 radiance for the Watcher and +70 for Dar Narbugud are the minimum necessary to avoid cowering; you will still have dread, with the resultant reduction of morale and skills. The more radiance you have, the better; this includes the extra +10 you can buy with Destiny Points, which stacks with whatever you get from your armour.

A SCARE-DWARF IN THE NORTH DOWNS

2009-07-16T09:33:00.004+03:00

One of LOTRO's minor pleasures is the discovery of small designer touches scattered across the vast expanse of Middle-earth for the delectation of the relatively few players who stumble across them - visual Easter eggs, of no significance to the game, but an unexpected reward for the adventurous.

One such is this scare-dwarf, a scarecrow in the form of a elven archer, placed in such a way as to give a brief heart-attack to any Dourhand sneaking back into the ruins of Ost Galumar at dusk.

RADIANCE FROM THE 3-MAN INSTANCES

2009-07-10T09:28:00.004+03:00

Agreed, the 3-man instances in Book 8 are well-designed, fun and repeatable, as well as offering another path to achieving the +50 radiance necessary for squaring up to the Watcher or the +70 essential for the new 12-man raid in Dar Nargubud.

However, one thing puzzles me: these instances drop Elf-stones exchangeable for three tier 1.5 purple armour items with +15 radiance each, a +5 radiance increase on equivalent items from the earlier set. So far, so good; acquire all three and you have a total of +45 radiance. Problem is... radiance rounds downwards, not up, so that +5 is essentially wasted, and +45 in practice becomes +40. In which case, it doesn't take long to work out that it's a waste of effort acquiring all three items, and that if you're only going for two, the ones to choose are the leggings and gloves (at a cost of 4 stones each), rather than the chest-piece (at a cost of 7 stones).

In practice, this means that the best way to exploit the 3-man instances as far as building up your radiance is concerned is to replace the original leggings and gloves (+10 rad each) with the new ones (+15 rad each), giving you an overall increase of +10, and leave it at that. Which makes me wonder whether the developers got their sums wrong in the first place. Why go to all the trouble of creating a three-part tier 1.5 set of radiance armour when only two thirds of it will ever be useful? Indeed, why bother rounding radiance up (or down) at all in the first place? Mysteries, mysteries...

BOOK 8: FIRST FEEDBACK POSITIVE!

2009-07-05T13:45:00.007+03:00

Well, after a week of exploring Book 8, I think I can safely say that Turbine have done well by us. I have completed two 3-man and one 6-man instances, and am very happy to report that they are interesting, well-designed and fun. They include a welcome puzzle element, but it's not exorbitant, and is unlikely to baffle the average party for very long. Combat is challenging but not ridiculously difficult, and the specific tactics required to take down the bosses can be worked out after two or three attempts at most. Above all, they can be completed successfully by pretty much any mix of classes; the basic formula remains tank/healer/DPS, but any number of changes can be rung on it, and I don't think any class is likely to be left out in the cold for long.

From the point of view of loot, these three instances (Mirror Halls of Lumul-Nar, Water Wheel and Halls of Crafting) drop Glistening Elf-stones which can be exchanged for the three new tier 1.5 radiance armour pieces (respectively, gloves, leggings and jacket with +15 radiance). You need four stones for the gloves and leggings and seven for the jacket, but the good news is that all participants in these instances get one stone each, every time the final boss is defeated. I haven't yet had a chance to try the new 12-man multi-raid sequence which drops the Greater Elf-stones exchangeable for the tier 2 (+20) radiance armour, but on the strength of what I've seen so far, I'm confident it will be a good one.

Unfortunately there are no new regions to explore (other than the instance dungeons), but then you can't have everything, or at least not all at once. A nice little extra is the fact that several items now stack up to 100 per slot, including crafting materials and potions, thus freeing up quite a few slots in packs and vaults. There are also lots of new decorative trophies to collect; now all we need is for housing to get some care and attention, so that we can actually display them...

All things considered, congratulations are in order.

SLOW BOAT TO CHINA

2009-06-30T15:13:00.005+03:00

There's another two hours or so to go before Book 8 comes available in Europe, and probably between thirty minutes and two hours of downloading the patch after that... If, in less than a week, Turbine and Codemasters have managed to catch all the horrific bugs which were reported after Book 8 launched in the States, they deserve congratulations.

So before we launch into the eagerly-awaited "Scourge of Khazad-dum", this seems like a good moment to take pause briefly and take stock. LOTRO, it seems is on its way to China... According to a timely post on MMeOw, "Turbine has apparently teamed up with CDC Games to release the title in China... CDC Games will be the MMORPG’s exclusive distributor in the country. As you might expect, both parties are excited about this: CDC has 13 million active users for the games it currently handles and expects LotRO to get a piece of that". A new client base of thirteen million customers, or even a small fraction thereof, isn't to be sneezed at by any means.

There has been much grumbling in the ranks of late, and the forums are full of people swearing blind that LOTRO is on the skids, that the player base is crumbling and that at this rate we'll be lucky to see Rohan, never mind Moria. The fact is that that none of us, myself of course included, have the figures to back up our views of how LOTRO is doing from a commercial point of view - so everything you read is merely opinion, sometimes reasonably well informed but mostly based on little more than the writer's prejudices or desires. For what it's worth, I don't go along with the prophets of doom, and I certainly don't think LOTRO is in any serious danger of folding. Granted, there have been several bad design decisions since the launch of Moria - I've highlighted several of them in these pages - as well as a certain amount of bad luck, but none of them are terminal. There are many reasons for optimism. First of all, the unique Middle-earth environment, no matter how much it may have been knocked about in the process of transformation; secondly, the much larger than usual mature audience, many of whom are happy just enjoying the scenery; thirdly, the fact that two good years into the project, neither Turbine nor CM have found it necessary to merge any servers. And finally, of course, there are those millions of Chinese players just a boat journey away...

ANOTHER GOLD SELLER SCAM

2009-06-23T15:14:00.005+03:00

The following announcement appeared two days ago on the US LOTRO forums:

ALERT: Notification of Suspicious Activity

We have been made aware of suspicious account requests via in game email and other means. These emails are very convincing and link to a site that has cloned the appearance of the lotro.com website. All players should be aware that this is not a valid site and is in no way associated with Turbine.

Example email:
“Becasuse you suspected of lllegal trade for gold, system will freeze your ID after one hour.If you have any questions, please login (URL) to make a complaint .We will be processing as soon as possible.Thank you for your understanding!”

We are currently investigating reports and will take appropriate actions.

European players will remember that a similar kind of attack was directed against Codemasters account holders last March. In both cases, however, the extreme illiteracy of the email texts should have made it pretty obvious that it was a scam, and a poor one at that. Presumably the next step would be for the scammers to ask anybody so foolish as to respond for account details, after which their player characters would be stripped of anything worth re-selling on the illegal gold market. People still willing to deal with gold sellers because doing so is supposedly a "victimless crime" must now realise that they may very likely be profiting from a fellow-player's misfortune.

"SPAM IS MY MIDDLE NAME"

2009-06-19T21:44:00.000+03:00

A frequently heard grumble, particularly from players on RP servers, concerns misuse of the player-moderated chat channel Global Looking for Fellowship (GLFF), with "player-moderated", in this case, being a euphemism for "unmoderated". GLFF, on those servers which have implemented it, is supposed to be for people looking for fellowships across all regions of Middle-earth. Being a channel most players keep permanently open, unless they are actually on a quest or raid, in practice it tends to be used for lots of other purposes, including idle chit-chat - irritating, if you are only keeping half an eye on GLFF in the hope of finally catching mention of that quest you've been trying to complete for the last two weeks.

However, what really gets some people wound up is the hijacking of the channel by LOTRO's equivalent of drunken louts, who use it to exchange incomprehensible badinage at tedious length; judging by the palpable snigger which accompanies many of these exchanges, the perpetrators are mostly 12-year old male refugees from WoW. Inevitably, increasingly annoyed requests for said louts to take themselves off to another channel and desist from clogging up GLFF are met by even more frenzied spamming.

I guess that's why the Lords of Creation (a.k.a. LOTRO devs) gave us ignore lists, though they might usefully have increased their maximum capacity. The following brief excerpt from a Chat Log which I saved a couple of months ago and just recently rediscovered gives a pretty good idea of what comes through an average evening. Names have not been changed to protect the guilty.

### Chat Log: General 04/25 08:30 PM ###

[GLOBALlff] Runarfin: 'rofl'
[GLOBALlff] Malethor: 'whats consonants preciouse?!:o whats consonants?:o'
[GLOBALlff] Arandarion: 'well, just don't react when someone starts to spam, or it becomes a massive spam in here :o'
[GLOBALlff] Runarfin: 'con-so-nants!'
[GLOBALlff] Erlo: 'Etten raid up.'
[GLOBALlff] Runarfin: 'b-b-boil em mash-em stick em in a stew'
[GLOBALlff] Thrawneekaran: 'watcher raid looking for burg now, any good out there?'
[GLOBALlff] Malethor: 'xDD'
[GLOBALlff] Erlo: 'God can people stop random spam. I do spam abit but this is just pure silly.'
[GLOBALlff] Candytuft: 'I'm excellent, but unavailable :-p'
[GLOBALlff] Dworim: 'ahahaha Runarfin'
[GLOBALlff] Glewdron: 'we always try to repel em but they always return in greater numbers -.-'
[GLOBALlff] Runarfin: 'spam is my middle name'
[GLOBALlff] Mpty: 'So I see.'
[GLOBALlff] Glewdron: '(speaking about spam)..'
[GLOBALlff] Runarfin: 'you just split my first name'
[GLOBALlff] Mpty: 'Whats the fun of spam if noone listens.'

BE VERY AFRAID - OR AT LEAST, A LITTLE UNEASY...

2009-06-13T13:06:00.005+03:00

We have a new splash screen, according to which Book 8: Scourge of Khazad-dum is nearly upon us - and very good news that is, too. But I am made more than a little uneasy by this chap, who figures mightily in the splash screen and, is, presumably, the Scourge personified. Now, I definitely don't want to sound negative before Book 8, upon which so much rests, is actually released; also, I remember an old Hawaian (I think) proverb which says, roughly, that if you're rude about your own coconut tree, it will drop coconuts on your head.

But - and I don't know how to put this diplomatically - dear old Scourge does not look very... Tolkienesque. Particularly not the blue neon highlights, of course, but also the fact that I'm prepared to eat my boots if he doesn't turn out to be half the size of a mallorn tree. Now as I've remarked before, I'm not a lore fanatic. LOTRO's designers have come up with a number of monsters perhaps undreamed of by Tolkien which are nevertheless perfectly convincing in terms of the mythos, or which at least fit in more-or-less comfortably; Gaunt Men, Morroval, Rogmul, Doom-singers are all both imaginative and appropriate.

The rot set in with Mines of Moria (where have I heard that comment before?), and specifically with the dreadful Foundations of Stone, whose shameless steals from "Alien" are not only contemptibly lazy, but also wildly out of place in Middle-earth. I sincerely hope that Book 8 isn't going to continue that trend, but Scourge here looks as though he belongs firmly in World of Warcraft. There's nothing wrong with WoW, in it's own place, but (and we really have to be firm, here), LOTRO is not WoW, and the last thing it needs is WoW's cartooney design. I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it.

Fingers crossed.

OK, WHO STOLE THE TURTLE'S HEAD?

2009-06-08T12:02:00.005+03:00

Quest trophies - the decorative items which drop when a particularly tough boss has been killed - are, quite rightly, Bind on Acquire (BoA) - they are meant to be proof of prowess or cunning, and shouldn't be available on demand to anybody with money or generous friends. The same applies, perhaps with rather less urgency, to decorative items only available to those who have achieved high rank with various factions.

There is, however, one very common occasion when this strict BoA rule needs be relaxed or modified. Many trophies end up gracing Kinship Houses, either because they are considered honours pertaining to the entire fellowship or raid responsible for the kill, or else because individual members choose to donate them. The problem is that because they remain bound to their original acquirer, they cannot be moved by anybody else; if anyone but the owner tries to do so, the only option given is "Return to owner", which means they immediately end up in the owner's escrow account. If the owner in question then fails to retrieve them in time, they are gone forever. Note also that there is no indication of just who the owner is, so there's no possibility of contacting them and having them move the item.

All of which means that making changes to a trophy-heavy Kinship House is virtually impossible, even for the leader. What's more, trophies and other BoA items will vanish in the wake of a departing member, even if he or she had no such intention. The obvious answer is to allow for decorative items of all kinds, including trophies, to be BoA with the sole exception of transfer to a Kinship, perhaps into a Kin Treasure Vault accessible only to the leader and nominated members by means of a new permission. Items taken out the vault and in the temporary posession of a player would immediately become BoA again unless placed in a Kinship House decorative slot. In other words: trophies would be transferable from the original owner to the Kinship, after which they could only be used in Kinship House decorative slots.

LEGENDARY ITEMS LATEST

2009-06-04T10:12:00.005+03:00

In the course of the 3 June developer chat, developers were by and large as wary as ever of making definite statements. However, sorting through the whole transcript, I found that a number of answers addressed the vexed question of Legendary Items, a frequent source of complaints and grumbles. Pulling these together, it seems as though we can expect some positive developments in the near future.

Perhaps most importantly, the devs acknowledged that there are indeed problems with the LI system as it stands today: “Are there any plans for redesigning the Legendary Item system? Completely redesigning it, no. It took a lot of work to get the various systems in place to create the LI system. However, we’re definitely monitoring the complaints and seeing where we fell short with our goals. So in that regard, we’re going to be making some solid changes. The details haven’t been completely solidified yet, but our main goal is to make it feel less grindy, to better maintain the feeling of advancement and progression”.

Other specific promises include a method of resetting the legacy points on a maxed out Legendary Item, to come “very soon”, and the ability to exchange legacies on LIs; the latter is probably more of a mid-term project, since they apparently haven’t decided exactly how to implement it.

On the question of crafted Legendaries, the response was “We definitely want to bring crafters into the LI system more than we have… this is a very large complaint we’ve heard and we fully intend to remedy it” - but no details were provided.

Finally, a crucial detail concerning the upcoming 12-man instance in Book 8 was dropped: “Some very special mobs (please see certain mobs in Dar Narbagud) are completely immune to Common damage”. This is very far from a minor point; if we are to come up against monsters immune to common damage, the implication is that either special weapons or else special titles for weapons will have to be acquired before these mobs can be attempted. So will this in practice turn out to be a weapons equivalent to the radiance armour – i.e., the instance will prove to be impossible without specific items? It certainly sounds like it…

The complete transcript can be consulted on Kill Ten Rats.

TALK TO THE COMMUNITY TEAM

2009-06-03T16:22:00.004+03:00

I suspect that not many players are aware of the fact that the Codemasters forum recently started running a section in which players are invited to respond to questions about the game and its design. Since these questions are usually quite specific, and presumably correspond to things the designers actually want to know more about, I would hazard a guess that somebody actually reads and takes note of the responses posted here - which is not necessarily the case with unsolicited suggestions and complaints.

The questions seem to change every couple of weeks or so; this is the current set:
Question 1: A friend who does not play MMOs asks you why you play them. What 3 reasons would you give them?
Question 2: Currently a hot topic among forum posters is play styles, so how would you describe your play style? Casual, Hardcore, or something in between?
Question 3: You're given the opportunity to pitch one new feature to the dev team. Go! (please be brief).

As you can see, some are probably of greater interest to players than others. Among the more relevant questions from recent weeks I would include "If you could change 3 things about LOTRO's User Interface, what would they be?" and "What three(3) features would you add to the Kinship system?".

In any case, if you have constructive views about the future design of LOTRO (as opposed to merely strongly-held views), it's worth your while contributing to this little feature.

TURTLES, BEARS & COOKIE-CUTTER RAIDS

2009-05-31T13:43:00.008+03:00

Responding to my earlier post about Nornúan, the great turtle of the Waterworks, "Anonymous" commented that his kinship had worked out a tactic which involved using a Lore-master's bear to tank the turtle: "A burg can provoke the turtle so it doesn't switch targets so no one gets an acid dot. The healer just keeps the bear up. Dead simple." I was intrigued enough to suggest the tactic to my own kin a couple of days later, only to discover to my astonishment that it was regarded as an exploit. Though I have not been able to find anything to that effect on the official English Codemasters forums, a kinsman tracked down and translated a Danish language post in which the tactic was condemned in no uncertain terms by a GM:

[18:22] +Forgildan: Hello Traxie, I am Game Master Forgildan. You have exploited the turtle raid. Therefore you will now receive a warning. Please do not exploit again in the future.
[18:22] +Forgildan: Next time we catch you doing this, a 7 day suspension will be the outcome.
[18:25] +Forgildan: I just checked your forums. It seems that this announcement has not yet been made on the english forums. As this is the case, I will drop the official warnings, so your accounts have not been marked as exploiters
[18:26] +Forgildan: But please do not attempt bear-tanking again. If we catch you again, they will be marked as such.

So there you have it: bear-tanking is an exploit. My first reaction was to be seriously annoyed; how could bear-tanking possibly be considered an exploit, other than because it happened to run contrary to the way the designers thought this battle should be fought? Coming on top of the forthcoming nerf of the Burglar's Enrage trick, the implication is that there can only be one way to complete an instance, graven in stone as Holy Writ - anything else is heresy. For me, and for many other players, the whole point of a difficult instance is that can be fun to work out different ways of completing it, some sneakier than others. A designer policy of turning all LOTRO instances into cookie-cutter exercises does not bode well.

In fact, it turns out that there is a reason of sorts for the pet-tanking ban, which is that in the Nornúan fight, a pet does not trigger the "snapping" attack and hence does not get landed with the acid DOT (damage over time) debuff. Using this tactic, Nornúan was actually duoed by a LM and Minstrel on the Snowborn server earlier this month (the debate on the link goes far beyond this issue, by the way). So on balance, I think one has to accept that bear-tanking the Turtle does rather make a mockery of the whole concept of raiding. At the same time, it would be nice if these things could be tidied up prior to general release.

TURTLE TROUBLE

2009-05-26T16:07:00.005+03:00

Nornúan lives in Filikul, a rather damp and plashy chamber of the great tower of Gabil-Munz, at the centre of Moria's Waterworks. He probably doesn't mind, though, as he's a giant Snapping Turtle - a chelonian not to be trifled with lightly, since he has 688,000 morale and a habit of shedding poisonous spines in all directions when he gets upset, which is often. The spines cause stacking acid damage over time (Gushing Wound) which is incurable by any potion, salve or spell.

Filikul is LOTRO's latest 12-man raid, and a very odd one it is too. Reaching Nornúan involves a swim/trek across the Waterworks and a two-minute walk down an undefended passageway - and there you are. No adds, no minor bosses, just a quick, very brutal fight; if you don't get him down in under ten minutes, the stackable DoT will wipe the party out. Now, to my mind, the first oddity about Filikul is that it feels astonishingly arbitrary. There's effectively no plot lead-in, other than a casual mention of a missing dwarf. So why, you would be justified in asking, should I go out of my way to beard a horrible great turtle in his sanctuary, where he's been living perfectly happily and not really bothering anybody?

The answer, I guess, is loot. Nornúan is supposed to drop one guaranteed First-age weapon, plus another Second-age item and an Iron Coin (good for normal radiant armour) as well some minor stuff (I say supposed, because last time my kinship took him down, there wasn't a sniff of a First-age item). Trouble is, when it does deign to drop, the First-age item is either a Warden Spear (something like 50% of the time), or else a Captain or Guardian spear; there have been reports of Hunter and Champion spears, but they are pretty rare. So if you don't belong to the spear-carrying classes, tough luck...

I haven't been overly bothered by this, as I tend to see Filikul as the designers' response to complaints that the Vile Maw instance is way too hard, particularly the post-Book 7 Watcher II: "OK, here's an easier one, no radiant armour needed (although it does help), you can have some low-cost First-age legendaries - but you probably won't like them...". Fair enough, in an weird sort of way, but there's more. It now appears that come Book 8, the developers propose to make Nornúan immune to the Burglar trick "Enrage", which causes the affected mob to attack at random - the method adopted by most raids to deal with the turtle's stacking debuffs, which would otherwise build up mostly on the tank. Note that this is not an exploit (a cheat, in other words, exploiting a design error), but the rational use of a game skill to defeat a boss attack. This decision has caused a lot of comment, most of it negative. Again, I can't say I'm too upset; it's not as though this was an astonishingly long and complex raid, and that a strategy carefully developed over weeks of trial and error had suddenly been rendered useless.

However, it is very poor design. If the developers really didn't want players to use Enrage, they should have seen it coming and done something about it beforehand. In the final analysis, Filikul looks and feels like a rather slapdash, not very well considered quick fix. On the European forums, Sanxo put the matter accurately if a little harshly: "The devs are fighting a losing battle against the law of unintended consequences, but rather than let the dust settle and think for second, they create a ragged patchwork of fixes held together with ill-considered nerfs". Ouch.

SOME NEW LOTRO BLOGS

2009-05-22T19:49:00.003+03:00

By and large, the average LOTRO player is rather older than players of most other online games. Does that make him or her more sensible, more mature and less likely to act like a completely selfish prat? With the exception of the thirty-odd people on my ignore list (you know who you are), this is to a certain extent true. Interestingly, it also means that an increasing number of players are electing to put pen to paper (update: fingers to keyboard) and writing about their experience of the game. It is therefore a great pleasure to welcome Epic Book to our little clan of LOTRO bloggers. Authored by Raegn, a gamer of some eleven-plus years experience, it includes some long, thoughtful but never dull posts on all aspects of the game, and comes highly recommended.

I also want to take this opportunity of bringing to your attention The Road Goes Ever On, an unusual and visually brilliant blog which is slowly and patiently illustrating each chapter of the original Lord of the Rings books with scenes from LOTRO, the game. The images are astonishingly vivid, but they have also made me realise how well and faithfully the game designers and artists have brought Tolkien's narrative to life. To give just a tiny example, which most of us may never have noticed (I certainly didn't): Tolkien writes that after waking up in the house of Tom Bombadil, Frodo peered out the east-facing window of their room and found himself looking upon a kitchen-garden, but "his view was screened by a tall line of beans on poles". Well, the beans and the bean-poles are right there where they should be, and we get a picture to prove it. Magic...

THORILDIN'S HAT COLLECTION

2009-05-13T12:40:00.004+03:00

Thorildin is a dwarf from Finland with a warped sense of humour and, clearly, far too much time on his hands. He has invested some of that time in assembling the biggest hat and helmet collection ever seen on LOTRO, and has very kindly placed it online for the delectation of the fashionable and/or desperate adventurer. The headgear shown above is only a small sampling of the collection, which currently numbers 45 different items and is no doubt growing apace.

After browsing through the set, you will probably be left in no doubt exactly why most players opt to not display their hat or helmet in public. On the other hand, you may be inspired to go shopping and vie for the best-dressed adventurer title, though in all honesty, its opposite is more likely to come your way...

THE SCHOLARSHIP OF GAMING

2009-05-12T12:31:00.007+03:00

As regular readers of some of the excellent blogs you can access via LOTRO Combo Blog already know, responses to online gaming are not restricted to inarticulate WoW-speak exclamations. However, beyond those of us who, like myself, enjoy analysing and discussing a favourite game, there are a few people who have engaged with gaming at a level of what can only be called genuine scholarship. And I'm not refering here to those who consider gaming exclusively from the point of view of another discipline such as psychology, sociology or economics, but to those approaching games and gaming as a viable field of study in themselves.

In this context, readers should consider taking a look at Nick Yee's The Daedalus Project, a fascinating site packed with extensive research material, essays and insights about MMORPGs. There is unfortunately nothing directly relating to LOTRO, and the site went into hibernation a couple of months ago, but a huge wealth of original material is nevertheless available online; see, for example, the exhaustive MMORPG Lexicon. This material, essentially a labour of love, is available freely and free of charge; as Yee notes, "Currently, the research presented here is not part of any commercial venture, nor am I receiving funding for this research from any commercial source. This research is being carried out as an extension of my personal and academic interests. I am motivated by the ease with which I can survey and analyze data in a fascinating area that has a paucity of empirical data".

LOTRO is not, however, without its own scholars. The indefatigable Alash, a European gamer based in Denmark, continues to post a stream of informative articles and research results on the Codemasters site, the latest of which is an extremely interesting survey of European server activity and demography. The data was gathered by Alash on Monday 11th of May from 11:58-12:45 GMT +1, using the search function in the in-game Social Panel: "At the time of testing, about 4,638 players were online in Europe, 51% coming from German speaking servers (2381), 39% coming from English speaking servers (1810), and 10% coming from French speaking servers (449). Even though only 36% of the servers are German, they make out more than half of the European player base, and are by a large margin the most spoken language on Codemasters' servers. The roleplaying servers make out 28% of the total player base".

Alash has produced a large number of articles, some of them - like his exhaustive study of weapon speed - essential reading for serious gamers. Alash's Article Compilation has been stickied by Codemasters.

THE STATE OF THINGS

2009-05-10T10:42:00.011+03:00

Once again, LOTRO seems to be at a crossroads. Over the last month, the game forums have hosted some long, heated and often quite profound debates about the current state of the game and where it's headed. Looking across a broad range of these debates, both in Europe and in the States, one thing is clear: a large percentage of current players, perhaps more than half, are currently unhappy with how things have been going since the introduction of Mines of Moria. There are many reasons for this malaise, some of which I touched upon in an earlier post, "The Mines of Moria considered as a Chinese Banquet", but it can essentially be summed up as a gradual but definite swerve in the game philosophy from collaborative adventuring to a more solo (some would say selfish) approach. The signs are clear: far more solo content, no multi-boss raid requiring careful study and practice by a dedicated group of players, epic quests which can be completed almost without any outside assistance. So are the results: by all accounts, more selfish player behaviour, fragmenting kinships and players switching off for longer and longer periods.

Those unhappy with this state of things are, virtually by definition, the hard-core players, often referred to as end-content players; of course, there are also many players who prefer solo play, and who are not in the least unhappy. The point is that Shadows of Angmar by and large succeeded in satisfying both groups, by providing alternative routes to success; sure, you needed to join a group of pretty hard-core players to get a complete Rift armour set, but the best crafted armour was almost as good (and anyway, unless you were going up against Thaurlach or Thorog, you didn't need the Rift set). You could also work at PvP, if that was your preference, and assemble an Ettenmours armour set. SoA offered lots of alternatives at different levels. MoM doesn't; it's much more linear and inflexible.

It's been said the current design mindset is aimed at potential Asian customers; I can't speak to that, never having played an Asian online game. But I don't really buy the theory, since it makes no commercial sense to try and expand your client base by pissing off your current customers. And while nobody can accurately gauge just what percentage of the current client base is made up of hard-core or end-game players (they are, indeed, more vocal, so forum activity is not an accurate measure), it would be a commercially dire mistake to write them off - one which I sincerely hope Turbine won't be tempted to make.

What is absolutely clear by now is the immense importance attached to the forthcoming Book 8, and particularly to the inclusion or otherwise of another Rift-type multi-boss raid. Here is a quick sampling of recent comments from the European forums:

"I wonder if turbine know how important the book 8 update will be to them. For a lot of people it seems this will make or break lotro for them." "The new raid will be in Book 8. Another delay would be the last straw for many, they just have to." "If the multi-boss raid is not out soon - they will prob kill the game off... All the bigger kinships on Laurelin are fed up with the watcher, and the turtle seems way too easy and pointless. We all miss the days with the Rift and Helegrod - all night raiding with plenty of loot and happy players."

None of these comments, and dozens of others like them, can be written off as knee-jerk whines; these are players who love the game, want to stay with it and wish it well. What's more, I think they are right: what LOTRO needs, as soon as possible, is a new Rift. Give this group of players another Rift-type raid, and they will forgive almost anything; hell, they'll probably be too busy to notice anything else between now and Christmas. Disappointing them, however, would not be a good move...

IF YOU GO INTO THE WOODS TODAY...

2009-05-03T15:11:00.003+03:00

Should you fancy a swim across the River Anduin and a stroll through the sinister woods of Gelirdor, on the east bank, you would be well advised to think again... The banks of the river are patrolled by ugly great Mirk-eaves Felarrows - l.65 orc archers with 41,580 morale who are decidedly not well disposed towards unheralded visitors, be they hobbit, dwarf, elf or human. I shall be curious to see how the developers handle our eventual landing in Gelirdor, since at the moment the Felarrows don't mess about, but simply one-shot anybody who comes within range. Oh, and sneaking won't do a bit of good, either. Guess we'll just have to wait and see...

ACCESS FORBIDDEN

2009-05-03T09:30:00.013+03:00

By the great wheel in the north-east corner of the Waterworks, just off the passage running northwards from the Rotting Cellar to the Deep-way, a bridge leads to a great building with a colonnaded portico. In the centre of the portico is a massive door; unlike the doors in the Rotting Cellar, this one appears "usable", suggesting that it can be opened to gain access to the building!

Alas, clicking on it, even if you are at the maximum level of 60, produces the message "Your level is too low". Now this is intriguing. Other locations or sites may at times be placed in the game with a view to activation at some point in the future, but they do not normally respond in any way at all - certainly not by appearing usable at the present time. So we may assume that this location is due to be activated in the near future; probably as part of the "back to Moria" quest thread which is supposed to be part of the forthcoming Mirkwood expansion.

However, I will pass on, will all due reservations, the following entirely unsubstantiated rumour. A kinsman who happened recently to ask a GM when this door would become accessible claims to have received the answer "At level 80". If true, this is truly astonishing. We have all been assuming that the level cap would be raised to 70 with the release of the third volume, presumably entitled Riders of Rohan, towards the end of 2009. Finding that level 80 has suddenly appeared on the event horizon is, to put it mildly, disconcerting.

AN ANGMARIM IDYLL

2009-05-01T10:59:00.003+03:00

Rarely Seen Sights, 3: An Angmarim Idyll

This charming rural scene of Angmarim soldiers fishing from the end of a dock in Bail Catharnakh proves that it's not all work and no play for Angmar's loyal troops. Enjoying a spell of rest & recuperation, these loyal warriors of the Witch King take a well-earned break from murdering, torturing and slaughter by dropping a line into the err... turgid green waters of Himbar.

[Issued by the Angmarim Army Recruitment Board, a public interest body]

THE RAIDS IN LOTRO

2009-04-28T10:19:00.010+03:00

Though raids do not play as massive a role in LOTRO as they do in some other online games, they are nevertheless very much the core element of most players' gaming experience; two years on, it seems a good idea to take a look at how LOTRO's raids have stacked up. First of all, what exactly is the definition of a raid? A raid is an example of an instance - namely, a copy of a building, a dungeon, or other location activated by passing through a portal, which allows an individual or group to take part in a private adventure, segregated from the main game and undisturbed by other players. A combat-based instance designed to be experienced by between one and four fellowships is called a raid.

So far, and ignoring the PvP raids in the Ettenmoors, LOTRO has included five proper raids; a sixth, Filikul, was to have been packaged with Vol.II/Book 7 but proved buggy when released in the States. The first to be released, Helegrod in the Misty Mountains, was a 24-man raid (four full fellowships). A vast, sprawling affair, it included nine bosses culminating in the undead dragon Thorog. Players could choose in what order to attempt some of the encounters, and even experienced groups needed at least two evenings to complete the raid. While the raid was visually impressive and offered a good variety of combat experience, it was never as popular as it deserved because of the extreme difficulty of getting together as many as 24 determined players. It also suffered from an odd system of rewards, including titles for defeating bosses which were effectively limited to just one of the 24 participants, and above all armour set drops which were class-specific; this made it virtually impossible for anybody to put together a full set of Helegrod armour, which until the advent of MoM was probably the game's second best after the Rift set.

The other two 24-man raids to date have been Bogbereth and Ferndur, both in Angmar. The first is a quick and easy single-boss attack on the spider queen of Torech-i-Bogbereth, near Garth Fornir. With unimpressive rewards, this raid ended up being farmed for its decorative trophy by 12 or fewer experienced players. The second targets Ferndúr the Virulent, Master of Imlad Balchorth, and is a fair bit harder, but it too could be completed with 12 players; again, it offers no particular rewards beyond a trophy, and it seems likely that many players have never tried it. There have been no more 24-man raids since these two, nor does it seem likely that there will be.

The Rift of Nûrz Ghâshu, the most extensive and, as many believe, the best-designed raid to date, came in with Volume I/Book 11 at the end of 2007. A 12-man raid, it included eight separate bosses leading up to Thaurlach the Balrog. Killing Thaurlach was a long and complex operation for most kinships, with a steep learning curve, but it was a fascinating experience and the rewards, the best set of armour and the best weapons in Volume I, were well worth the effort. Even more than was the case in Helegrod, teams had to learn the different tactics necessary for each boss and the usually very specific actions required, and raid leaders found themselves stretched to the maximum keeping all the balls in the air. One of the great virtues of the Rift was that it managed to balance the different classes, all of whom were needed at different times. It also kept many players happily busy for at least six months, if not more.

The fifth official raid is the 12-man Vile Maw in Moria, which it's probably fair to say is the least-loved and most badly designed to date. Many players have hated the grind of assembling the six-piece set of Radiant armour without which the raid cannot be attempted, the location is minimal and unimpressive (a single room full of water), the fight with the Watcher seems, once you work out the tactics, rather tedious and mechanical, and it can only be completed once a week. Finally, compared to the splendid Thaurlach, the Watcher seems cartooney and lumpish. Not, on balance, a success. Also located in the Waterworks of Moria is the new Filikul raid, which involves killing the turtle Nornúan. Since it's not yet accessible in Europe, I can't comment on it, but - a turtle?

Though it is not officially considered a raid, I would certainly include among them Barad Gularan, a combat instance fully as complex and demanding as any raid. Six bosses must be killed, of whom the last, Udúnion the Rogmul, offers what I believe to be one of the hardest fights in the game, largely because of the split-second coordination called for. Finally, the Delvings of Fror in the Ettenmoors are home to one of the nastiest and probably least visited bosses in the whole game, Gaergoth the Unbound. Gaergoth is another Rogmul, only this one is at l.63 and has over 500,000 morale points; considering that he drops nothing better than four Luminous Stones (though this may have changed recently), it's hardly surprising he's not the most popular holiday destination in the game...

TO GOAT OR NOT TO GOAT...

2009-04-24T17:12:00.007+03:00

In the depths of Moria, the mount of choice is the goat - indeed, it is the only mount available. An extensive and reasonably well-placed network of goat stables allows normal and even (after you achieve a high enough status) some rapid goat travel to most of the points of interest in the mines. However, players can also acquire their very own goat from the Iron Garrison Miners: a rather slow Tame Redhorn Goat costs 1g, 255s and requires Friend standing, but if you've achieved Kindred standing and have a spare 6g, 24s, you can acquire the faster Nimble Redhorn Goat. Actually, this is pretty much the only reason for striving to reach Kindred with the Miners.

Even by current inflationary standards, 6g is nothing to be sneezed at for the average player. Is it worth the effort and expense? Well, it's an oddly attractive beast, has a cute miner's lantern swinging from the back of the saddle, and, unlike its goat express cousins, it doesn't suddenly spin round and round whenever it gets confused about routing... but to be honest, you won't be using it very much. The problem is that it is extremely vulnerable to attack, and can be brought down by about three hits, or even a dirty look and a spit. Which is about all the standard LOTRO horse or pony can take, too, except for the fact that out on the surface, if you stick to the roads you will usually get home safely. In Moria, however, the passages are inevitably narrow, there are endless choke points and little or no room for evasive manoeuvres and, above all, the mines are positively crawling with orcs and other nasties. As a result, you will rarely stay in the saddle for more than a few minutes or even seconds, with the added bonus that when you do come off, you are welcomed by all the mobs you've pulled along the way.

There are of course a few routes in Moria which are pretty much free of lurking enemies: the Wide Halls and Broad Way in Zelem-melek, and the long winding passage from the Great Delving to the 21st Hall, for three. On balance, however, the Moria goat remains a luxury for the rich or the obsessive completist; for everyone else, swift travel and the goat express service are definitely the better bet.

COMING SOON: THE NECROMANCER'S FORTRESS?

2009-04-12T10:44:00.008+03:00

After Lothlórien, what? There has been much conjecture and scratching of heads over this one, and Lotro Follower, for one, has posted a longish entry discussing possible destinations; he finally, if speculatively, comes down in favour of a journey south along the river Anduin, following in the tracks on the Fellowship.

I have to say I disagree, because the conclusion of Book 7 seems to me quite unambiguous: our next mission will be to enter Mirkwood, rescue the captive dwarves from the fortress of Dol Guldur, and destroy that standing threat to the safety of Lothlórien. At the conclusion of Chapter 9, Celeborn himself announces that "... its power is growing. We cannot wait for the force of Dol Guldur to come forth in strength". And Haldir, before he hands over the reward for completing Book 7, warns the player in the starkest possible terms: "The winds of change are blowing, and I fear they carry with them the onset of war. Lothlórien cannot remain isolated and in safety forever. Lord Celeborn's gaze must turn toward Mirkwood and the great shadow that lies over Dol Guldur. When the time comes to cross the river and fight, as it seems we must, I will call for you". Could anything be clearer? I would hazard a guess that Haldir's promise will be fulfilled no later than Book 8, since there is not all that much left to do in Lorien itself.

Dol Guldur ("The Hill of Sorcery" in Sindarin) was Sauron's first stronghold in Middle-earth, and remains a place of great evil. Here it was that King Thráin II, who bore the last of the seven Dwarven rings of power, was captured: "Only long after was it learned that Thráin had been taken alive and brought to the pits of Dol Guldur. There he was tormented and the Ring taken from him, and there at last he died." (The Return of the King, Appendix A).

This all sounds fascinating enough, but study of the lore suggests the exciting possibility that in Dol Guldur, players will find themselves coming up against one or more Nazgûl, presumably by now at the height of their power. According to Appendix B of The Return of the King, amongst other ominous events which took place in the year 2951, "Sauron [sent] three of the Nazgûl to reoccupy Dol Guldur". Now, I have felt all along that the Nazgûl defeated in the treasury of Helegrod (SoA/B5/C8, "Fire and Ice") was a bit of a pussycat, and that the developers had missed an opportunity, throwing away one of the most powerful enemies of the Free Peoples on a mere fellowship quest - whereas a Ringwraith is obviously destined to be the end boss of a major raid. It may be that that oversight is soon to be rectified...

For those who wish to learn more about its history and lore, an excellent article on Dol Guldur can be found in Wikipedia.

A DEARTH OF FIRST AGE LEGENDARIES?

2009-04-11T14:09:00.006+03:00

Just before Book 7 arrived, the forums were buzzing with rumours that the much sought-after First Age Legendaries would suddenly become relatively more common, what with drops from the new 12-man raid and from Lothlórien elven gift boxes as well as from the Watcher.

Well, in practice the opposite seems to have happened, at least on the European servers. How can one tell? Simply by the fact that for the last seven days, not a single First Age legendary has been on offer on the Laurelin Auction House - not even those relatively unpopular, or at least not much in demand, Runecaster and Warden items which had been most in evidence earlier.

This confirms the widely remarked fact that the (very expensive) gift boxes usually, if not nearly always, prove a disappointment. They do, however, sometimes come across; I recently witnessed the jubilant discovery of a l.60 Captain's greatsword by one lucky player. But a poor drop rate from the new gift boxes doesn't explain why fewer items overall should be turning up compared to pre-Book 7 days. The answer, I think, must lie in the fact that the Watcher raid has been modified and made considerably harder - the result being that Watcher (Mark II) kills are still extremely rare, resulting in few if any First Age legendaries from that source.

UNDER THE EAVES OF LOTHLORIEN

2009-04-06T12:03:00.007+03:00

What of Lothlórien? First of all, of course, it is visually stunning, above all the forest itself: impressively unlike anything we've seen so far, and, as it ought to be, ever so slightly spooky both by day and by night. The contrast with the gloom of Moria makes it that much more effective. I would also rate the epic storyline of Volume II, Book 7 very highly; it can easily be completed solo by anybody who has reached level 60, has a good, strong plot line and maintains its interest to the end (though I admit to finding the ultimate fate of the book's principal villain excessively tame, even rather wishy-washy).

On the other hand, I am disappointed by many of the quests which must be completed in order to gain favour with the Galadhrim, far too many of which are ridiculously trivial and even foolish. This is, I concede, a standing problem with all computer role-playing games, whether online or not, and one which becomes particularly acute in our case, where we are all playing notional second fiddle to the Fellowship: on the one hand the individual player is involved in events of epic scope and grandeur, but on the other, he or she must constantly be brought back down to earth lest he become too big for his boots (and for the lore).

Fair enough. One day Warlord of Angmar and Slayer of Thaurlach, the next begging Galadhrim guardians for the right to enter Lorien, or fending off Anduin lizards; that's the way an adventurer's life goes. But to be invited to go picking berries and mushrooms, or to be treated as a pack mule and instructed to carry supplies right, left and centre is really a bit much; where were you, buster, when we were killing Thorog in Helegrod? Such piffling quests do nothing to maintain suspension of disbelief, and are really a sign of laziness or lack of inspiration on the part of the developers. Obviously there will have to be grinding - but let it at least be inventive and preferably adventurous grinding, not this poor "kindly step out and get me a pint of milk, boy" household chore stuff.

BOOK 7 LATEST

2009-04-02T09:24:00.005+03:00

Well, despite the panic Stateside, it looks as though Europe will be getting Book 7 today after all. According to the Codemasters login page:
Leaves of Lórien Coming Thursday!

Don't forget that this maintenance day we will be patching the servers up to Book 7: Leaves of Lórien along with the additional Patch 1. Servers will go down at 08.00 and be back up at 14.00 hours, UK time (GMT+1).

And at 19.00 GMT+1, the news was:

Unfortunately at the moment we are experiencing a few technical difficulties with our content distribution provider which we use for high bandwidth delivery of new patches.
We are actively managing the situation by moving some patching onto additional datacentre patch servers to improve the situation, which might lead to some of you receiving 404 errors while connections are being moved.
If you are experiencing slow patching speeds then please try stopping and re-starting the launcher as this may move you onto an improved patch connection.
We are in contact with the content provider and hopefully normal service will be resumed before too long.
Thanking you for your understanding and we hope you are able to get patched up shortly.

BOOK 7 AND THE END OF EXPLOITS

2009-04-01T10:32:00.005+03:00

Volume II, Book 7 is due to hit Europe tomorrow, Thursday, just over two weeks after it was released in the States and a week after the first official release date. Not too bad, particularly if some of the more glaring bugs in the US release have been dealt with. I was particularly happy to see that the community's response to the probably inevitable delay has been much more muted and sensible than in the past - far less of that screaming, throwing the rattle out of the playpen, "want it now!" attitude we've seen in the past. Evidence of a more mature or of a wiser and more experienced audience? Either way, a relief.

Apart from the very welcome new content, Book 7 will hopefully also eliminate all those blatant exploits in the Moria instances which have been straining consciences and provoking arguments in PUGs for months. You know the ones I mean: the strange but indubitable fact that in many cases, if you stand in a doorway, you can hit a boss but he can't hit you. And yes, of course they are exploits, irrespective of the fact that they should have been (but weren't) fixed weeks ago. Principled players should (and mostly do) avoid making use of them, but the temptation is always there, particularly if you are called upon to repeat the 16th Hall instance for perhaps the thirtieth time, purely in order to complete somebody's radiant armour set. In some ways, this may well be the strongest argument against the the policy of requiring players to collect a specific set of armour before trying a particular raid (in this case, the Watcher): the fact that it became tedious enough to lead many players into the temptation of cutting corners. If all goes as planned, that temptation should soon be removed.

THE MISSING TROPHIES

2009-03-23T11:19:00.004+02:00

Few things are as frustrating as being told something is in the game when it isn't - particularly when those responsible refuse to clarify the situation by stating whether it has or hasn't been implemented. A classic case in point was the the Winter-tusk (mammoth) trophy which was supposed to drop from the time Forochel was opened up, but the drop was only implemented with Mines of Moria; the annoying thing here was the bland refusal of European GMs to state whether or not the damn thing existed.

For the last three months, many players have known of the existence of two new trophy (decorative) items which were added to the menu of the Bree taxidermist: a Whitehand shield supposedly dropped by the final boss in the School of Tham Mirdain, and an Uruk helmet (with stuffed Craban) supposedly dropped by the final Library boss (see details from the Lorebook, above). Unfortunately, nobody has ever seen these drop, and according to a depressing post from a Turbine developer on the US forums dated 13 February (!), "I'll look into this but I'm extremely dubious about them being (or getting) fixed for Book 7. I think this post is the first time we've heard of this bug. I'll bug it internally here and get the ball rolling." On the one hand, a shame it took them three months to notice, but on the other, kudos for actually responding to a valid complaint - something we on the European side almost never see...

As for the Egg of the Mistress, on the menu of the 21st Hall taxidermist but nowhere to be found as yet, the chances are this will drop from the new 12-man raid in Book 7.

MODERATED COMMENTS

2009-03-20T09:22:00.003+02:00

I apologise to readers for changing settings so that all comments now have to be moderated. This is because some creep has been abusing the system by systematically posting commercial spam. It's obviously done by a person, since they are able to bypass the word verification... We will return to normal as soon as possible; in the meantime, please bear with me; your comments will usually be released within a few hours at most.

A SINISTER FETISH

2009-03-19T10:10:00.003+02:00

Of course, there's no accounting for orcish tastes, and they no doubt have a great variety of weird items in their pocketses - half-gnawed hobbit bones, genuine "One Ring to Rule Them All" souvenir copies, spare metal clubs, bits of string and whatnot; but the orcs of Nanduhirion have a strange and to me inexplicable fondness for dwarven breastplates. Anybody hunting orcs along the banks of the Mirrormere will soon find their packs cluttered up with stack upon stack of these items, since two out of three orcs seem to carry them. The question is, why? If they dropped battered orcish breastplates, it would make sense; but for these extra-large orcs, a dwarven breastplate is of no practical use whatsoever. It would certainly take a psychoanalyst of unusual skill and persistence to ferret out the reason behind this sinister fetish...

THE NIGERIAN SCAM

2009-03-18T10:52:00.006+02:00

You will have heard of the famous "Nigerian scam", whereby the recently widowed wife of a Nigerian minister (or similar) writes to you suggesting you share her late husband's ill-gotten loot by providing her with a way of quietly exporting it - namely, the details of your bank account. Needless to say, once the scammers have these details they waste no time hoovering out your life savings. A similar internet scam involves sending out fake letters, purportedly from bona-fide banks, requesting your account or credit card details for purposes of verification. It's amazing how many people fall for one or another of these - never mind that your bank has told you time and again, in letters of fire fifty feet high, never ever to release such details, not even to their own employees.

Well, it's a sign either of desperation on the part of scammers or of the growing importance of online games that the Nigerian scam has come to LOTRO. In the last 24 hours, many players in Europe will have received the following email: "Greetings, It has come to our attention that you are trying to sell/trade your personal Lord of the Rings Online account. As you may or may not be aware of, this conflicts with the EULA and Terms of Agreement of Codemasters and Lord of the Rings Online. If upon further investigation you are indeed attempting to obtain monetary profit against the terms of the user agreement, your account can and will be disabled. Codemasters has the right to consider legal action if necesarry, based on the severety of the action. If you hope to avoid account suspention you should verify your personal possession of the account in question. We at Blizzard Entertainment take infractions of the user agreement quite seriously, and we must confirm the original ownership of the account. Please Complete the information in [link removed] you are the owner of the account in question. If you ignore this mail your account can and will be closed permanently due to suspicions of alternative ownership. We ask that during the time of the investigation you give approximately twenty-four hours of inactivity after sending a response email. This should provide enough time for Codemasters to confirm your identity and that the terms of agreement are being followed as is necesarry."

Well, everybody should have spotted the wonderful howler about "We at Blizzard Entertainment", but there are other clues as to the African (or more likely East European) origin of this message. One is the odd misspellings ("necesarry", "suspention", " severety"), the other is the rather more subtle errors of usage which indicate a non-native English speaker trying to sound formal: "attempting to obtain monetary profit against the terms", "give approximately twenty-four hours of inactivity", and so forth. And of course, like your bank, nobody at Codemasters is ever going to ask you for this information. So do not, under any circumstances, click on that link.

A FLIGHT OF DROMEDARIES ABOVE ROHAN

2009-03-17T10:18:00.007+02:00

Once again, the vexed issue of flying mounts in LOTRO raises its gory head. Some want them, most don’t; the parties of the first part don’t see why they shouldn’t get the thrill of zooming above Middle-Earth like the Red Baron, while the parties of the second part describe the idea as the last nail in the coffin of the Lore. You can read just about every view on the subject here.

Personally, I have to say I’m against it – not because I am a diehard adherent of the Church of Tolkien (after all, if you think about it for a moment, the whole concept of a MMORPG based on Tolkien is about as anti-lore as you can get), but because a measure of respect for the basic parameters of Middle-Earth is what makes LOTRO different from other online fantasy games – and I happen to believe different is good. Look at it this way: wine is good, and so is coffee. Would you want them homogenised so that you end up with a single product called, say, wifee? Do we want all online fantasy games to be exactly the same, containing the exact same elements, so that you can no longer tell LOTRO from WoW from Product X?

For the moment, anyway, the issue is moot, since as LOTRO designer Scenario points out, “Flight is not something we support within our game mechanics (we totally fake our flying monsters)”, and “Even if it was supported, our existing landscape is not designed to support it (monster camp balance and just general terrain development)”. So that’s that as far as flying dromedaries in LOTRO are concerned.

However, there’s another fascinating parameter to the issue, namely the glaring hole in the Lord of the Rings plotline which almost every reader of the book has noticed – the fact that given the existence of friendly eagles in Middle-Earth, why didn’t the Council of Elrond have an eagle carry the Ring-Bearer directly to Mt. Doom? Tolkien himself was aware of the problem; in Letter 210, he noted, “The Eagles are a dangerous 'machine'. I have used them sparingly, and that is the absolute limit of their credibility or usefulness. The alighting of a Great Eagle of the Misty Mountains in the Shire is absurd; it also makes the later capture of G. [Gandalf] by Saruman incredible, and spoils the account of his escape.”

Sean Crist has compiled an excellent essay on this subject, “Could Eagles have Flown Frodo into Mordor?”, which you can consult here. He explores every argument, pro and con, basing his conclusions on hard evidence from the published sources. His final conclusion? “Once [Tolkien] has placed the eagles in the world of his sub-creation, the possibility of the ‘eagles’ scenario is open, and so far as I am aware, there is nothing in Tolkien's writing to rule it out. For this reason, I am calling it a hole in the plot.” But what a plot!

THE ELITE AGGREGATOR ORC

2009-03-16T08:34:00.006+02:00

As befits a rather more mature online game, LOTRO has attracted a number of blogs devoted to the game, many of them both readable and informative. Some of these I have noted from time to time and added to the recommended links, but up to now it's been largely a matter of luck whether or not I stumble across one. Now, mmeow.net's LOTRO Combo Blog has come online, its mission, like it says on the title bar, to "Aggregate LotRO Blogs Faster Than an Elite Aggregator Orc".

They must have found a really a hard-working orc, because it carries out its instructions perfectly: click on or, better yet, subscribe to http://combo.mmeow.net/ and you will find a constantly updated list of feeds from the best LOTRO-related blogs, including, title, link and the first few lines of every post. Eight fine blogs are currently included. Service with an (orcish) smile...

THE MINES OF MORIA CONSIDERED AS A CHINESE BANQUET

2009-03-11T17:47:00.003+02:00

An old western libel, no doubt invented or at least perpetuated by French restaurateurs, would have it that Chinese banquets, though impressive in quality, quantity and variety, somehow leave the diner with a feeling of emptiness, as though he had partaken of an oddly unsatisfying fairy feast. I have often thought over the last few weeks that in that sense, the Mines of Moria have much on common with that mythic Chinese banquet…

Make no mistake: there can be no two opinions about the quality of the graphic design. Almost three months down the road, I still hold by the view I published here last December: “This is by far the most impressive game environment I have ever seen. For once, the pre-launch hype didn’t lie. The Mines of Moria are breathtakingly grandiose and wonderfully imaginative”. The problem is that after a few weeks, the game started feeling repetitive, and, like the aforementioned fairy feast, oddly unsatisfying. And judging by the comments of other players (thoughtful players whose judgements I respect), I was not alone in feeling disappointed.

Why? I don’t think there is any single reason for this sense of flatness, rather a whole series of minor reasons. First of all, perhaps, the almost universal disappointment provoked by discovering that the eagerly awaited legendary weapon system was nothing of the sort. Secondly, the absence of a good, meaty twelve-man raid involving a series of bosses – another and better Rift, in other words, which one could really sink one’s teeth in. Now I know that long-term raiding isn’t necessarily everybody’s cup of tea, but the thing about the Rift was that it kept an awful lot of players beavering happily away for well over six months. Third, the way reputation with the dwarf factions turned out to be, well, almost completely useless, with the exception of the Hunter and Warden quick travel skills. Fourth, the pointlessness of mounts in a dungeon environment, in which a rider gets knocked off his goat roughly every twenty paces. Fifth, the excessively fast levelling between levels 50 and 60, which meant that players stopped gaining experience points after completing no more than half the available quests.

At the end of the day, and despite the excellent Eregion prequel, this was, after all, largely a dungeon crawl. And the problem with that is that dungeon crawls are, by their very nature, overtly linear; despite the many nicely executed larger areas such as the Waterworks, one still had a sense of being herded along far too many dark, narrow passageways. As a result, the relief one felt at finally emerging into fresh air at the Dimrill Dale was palpable, and very real (so kudos to the designers for that!). On balance, I suspect that had MoM shipped, as originally planned, with all or most of the Lothlórien content included, it would have made for a much better balanced game. Hopefully, Book 7 will help restore that balance.

MAPPING THE WATERWORKS

2009-03-10T00:45:00.005+02:00

After what seemed like several months of relative somnolence, those remarkable artists at The Brasse.com have sprung back into action with another brilliant hand-drawn map, this time of the Waterworks in Moria. Though crammed with information about locations, mobs, allies and items, the Brasse maps have an uncanny ability to make highly complicated terrain look simple and easily navigable; many a baffled player has owed his continued sanity to the Brasse map of the Old Forest. The Waterworks map can be found here ; see the link, below, for a full list of all those currently available.

ON THE PLEASURES OF FLATTERY

2009-03-05T16:25:00.002+02:00

I have taken to patronising the 21st Hall Auction House and Crafting Bunker almost exclusively, to the neglect of the Breetown facilities which offered such sterling service for many months. This is, of course, largely because they - and the banking facilities - are conveniently just footsteps away from one another. There's another reason, however; every time I wander past, I get hailed by those excellent dwarf guards at the entrance to the bunker area in terms of the most outrageous flattery - or at least, I have been since completing the long, long chain of quests they had bestowed on me. One of them was "Enemies of Lothlorien", which as far as I can remember involved killing lots of everything in the lower levels of Moria, including all the bosses. Since the actual reward for completion was insignificant (something like 50-odd silver and some small change), I guess flattery laid on with a trowel is the best I can expect...

REVISE THOSE ESTIMATES!

2009-03-03T09:05:00.005+02:00

Anybody rash enough to venture comment on matters financial should be prepared to eat their words, which is what I must do today. In my previous post, I said, referring to a l.60 Second Age Hunter's Bow on offer at the Laurelin AH that "just under 75G is way over the top for an unidentified item", gratuitously adding that 100G would most likely "represent both an actual and a psychological price ceiling" for some time to come.

Well, pride goeth before a fall. My conclusions held true for about 24 hours at best. Last night, with under two hours to go, that self-same bow reached a price of 140G, 175S, 98C - and for all I know, some lunatic may well have slipped in yet another bid at the last minute. This, remember, is for an unidentified item, which may well turn out to be an absolute lemon in terms of legacies.

It is small comfort to realise that I am not entirely alone in my mortification, since 99.9% percent of economic commentators in the real world have also had to eat their words in recent months...

PRICING LEGENDARIES

2009-03-01T18:39:00.010+02:00

The price of top l.60 Second and First-Age legendaries is a matter of consuming interest to most advanced players, but the market is still extremely unsettled; sellers tend to be wildly optimistic, but buyers remain cautious. Apart from anything else, we still don't know enough about drop rates. The first image in this post, taken from the Laurelin AH, shows prices for three typical Second-Age legendaries (I am considering l.60s only; anything else is a stop-gap). The cheapest item is an identified Rune-Keeper' stone with five legacies, offered at an opening price of 15G with no offers as yet. In my opinion, this is far too expensive in view of the very limited demand for top-end RK and Warden equipment - after all, how many of these classes have reached l.60? Next is an unidentified Loremaster's staff, opening price 45G, buyout 70G - ridiculous on the face of it for an unidentified item, but a rich LM might just possibly take a flutter with a first bid. Finally, an unidentified Hunter's Bow, with no buyout and a current bid of 74.5G. This is the highest price I have yet seen offered for a Hunter Bow, and merely confirms the widely held belief that top-end Hunter gear continues to fetch the highest possible prices. I would argue that just under 75G is way over the top for an unidentified item (remember I acquired mine for 30G), but at least two Hunters disagree with me, and the market is king.

Turning now to Firs- Age items, which are beginning to appear on the AH with greater frequency, the first thing to strike one is the apparent preponderance of RK and Warden items. There could be two reasons for this: one is that the drop tables really are badly skewed in their favour, which would be bad news. The other, and more likely, is that if rolling for a First-Age item after a Watcher defeat is limited to players of the same class as the dropped item, then the great majority are hanging on to their prize. Whatever the reason, this does not make RK and Warden items with a 150G buyout very likely to move before hell freezes over; on the other hand, a first bid of 25G on the Warden's club, despite its poor legacies, is a distinct possibility. Finally, there is that Loremaster's Book offered for a first bid of 150G and a buyout of 180G, and once again no bids. This is a marginally more likely sale, but I somehow doubt it. My gut feeling, based on posts here and there on various forums, is that the small percentage of seriously wealthy players have savings which average around 100G, and that at least for some time to come, this sum will represent both an actual and a psychological price ceiling.

CARAS GALADHON SNEAK PREVIEW

2009-02-27T11:37:00.003+02:00

Volume II, Book 7 of Mines of Moria, to be released - we fervently hope - in the not-too-distant future, will take players deeper into the enchanted forest of Lothlórien. Actually, all of Lothlórien (rather than just the tiny fragment of it we can access at the moment) was due to be packaged with the original MoM expansion, but as it was still unfinished round about the crucial Christmas release date, Turbine opted to hive it off.

The image above is of Caras Galadhon (or Galadon, as the first edition has it), tree city of Lothlórien and closest thing to an elven capital during the waning of the Third Age. It appeared recently on official game forums, only to be quickly whisked away for being in apparent breach of non-disclosure agreements. Such is the current hunger for more hard information about V II/Bk 7 that it seems worth recycling, though apart from looking pretty, it doesn't really tell us very much...

SECOND AGE LEGENDARY BOWS

2009-02-25T18:27:00.007+02:00

The bow on the right, Reason, is the l.58 Second Age legendary I've been using in Moria for the last couple of months, and it's a pretty good bow. However, I've been on the lookout for a l.60 Second Age, more out of a feeling that I really needed to get the best possible (leaving aside First Age items for the moment, please), rather than because I was unhappy with Reason. A few days ago, chancing to log on early one morning when almost nobody else was around, I was very lucky to find a l.60 bow on the Laurelin Auction House with a sellout price of 30G. It was unidentified, and therefore a gamble, but it paid off - the legacies it came with were more than decent, if not perfect.

So Darkfall has now become my main ranged weapon, rushed up to l.30 in a matter of minutes thanks to a stash of item experience point runes. However, what has really floored me is the difference two levels make to the DPS (Damage Per Second) rating: maxed out in both cases, Reason has a DPS rating of 53.6, whereas Darkfall, raised to the same tier, achieves an astonishing 59.1! Oh, and the speed is significantly better, too (2.2 versus 2.5),

Moral: Use the highest level legendary weapon you can lay your hands on to be getting on with, but as soon as a l.60 comes your way, grab it at almost any cost. What will happen to faithful old Reason, you ask? I though of breaking it up when it reaches l.40 in order to reclaim some of the experience, but on second thought, I may after all use a Beleriand title scroll on it, and keep it around as an alternative or backup weapon...

THE COIMBRA VARIORUM EDITION

2009-02-22T15:22:00.004+02:00

A debate has been raging on the European LOTRO forums around a casual comment by Halo Jones concerning a hitherto unknown edition of Lord of the Rings: "After Moria, the fellowship went to Mordor directly, at least they did in edition 1 of the book, and thats the only edition that Turbine have rights for. There was no Rohan, there was no Gondor, Helm's deep was added in the 70's as marketing people suggested reprints should have more blood and gore to keep up with the times".

It would have been helpful if Halo Jones had given the full background to this fascinating bibliographical conundrum. He is of course wrong in referring to the so-called Coimbra variorum edition as "edition 1"; the true first edition is the one published in 1954 and 1955 by George Allen & Unwin, London. However, in 1957 an unauthorised and indeed pirated version of Lord of the Rings was published in a cheap, one-volume paperback by Olivares S.A. of Coimbra, Portugal, and exported to a number of countries in the Mediterranean, North Africa and the Middle East. Olivares was able to do so thanks to the same loophole in international copyright legislation which allowed Ace Books in the U.S.A. to circulate their own unauthorised paperbacks of the work. As it happened, for reasons of economy, Olivares employed an expatriate Welsh poet called Owen Shuttlegrove, then resident in Coimbra, to reduce the full original text to the final 278 pages of their version; rather than undertake an extensive re-write, Shuttlegrove simply carved the central three quarters of the plot out of the book. It is undoubtedly this version that Halo refers to, above. I should add that the Coimbra variorum is exceedingly rare, and that copies can fetch substantially more than authentic first editions of Lord of the Rings.

http://community.codemasters.com/forum/showthread.php?t=336194

LEVELED OUT?

2009-02-18T13:07:00.005+02:00

A recent posting in that pleasantly discursive blog, The Middle-Earth Adventurer, was entitled "Post 60 Slump", and I believe it definitely touched on a sore point for many players: "I think that there's a natural incentive to seeing the blue xp go up and up and up as you level. It hits a part of the human psyche that drives us to keep going on whatever path we've set out on. Once that stops... well, you lose something, even if there's everything else in the game still pushing you forward."

I couldn't agree more, even though in my case it hasn't yet stopped me carrying on with the last batch of Moria quests... but it's true that the salt hath lost somewhat of its savour. What's the problem? Basically, that when Turbine released Mines of Moria, they raised the level cap from 50 to 60. In other words, you could now earn experience points and level up as far as the new upper limit of sixty. This was a fine and necessary change, as far it went; unfortunately, in practice it proved all too easy to reach the new upper limit. Dedicated players went from 50 to 60 in a month or less; for the average player, I would guess a time period of around three months is probably about right. That is way too damn fast, given that it probably took an average of nine months or so to go from level 1 to level 50 in Shadows of Angmar. And as the Middle-Earth Adventurer points out, once you reach the cap level, things somehow seem a lot tamer. Particularly if the game as a whole seems to have slightly run out of steam (which is a subject I shall be getting back to very soon).

Now, normally you can't just say, "OK, we'll simply increase the leveling requirements - let's double them", because to do that, you have to build in the extra quests and activities by a similar factor. But in the case of Moria, that wasn't a problem. How do I know? Simply, because when I hit l.60, there still remained at least 45%-50% of total new quests still uncompleted. And though I obviously can't say how many EPs their completion would have given, it should have been substantial, given that many of them, like "Enemies of Lothlorien", are multi-strand quests calling for the completion of several strands of very difficult quests. It would have made more sense to extend leveling from l.50 to l.60 by a factor which have ensured reaching the cap after completion of, say, 80% of the new quests. Let's hope that when Turbine next raise the cap, as they will surely do sooner or later, they will have learned their lesson.

http://middleearthadventurer.blogspot.com/2009/02/post-60-slump.html

ARMCHAIR STRATEGY IN LOTRO

2009-02-10T18:40:00.001+02:00

Armchair strategists and military scholars in LOTRO are no different than in real life: they tend to base their arguments on what should be, rather than what might actually turn out to be the case in practice. In the months before the German army overran France in 1940, the French general staff insisted that there was absolutely no way the invasion would come through the Ardennes, since tanks couldn’t negotiate the terrain – never mind that General Guderian, who led the invasion, had actually published a book explaining very clearly what he planned to do. Reality check…

A recent and very interesting debate on the Codemasters forums has been running under the title “Hunters are NOT tanks! Please, people!”; it includes a lot of stern comments by Guardians and the like ticking off Hunters for having the gall to think that they might sometimes find it necessary to tank an opponent. This is, of course, absolutely correct in principle, and under normal circumstances no Hunter with an ounce of sense will do something as stupid as pulling aggro off a Guardian. This is fine as far it goes… assuming the fellowship includes a competent Guardian.

Thing is, most of the arguments in the thread are predicated on the performance of an ideal fellowship, namely the classic two heavy, two crowd-control and two ranged setup. Unfortunately, unless you have the good fortune to belong to the kind of über-military Kinship which maintains one of each class online at all times, fully equipped and ready to go, your average player will find himself or herself all too often questing or raiding in a very mixed group indeed – and I don’t necessarily mean in a PUG.

In the first two months or so after Mines of Moria came out, my kinship experienced a temporary shortage of heavy tank classes, so that in a number of cases I found myself leading 6-man raids without a Guardian, indeed sometimes without any kind of melee class at all. As a result, I had no option other than to tank myself, and while of course this ended in tears a number of times, we eventually got the hang of it; by the time things got back to normal, I had successfully tanked four out of the six Moria instance bosses. Let me quickly add that this was entirely a group effort, and that I would have been ground hamburger in no time without the sterling efforts of a dedicated Minstrel and/or Lore Master – but the point is that in war as in the legal profession, hard cases make bad law. It’s easy enough to lay down rules under ideal circumstances, and those rules are obvious enough. It’s the less than ideal, or frankly chaotic, situations that are a damn sight more challenging, and that’s when the rule book won’t necessarily give you the answer.

http://community.codemasters.com/forum/showthread.php?t=331537

GENERAL TALUG'S ARMOUR

2009-02-06T00:24:00.004+02:00

Many players have no doubt by now acquired that remarkable trophy, General Talug's Armour Display, which comes in a nifty red cabinet. Rather fewer of its proud owners may be aware of the fact that this is LOTRO's first functional trophy. Which is to say that if you click on the display, you will suddenly find yourself wearing the late general's armour. That's right, a full set of finest orc armour for you to strut about in - just like the armour set you looted in Fil Gashan, which was so rudely yanked away again when you exited the instance.

The down side is that, like the Fil Gashan set, it vanishes after five minutes. Still, that's long enough to get to Bree and spread raw panic among the citizenry...

LEGENDARY WEAPONS & ITEMS

2009-02-04T15:38:00.005+02:00

Legendary warriors in fact and fiction have often wielded unique weapons, usually swords, which sometimes become as famous as their owners: El Cid’s Tizona, Charlemagne’s Joyeuse, King Arthur’s Excalibur, Roland’s Durendal, Beowulf’s Naegling, Elric’s Stormbringer… and of course, Orcrist, Anduril and Sting. So Turbine’s announcement that legendary weapons would play a major role in the Mines of Moria LOTRO expansion was greeted with justifiable enthusiasm; according to the official release, "Players will be able to forge weapons and class-related equipment and evolve them to build a legacy the likes of Bilbo's Sting and Gandalf's Glamdring. These legendary weapons will level-up along with the player, allowing customization by advancing the item's virtues, adding runic legacies, modifying its titles and forming fables".

The reality proved somewhat different. What we have now is interesting, but a legendary weapon system it ain’t. What we have is several hundred different legendary items of three different kinds; in order of increasing rarity (and value), these are Third Age, Second Age and First Age legendary items, all of them class-specific and of several different types. Furthermore, Third Age legendaries can be of user levels 51-60, Second Age legendaries can be of user levels 53-60, and First Age legendaries span user levels 59-60. For each player class, age and level there is a sword, dagger, club, spear, hammer, bow and crossbow, plus all the class special items such as burglar’s tools. You do the math.

Third Age items drop like flies, and are virtually given away with cereal boxes – not very legendary. On the other hand, Second Age items are extremely rare, while you can virtually forget First Age stuff. Another factor which players have come to realise is that user level is critical, almost more so than age; a user l.60 Third Age weapon is virtually as good as a Second Age weapon of user l.58 with roughly equivalent legacies. What this means in practice is that a very rare l.55 item may turn out to be little more than vendor trash.

As now implemented in LOTRO, legendary items (LIs) are essentially a running crap shoot, an exercise in gambling. You gamble on winning a roll and getting a good drop (imagine winning a 1:12 Vile Maw roll and receiving a l.59 First Age club!), you gamble on your LI having half-decent legacies, you gamble every time you reforge, you gamble on improving your runics… Somebody on the forums has worked out exactly how many Third Age LIs you would have to deconstruct in order to end up with six tier 8 runics, three for each of the two LIs you can equip; believe me, you don’t want to know the numbers. And you will carry on gambling, because by its very nature the system always sets a new goal: get a higher user level item, get a Second Age item, get a First Age item, then get a better yet First Age weapon.

Turbine’s developers have devoted a lot of ingenuity to devising a very complex, reasonably effective (in its own way) system of grinding in order to constantly upgrade your LIs – and yes, it can be fun, and it gives you something to strive towards after hitting the level cap of 60. Unfortunately, in the process they seem to have lost sight of what a legendary weapon actually means. A legendary weapon becomes part of you, remains identified with you for better or for worse; you would no more throw it away than cut off your hand. Can you imagine Aragorn casually chucking away Anduril because, uh, that dwarf arms dealer seems to be selling a cooler sword?

I currently carry a reasonably nice l.58 Second-Age bow with about 865,000 experience points on it. It’s called Preacher, we’ve been together for a long time now, I’ve managed to put some decent sixth-tier runics on it… and first chance I get of finding, buying or stealing a l.60 Second-Age bow with a half-decent set or legacies, out it goes, deconstructed and as much of its experience as possible re-routed into the new bow. Not very legendary, I know, but there it is.

It’s too late now to tinker with the system, so we’re stuck with it. But it would be nice if, perhaps with the next volume, the developers came up with an another crack at the problem. Here’s what I suggest: make the player’s choice of a new legendary weapon the reward for a long, hard quest or even quest chain. There should be no different ages or levels: just starter legendaries, all of the same level, and the player could pick whatever he or she fancies – sword, dagger, bow or whatever – as well as the starter legacies. Then use the existing system of weapon experience points to build up weapon experience, exchangeable for different improvements at various levels, leaving as much of it as possible to the player’s discretion. That’s it: that’s your new, truly legendary weapon, yours forever, growing along with you. No second choices, no exchanges. How about it?

HOUSING CONTROL FREAKERY

2009-02-02T17:59:00.006+02:00

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.)

MORIA TROPHIES

2008-12-11T17:41:00.008+02:00

To be honest, the first couple of Moria trophies to come my way have been a bit of a disappointment - certainly not a patch on the Shadows of Angmar trophies. The Fire Orc Banner drops from the Fire Orc boss in the Grand Stairs instance, and Morhun's Gemstone from the final boss in the Treasury instance. Neither are exactly earth-shaking: the banner looks a bit like a traffic bollard, while Morhun's Gemstone reminds me of nothing so much as a fancy bell-push (it also underlines the inanity of hooks in housing: once in place, it stands in solitary splendour on that stretch of wall, to which nothing else can be added).

Hopefully, things will improve, but at the moment, it looks as though so much imagination went into designing Moria, there was none left over for the trophies...