SKIRMISH POINTS: WHAT WILL THEY BE WORTH TOMORROW?

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.

WHITHER LEGENDARIES? WHO KNOWS...

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".

WANTED: A UNIVERSAL BARTER CURRENCY

The barter economy of Middle-Earth is becoming extremely complex. Barter items now include Battered Arnorian Armour (BAA), Vile Bronze and Silver Coins, Rift Coins, Marks of Triumph (MoT) from the repeatable epic instances, Marks of Victory (MoV) from the battleground instances, and of course Luminous Stones from the Delvings of Fror in the Ettenmoors.

All of these can only be bartered for specific items as follows:

BAA = Annuminas armour
Vile Coins = Angmar armour
Rift-iron Coins = second-rank Rift armour
Fror stones = Ettens armour
MoV = teal jewellery or a gamble on the chests
MoT = various

The interesting items here are the MoT, which are the closest thing LOTRO has to a universal barter “currency”; they can be used to acquire any of either Helegrod, Annuminas or Angmar armour (respectively priced at 30, 16 and 8 MoT per item). However, they can also be exchanged for Annuminas or Angmar barter items at a rate of 2 MoT for one Vile Silver Coin or one BAA; unfortunately, the reverse isn’t true – you can’t hand over a Vile Silver Coin and receive two MoT.

It’s hard to say why, and it’s a pity the developers didn’t take the plunge and make MoT a true universal barter item. If they had, players would be able to consolidate all the barter items acquired from various quests and instances (including perhaps even Helegrod barter items) and convert them into whichever barter currency they prefered. Instead, many players are lumbered with a variety of barter items which take up precious storage slots, none of them in sufficient quantities to trade in.