SWINGS & ROUNDABOUTS

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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?