Author: Zubon

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The Mirkwood Endgame

The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ did well with its endgame under Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ but has struggled since. The SoA endgame had two sets of three full-group instances, of length varying from three large rooms to three hours. Late in SoA, there were full-group battle instances that were precursors to skirmishes. Small fellowship instances had yet to be developed. The two raids were big deals, Helegrod less popular because it took more effort to organize 24 people, but there are still regular groups for The Rift.

The endgame in Mines of Moriaâ„¢ was deeply marred. The six instances were known for bugs and exploits, and the current player approach seems to be farming the fastest and avoiding the two that are painfully long and/or difficult. The developers have judged Radiance to be a failed mechanic (as implemented) and are removing it. MoM launched with a one-fight raid, later added another one-fight raid, and at the end of its life added something comparable to The Rift. I have no idea if that ever became popular; the small fellowship instances never did, but the full-group Halls of Crafting still sees regular use. The small fellowship instances faced the problem of using mirrors, levers, and gates to create puzzle content. Group puzzle content does not work well aside from the occasional puzzle boss.

Siege of Mirkwoodâ„¢ is about to get its second shot at an endgame, and it needs it. It launched with three small fellowship instances, a full group instance, and a two-group raid. Aside from skirmishes and scaling content, that has not changed in over a year. Of these, the ones seeing the most use seem to be the fastest small fellowship instance and the full group instance. (LotRO has consistently had some fun full-group instances. SG is a good dungeon.) I enjoy the Warg Pens, even if the challenge mode there is a bit tedious. The Dungeons of Dol Guldur is just poor on every level; it is a neat idea, but stealth content + groups + MMO does not work well together, to say nothing of its boss fight (he can repeatedly disable the entire group with no way to prevent it, and if he randomly does one move back-to-back, he kills half of the prisoners you are rescuing; combine the two for bonus fun) or its deed that requires running it many times (save 10 named prisoners, a random 2 of which count per day, and of course you must successfully get those two out). I am not much of a raider, so I cannot comment on whether people like BG or are just dutifully running it because it, like DN, was the only raid content out there. Oh, and it can give the best loot, so of course people are running it for the reward. I hear about loot, but I have yet to hear anyone argue for it on the basis of being fun. And you only need that loot if you are running the BG raid, so it is neatly circular.

If GLFF is any guide, the most popular and widely used SoM endgame content is the level-scaling SoA content, the Great Barrows coming in #1. Which is kind of sad, if the first dungeon in the game is the most popular dungeon at the end of the game. Let’s hope things go well in the next update.

: Zubon

Approaching Mid-Game

My Warden is entering the mid-40s and exiting “one level per day” unless I take some vacation time. The real goal is level 58, when a daily Barrow Downs Survival skirmish becomes more plausible with Conviction (AE heal and threat: kite-tanking).

Just ahead lies what used to be the endgame, so there is a ridiculous lot of content available: Angmar, Goblin Town, Eregion, and Forochel, plus all the Shadows of Angmarâ„¢-era endgame instances and occupations, plus skirmishes and scaling content. The leveling path becomes far more constrained in Moria, but I could enter there in my mid-50s, or you can skip any level range in these days of scaling content.

I already have my completist character with a mostly complete deed log, so I have only a minimal urge to achievement-grind on this character. I have accepted advice on the five virtues she needs, so that will be ~50 deeds, and the rest is decoration that no one else can see. The “Warden” title is not available until level 65, so I may pick another target deed before then. I do feel compelled to complete the deeds for X quests in each zone plus the epic chain, but The Shire is my only place to backtrack and quest-grind. I may even overcome the compulsion to complete the mail and pie delivery chains.

: Zubon

Different Directions

Tobold ponders the directions of WoW and Rift. WoW, he says, is pushing raiding towards high selectivity based on gear and/or skill (I find the former more annoying in a game). Rift, he says, merrily invites everyone by having easier content and not limiting numbers. Players, he suggests, seem to be preferring the latter; I might append that vocal players of Rift seem to be expressing that preference, while subscriber numbers make it premature to ponder anything as a WoW-killer.

The day before, a LotRO developer diary lovingly described the design philosophy behind the new raid: higher difficulty, perfect execution, learning via wiping repeatedly. It explicitly contrasts skirmish Tier II (higher numbers) with the new raid Tier II (different abilities), although I might again append that I would be surprised if higher numbers (i.e. gear dependency) were not a factor.

My long-running game was City of Heroes, so I enter with an expectation that you can bring a full group of almost anything and beat almost anything. A few fights all but demand something from a small set of options, but those are notable because they are rare rather than the norm. Add to this the City of Heroes assumption that you will be able to play with your friends now rather than waiting two months for them to hit the level cap, and you have a very different philosophy than gear-gated tiers of raids.

I refer back to Tobold’s excellent discussion: does this encounter test the worst, best, or average player? The most restrictive content will test the worst player. Raids demanding synchronized dance and perfect execution wipe if you add one new or slightly undergeared guy. (See Spinks on the different effects of this philosophy in single- and multi-player games, or try a LotRO PUG Durchest raid in which one of your three tanks is not geared above the boss’s potential one-shot damage range.) Not restricting encounters by player count gives you a fourth option: testing the sum, so you can beat the Rift by bringing more people. Combining unrestricted attendance with testing the worst player would be apocalyptically horrible.

I cannot tell you what the mass market wants, because I am obviously an outlier, but I will favor a design that makes it easier to join with my friends, all of them, whatever level they are. Lowering the minimum difficulty threshold tends to do that.

: Zubon

Apologists

The population distribution on forums has very long tails, but I still find myself curious about some of these people. There is a substrain of fanboyism that I call apologetics: some fans cheer their games or boo the others, but these folks are devoted to defending the game against complaints, right or wrong, and seemingly most loudly when least defensibly.

The stages of denial seem to be denying that something happens, denying that it is a problem, and denying its importance. This is the politest case, assuming it does not collapse into personal attacks during step one. To take last week’s example (now solved), this was an obvious and acknowledged problem including a customer effort to track it, and here we have players announcing that they play on four lag-free servers and maybe you should stop buying K-Mart blue light special computers. When Qaddafi says there are no problems in Libya, I get the motives and delusions in play, but is there some sort of e-peen value to defending the honor of a corporation’s servers?

A recent favorite is a highly rated comment on a flash game that paraphrased to: “Okay, this game isn’t very good, but you should not badmouth it because the guy makes a lot of flash games and many of them are better.”

Some people troll, but you get the sense that some really see themselves as the company’s defenders. They think they are helping. Maybe they believe their own propaganda and think their games are perfectly balanced, lag- and exploit-free utopias, undermined only by an impossible to please playerbase. They at least think you should believe it. They are rude and abusive to people with (potentially legitimate) issues. Do they really think the Alpha Nerd approach works? Maybe that the problems will go away if they can drive away dissenting players? I can almost hear Sanya saying, “Stop telling my customers to go back to WoW!”

: Zubon

I Feel Safer

guarding This is not a guard on patrol about to turn around. He does not move. The sentry is staring into a corner while a poorly designed outhouse sneaks up on him.

He is guarding the secret camp of the rangers, which I found unaided on my first time in the zone because there is a giant horse head marking the spot, to say nothing of the road leading there.

: Zubon

Lag and Gambits

As a Hunter, lag is inconvenient. I might need to wait an extra second before an arrow fires, and I will occasionally mess up my rotation because a lag spike lasted longer than an activation/animation time. Meh, I sometimes shoot people in the face a slightly different way than expected.

As a Warden, lag is fairly horrible. Gambits key off combinations of three skills, so you could be in trouble if thrown-off timing leads to your getting the wrong skills, the wrong order, or a gambit firing before it is complete. If I need my area effect morale leech (312-4), I may really need that health, and 31-4, 32-4, 12-4, or 312-“why isn’t this firing” are not going to cut it. Those are all other gambits, one of which has a small HoT, but they are not the one I need.

Server-side lag has been problematic since the last update. Every fight or two, everything freezes for 0.5 to 2 seconds. It feels absurd to whine about 1 second delays, but that is very frequent, relatively large, and annoyance builds up. Gameplay has a rhythm, and you do not want skips several times a song. I find myself paying more attention to the UI so that lag befouls fewer gambits.

: Zubon

Shared Storage

I do not know what it costs in these days of Turbine Points, but I received shared storage in LotRO as a part of the Siege of Mirkwood/Adventurer’s Pack deal of 2009. I may or may not have thrown some Turbine Points at expanding it, but I may if I notice a sale (otherwise: save for buying this fall’s expansion).

I had originally bought in-game housing for the shared chest, so this replaced my need for a house, and it was conveniently accessible from any vault. Upgrade! I only re-acquired housing this weekend, because I am willing to spend 1 gold plus 50 silver per week to give all my characters a convenient recall to Thorin’s Gate. The atmosphere in dwarf housing may not be the best, but it is the closest to town and a stable, and my new house is conveniently right next to the door. Upgrade!

shared storage After the 238th time of forgetting that I wanted to pass that [Drop of Amber Resin] to my Loremaster while muling, I used the new tabbed vault interface to set up what you see in the picture. Each character gets a tab (level/class indicated), and when I empty out a character’s pack of goods for alts, I just drop items on the appropriate tab. (You do not need to open each pack, just drag the item to the tab name.) 9 characters, 10 tabs, plus a main pack for unsorted items: no more forgetting items when switching characters.

This has been especially handy as I take advantage of tasks. My Warden has been gaining a level a day, so when I finish a quest hub, I dump the out-leveled vendor trash on a character who can redeem it for xp. (The same applies if I farm deeds or visit old dungeons.) I usually pass 5 to 10 tasks worth of excess vendor trash, plus change for when I play those alts again. It is not a lot of xp, but it works around the 5/day/character task limit, and the loss of silver means nothing when my level-capped character is sitting on enough gold to buy an entire neighborhood of housing.

: Zubon

An Unusual Advertisement

The developer diary for the new upcoming LotRO instances fails to name or discuss the upcoming instances. It is almost entirely about loot and barter token drops.

Okay, how does it advertise the barter token drops? “[T]he costs for barter currency have been inflated significantly,” and that new currency is available on from quests that “reset just as though they were on the twice-a-week raid reset timer.”

The makers of Rift quake at launching in the face of such competition.

: Zubon

Alpha Endurance

For my return to City of Heroes, I took three characters out of mothballs. My old main, a Blaster, is on the list of characters to play. I mentioned taking Leadership on too many characters; she was one to pick up a couple of toggles, and Ice Blasters were always known for dumping their attacks very quickly. She received the endurance-conserving Alpha Slot enhancement. Wow, that solved everything. For non-CoXers, imagine picking up an ability that reduced the mana cost of everything by 15-25%. Combined with the already high endurance recovery, that made the difference, letting her attack more or less continuously forever.

The next options along that chain are damage resistance and range. She has just the one, small damage resistance power, so improving that will not do much, but I am amused at the idea of adding more range to all her attacks. She already has three damage/range Hami-Os in Caltrops, so this will let her “drop” them all the way across a room.

: Zubon