Author: Zubon

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Pack Space

Storage is broken in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. It works, as in I have rarely heard of its losing folks’ stuff, but as a game mechanic it is broken. This is not true for everyone: if you are not a crafter, collector, or social player with several outfits, and you are past level 30, you are fine. Turbine has done some good things to alleviate problems, such as simplifying the crafting items and increasing stack sizes. Once you save a cosmetic outfit, you can get rid of the items. Still, forum discussion directed me to what WoW is planning. Even before that, it would be nice if a game took advantage of the gameplay innovations from previous games. Keyrings, for example, should be required if you have keys. The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ lacks keyrings.

Note in the WoW plans “Pet and mount tabs” and “currency user interface.” That is, don’t store mounts in the vault, and track all those barter/reputation items the way you track money.

Continue reading Pack Space

Feedback Sought: Scheduling

Blogs get far less traffic on weekends. I presume that many of you are reading from work. Lucky. The blog-reading I do from work needs to be at least plausibly work-related. This leads to a feedback loop where blogs post less on weekends. So you are less likely to read on weekends. So we post less. Does this fit your reading pattern? I tend to worry less about missing a weekend, which often leads to missing a Monday because I write now and schedule it to go live at 12:02am Central. (And I only post once a day, or else my wife makes fun of me.)

I notice that many blogs have less content on Friday. This is a letdown for readers, who want to do something other than work on Friday afternoon, but then it also demands that bloggers work Fridays. Would it be better for me to plan longer pieces for Friday? Or pieces seeking lots of feedback/discussion/comments? Might as well fill that gap. I have hit Monday and Friday harder without great planning in the past.

Anything else in how you like things or what you want to see? I stopped the CoX Character Contemplations series because they seemed to get few views, which I interpreted as “tl;dr” (though I have a couple more written). I should do another “Recent Searches” post; I fell out of the habit after skipping a month of WoW porn searches. I have not looked at the site stats at all in the past three months or more.

And this is a Monday morning post seeking discussion, so it’s all meta. Please, your thoughts.

: Zubon

Feign Death as PvP Crowd Control

Each race in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ has a panic button, of varying quality. Humans get the best, with a full heal. Dwarves get massive resistance, elves get “parry everything,” and hobbits get feign death. Minstrels also get a feign death ability, which is helpful when the group is wiping.

In PvE, feign death is sometimes useful. As long as you are not in the enemies’ aggro range, you will be safe when you stand up. It works nicely when you run through a crowd while trying to get somewhere difficult. As a Hunter, it can help when I pull too much aggro and need to let the tank get it back.

In PvMP, feign death is a fabulous distraction. People will stand there and wait for you to get back up. We got this Minstrel down to 200 hit points, now we just need to wait the 30 seconds for him to become available as a target. If we leave, we know that he will stand up and run around a corner. So three or four creeps will target the feigned corpse and wait. (Freeps do the same thing to spiders in Trap Door Sanctuary. He has 60 seconds. If the creep raid leaves, we may skip pursuing just to camp and trap that one spot.) We are getting that kill.

I want to take a Hobbit Minstrel into PvMP sometime just to mess with this. Start going down: Hobbit Silence. Tab through the enemies to make sure they are still on you. Stand up and immediately feign death. Tab tab, wait. Stand up and use one of the feign death scrolls from Forochel. Ha! Yes, I will be out of the fight for more than a minute, but so will four or more enemies, and they can be shot during that time. It’s like a channeled AE mez.

: Zubon

Five Degrees of Awesome in Testing

Testing of the City of Heroes Halloween event started last week.

  1. This year’s addition is Zombie Apocalypse, modeled after the Rikti invasions. I think we can all agree that Zombie Apocalypse is an awesome theme to run with.
  2. It will reappear for the occasional hour throughout the year, in case you miss it or want to experience it again. If the reaction is anything like it is with the Rikti invasions, these will be a lot of fun with massed players, assuming your system can handle it.
  3. City of Heroes Halloween is cumulative, so previous years’ events will be returning. Trick-or-treating is being tweaked to get people moving; doors are still giving out candy, monsters, and costumes; and there are giant monsters to enjoy. Badges, badges, badges.
  4. Halloween was being tested in July. This is the most awesome part: leaving plenty of time to get it tested and get it right.
  5. Because Halloween will be ready months in advance, the test server will be free for Issue 13 testing.

: Zubon

On the Value of Crafting

I have previously characterised crafting in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ as a low-value time- and gold-sink. With quest rewards as you level up and drops in the endgame, the place for crafted items is limited. Commenters argued that I was over-stating the point, and this is true. I wish to re-visit the point.

First, crafting is of very limited value as you are leveling up your first character. I stand by this. Unless you are very aggressively pursuing trade skills and spending a large amount on raw materials, it is unlikely that you will make many pieces of use to you. There will be some, but few.

Second, crafting is nice for your second character. Continue reading On the Value of Crafting

More Issues

Tech-wise, Book 14 has been a bit of a debacle. It is quite common for a patch to break things, but it just keeps happening.

I posted about server issues a week ago. They seem to have mostly cleared up. The third or fourth patch did it. I am still crashing on zoning daily, which had never happened under Book 13, but maybe that’s just me. I also mentioned the new zone in that patch. It is still not available. Two weeks into Book 14, we are looking at another two weeks to having the zone after which the book is named. It is not bugged; we just need to open AQ. As a populous server, we are in 3rd place, more than half-way there. Other servers may be waiting an extra week or two.

Continue reading More Issues

Endgame Guilds

I am beginning to see the appeal. It would be nice to run instances and raids where the majority of the people knew what they were doing. I would like to do anything without needing to explain it, rather than its always being someone’s first time. I would like everyone to have voice chat on, and for those with voice chat on, I would like them to be using it; I see six people with voice chat enabled, but only two can hear me; and as a side note, if everyone except you can hear me, the problem is probably on your end. I would like to spend less than thirty minutes waiting on people. I would like there to be no wipes on the way there. I would like people to be familiar with the game mechanics.

While I’m at it, I would like a pony.

: Zubon