Category: General

One of my Kinship member said to me, “In the old days of Lotro, you would run Helegrod every week.  You might have to run it 300 times to get the best bow in the game, but it was worth it.  This new Legendary Weapon system is just a grind.”

Whenever people talk about “the good old days” in an MMO, they mean the good old days for them.  When you first play an MMO, especially your first MMO, you have way more tolerance for grinding.  There’s nothing particularly superior about doing a multi-hour instance hundreds of times vs doing a weapon-xp instance hundreds of times.  But in our memories, the old system is always better.  The old mmo, with less features, had more charm.

But for the newbies, the new is better.  The new is better, and old way is out-dated.

Most battles in MMOs are not fun.

I ride my goat in Moria. I get hit off of it by a goblin throwing spears. The goblin has absolutely no hope of killing me. By the time it’s dead, I’ll still have 90% of my health. When it’s dead, I will receive no sense of accomplishment. The only thing I feel is annoyance at being knocked off my mount.

It reminds me of those random battles they used to have in single-player RPGs. Remember those? The enemies there usually had no chance of killing you either. You could just choose “attack” from the menue multiple times until the enemy was dead. Some RPGs even gave you the ability to automate your characters so that you wouldn’t have to be bothered with actually playing the boring fights. Others had items that allowed you to avoid random battles, or vehicles that allowed you to skip random battles on the over-map.

The question comes up, why even force the player to have boring fights at all? Thankfully in most MMOs you can expect the grey-con mobs to stop attacking you automatically. But lets be honest, any npc at your level or below is going to die easily unless it has friends. Without a chance for me to fail this battle, I’m bored as hell.

In games like Guitar Hero I can enjoy playing a song I’ve already played to see if I can do it with less mistakes. Or I can play a fighting game to see how many people I can beat in survival mode, or how well I can combo my opponent. But those are twitch based games.

MMOs usually have me hitting the number 1 on my keyboard, waiting, and then pressing the number two. I might tap six or seven keys on my keyboard in the time I would have tapped dozens of buttons in twitch-based game. To top it off, I’ve been using the same four skills in the same order over and over again in nearly every fight for the last hundred hours of gameplay. That’s like playing the same song on easy-mode repeatedly.

Combat in my current MMO is not twitch based enough to challenge my reflexes. Therefore, it’s not twitch-based enough to cause twich-fun.

That isn’t to say that twitch-fun is the only kind of fun. There’s also fun to be had at thinking up strategies and planning ahead. There’s a lot of fun in games like Starcraft or Chess in anticipating what you think is going to happen, making a plan, and executing that plan.

In most battles in MMOs, you’re fighting something that does the same behaviors over and over again with little to no variation. This goblin will throw spears at me, then I’ll tap the same buttons I always do, and it will die. That’s like playing chess against a computer opponent which makes the exact same moves every time. Worse yet, this computer opponent doesn’t change up its moves if you leave yourself exposed, or screw up. It just keeps throwing those same moves at you, blind to the circumstances.

Being a rare class is a loot boon in the Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ raiding environment. Tell me if you are seeing something similar/different in your game/server.

First, understand that (at least on our server) raid loot is awarded by a standard need/greed roll. I know of guilds that use DKP and such for their guild raids, but the game is very supportive of casual raiding, so I have never been on a raid that used anything other than need/greed (with master looter enabled). This does give an under-equipped character greater rewards for raiding, but no one seems to care much. Even if there were DKP, how many would you need to spend in competition with your guild’s other level 60 Warden?

We noticed that we had a dozen level 60s on last night, so we called in impromptu turtle raid. Our team make-up was rather good without much fiddling, despite what looks like a ridiculous class balance: we had 6 Hunters, 2 Minstrels, 2 Burglars, 1 Guardian, and 1 Champion. For the non-LOTRO players, the turtle raid calls for tank rotation due to a stacking, incurable DoT, and the easiest way to do that is with a Burglar’s Enrage ability, which makes the enemy attack at random. That makes everyone a mini-tank, spreads the damage, and makes it a race between your DPS versus growing damage-over-time. The ideal team would probably be 10 Rune-keepers, 1 Burglar (for Enrage), and 1 Loremaster (for fire damage debuffs).

As one of the 6 Hunters (before dropping to let a Captain join), I realized that my odds of getting loot were not great: 1/9 that any item is for Hunters, then 1/6 that I get it. Hunters are the most popular class, so every group of six for every raid will have at least one Hunter. Minstrels have a similar problem, caused by their necessity rather than their popularity. Meanwhile, if you came to our raid with one of the other seven classes, only a Burglar would have needed to roll to take home his/her class’s First Age weapon. I have not checked how the raid turned out, but that was a greed roll if the drop was for 1/3 of the classes.

A similar factor explains why Hunter items are always ridiculously expensive on the Auction House. For every person who needs a good Warden javelin, three need a good Hunter bow.

: Zubon