Category: Lord of the Rings Online

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The Turbine Two-Step

When I play games I often rank them by tempo rather than genre.  Hypertempo games, like Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead, require a lot of energy and give a lot of excitement in return.  Slower games such as Civilization 4 or a tower defense give me a slow, entertaining beat.  MMOs have their own rhythm as well, and last night I filled a much needed missing tempo in my MMO library.

Lord of the Rings Online in itself has multiple tempos, at which I can play.  There is the calm steady beat of solo questing, the more demanding march of group instances, and even crafting affects the whole symphony with a coda of rest.  Still, Lord of the Rings Online is missing many tempos that are crucial to my well-rounded gameplay.  The combat is sometimes too rhythmic, even in group instances.  The game can feel like an If/Then line dance, where agro, healing, placement, and killing are all just part of any veteran’s action equation.  I felt this lack deep in my soul last night after playing for countless hours over the weekend.

I still wanted to play an MMO, but I needed a more aggressive rhythm.  One filled with staccato notes and out of control riffs rather than a steady Bolero.  I found Dungeons and Dragons Online. Continue reading The Turbine Two-Step

Towards a Perpetual Stream of Events

I like festival time in Middle-earth. There is a festival for each season, and each runs about a month, so either it is festival time now, or it was last month, or it will be next month. World of Warcraft has something similar with its seasonal events. About half of each month is a festival.

As games age and have more events, they should repeat and accumulate rather than cycling out. All seasonal and holiday content can be re-used for future years. (I gladly exempt Kingdom of Loathing‘s Crimbo season from this rule, as I always look forward to the next winter solstice’s insanity. They do recycle all the other holidays, however, and they appear whenever either the real-world or in-game calendar would have them.) Just keep adding a few more each year until the game world is always having some kind of festival. If you run out of seasonal and holiday events, re-invigorate some little-used town with a local event. Have competing local events on the same theme. Come to think of it, having competing potato queens as event quest NPCs would be awesome.

City of Heroes has a slightly different take on this. Instead of adding new holidays each year, they add new events to existing holidays. The previous content still exists, but each year makes it bigger. Halloween features trick or treating and the great pumpkin and costumes and a haunted giant and zombie attacks and the apocalypse and oh my goodness.

: Zubon

Blame November Rain

This week has been really “blah” all around.  There have been some exciting things.  Like a possible new boss battle in Guild Wars.  The Volume 1, epic quests becoming soloable in Lord of the Rings Online.  And of course, the Evil Empire’s RMT sale of drunk panda pets.  It’s all great, I guess.  I would probably care more if it had not rained the past two weekends.

Mostly I have been plugging away at Borderlands.  I gave up on multiplayer.  Yes, I have tried every suggestion (GameRanger, Hamachi, port opening, etc.), and 90% of the time the system refuses.  What drives me absolutely batty is that 10% of the time it lets me co-op and nothing has changed!  Until I see a fix from Gearbox, I am just going to assume I bought and am playing a singleplayer FPS.  And, quite a good one at that.

Last night I decided to head off to bed after turning in a quest, and along the way I got a purple-named revolver that shoots AoE electrical bursts.  I stayed up for another half an hour just roaming around the main zone looking for bandits to electrocute with magnum bullets.

–Ravious
she sure got the boogie

Custom Design

The following is a guest post by Moormur.

Greetings, readers! My name is Moormur. Some of you may know me from LOTROCast or the Galactic Holofeed, podcasts I co-host both with a very able crew. I am also an avid reader of all the stuff here at Kill Ten Rats. I refrain from posting commentary on my podcast websites for whatever reason, so I have asked Ethic here at Kill Ten Rats if he didn’t mind a guest column.

I’ve been thinking lately of a trend of sorts in the MMO developing community-player designed content. I’m not talking about sandbox MMOs those are really a topic for another time and place. I’m talking about when developers release a set of tools in a theme park style MMO that allows players to create missions. City of Heroes, as far as I know, was really the first to do this. Now, my former MMO Star Wars: Galaxies has put out their own set of tools with the Chronicle Master.

Continue reading Custom Design

Great Moments in Licensing

Turbine has the right to use anything from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Turbine does not have the rights to Tolkien’s other works, even Tolkien’s other works set in Middle-earth.

The nine Ringwraiths appear in The Lord of the Rings. The Witch-king of Angmar is the one you may know by name, he being the leader of the Nazgul (and either you know the fight or there is no point spoiling it). Khamul, his second in command, is named in the Unfinished Tales. He will appear as the Big Bad in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Siege of Mirkwoodâ„¢. Turbine has the rights to the character and his appearance but not his name. He will appear as “Lieutenant of Dol Guldur.”

: Zubon

Update: title edited at Brian’s suggestion. It is a licensing issue, not directly copyright.

Ignoring the Approaching Diku Gate

The foreboding Gygaxian DIKU gate is imminently approaching in Lord of the Rings Online.  We are given until December 1, 2009 for the Mines of Moria iteration.  Then, the Siege of Mirkwood power levels are deployed.  Following the usual formula, your hard earned gear is washed away as more powerful boars and spiders resist laugh at your feeble Morian might.  At least on my server, it seems, no one cares.

I just bought a new ring at the sizeable price of 4 gold.  I didn’t need the ring per se, but at a 33% discount from the usual market price it felt like I was making a good decision.  My stats were buffed the usual 2%, and I had another teal to adorn my indigo-hued Captain.  People are still buying my black dye, and my top tier morale potions seem to sell within the hour.  Shouldn’t we all know that within a month all of this will be for naught?

People are still working on radiance gear in the Moria instance cluster, the Watcher and Turtle are weekly runs for many, and generally the heroes fighting the denizens of the deep are unaware of the war-hippies’ plans to attack Southern Mirkwood.  Maybe all at once the cultural focus will shift from advancement to preparation.  Open beta perhaps?  Until then, ignorance is bliss.

–Ravious
a child said, what is grass

Expectation of Balance

What follows is, a nitty gritty nerdy look at certain legacies on legendary items and class balance, so be warned.

Some time ago, I was trying to determine the value of different fire legacies on runekeeper items by determining their exact relation to the dps of runekeeper skills. There were two legacies which were causing me confusion. One of those legacies was called “Wrath of Flame Damage Over Time” and the other was called “Fire Skill Damage”. Because every single runekeeper fire skill does damage-over-time and every single runekeeper fire skill is considered a “Wrath of Flame” skill, I found this to be confusing. I thought that there must be a reason behind their separation. I thought that if one effected “Damage over time” specifically, the other must somehow… not do that.
Continue reading Expectation of Balance

The 2% MMO

The one thing I hate in DIKU-style MMOs more than grinding, more than the level cap gear-reset, more than content gating is quite simply bonuses.  I hate bonuses because there is such a delicate balance between the growing player stats and mobs stats up the leveling food chain that the bonuses have to appear to be insignificant.

Take one of the best crafted jewelries in Lord of the Rings Online right now, the glowing aureate band.  It has a bunch of strong stat and morale bumps, along with a stepchild bonus to parry rating.  +124 parry rating is about the equivalent of 0.33% more parry chance.  That means that statistically speaking a player will parry 1 out of every 300 attacks made against him or her.  It seems petty.  Was adding the additional parry rating the item dev’s attempt at a joke? Continue reading The 2% MMO

Dyed-in-the-Wool MMO Health

I like alternative ways to rate things, and it is especially needed for Lord of the Rings Online because Turbine (a privately held company, mind you) does not and will not release subscriber information unless they want to.  My new alternative benchmark for peering behind Turbine’s iron curtain of server populations involves black dye.  Continue reading Dyed-in-the-Wool MMO Health

Voice of the Raid leader

I recently found audio from a particular raid leader who is somewhat famous for screaming obscenities at his raid over voice-chat. Just this morning, I find myself wondering if someone getting that bent out of shape is universally funny, or if it’s only funny to me because I see hints of that behavior in my least favorite raid leaders.

For example, the other night I was in a raid which was going to attempt to take down the Mistress. I’ve never killed the Blind One, let alone the Mistress, so the idea of taking down the final boss of the current raid was pretty cool. Someone in the raid asked for five minutes AFK, which we granted. After twenty minutes, people realized he had fallen asleep at the keyboard, again. All the top dogs in the raid started screaming at the top of their lungs into their microphones hoping to wake him up. After nearly an hour of waiting, we knew we only had one shot to attempt the Mistress before people went back to bed, so we tried to kill her with only eleven people. It didn’t go well

After we had started the fight, our missing raid member came back. He just said, “Back” and asked where everyone was. I don’t think he had any idea how long it had been.

A lot of obscenities were shouted at that moment. It wasn’t funny to me, because I was pretty annoyed myself. But now I wish I had recorded the moment, because some day I may go back and look at that situation and find it the funniest thing since Leroy Jenkins.