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.Summer is here and that can mean only one thing, the Lithe Festival has come to the Shire.
One of my favorite parts of the festival, besides getting away from the trolls for a while, is the fishing contests.
If only there were prizes given for the most goldfish caught or maybe listening to a dockworker make astute observations, I would have won big.
But really, catching goldfish in a river has got to be a pretty special talent.
– Ethic
In Lotro I now have two max level characters. This is good. One would think this would give me more flexibility when looking to fill an open slot for the new raid. But it doesn’t.
I still don’t have the last two pieces of radiance gear I need to enter the new raid. The entire time I was leveling up my Runekeeper, I kept an eye on the global LFF channel to see if there were any groups forming for the pieces I needed. When you think of it, it’s rather ridiculous to think that it’s far easier to max out a new character than it is to get the tier-1 raiding gear. The EU servers went down tonight for the new raids, and I’m afraid that neither of my max level characters can enter the new raid.
I don’t mind the idea of doing some requirements first before getting into the new content, but those requirements shouldn’t be such a major pain to accomplish. I can’t say for sure, as I haven’t experienced the book 8 raid, but I doubt that every boss in there is tougher than the hard-mode challenge faced at the end of Dark Delving or 16th Hall. If only I had obtained my radiance gear before they fixed the exploits like everyone else!
I’m not alone, of course. All my friends who came over from Star Wars Galaxies don’t have the necessary armor either. We came much too late for the Rift, and just a little too late to get the gear we needed to see the Watcher and Book 8. If they were all 60, we could probably make our way through the radiance gear instances without exploiting them. They’re great players, and we conquered the SWG content together.
I’m now faced with a choice. Either I can try to catch up with the new content or I can wait for my friends to catch up with me.
Most death penalties come down to lost time, in its various incarnations of lost experience points, item repairs, corpse runs, and debuffs. As death penalties become increasingly light, one type almost invariably remains: you wasted the time you spent failing, and now you need to run back to continue. (If you die in a group, you may just sit out a while until rezzed, hoping your group does not wipe at -1 member, or a shorter time with -2 members during the rez.)
This time-to-return can be very important. If it is very short, and the death penalty is otherwise small, you zerg things: just keep dying and coming back until you get through it. It is a measure of how far we have gotten past meatspace that we can now intuitively see solutions that include “die and come back” as part of viable plans. To take the first few examples that come to mind: our LotRO static group wiped on an overpull with adds last week, but ran back to clear it easily since we had taken out 75% of the enemies on the first try; LotRO three-man instances are short enough for people to die and come back while someone keeps the boss from resetting, and some turtle-raiding strategies involve planned deaths to reset the stacking DoTs; fights against CoX archvillains and giant monsters often involve multiple resurrections and hospital runs/teleports, and the Hamidon raid usually involves planned near-wipes.
This is usually not a good thing for the game. Continue reading Player Respawn Timers
Book 8 is live. When you log in, the Summer Festival will have started. But how do you know what and where everything is, especially if you are not a forum-reader? When you log in, you will have mail waiting. You get “Invitation to the Summer Festival.” It starts the quest “Invitation to the Summer Festival.” This tells you what city to visit to start, and the quest guide will take you straight to the spot. The quest awards the Summer Festival Guide, the fishing intro letter (in case you forgot how to fish), and a free festival token.
This is a good way to introduce people to the event. *clap*
: Zubon
(Known Issues with the new patch.)
I’ve been jumping into every group for the 16th Hall that I could get. I still need the token from there. This is the instance I talked about screwing up earlier. The one where my pet killed a small bug and I wasted hours of people’s lives. Well, since that time I’ve become much better as a player. I’ve spent so many hours trying to clear this damn instance that I know it like the back of my hand.
I felt so overwhelmed the first time. Now I know not just my own role, but what everyone else should be doing as well. Tonight was the second night in the row of attempting the 16th hall. We got to the end, and this time, our guardian was lack-luster. He was anonymous, which I immediately take to mean, “Don’t look at me, my equipment sucks”. Sure enough, his equipment and traits sucked. Every time we went into the boss fight, he was dead within 30 seconds and I ended up tanking the boss every time we went in. In my head a voice was nagging, “I wear light armor, I’m a lore-master, I shouldn’t be tanking this boss every time.”
It reminds me of Exar Kun in Star Wars Galaxies. Yes, the Exar Kun instance. It’s the toughest instance in the game. I knew every strategy in every room in that place. But I needed tanks who could do their job, and commandos who could run the elements successfully. One day, in the last room of Exar Kun, there was this commando guy and I needed him to tank something
When the fight started, the commando was nowhere near his assigned position. So where did the boss he was supposed to be tanking go? To me, the medic. This left me doing several people’s jobs at once. With each of the four bosses, I was involved in some way. I was attacking the Promised with everything I had, while ping-pong tanking both the Lingering and the Embraced. And while all of this was going on, I was hovering my mouse over the Unquenchable every 3 seconds to see which element that boss was vulnerable to and calling it out over voice chat. All of this I was doing while spamming my group-heals.
Again, a voice in my head was saying, “I’m the medic… I shouldn’t be tanking anything. I shouldn’t have to call the elements for the person who’s job it is to run them.”
I can learn an instance well, given enough times in it. But you know what? I’m only going to see an instance that many times if it’s incredibly difficult to get together a team capable of doing it successfully. It’s the same in 16th hall. Our hunter was fantastic. Our minstrel was great. And I like to think that I performed admirably. But that’s only half a team. So we were destined to fail. Three hours down the drain.
The funny thing is… the more I compare this to Exar Kun, the better I feel about it. I have fond memories of the journey from being one of the people who sucked at instances to one of the most popular group leaders on our server. When I think of it like that, the idea of dying in this instance over and over doesn’t feel so bad. Eventually, we found the people we needed to do a competent job, befriended them, and got them into the instances.
When our failed run had ended and the group broke up, our minstrel sent me a tell. He wanted to know if he could add me and my alts to his friend’s list so that he could call on me for future runs….
Ahh…. good times.
The game will introduce a mechanic to you early on, something perhaps unusual but reasonable in context. Over time, the game will expand from its simpler beginnings. By then, you will be so used to the mechanic that you will rarely pause to notice that it makes absolutely no sense in its new or expanded context.
Example: The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ uses “morale” instead of health. You don’t die, you just get too disheartened to continue, and you must rally. Sure, goblin spears to the ribs hurt, but you can keep fighting so long as your morale does not flag. A Minstrel’s songs raise your spirits, and you carry on. Then you start meeting trolls, the sort that would crush your skull and limbs with their giant clubs and rocks. You could conceivably rally through a few broken ribs. Then you get to poisoned water that instantly drains all your “morale.” Insta-death from morale drain? Then you get to lava flows, where you burn to death and your armor melts. Life is just a song away!
Example: pills in Left 4 Dead. Reasonable for ignoring scattered cuts and bruises, and then someone starts carving a hole in your chest.
I wanted to use Katamari Damacy as an example, when you start rolling up clouds as if they were huge sheets of plywood and fire that still burns, but Katamari Damacy is sufficiently insane to defy logic anyway. Instead, tell us your favorite example from your current game. Telling riddles to wolves? Backstabbing buildings? Tripping gelatinous cubes?
: Zubon
Players take breaks from MMOs. Some are short, and there is no reason to stop subscribing or to uninstall. Others are more on the sabbatical nature. The latter is usually accompanied by some sort of burnout, boredom, or other negative feeling resulting in a far longer break than the usual refresh.
There are reasons to return, and the biggest are usually the game changing, world-expanding expansions. But, I don’t want to talk about those because their very nature is set to get players to return. I want to talk about the free content updates and maintenance updates. Continue reading Reason to Return
Another person from my SWG guild has joined us in Lotro. Although not all have actually continued playing, that’s the 6th person from our old guild to follow us over. Each of these people have been admitted to our current kinship. In the kinship’s teamspeak server, we often out-number the original crew. It’s beginning to feel like we are slowly taking over the guild we joined.
It’s not that any of us are officers… we don’t get to decide rules or anything. But the topics of conversation and the mood of the kinship is influenced by the conversations we have with each other. For the veteran players, the game is stale, old, and far too much of a grind. For us the game is complicated, new and exciting. We’ve actually contemplated creating our own separate kinship. In fact, we did. But we only put our alts in it for now. It’s something to fall back on if our current kinship doesn’t work out.
Even if we are not officially a separate kinship, we clearly act like one. We group with each other and help each other out. We talk to each other about old times and send each other crafted goods. We are all so close-knit. We started playing this game at the same time, and we started playing our last MMO together at roughly the same time. By contrast, most of the other people in the kinship started playing Lotro two years ago.
Will we ever feel this closeness to the veteran players of our kinship? I don’t know… but I honestly doubt it.
With my time returning to World of Warcraft, I have come to the same conclusion, independently, that much of the blogosphere seems to already know: the thing that will kill World of Warcraft is World of Warcraft. Their hubris will be their downfall. This will be, unfortunately and as hopelessly optimistic as I was in starting this, my last degree of WoW.
My biggest worry when re-entering World of Warcraft after having not played it for three years was the feeling of playing catch up the entire time. I am a very casual player. I like to get in grind mode occasionally for loot or leveling, but I also like to explore both areas and quests.  I had plenty to explore in World of Warcraft. However, I would be exploring mostly alone. I saw people here and there on both my blood elf in the blood elf starting zone and death knight in the outlands, but it was almost awkward. It was as if we did not really expect to see each other there, and secretly did not want to. It felt kind of like meeting an old high school buddy at the mall.
On global chat and guild chat, I continually saw the nightly events for some raid (mostly max-level Ulduar), but I never saw anything for Outlands. I tried to get a group for “ramps,” some early dungeon in the Outlands. After 15 minutes on a Friday night, I managed to get one other death knight in my party. I could not take this type of gameplay any longer. It actually destroyed my will to play MMOs for a weekend.
This is how WoW will eat itself. Players just starting or returning and 20 levels behind will hit a lonely cliff face. At the top they will hear something of a party, but the climb is long. This is not something a developer should want. If anything a returning player should be surrounded with activity. Continue reading WoW will eat itself
Today my husband and I joined a guild mate in an instance called Carn Dum. This used to be the place to go, before they raised the level cap. We joined a few hours after they started and stayed for two or three bosses over the course of two hours. Earlier in the week, we joined a kinship group of level 60’s who were going through the rift for the heck of it. Like Carn-Dum, it was once the thing to do… but now the glorious rift-armor is out-dated. A week before that, I went through Helegrod in a 24-person loremaster raid. Yes, it was a raid of pure loremasters just for the heck of it.
It’s mind boggling to think of how much content Lotro has which is now out-dated and pointless. I’m looking forward to them raising the level cap so that I can play something other than the same-old instances… but I also know that such an action will immediately make all the rare rewards I’m working towards a full 10 levels below the quest-rewards of the new content.
Why couldn’t the instances and their rewards level with me? I’d love to see the Rift and Carn-Dum balanced for level 60s. And it’d be nice if the rewards from the rift could be traded in for something more appropriate for level 60s. It doesn’t have to be the best armor in the game… go ahead and let the new content have that. But god, I get tired of the same old instances and I hate to think that new stuff will always out-date old stuff.
