Category: Lord of the Rings Online

Today on the Lotro USA boards, a developer asked “What would make you want to log in?  I’ll stay afterhours to build it”  He makes quests, deeds, and areas, so he asked that suggestions be limited to something he could actually do.

I’ve been watching the thread grow all morning.  Unfortunately, I play on the European version of the game, so I can’t post on the American forums, but it’s quite interesting.  How do you say what you want in a quest with just a forum post?  I want content that has a good reward, that is fun to play, that feels good… I want content that doesn’t suck.

It’s easy for me to nit-pick individual game mechanics like a DOT in PVP being removable, or a particular class being overpowered.  But when it comes to world-building, it’s like art.  It’s like trying to describe what kind of painting I’d like.

A few days ago, I was in the 16th Hall.  We were trying to do it in Hard-Mode.  This meant that after a couple of hours of making our way to the last boss in this area, we were going to have to kill the last boss without killing any of the tiny weak little bugs.

Along the way, I accidentally rolled on (and won) a coin for some armor that wasn’t for my class.  I felt like crap about that.  I also accidentally sent my pet to attack an orc I didn’t mean to.  It dragged a whole bunch of orcs back towards us and killed the entire group.  I lied and said my pet had some path-finding issues.  I feel bad about lying, but I felt really emberrassed about killing the group too.

In the final room, we died to the boss the first two times without doing much damage on the boss.  We weren’t doing so well.  On the third time, I set my pet to attack my target instead of passive.  I figured “I’m not going to be attacking any bugs, so this way it’ll attack the boss when I attack it and the mushrooms when I attack those”.  During the fight, our tank was being chased by the bugs.  I threw an AOE debuff on the bugs to keep them from hurting the tank so much.  It was a non-damaging de-buff, but my pet took this to mean I was attacking the bugs.  It flew over to the bug and killed one in a single hit.

We failed hard-mode.  Everyone saw in chat that it was my fault.  The group broke up with a lot of angry people.  I felt like quitting Lotro.  It was awful.  That night, I kept thinking about how good I was in SWG at leading groups through the instances, and how awful a player I am in Lotro.   I found it hard to sleep after that.

That was one group.  Last night I joined another pick-up group.  This pick-up group was for the Turtle raid.  They wanted a loremaster for the power-regen abilities.  I changed my traits and equipment in preperation for the raid.  I had the best food, the best scrolls, and I even used destiny points to purchase temporary buffs.

We fought it and everyone started dying towards the end.  I was the last person standing.  This was mainly because when I died, my eagle brought be back to life.  When this happened, the DOT started over on its timer, and I could survive fairly well.  There was me and a hunter alive when it was at 10k.  I was healing the hunter and giving him power, but the hunter got too close and died when the turtle was at 3k.

It was just me and the turtle.  I was running from it and dotting it.  I typed while I was running around that I was going to solo the turtle.  My health was near empty.  My pots were on cooldown.  The acid damage was ticking away and I was slowly dying.

Everyone was talking in raid chat.  “Kill it!  Kill it!” and “Why are you runing?!?”

Of course, no one questioned my tactics when the turtle finally died to my hand.  I stood triumphant.  Eleven players could only lay on the ground and watch me fight.  I rez’d their minstrels and soon they were all on their feet and celebrating.  The raid leader was even clapping for me and /cheering me.  It didn’t matter to me that there wasn’t anything for a loremaster in the chest at the end.  I had saved the entire raid.

I couldn’t sleep after that.  I’ve been replaying that moment in my head all night and into the morning.  It’s 6:00am now and I still haven’t been to bed.  God… that felt good.  No… it feels good.  For the rest of my character’s life, I’ll remember when she got the killing blow on that turtle.

if you display each user’s post count under their username, then people are going to start posting a lot. If you implement a karma score, then people will try and do things that maximize karma. Not only [is] exposing information about valued work important, not exposing information can also be an important design strategy.
– Xianhang Zhang

If players have achievements they can see, many will go out of their way to get them, and a subset has gotta catch them all. If you let other players see what achievements they have finished, you will see more achievement-seeking. If you only (or more easily) show how many achievements people have completed, they will tend to get the easy ones to drive up that count. If you add varying points for each achievement, you will see min-maxing based on the difficulty-reward of achievements, with forum posts on how achievement x is too easy/difficult for its reward.

In The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, you cannot see how many deeds someone has finished, only their equipped traits. You should expect to see people polishing the virtues they equip and ignoring the ones they do not, because both function and style reinforce that. You cannot see someone’s crafting ranks, but when they added auto-generated forum signatures, crafting ranks were listed on there. I don’t suppose that anyone has the data, but I would expect to see a bit more crafting done after that point, particularly for people more active on the forums (and using the character signatures).

We will also expect some counter-culture blowback: people who do no crafting or avoid achievements specifically so that they have 0s. They just need some way to signal “I am a conscientious objector” rather than “I am a scrub.”

: Zubon