Category: Lord of the Rings Online

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After Book 7

My level 60 character is a Hunter. After Book 7, I re-traited her for speed and sustainability (Huntsman line) because the damage (Bowmaster) trait set was nerfed. If you take a 25% damage nerf, roll with it. I tried Lorien and the new epic book, discovering that it was an easy weekend worth of content. Which leaves me nothing new to do with her for a few months except grinding. The Battle of Lorien is enjoyable. I could stockpile Lorien barter items, in hopes that the legendary class items become worthwhile, but that is not terribly compelling right now. I should probably hit The Watcher a few times, try for some shinier toys, but I am still not compelled. The only thing left that I really want to try is the new turtle raid, but that is turned off (for now (odds on its staying up this time?)).

While weapon damage took a big hit, tactical (magic) damage received a large boost. Conveniently, my next-highest character is a Minstrel, and I had been wanting to try a Runekeeper. Decreased Hunter damage, increased magic damage, and several weekends with bonus experience pushed me to playing alts.

My Minstrel gained eleven levels, ran through the epic books, and is currently parked in the cave for 1.13.9 until I get a group for that quest. I may become more interested in him again after that, as I finish Volume One and move him to Moria. Or maybe not. Good damage, good survivability, and his current level range is when monsters took the greatest hit (in health, resistances, etc.) in Book 7. It is nice not to have induction times on my attacks, although grouping becomes annoying as my healing inductions are constantly set back by the enemies attacking me. Some groups are good about keeping enemies off the healer. Those groups are too far apart.

Continue reading After Book 7

Forochel

Going through Forochel a second time, it shares some of the merits of Eregion, combining them with other merits and flaws. The epic quest chain takes you through Forochel in a way that tours the zone well, but it remains an optional area that is out of sync with the leveling path. It makes a better use of the reputation system than any other zone, providing a model for how reputation would work in Moria (less so in Lorien). Having roamed on my first character, I found it a surprisingly tightly built zone on my second pass. Sadly, it is now almost entirely irrelevant to the game.

Continue reading Forochel

Hang out spots

When I first started playing Star Wars Galaxies, I noticed there were certain “hang-out” spots in each city.  Even if you went to a different server, the hang-out spots were exactly the same.  I thought it was weird because back then, you could choose to start in any city on any planet.   There were no quest-hubs to draw anyone to any place in particular.

After thinking about what all the hang-spots had in common, I came to realize that gamers are very lazy creatures.  If the game mechanics didn’t force a player to go somewhere to hang out, they would hang out wherever they loaded in.  This meant the main hang-out in every city was the starport.  The developers tried to force people into the cantina’s by giving them a nasty debuff called “battle fatigue” that could only be slowly removed in certain locations.  They also tried to force people into hospitals to have their other crippling debuffs removed.  But even if these locations were 30 seconds away from the load-in spot, people wouldn’t make the journey.

You can’t artificially create game-mechanics to force players to hang out somewhere.  Oh, you can try, but leaving the load-in spot to go have a medic remove my wounds in the hospital was about as much fun as waiting in line at the DMV.  If they really wanted players to hang out in the hospital, then they should have made the hospital the place you load into after you die.  But they didn’t.  You woke up as a clone,  if I remember.  A wounded clone…. or something.

By contrast, everyone hangs out inside the Prancing Pony in Lotro.  Could the developers behind SWG believe that players use instruments to play music there on a daily basis without being forced to grind “entertainer xp”?  The Prancing Pony has several reasons it’s a hang out spot.  First of all, there’s a mile-stone right outside to make it a possible load-in location.  Second, the beginning of the Epic quest line forces you to go there several times.  Third, there are many amenities inside such as a barber, vendors, and a bard, so people can stop off there for multiple reasons.  And of course, it’s a memorable location from the books/movies.

Star wars Galaxies, if you want people to hang out in a cantina, let me land on the roof!  Put in bazaar terminals, mission terminals, bank terminals, and bounty-hunter terminals inside it, and then make the cantina the default place to land when coming from another planet.  Basically, if you let me load in and get my stuff done without having to move my little virtual legs, then I might consider hanging out there.

Eregion

Going through Eregion a second time, without the full weight of Mines of Moriaâ„¢ expectations, I found it to be a rather straightforward, enjoyable zone. It is placed horribly in the zone progression, but it features a clear structure, a small story, a coherent layout, a few new mechanics, two new monster types, and strong solo content. It does not feature much group content, and adventuring there is entirely optional except as a pass-through to Moria. Eregion notably ends with the two three-man instances, the School and Library.

Continue reading Eregion

Sets of Sets

The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Volume Two: Mines of Moriaâ„¢ introduced many quests and deeds that are sets and sets of sets. What does Zubon mean by that, and why does he like it more for deeds than quests?

Take 2.5.5, in which you defend three places in Moria. You get one quest, and the goal of that quest is to complete three sub-quests. You now have four quests in your quest log, and as you complete the first three, it checks off the objectives on the frame quest.

Deeds work similarly but invisibly. When you finish all the deeds in a Moria instance, you are awarded a hidden deed and title for doing so. Hurray, you are a Curator of the Forgotten Treasury! There is a hidden deed for exploring all of Moria; you complete this by completing all the exploration deeds in Moria; you complete these by reaching all the exploration spots listed on those deeds. These are neat little bonuses, and I would like to see previous zones and instances retrofitted with them. But then, I like deeds, and getting deeds for getting deeds is meta-joy. (Was Annuminas the first of these hidden set deeds?)

Why are quests less successful? You can have as many deeds in progress as you like. Quests are more limited. Consider the quests for the six radiance instances. The Twenty-First Hall has two quests to go help people in those instances. Each of those quests is to go help several people with quests in those instances. Some of those quests are to help the person in multiple ways. The Grand Stair is the big one here: if you complete all the quests, you will receive more than half a gold piece in quest rewards because: Alice tells you to help Alice, Bob, Carl, and Dan; Alice wants you to fight fire orcs and their boss; Bob wants you to fight goblins and their bosses; Carl wants you to fight shadow orcs and their boss; Dan wants you to fight orcs and trolls, each of which is a pair of quests to fight them and their boss. All of that is one checkbox on the top-level quest to go help in the radiance instances. In a way, this is neat. In another way, good golly I need more quest space. I decided against seeing if I could cancel the top-level quests and pick them back up for insta-credit after completing the sub-quests.

But back to deeds, you get another quest slot for every 40 deeds you complete. More deed-hunting!

: Zubon

Individual Expression or Group Coherence?

I thought that limited class options helped pick-up groups in The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ while making City of Heroes PUGs sometimes vulnerable to ineffective “concept” builds. Ravious commented that Guild Wars PUGs were improved by being able to see what skills other people were using, with the implication that you could educate the newbs or avoid people who look useless. (For the unfamiliar: you equip one bar of abilities in Guild Wars, and that is all you can use until you go back to town and change your bar. Many options, few available at once.) These experiences suggest to me that putting characters in small boxes lets you build things more easily.

Is this trade-off I am proposing between ease of grouping and narrowness of class roles a false dilemma? Can you have highly flexible character roles and still have the ability to assemble groups quickly? DC and Champions Online have both planned to bridge this divide by having roles that change on the fly instead of classes. That is, you build your character with “fire hammer,” “healing flames,” “fire shield,” and “blinding smoke,” and have a dial that makes you a DPS, tank, or support class. If you turn it to DPS, you deal more damage, but take a defensive penalty (alternately: set the dial to give only bonuses and not mention that the penalty is built in).

If the trade-off exists, which direction should your game take? I am a fan of individual expression, but as a game designer I would be more interested in seeing people play together frequently and smoothly. Bind people to each other, make cooperative play in your game a good thing, and let social factors help you retain players. This is why you add bottlenecks, downtime, and forced grouping: bring people together for interaction and bonding. Or maybe this is all crap, because WoW made its billions as an extremely solo-friendly game, but then the end-game is entirely raid-centric, forcing people into class roles.

Do you like being able to over-specialize? Planned supergroups in City of Heroes are awesome. Brutal Speed was a simple City of Villains idea: Corruptors with Kinetics, Brutes with AE attacks, everyone with Leadership, no one with knockback. A standard group was any 5 Brutes and any 3 Corruptors, with no further thought needed. No one needed to take Hasten or Stamina, because you always had 3 Speed Boosts available. And the little Leadership toggle bonuses stacked nicely when everyone had them. In The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢, our Casualties of War group has low DPS because we all went with tanks and support classes. Why go for that soloing build if you will always have a group available?

: Zubon

Alts as Travel Management

The epic quest chain likes to have a central contact who sends you to all corners of Middle-earth. And back. And out and back again. You go from A to B to A to C to B to A to D to A to somewhat near A to A to B to A to… I am getting used to paying large amounts of silver for slow horse rides, now that I am leveling up non-Hunters, but some places do not have stables. Your map back to A has a one-hour cooldown.

I deal with this by having alts. Log on a character, play until you run out of convenient travel options, then move to the next. If my gaming session is long enough, and it often is, I can cycle back to earlier characters to do a few more steps in the quest chain. If I am feeling really ambitious, I can map them all home before work, so they will be there with minty fresh timers when I get home.

Completely destructive of immersion, flow, grouping, and social interaction? Sure, but when the game would otherwise insert a 12-minute travel break (actual time from Rivendell to Echad Dunann on a stable horse), it is not much worse to round that up to an hour and play another character, which might be more fun than waiting on a horse. You can clear dread similarly.

: Zubon

Turbine’s Recent Technical Record

  • Release Volume Two, Book Seven, a content-light patch that breaks, among other things, pet and enemy pathing in several zones, placing some targets in permanent anti-exploit mode.
  • Add a more reliable way to get Second Age legendary items. Between the test and live servers, change the reward table so that it is less reliable.
  • Let players complete a quest 20,000 times per server to unlock a new raid. Never put it on the public test server, open it with broken lockout timers, and shut it down within twelve hours.
  • Release the Spring Festival. Shut down the horse race within twelve hours.
  • Launch a “welcome back weekend” so that more players can see these. Start a log-in queue.
  • Their web sites and other games were unexpectedly down for an extra twenty hours or so, but eh, that happens during a datacenter move.
  • Realease an April Fool’s event. Shut it down within twelve hours.

There are many good things mixed in here, like a pretty zone and a very successful Spring Festival maze. But you do not say, “Most of the links in this chain are adequately strong.”

: Zubon

Update: and now log-in issues, which render the rest moot. Good communication on that issue, though.