Category: Lord of the Rings Online

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Virtue Caps

Virtues are a category of trait. You can have any five virtues active at once (at higher levels). Each virtue has up to ten ranks, providing three bonuses that scale based on how many ranks you have in that virtue. You gain ranks by completing deeds, such as exploring the farms of the The Shire, finding the lost lore of the Cardolan princes, or slaying wargs in Angmar or the Lone Lands.

Only one deed currently goes all the way to ten, and only since Book 14 went live. More may hit it when the new zone opens up. It is unclear whether they will still stop at 10 with the expansion pack or whether they will scale higher with the higher level cap; otherwise, they become worth relatively less, as 30 Agility is more meaningful at 50 than 60; or not, if the stat cap stays at 500.

If the cap does not rise, we will very soon have more ranks available than necessary. There will be options. This is a neat notion to me. Currently, you have quite a bit ahead of you if you want to cap anything. There is a more or less continuous group going in Sarnur for people farming trolls. You will likely hit the experience cap long long before you run out of quests, and there are always several ways to go about seeking experience. It might be nice to provide similar trait options.

I cannot see anyone killing 360 worms in Ram Duath if there are other options. It might be meaningful to developers to see which deeds fall in the category of “only if I need it, only if there is no other way.” That data is probably spoiled by incorrigible completists like me. Like me and half the other gamers in the world.

: Zubon

Appearance: Achievement or Individualism?

Can you identify the hardest-to-get weapons in your game? How about the tiers of armor for your class? Can you tell how far someone is into the endgame based on what s/he is wearing? This is the standard item-based model of character (appearance) customization. There may be options to make your orc 5% bulkier or give your elf fourteen shades of blue or green eyes, but it will be covered by equipment anyway. Making yourself look interesting is almost always a result of making yourself powerful, and your appearance suggests your capabilities. The guys in those robes heal, and the guys in those robes blow things up, and the guy in that hat is obviously very experienced. Looking good is a reward worth working for, and it immediately commands the appropriate respect from the knowledgeable (and often wonder from the ignorant).

Or is form radically separate from function? City of Heroes gives you almost all the costume items up front. Norrath and Middle Earth have cosmetic tabs for equipment to cover your mismatched raid gear (a half-measure to let you lock in your favorite achievement-based appearance). In a world where the same gesture might be a sword-slash or a fireball-toss, there is no need to connect how something looks to what it does. This allows the maximum of customization and individualization, and it can come as early as you like. I have seen swordfights somewhere between a feline hominid and a lightsaber-wielding lesbian mermaid slave; spectators included several librarians, someone in an oversized cowboy hat, and a robot-thing with a cow levitating over it. None of these had special abilities.

You can cross the two a bit. Item-based systems have dyes for customization, although the colors can still signify wealth levels. Function-free systems can have unlockable pieces or categories, like City of Heroes auras that are available after level 30, costume sets reserved for long-time subscribers, or weapons that require certain badges (and you can bet I show off my Rikti Axe).

Is one better, or is it a matter of taste? I often enjoy a connection between form and function, such as making the meaner monsters bigger. You can even reverse the two standards: have item-based play that does not affect appearance (like Diablo II sockets or City of Heroes enhancements) or non-item play that ties appearance options to accomplishments.

: Zubon

Yeah, I keep citing City of Heroes here. I have played a few years of it, and its costume designer is still the industry benchmark.

Server Issues

Book 14 went live this week. Players have wondered a bit about the “players must do this 1/day quest 70,000 times before the new zone will open.” Depending on how many high-level characters your server has, that is up to a month to unlock. There is more or less continual speculation that the zone is not done, or at least has not been tested.

Something about Book 14 was not tested, because the game has not run properly all week. The mail or auction house might stop working for hours. You might rubberband or hit invisible walls. The invisible walls are the most interesting to me, because they show how the game divides up the zones. Many of the walls align with existing terrain features like shrubs, hills, and fences.

I was in The Shire when the latest wave of server wonkiness hit. I was trying to run the mail quests on a new character, but I could not cross an open field. I ended up mapping the range of those invisible walls, since I ran other miscellaneous quests that took me to the wall on the far west, and I found the corner where it met the south wall. Unfortunately, that was on a slope. Hop down the hill, bounce back, fall, bounce, fall, bounce, motion sickness. /stuck still worked, so it looked like I was tap-dancing in place for the minute it took to engage. And then I was at a loading screen until I alt-tabbed.

Servers went down at least twice on Friday. Depending on your time zone, the current downtime might have come on Friday, too. Servers are down as I type this, a 7 hour downtime on Friday night. Someone is having a late night in Westwood, after the previous fixes failed to take. Either time.

: Zubon

I haven’t seen much that is new, just lots of new rewards for the old. Lots of rebalancing and bug fixes, some new bugs added. I’m not to Book 14 yet. I did the Moria prelude: underwhelming, but it must appeal to some folks’ RP sensibilities. Except that I can still see all the fellowship members, even though I watched them leave. Which is probably necessary since they are the contacts for your legendary trait books.

Frodo, One Year Later

[Original review]

A year ago, I decided not to subscribe to The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢. The option for Founder’s pricing ($200/lifetime) made other payment plans look like bum deals, and I was not then convinced that the game was worth playing for enough months to justify it. If I had known then what the game would look like today, I would have recommended buying the lifetime account. Founder’s pricing is again available, and available anytime from an existing Founder’s account holder, so I now own a lifetime account to The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢.

The game vaults the “worth playing” bar, with prospects for better things to come. No, it is not revolutionary. It is EQ/WoW/DikuMUD with graphics: Yet Another Fantasy MMORPG. But it is a quality implementation of that model of play, with excellent graphics, support for several playstyles, better roleplay options than in most games, and plenty of little fun things. It has a PvP game that I, an EASK, enjoy and play regularly.

There is a great sense of a world, particularly coming from the heavily-instanced City of Heroes. The quests set the right tone as you move from the safe homelands through hard-pressed borderlands and into enemy-controlled territory. There is more content in each area than you need to outlevel it, so there is much to explore and content for replay.

Continue reading Frodo, One Year Later

How Alts Happen

I made a Minstrel a week ago so I could pick up a couple more trade skills. He holds stuff, he eventually crafts, great! I got him in the kinship today, so that I could use the kin storage chests to transfer items. I went on a trade skills supply run across a few zones, then went back to kin storage to transfer it.

After logging on the other characters for their toys, I brought on the baby Minstrel. He had done nothing outside the tutorial area except pick up the quests when you first enter the real world. Grab all his stuff from the kin box, and head to Thorin’s Hall. I can hit the vault there and maybe crunch some of these trade skill supplies into points. Oh, cave claw along the way, lets zap him to get a click on the deed log. *bing* Oh, I have a quest that needs some of those. Hmm, and I need this cave to the north. I can hit that before swinging by Thorin’s Gate. Fight goblins on the way up, collect the items in the cave, fight goblins on the way down. *bing* First deed complete, basic goblin-slayer in Ered Luin (new title). And I hit level 7 along the way.

Hmm, those cave claws and the items I picked up are half of two quests. I can redeem them at Thorin’s Hall, so let’s get the other halves before heading in. Zip across, collect a few items, whack a few enemies along the way. Quest done, done, done, trade skill quest done with the items I transferred at the kin chest. Let’s do my own trade skill stuff, which gives me a new weapon, oh and that other quest done. Just a couple more quests before I’m done in the area, so I might as well clean up and move on. Quest done, level 8.

Run along to the next town, drop off quest done, done, done. One is a click-and-come-back, and it passes me by another quest (done), so let’s clear that river and … small detour, talk to that guy after clearing the river (done), head back. Hit a few birds and cats along the way to get another quest half-done. And back to that second town, another quest done, level 9. And somewhere in there I completed another deed, the first for completing quests in Ered Luin.

Luckily, I am out of blue bar (rested xp), so I can go to bed now. But tomorrow, if I want, I can finish the quests that take me from here back through the starter area and back, then the first group quest and on to the middle-sized city in the middle of the zone… And I’m 3/4 of the way through the first bar of a trade skill, so I just need a bit more bronze to finish that out… And so it goes.

: Zubon

Also Annoyingly Linear

The problem with annoyingly linear is not that it is linear, but that it is annoyingly so. Done well: Portal, a puzzle game where the whole point is to get from Point A to Point B. Done not too badly: the last level of Portal, where the tile set changes but there is still just the one path and someone has conveniently painted signs as if this too were a planned part of the enrichment center activity.

Done fairly badly: City of Heroes office buildings, where each set of elevators only goes between two floors. To get to his office on the top floor, the boss must walk about a mile and take five or ten staircases (on the strange multi-story floors). The shapes of the floors have no connection to each other, despite the normal outside appearance. Darn non-Euclidean architects. This one is bad in terms of logic and suspension of disbelief, not gameplay; as a gameplay element, the buildings are fairly straightforward tubes of monster to smash. The gameplay problem is when things are less linear, and you must find the last three enemies standing behind a rock around a corner on a small incline on a spur off the third path on the second level, who did not notice when you fired some grenades and a sonic wail at their boss twenty feet away.

Done badly: Garth Agarwen in Middle Earth’s Lone Lands. Garth Agarwen is an outdoor instance, your group’s own chunk of the red swamp. There are a few loops and dead-ends, and a fork separating the two big bosses, but mostly it is a path that winds around itself. It faces the same strange architecture whereby you go through every room to get to the back. It is as if you took all the hallways out of your home and put a door on either side of each room. And sometimes the door is a trapdoor leading to your basement, then up to the catwalk you built near the ceiling to get to the trapdoor up into the bathroom, through the door in the back of the shower into the laundry room, slide the oven aside to get into kitchen, take the door to the kids’ room, out the window into a fenced portion of the backyard, climb the ladder to the top of the shed, then walk across the board into your bedroom window to get your cell phone, which already went to voice mail, dangit. Was that oven-slide a one-way passage? I need to use the bathroom. It might be faster to jump out the other bedroom window and walk around to the front door, assuming the dogs haven’t respawned.

Again, this is not necessarily bad gameplay, although it is annoying to see a teammate just above your jumping height when you know it will take a hundred yards of running to reach him. Could you just throw me a rope? Or when you shoot an enemy and must wait a minute while he navigates all those corners on the way to you. Or when you try to think about the enemy actually living there. Okay, it’s annoying.

: Zubon

PvMP at the Minimum Level

Don’t do that. Do not even step into the Moors unless you are level 45 or higher. 50 and well-equipped is strong. 50 is normal. 47-49 is training: at least 90% effective, as far as the red team is concerned. 44-46 is bait: weak targets, easy kills, not significant threats. 40-43 is insulting: red players will go out of their way to kill you.

Seriously, creeps eat freeps below level 45. Even a new creep does not have bad odds with a five-level advantage. The voice chat channel notices every 40-43 in the zone. We target you first because you do not belong there. “There’s that Hunter again. Welcome to the Moors!”

More amusingly, you frequently see lower-level freeps soloing in the Moors, trying to complete the assorted PvE quests. Idiots. If the creeps catch you trying to ride to Hoarhallow, they will call in friends just for the fun of encircling you, then they will wait for you to rez and try to come back. Most freeps stop after the second or third death, but easy infamy is always accepted. If you are hunting wolves, you may notice a Blackarrow setting you on fire. If you hide in Hoarhallow or Elf Camp, the creeps can survive the NPCs for long enough to catch you.

It is always worth the time and effort to prey on the weak.

: Zubon

Please Balance Based on That

Last time, I suggested that The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ PvMP should not balance based on the idea that the creeps will eventually (and then forever) be high rank, since it will take most people years and years to hit rank 9. I failed to note that freeps gets their comparable abilities, and more of them, in weeks rather than years.

But you notice that the high-rank stuff is not all that much better than the low-rank stuff. +2% chance to crit is nice, but it is far from epic. An ability you can use every five minutes or only below 10% health can be interestingly powerful, but it is not a major part of your arsenal.

So we look at the freep PvMP armor and equipment. Don’t get me wrong, this stuff is pretty nice. Not all of it is as nice as level 45 quest rewards, which is kind of an issue, but it is not all trash. Many “ideal” equipment builds include a few pieces. But you again need to be rank 9 or higher to use all of it. Even when freeps get 1000 reknown per hour, level 60 equipment will be available before 100 freeps in the entire game hit rank 9. Rank 9 requires a longer grind than getting all of WoW’s raid dungeons on farm status. Affording the items requires a separate grind in the dungeon that is available only when your team is winning in PvMP (same for getting the high-rank creep stuff). That is a lot of effort for a piece that you might stick on a cosmetic armor slot.

: Zubon

Lazy Fellowship

Frodo, Aragorn, and the rest have been standing around Rivendell for a year. No big hurry on that Ring thing, eh? Boromir is the only one who seems to be impatient with the waiting. The test server notes mention that your next epic side quest will be to help the fellowship get ready to head to Moria. Maybe we can get more hides for blankets and feathers to fluff their pillows. There are no farms within two zones, and Elrond must running low on that magic bread. I bet they will still be standing around Rivendell when the servers shut down.

Some people.

: Zubon