I’ve thought long and hard about how to write this letter and I just can’t think of a nicer way to put it: I’m leaving you. Wait, before you get upset and say that I didn’t give you enough of a chance, I need you to hear me out. This past month and change has been a lot of fun; for both of us, I think. Your new player introduction is nicely framed as an entry to the game in a way I didn’t even realize I was in a tutorial instance for a while, which is not something I can say happens often. You know you’re not the first, but you were the best in that aspect. It was just you and I, but that’s what was almost magical, in a non-wizardly way of course due to lore, about it. And when you gave me my first title after just a little while together…I really felt touched.
Category: Lord of the Rings Online
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.50 Reasons Lord of the Rings Sucks
I know this is old, but since we have a lot of The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢ fans here, I thought I would point out the list:
The Orcs were obviously stolen from PC game maker Blizzard and its Warcraft series. Too bad Blizzard is apparently too scared to sue New Line over it.
There are some spoilers, in case you missed the whole Tolkien thing. Oh wait, you know what other game it rips off?
The character of Elrond was based on Agent Smith from The Matrix.
That’s right, fanboy, your game is a lousy rip-off of The Matrix Online.
: Zubon
Still Thinking About Session Play
Dude! A chicken! lol!
: Zubon
The Great Value Inversion
Any other trade skill aficionados in the house? Between crafting and badges, I could go through entire games without killing things. I look at my time in A Tale in the Desert, and I wonder how much money I spent for the privilege of pretending to make charcoal. Good times.
Tuebit at WorldIV has some The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Shadows of Angmarâ„¢-specific discussion of one of the great problems crafters face: raw materials are worth more than finished products. Go, read, see how gold ingots are worth 0.005 gold each; how treating raw wood (the only thing you can do with raw wood) makes it fall in value; and how you can reduce the value of your raw materials by 85%, simply by making a finished product. Now you know why you can carry huge stacks of metal ingots around: each is far far smaller than a gold piece.
People are paying to make progress in a profession that is so wholly un-enjoyable it is preferable to not play that profession, but rather, to grind cash and, in effect, purchase the profession.
Very strange.
: Zubon
LoTRO Cancelled: CS and Tech Support Matters!
My wife and I have ended our time in Middle Earth.  Sadly, we were really enjoying ourselves, and would have easily made the level cap, but after Book 10, I started to experience some very bad technical problems running the game, and despite numerous attempts to get the problem fixed through all of the available tech support channels offered by Turbine, I hit brick wall after brick wall, and simply called it quits.
Developers grab a sticky note and a pen, because here is a tip just for you: CS and Tech Support matters!Â
Continue reading LoTRO Cancelled: CS and Tech Support Matters!
LoTRO tries too hard
While I’ve been nuttily busy, a friend passed me a 10-day trial code for LoTRO. I had mentioned previously that this is pretty much the only major MMORPG I hadn’t played, and so I felt I had to give it a try. Summary: It’s a decent game, but it tries too hard to please too many people, and thus ends up leaving some wanting.
Spin To Win
“…the Hottest MMO of the Year”
“…the second largest MMORPG”
What game is this? No, not that one. Guess again. Give up? It’s Lord of the Rings Online, at least according to the latest press release. 4 million characters? What does that even mean? I have 5 characters. Lets even assume everyone has 4 characters, that translates to 1 million subscriptions. Are they counting people that cancelled? Free trials? Where do they get these numbers?
Oh look here – way at the bottom: “Comparison data includes subscription-based MMORPG titles developed in North America based on reported data.”
I am more interested in seeing how these companies spin the statistics than almost any other aspect of the game.
– Ethic
LotRO: Book 10
I just wanted to put a quick preview of what we can expect next week when Book 10: The City of Kings goes live on August 20th.  My first impression of this feature list is, ‘How in the hell did they put all of that together in the two months since Shores of Evendim?!?’
Not only that, but they have promised the third installment in their content update schedule, Book 11, will be released in October and will in include the much awaited Player Housing.
Detailed update notes pulled from the test realm, Roheryn, after the jump.
~Cyndre
Chicken-Play Research
I somehow failed to mention that the Annals of Improbable Research has a paper directly relevant to session play. This could help Turbine work out some issues in advance. For those of you not interested in reading some fairly academic research, there is a video of the author presenting a summary at a conference.
: Zubon
Why did the chicken cross the Lone-Lands?
As jokes go, the punchline to this is going to be a huge letdown. So let’s make like an goblin raiding party and move swiftly on.
The recent news about the forthcoming “session play” was greeted with mixed feelings amongs the community, not least this one. While the introduction of player Trolls and Rangers in the Ettenmoors PvP zone was understood, there remained a big “why?” with respect to the introduction of player controlled chickens.
In an interview with GameSpy, Creative Director Cardell Kerr gives a little bit more of an insight into the thinking behind this decision, amongst other musings on the games future:
Chicken play is an experimental prototype for the eventual inclusion of other time-limited Monster-play type classes in the game’s PvE zones. “This all started because we were thinking about a monster-play style quest in which the player plays as a wounded orc trying to get back to his camp after the attack on Trestlebridge,” Kerr said. The problem, according to Kerr, was figuring out how to control the presence of evil player characters outside of the Ettenmoors in PvE zones. This is an issue the development team has been wrestling with for a long time and it’s one he admits that the team hasn’t figured out how to solve….Chicken play is the first step in figuring this out.
So there we have it. Let the discussion commence.