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.In a different part of the cash shop, LotRO has its weekly free sample. I forgot about this until earlier this year. This week, it is a free Greater Skill Deed Boost when you use the coupon code BVHH66. Just one, but they have tempted me to log on an alt and macro a skill deed or two to completion.
: Zubon
Because, hey, free stuff
Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) is an MMO with a few gray hairs showing. It’s not dying, fools that think that, but it is an old game that requires a certain agility to stay alive. It appears that in doing so Turbine is going back on their word that they would not sell armor with stats attached. Turbine’s Sapience responded that “[m]any players have given us feedback that there is a sparcity of [lower level] gear on the AH at these levels and they wanted an alternative. We’re trying to accomodate that.”
The Tier 3 versions appear to be on-level somewhere in the level 20-30 range. This isn’t low level armor, this is super low level armor. I tend to think that anything below 50 is definitively “low level” so Tier 3 versions won’t even last players through all the low-levels. So this offering is clearly not “pay to win.” It’s barely “pay to accelerate through much-needed leveling.”
What I am disappointed in is how Turbine handled it. First, they went back on their word. They are allowed to do that, but if they want to seem “not shady” then they should have preemptively issued a statement as to why. Some statement even just repeating what Sapience said above would at least show they weren’t going to slide this in without acknowledging they were crossing a line they had made. Continue reading [LOTRO] New In-Store Armors
I am significantly behind the herd in Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) since I took my prodigal sabbatical just a little after Enedwaith’s release. I think what really ran me off was the early parts of Book 2 (Vol. 3) in getting the rangers to even get to Enedwaith from Eriador. In hindsight I should have enjoyed some of Enedwaith and then returned back to the epic line of quests.
I have just completed perhaps a third to a half of Enedwaith coming from the North downward as I haphazardly follow the Book quests. I must say that I am really enjoying the design of this zone. It feels like a refreshing return. There is the old comfortable with a bit of new flash. It is actually getting me pretty excited to hit Dunland, the next zone.
The story of Enedwaith is one of flux. Rangers in the Grey Company are traveling southward trying to ensure a safe route through tribal lands. The tribes are dealing with enemies and allies of the Grey Company, Saruman the White, and other tribes themselves. And, so far, the Enemy seems to have less of a stabilized power base than the half-orc companies in Eregion to the North. The theme of this zone is really well done, at least in the northern half of the zone. I will have to see if it changes as I hit the main town and a possible dwarven area. Continue reading [LOTRO] Go Your Own Enedwaith
My captain is legendary. His name has been sung across Eriador, in the depths of Moria, and his legend is swiftly growing east of the Misty Mountains. The captains latest tales tell of crippling Dol Guldur’s armies. During his journey into Enedwaith, he happened upon a lost colony of hobbits. Good folk living on their own in some small canyonlands. Some big, armored galoomph comes along, and what do they ask of this god walking among mere mortals to do as a token of friendship. Well this picture has a couple dozen words:
Turbine devs doing this kind of reminds me what Viktor Taransky (Pacino) did to his digitally created star in the movie Simone. I expect to be cleaning horse stalls in Rohan as part of mounted combat pre-training.*
–Ravious
*mounted combat not confirmed, as far as I know.
I deftly evaded the siren song of the Dark Side (for now, even with Grandma Christmas Cash burning a hole in my pocket), and decided to reinstall Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO). Me and the Tolkien MMO go pretty far back, and except for Guild Wars, it ranks as the number one MMO for time played in my book. It is number one if you don’t think Guild Wars is a “true” MMO. Anyway, I have been taking a long sabbatical from the game since the Mirkwood expansion and the Free-2-Play (F2P) switch. It was not the game’s fault by any means. The Mirkwood expansion was excellent, and as I was a lifetime subscriber to LOTRO anyway, the switch really didn’t affect me. I just seemed to have wandered off somewhere near the beginning of Volume 3, Book 2 as the Grey Company headed south.
My return was horrible to be frank. When I logged back in I was beset on all sides by system mailings, announcements of new achievements I had somehow started, resets to all my legendary weapons, and a new trait / stat regime. It was bad enough that I was in the middle of a book, with tons of other quests already started, in the beginning of a region I didn’t remember while staring at a virtual cockpit of skills. Like a strange, albino gangle creature emerging into sunlight, I just blindly stumbled around for awhile until I found something to kill. It took me way too long to kill the enemy (as I, in the madness of things, had forgotten to up my legendary weapon’s DPS because it had been reset), and frustrated I logged off.
All I wanted was to start playing. Was that so much to ask? I didn’t want to think about all the chores I had to do. I would get to that. There was no easing back in to things. It was a sheer cliff wall of activation energy facing me. Continue reading [LOTRO] A Tale of Re-Entry
I will now get the highest score of any MMO pundit making predictions. Ready? “It will not go live in 2012.” Whatever we’re talking about, I’m predicting that it will slip into 2013, or later, or just never ship. The game, the expansion, whatever: not in 2012. I’m going to lose a few points, since something will ship in 2012, but I don’t see how anyone can beat my accuracy rate here.
: Zubon
Seriously? I’m kind of touched. And it’s part of the central epic chain!
: Zubon
Hugh Hancock has some words about the gear grind. My words? “Screw that.” You know there is going to be a new tier within a few months and a complete gear reset in the next year. Keep running on that treadmill, but don’t pretend you’re ever getting anywhere.
At least a real treadmill gives you the real progress of a lowered % chance to die of heart disease.
: Zubon
Hat tip. I credit LotRO for having an extremely minimal gear grind, in that there are perhaps two or three tiers of endgame gear between expansions, and the tiers are not that far apart. You only need the raid gear if you are doing the one or two raids anyway.
There is one school of thought that thinks F2P means “if you spend enough time, you can experience the whole game for free – paying is just a shortcutâ€. There is another school of thought that says “you will never see the whole game, unless you pay astronomical amounts of money, and maybe not even thenâ€. There’s a real conceptual rift between the two camps, and some games are finding themselves caught in the middle, or transitioning between the two.
— Brise Bonbons
I’d argue “astronomical,” although that depends on the model, and it’s really the models I want to discuss here.
We’re all familiar with pure subscription models, as well as subscription plus a small premium shop (WoW sparklepony, CoX booster packs). WoW, Warhammer, and others now have unlimited free trials along with their subscriptions. Most Western players have limited familiarity with the item shop model in its pure, evil form, although Allods players got a taste. I think it’s clear under these models that you will be ponying up some funds or you will not be getting much beyond the most basic experience; item shop gamers may have been fooled at the onset, but it should become quickly apparent once they’re into it.
The murkier middle comes from hybrid models and games that let you unlock content (“no cover charge”). Wizard101 has a very clear unlock model, in which you just do not get most zones unless you pay for them. League of Legends gives you access to everything, eventually, a little at a time, with some free permanent unlocks and why don’t you just give them $20 to get the handful of champions you really want? Turbine is the headliner for the hybrid subscription/pay to unlock model, with Dungeons and Dragons Online and The Lord of the Rings Online. You could theoretically unlock absolutely everything in LotRO without paying, although you would be creating and deleting characters to grind deeds until your very fingertips wore away.
And there really is tension between people who want to play for free, absolutely free, and those who are willing to pay and/or recognize that someone needs to fund these companies if you want servers to stay up. When I am getting a lot of value from a game, I don’t mind giving an extra $20 to Valve or Riot or whatnot. I look at my Settlers of Catan box and wonder if I should mail Klaus Teuber a check or something, based on the play value received. But I remember having no money, and I can see a bit of that perspective.
And then there are games that are just annoyingly in your face with their pleas for money. See, for example, the LotRO UI re-design that makes the shop the most visible UI item (poor design decision: the shop links are annoyingly present even if you cannot use them to spend more money, such as subscribers/lifetimers at the stables).
: Zubon
The pre-order option for LotRO’s next expansion just became more attractive when Turbine released the Turbine points costs, which are about twice as much and were presumably calculated as “every single point a lifetime subscriber would have accumulated since F2P.” Oh, and the pre-order xp item is being added to the store, so that’s $10/character bonus in the pre-order, if you wanted to price it that way. I would expect more upcoming content to be classified as “expansion” and therefore an additional cost to VIPs and lifetimers.
We also now have the timing of content release: raid at launch, the instance cluster in December. That is, the answer to Mirkwood’s ridiculously lacking endgame is to launch without most of the endgame and patch it in 3 months later. That kind of worked for City of Heroes/Villains, because they launched the entire game that way, giving you 40 levels to enjoy until the first patch, rather than 10 levels in a game with rested xp.
This is basically the make-or-break point for any current players. Either you pay the $30 for an Isengard pre-order or you quit, because the Turbine Point cost is not worth it. I would have paid 3,000 TP for the expansion, but not 6,000; the pricing at 6,000 perversely makes me want to wait for it to be 1,500, so someone comment or something if it goes 75% off someday.
Following up on last year’s post, the F2P model has apparently gone off the rails for Turbine. Has revenue fallen that much, or are they plowing it into their next game rather than their current games? LotRO is now a game with an excellent mid-game and an endgame that has gotten worse every time they raise the level cap. But hey, if people will pay for it, “less content for more money” is a great business model.
: Zubon
Hat tip: Spinks