Kill Ten Rats

One of the things that lured me to WoW from EQ, besides the exodus of friends of course, was the light-hearted attitude the developers had about the game. The many tongue-in-cheek quests, self-effacing NPCs, and endless pop-culture references were a nice switch.

LoTRO, on the whole, does not do this. I’m totally ok with that, as they remain very faithful to their source material. There’s a few fun things, like the Moor Cowbell, for example, that add some real-world humor in. Where they do tend to slip in humor frequently, I’ve noticed, is in patch notes. Today’s has a few, but I found one that amused me in the middle of the recently changed armor list:

Helm of the Brazen Call
Knock knock!
Who’s there?
Ida
Ida who?
Ida know!
Shield-bearer’s Gauntlets

Such a massive list, 112 items at the very end of the notes, so most people probably never looked at it. I did, made me laugh. Enjoy.

Unfortunately, the virtues of the Sixteenth Hall contribute to its problems. It is long, relatively unrewarding, and had the largest penalty for minor mistakes, but it is just as necessary to hit 6/6 radiance as the other Moria end-game instances.

A very good group can finish the Sixteenth Hall in 45 minutes, using “unintended gameplay” that is being removed today. A normal group takes 60 to 90 minutes. So each of the three wings takes 15 to 30 minutes, depending on your group. Except for the last stretch, each features one hell room, one other hard pull, and a series of standard encounters with high hit point enemies. That last stretch is a few big bugs that can be avoided, then a half-dozen queen bugs (with workers) that must all be cleared. The boss fights are not difficult, just lengthy (high hit points) with a lot of disease being tossed around.

The rewards are the worst of the six instances. Continue reading 16th Frustration

This is a phrase I hear a few times a day from the leader of the project I’m on. I miss gaming a lot, but what I truly miss most is what I haven’t done in maybe 5 years – testing and tuning of games. Long ago, on a planet with two moons, I used to help in the creation of material in a wildly successful MMORPG. I did a fair amount, but nowhere near the level of some folks I knew, of which I was highly jealous. It was completely unpaid, but it was wildly fun. But it was not always creation of material that I got to work on, sometimes it was fixing bugs and locking out what we called ‘exploits’. To be fair, many of these exploits were simply patching out creative ways to do things that players had through up that the game company didn’t like. As a veteran DM of many a pen and paper RPG, I expected this – players will often find the fastest way from point A to point B lies through undefined area Q.

This somewhat meandering back-story brings me to tomorrow’s patch for LoTRO, Book 8.

Continue reading I’ll Take Your Silence To Mean Acceptance

While the Sixteenth Hall may be the last Moria instance that I reached, it is the central one in their story. It is the lengthy but straightforward, and its three parts lead you through the instance progression. (This is fairly spoiler-ish, so I’ll insert a break now. RSS readers: note.) Continue reading 16th Fulcrum

I had a chance to talk with Jeffrey Steefel, the executive producer for Lord of the Rings Online, and I decided that it would be great to discuss some of the lore aspects of the MMO.  Since I had recently completed most of the Mines of Moria quests, I figured talking about the lore of the black pit would be a good way to go.

Continue reading Interview with Turbine’s Jeffrey Steefel