Kill Ten Rats

I am on Book XIII in the epic quest chain, and since I have not complained about travel times in a little while, I thought this would be a good example.

Forochel was the new zone for Book XIII. It is a nicely crafted zone of snow and ice with some interesting gameplay features. Geographically, it is dominated by the bay in the center. Stay out of the bay. While you can swim anywhere else in the game, the water there will kill you in a few ticks. The capital is in the north, Suri-Kyla. There are towns in the center and southeast, a dwarf town in the southwest, and a little camp in the northwest. (Unless something was added in Book XIV, none of these towns have a Provisioner who sells the Traveling Rations one needs for the game’s teleportation abilities.)

The horses indicate horse routes (not surprising). A horse route usually goes to the nearest towns, sometimes with a fast travel (teleport) to a further town. So the center town connects to the other places on the road. The northwest outpost connects only to the northern city, via fast travel, and only if you unlock it. I forget whether that unlock is reputation-based, requires completing a quest that involves running around the bay a few times, or both (to get both directions). Suri-Kyla, being closely tied to the reputation system, demands reputation for its horse routes. Unlock the routes to other major cities by reaching Ally (next-to-best) standing with that city. Oh, and you must have visited both ends of the route to unlock it.

Do you see the red numbers I added to the map? That is the chain of locations for Book XIII, Chapters V and VI. This is not that bad, assuming you have unlocked the horse route around the bay. It is 25 silver each way, which is about a quest reward in this game. With animation and zoning, it is only about a minute between those two spots, plus another couple minutes to get to where the contact is, either at the furthest point in the city or in a cave northwest of the northwest outpost. So the route is: contact in capital city (1), run to horse, ride to outpost, run to cave (2), run to boat, fight to contact (3), run to dwarf cave, fight to quest objective (4), run to boat, fight to contact (5), run to outpost, ride to city, run to contact (6), run to horse, ride to outpost, run to cave (7), run to outpost, ride to city, run to contact (8). If the blue team has the boat, you can skip most of the fighting there. So the gameplay of these quests is fighting through one cave of dwarves, surrounded by about forty minutes of travel, probably closer to an hour since I always under-estimate how long things will take (ask my wife on that one: how much longer will it take me to get back to town and log off?), at a cost of 75 silver. You can cut a little time by locking your “map home” to one of the sites, and your time will be much longer if you have not done enough quests in the zone.

Getting there is half the fun. Getting back there twenty times is not ten times the fun.

: Zubon

I have hallucinated part of 13.7 into that. 13.8 involves two laps between the city and the cave, so they are starting to blend. And while we’re on 13.8, can we talk about bugs in the ice giants’ knockback code?

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

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.

[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