When a game becomes a job

Tobolds had an interesting comment on this blog about gaming attitude.

The increasing acrimony [between casual players and hardcore raiders] is probably just an effect of burnout. MMORPGs are curious in that many people don't stop playing when they stop having fun; instead they keep playing with a more and more negative attitude, complaining all the time on the official forums. And as Ontherocks remarks, the negativity is directed badly at other players. Not only casuals vs. hardcore, but also mages fighting warlocks, or other classes crying for somebody else to be nerfed. It is an illusion that you could have more fun if only fun was taken away from somebody else. World of Warcraft certainly has balancing problems, but these are more due to the impossibility of balancing classes in a way that they are equivalent but different in solo play, group play, and all the various forms of PvP.

I’ve noticed this before as well. I think a lot of the drama that exists between players (or entire guilds) is in large part because they’re not finding the game fun anymore. Everyone loves when a game is all new and shiny. You have no idea what’s going on - around every corner there are new surprises and adventures. Leveling brings new skills and ways to play your character such that even when asked to kill yet another ten boars, you’ll race off to do it because you can kill them in New! and Exciting! ways.

Then you hit a wall.

The wall could be the level cap, or a questing dead end or a game mechanic that changes your class so you’re not able to do the things you used to. That’s when you start trying to rationalize continuing. I suspect that the longer a player has played a given character, the harder that wall will hit and the less likely they are to start over. Most players will just try to struggle through it … and get pretty irate in the process.

LotRO is my third MMO (after City of Heroes and the World of Warcraft) so I’ve been there before. As a result, I have made some general observations in an attempt to maximize my fun and not have to deal with turning a video game into the worst-paying job I’ve ever had. These won’t work for everyone, but they have helped me to keep my head screwed on straight.

1) Try new locations. When I’m starting to get down about leveling a given toon, I’ll start looking for a new place to play in. The North Downs was getting pretty old for me, so I went over to Evendim for a bit. Sick of the Barrens? Try some of the higher-level stuff in Silverpine or the lower-level stuff in Stonetalon. Sometimes all you really need is a change of scenery. I’m an explorer by nature anyway, so looking around in a new area can be fun all by itself.

2) Try a respec. This doesn’t work all that well in LotRO as the specs (traits) aren’t all that pronounced at lower levels, but in a game like WoW, it can make a big difference. Even if someone else says your new spec is totally stupid, who cares? If it’s fun, it was worth it. I respecced my arms / fury warrior to fury / arms and that’s what kept my interest alive through to 70. Flailing away with two weapons and near infinite rage was a blast. When you change the way your character functions, you change the way you interact with the world and it basically changes the game for you.

3) Read the quest text. Too often, I’ve caught myself just ramming through content. Depending on the game, there could actually be a lot of interesting stuff going on behind the scenes. So you were asked to kill ten boars. Why? Why boars and not wolves? Is there some other objective involved? Reading the text tends to get me more personally involved in the story. I’m not someone out grinding boars for XP, I’m killing them to save the good people of wherever from the dreaded boar disease of somethingorother.

4) Establish “for me” time. It may seem odd in a video game to set aside time to do what you want to do, however, so much content is driven because the company is telling you to do something that sometimes it’s just nice to tear off and do something because you want to - even if there’s nothing in it for you other than to say you did it. In LotRO during Open Beta, we couldn’t go beyond level fifteen. One thing I really wanted to do is see Rivendell. To get to Rivendell, you need to pass through mobs that are level thirty-five or more. I went anyway and now it’s a regular thing for me. All my alts make the trek to Rivendell after the level fifteen class quest. Go places you’d like to see and see them. As a burglar, I’m constantly going places just to go. I was sneaking around Annuminas (a level fifty area) at level thirty-five. I sneaked my way out to the Council of the North base in Angmar around level forty-two. It’s fun to push the boundaries of what should be attainable and go places you want to go just because you want to.

5) Hang around / level with friends. One thing that I enjoy a lot is gaming with like-minded people. They can motivate you when you’re down and the company can help make dreary things fun. Killing 500 wargs gets old fast, unless you’re also chasing around your silly minstrel friend who doesn’t seem to realize she’s not a tank.

6) Know when to let go. If you’ve tried to make things fun and it’s just not working out, maybe it’s time to try something else. Even if it’s just for a little while. I know too many other players that will cling like grim death to a toon just because it’s their highest one. “My main is thirty-five so I really should focus on getting him to fifty before rolling another one.” Says who? I got my guardian in LotRO up to thirty-seven and decided I didn’t like it. So I created a hunter and got him to thirty-three and THEN created a burglar who became my first fifty. You can’t always tell right from the get-go what class / race combo you’ll really enjoy so don’t be afraid to experiment.

It also could be the game itself. For better or worse, LotRO is what it is. I find it fun and that the good outweighs the bad. I roll with an awesome kinship on a fun server. Not everyone is so lucky in their friends and not everyone will like the game. WoW is a great game, but when you've played all the classes and the races and seen what there is to see, that's pretty much it. Many people are not fond of the PvP system they have or the raid-till-you-drop stuff at endgame. For many, level seventy equals done. I’m always a fan of trying new games - by all means keep looking to find one that’s fun for you.

And while I’m on the subject, video game companies should make accessible free trials available for their creations. I don’t mind chat restrictions to keep the spammers at bay, but make sure your trial is open enough that I can actually see everything in the game. My biggest gripe about my EQ2 trial was that I couldn’t get a house. Not a huge deal, but at the same time it would have been cool to see how a “house” in EQ2 worked. Even if it had limited furniture options, I could still mess around and see what kind of system it was. Got a game involving space ships? Let me fly one! Now! I don’t care if it disappears after I log off or it’s underpowered or whatever. Give users a taste of how cool your game can be and they’ll plunk their money down for subscriptions.

It’s also worth noting that players will likely have to let go of the games you’re playing at some point. Either because you’ve done all you’re interested in doing (like me in WoW), because the game becomes a hopeless grind (like CoH became for me) or because the game company says “that’s it folks, thanks for playing” and then closes it down.

7) Listen to what others say but listen to yourself first. It's your money. It's about to become the gaming company's money. The only important question is: are you having fun? If you’re not having fun, then it’s not a game anymore. Following the advice above, you may find the fun again. If not, it’s time to let go: either of the class you started or of the game itself. There’s nothing wrong with playing a game and then deciding it’s not for you. There’s something fundamentally silly though about sticking with a game you started hating a long time ago.

Mines of Moria Release Information

Information about the Mines of Moria paid expansion for LotRO has been released.

From the site:

BIRMINGHAM, UK - March 14, 2008 - Turbine, Inc. and Codemasters Online today unveiled Volume II of The Lord of the Rings OnlineTM, the first retail expansion for the award-winning massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG). Announced in Birmingham, the childhood home of J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings OnlineTM: Mines of MoriaTM will expand the online world of Middle-earth to let players explore the ancient underground cities of the dwarves, battle epic characters in the depths, face off with the Watcher, be a part of the fateful release of Durin's Bane and more! The Lord of the Rings Online expects to open Volume II of its epic story in the fall of 2008 with an increased level cap, two new classes and the introduction of a unique item advancement system.

What’s in an Appearance?

What with my blathering on about the outfit changes in The Lord of the Rings Online, it got me to thinking more about appearances in MMOs. One of the best appearance-related systems is that of City of Heroes. Right from the beginning, you can create a very distinctive appearance for your character. As you level up, you also end up getting the ability to change your appearance and get new outfits. The appearance changes in CoH have no impact on your character’s stats – it’s just what you look like.

In contrast, the World of Warcraft is fairly limited in the appearance modification department. Your character looks like your base model, which does have variations, plus whatever gear you are wearing. Two tauren warriors in full Imperial Plate armor will look practically identical.

A happy medium appears in the Lord of the Rings Online. At level 20, characters get appearance slots in addition to their standard armor slots. People can equip their toon and either show the equipment they have or opt to show whatever equipment their outfit is.

So what’s with all the appearance stuff and why is it important to players?

I think a main reason people like appearance systems is one of distinctness. My character is different from others and you can tell because I look different. My Dark Scrapper (CoH) or Hobbit Burglar (LotRO) doesn’t look like someone else even if they are the same class, race, etc. People like feeling different from the crowd, especially in games where they are supposed to be a hero doing great deeds. Aragorn, the ranger-to-be-king, didn’t look like Barliman Butterbur, the balding, portly bartender of the Prancing Pony. Heroes are distinct from the general population and the most obvious way to be distinct is appearance.

Another reason for liking appearance attributes is status. LotRO or WoW armor gained by raiding looks very different from other armor sets. You can tell from across the street that someone is wearing Rift armor. Rift armor can only be attained by going to the Rift in a raid and killing a boss that drops the barter gem for that particular piece. Right away, you can tell that the person wearing that armor is a raider and has been fighting through some difficult content. It’s the same in WoW. You can’t just purchase Ashkhandi (sp?), Destroyer of Worlds (a giant two-handed sword), you have to kill the boss that drops it. The only thing similar in CoH is the badge album through some badges give you access to neat trinkets like a freeze gun (the name and conditions of getting it escape me).

Role players in particular enjoy the ability to change ones appearance. As a sometime-role player, I like that I can be off fighting orcs while wearing full armor and do my farming crafting wearing something more appropriate (like coveralls). Farming while wearing my whole combat set seems odd. Are the pests after my crops really that tough? Same with hanging out in a tavern. I don’t wear the coveralls or the combat stuff, I tend to have my Hobbit dressed like a Hobbit going to a tavern. If you saw a SWAT operator wearing their full gear in a bar, you’d probably want to leave immediately so as not to get caught in the crossfire. You probably wouldn’t think he was just there for a drink or to chat with friends.

Another benefit of an appearance system is to create an established look – if you get a look you really like, why change it? A friend of mine has a thing where she always wears red armor. Red dye is expensive as is heavy armor (she plays a Champion in LotRO). With appearance being separate from the actual equipment, she can keep the armor look she has no matter what pieces she wins in other instances or quest lines in the future. Just because she gets new items doesn’t mean she has to change if she likes the stuff she has.

While appearances attributes in a game are merely cosmetic, they are all too often overlooked even though they can help create a better sense of attachment to a character and a sense of immersion in the world in which the character resides.

LotRO Book 12 Review

Book 12 is here, woo! The latest free expansion, Book 12 offers a number of changes in the game including clothing, housing items, Angmar changes, new quests and more. They started with Book 9: the Shores of Evendim. Then came Book 10 with its expansion of the epic books and some more questing areas. Book 11 brought us the new areas in the Trollshaws, housing and the Gollum quests along with Goblin Town. That’s a lot of updated content being churned out and I for one appreciate the expansions and the care with which Turbine releases them.

So what’s new in Book 12 and what do I think about it?

Clothing Changes
The first thing I did was check out the character tab. There are now, at level fifty, three tabs for appearance. The first tab is my equipped items tab – it’s the standard paper doll showing the items I have in my toon’s head, shoulder and other equipment slots. The second and third tabs are outfit tabs. To load an item into the outfit tab, simply drag an item for the into the appropriate slot on your paper doll. You will also need to select the radio-button to activate whichever outfit you want visible. Once you select an outfit to display, the items you have in your outfit paper doll will override any other items in those slots. It’s also worth noting that some outfits have overrides within them. One suit-looking chest piece I got as a rep reward from the Mathom House, for example, overrides gloves automatically as well as adding shoes. Items can be made visible / invisible by using little click-boxes next to those items.

I liked the variety of the clothing items available. New NPCs called “Outfitters” are available near where many of the other standard vendors are in major towns (Michel Delving, Bree, Rivendell, Celondim, Thorin’s Hall, etc). You can purchase a number of hauberks with different patterns and default colors. You can also get simple clothing items like coveralls for the farmers out there or a simple suit or robes, etc. All of the clothing items can be dyed to different colors if you wish as well as remove dyes with a dye wash available from suppliers in towns. (Note: dyes have become VERY expensive with the clothing changes.) Also available are backpacks: a day pack is available from most of the outfitters above and also a prospector’s backpack from the Michel Delving vendor. To get a quiver of arrows for your character find the Outfitter in Rivendell in the marketplace there or the one in Trestlebridge in the North Downs.

In addition to the standard, vendor-purchasable items, you should also swing by any areas where you have reputation points. There are a number of new clothing items (hauberks, suits, dresses, etc) available from the reputation factions. For example, there is a suit available from the Mathom House group (at Kindred, I believe). There are also a number of backpacks available – one from Thorin’s Hall and a couple from Breeland rep that I’ve seen thus far.

The new clothing options are very well done and I’m enjoying the changes. The outfit system hearkens back to my City of Heroes gaming days where you could modify your appearance separate from your stats. Nice work, Turbine!

To see pictures of the different clothing items, you can visit Vonabor’s guide on the subject.

Housing Changes
Housing changes were less pronounced than the clothing changes. You can now rotate free-standing items 360 degrees. I changed the position of my cushioned bench so it actually faces my fireplace. I’ll experiment some more with positioning in the future. Another nice feature is the ability to actually light / extinguish the fireplace and candle furniture items. You can click on the item, go through an animation and the object will light if it’s not lit or visa versa.

I haven’t seen any new furniture or furniture recipes yet. There is a Spring festival coming up and a continuation of a Pirate quest line in Western Breelands that may expand on the current offerings though. Of particular interest are the trophy items available from bosses. I don’t have a comprehensive list but there is a helm from Sambrog (sp?), a tentacle from Helcham (sp?), a banner from Ivar and a dress from the Red Maid in GA.

I can’t say I’m a fan of the boss trophies. The Sambrog’s helm is too small (but the smoking effect is cool). The banner from Ivar is a corpse on a stick (we have jokingly begun referring to it as “Corpsie” in our kin). Helcham’s tentacle is bizaar and the Red Maid’s dress is just … disturbing. I mean, we, the heroes of Middle-earth, defeated one of it’s evils and then, in a display of our righteousness … stripped her dead body? Eeeeww! Did we at least put a towel over her after we got the dress?

Tally thus far: cheers on clothing, /shrug on the housing stuff and a resounding ‘meh’ for the boss trophies.

One housing point of interest: when you buy a house all of your alts get a fast travel skill to your home. That’s a cool change – all of my alts can now enjoy the neighborhood discount.

Angmar Revamp
The map and quest structure in Angmar has been revised. I didn’t have much of a chance to go over the changes, however I did head over to Himbar in the North-East of the map and took a walking / sneaking tour between there and the camp in the far South-West. One point of interest: there are now horse paths from Himbar to the dwarf camp in the South and over to the South-West camp making the entire zone MUCH easier to get around in. The Himbar horse path is rep-related however requiring riders to at least be an acquaintance (the lowest rep level) of the Council of the North. The topography of the zone has changed somewhat and there is a new dwarf camp in the center of the map near Imlad Baratheon (sp?) above where all the wights and skeletons are walking around. Gone are the boars but still present are the stealthed wargs, drakes, neeker-breekers and other common mobs from the original. I’ll be spending some more time on this map in the near future.

Class Changes
My burglar got eleven new skills to the tune of two-plus gold. Ouch! One of the changes was a new burglar stance called Mischief which keeps the burglar from stealthing but significantly reduces the power cost of tricks. There are a couple of new abilities tied to this stance such as an aoe damage over time effect with a nice stun once the dot disappears. There’s also a new ability, similar to Touch and Go which, instead of increasing my evade abilities, adds damage when I get hit. I’ll have to do some playing around with the changes as my toolbar is now filled with icons that are unfamiliar to me.

Champions and Guardians also received an overhaul in the latest expansion. Initial reactions from friends of mine that play those classes have been favorable though training was also pricey for them.

Book 12 Epic Questline
Another installment of the Book quests! A group and I had a chance to go through this. There is a new feature in this set: insta-travel to where you need to be. Rather than having to trek all over the place to get to the place where you can start, you are teleported there in the regular game world so you can start fighting. The teleport changes vastly reduce travel time and are much appreciated! The quest line itself is also interesting including a screenshot-worthy finale for us RP / Lore nerds! I won’t spoil the details but the story which really got going in Book 9 is getting better and better. There are some very nice items available for completing the quest line including a neat teal cloak from Elrond at the end.

While the boss trophies are kind of a low point in the expansion, the rest was excellent. If Turbine follows it’s usual MO, there will be several non-expansion additions to the content they already added to this expansion (more clothes, more furniture, more trophies) before another expansion (which I believe is set to be a paid one).

Other Expansion Stuff:
In this expansion, Turbine apparently decided to update to the latest OpenAG dll [????] This is the dll file (or one of them) that affects in-game sound. Some folks were getting BSOD in Windows XP and had to do some odd things to their sound to get the game to work without crashing for certain sound cards. Well, they fixed it … and broke the sound for my card. I was in Helegrond and ended up getting three blue screens before I decided that it was enough for one night. Situations where I got the blue screen were times when I was grouped with other people and there were a lot of in-game sound and animations occurring at once. I was also in Vent during the crashes. The solution, on my PC anyway, was to enter the game and change the sound settings to all generic instead of using the FXI sound card which was the default. I haven’t crashed since and, at least to my undiscerning ears, the sounds were about the same. I also switched the driver for my Vent settings to be on the safe side.

Another change I haven't looked at much is a new instance in the PvMP zone. You can check out more information about it at the Book 12 site, however, I haven't been there and really can't comment on it much.

Why Fantasy?

The question about why the MMO genre has been gravitating towards (inundated by?) fantasy has been a featured question on a number of blogs. I hadn’t really touched on the subject before. Richard Bartle over at Terranova posed the question and got a number of interesting posts in response.

A number of posters point to Tolkien and tales kids grew up with. They also mention how risk-averse most companies are towards anything new – fantasy works, why change it? While a lot of their observations are right on the money, imho, I think there’s more going on than just a cynical corporate thing.

One of the big draws about fantasy is the use of magic verses technology. Magic (fantasy) works just because it works. Technology (sci-fi) works because the Morlocks make it work and everyone hates Morlocks. With fantasy, you can believe that magic is possible because of the universe or a trinket or just because it’s a somewhat natural gift. Sci fi’s technology is different in that someone had to build it. If it can be built it can be destroyed. Technology can be taken away. Technology is also hard to figure out – something with which most people have real-life experience. If you can’t figure out how to stop the clock on your DVD player from flashing, how can you expect to figure out how to operate the P-Flux Space Discombobulator to keep the Argonian Empire from vaporizing the Duckoplatian fleet?

Technology is less special. Shea in the Sword of Shannara is the only one that can wield the sword. Frodo in the Lord of the Rings is the only one that can be trusted to bring the Ring to the mountain. Ripley in Aliens, however, can grab any weapon from any space marine and, after the brief training montage, can blast alien scum with it.

The difference between fantasy and sci-fi may also have to do with the past. The past is often viewed as a time of simplicity and innocence whereas the future (as viewed from the present) is often dark and uncertain. To paraphrase Jose Chung at the end of Jose Chung’s Doomsday Defense: the new centuries will be like the old – thousands of years of the same old crap. Wars and empires and deaths and more wars.

The question about ‘why fantasy’ is a good one and I think beyond just the coding of swords verses laser guns or corporate cowardice, the preference for fantasy may well be cultural or psychological. The Terranova comments are interesting food for thought.

LotRO Book 12

Book 12 is coming this coming week! Yay! If past updates are any indication, the latest Book update should provide a lot of new content at no cost to the players (except download time and possibly a few bugs).

Game spot has an interesting review of the new content and there is a post on Turbine's LotRO site as well.

The changes most interesting to me are those for clothing and housing. As a Hobbit Burglar, I have always felt a tad out-of-sorts wearing smaller versions of the armor and weapons that the big folk wear. Now I'll be able to customize his appearance to make him look more like a resident of Middle-earth and less like a subdued version of something you'd see in WoW. Housing should be neat also since I'm tired of looking at the same old furniture. Other interesting stuff is the great Angmar revamp (fewer boars! Woo!) and the addition to the Book questline.

Pieces of my mind

It’s been a while since I’ve posted so for that I apologize. Been pretty hectic at work and basically coming home meant crashing or playing LotRO instead of writing. So here’s something a I wrote a little while ago.


Complete at Fifty?
A couple of weeks ago in LotRO, I wrapped up my level forty-five class quest by handing in a crap-ton of materials to my quest contact. As a result I got the epic Burglar trait called “Stick and Move” which grants me access to my critical skill chains not only when I crit but also when I evade an attack. Basically, that all spells more dps since I evade quite a lot.

With my traits set near max for my level and my final Burglar legendary trait slotted, I’ve been feeling more and more like that character is “done.” My concern is basically what happened to me in WoW when I completed getting most of an armor set or maxed in some way: will I continue to play this character past the point of completion?

In WoW when the cap was sixty, I got my warrior to the cap and basically stopped playing him. Raiding didn’t appeal to me at the time, so level sixty equaled done in my book. Besides raiding, there was PvP, which I did for a while, but WoW PvP isn’t all that interesting to me (besides Alterac Valley … at least in the good old days where it felt like an epic battle). My Paladin met a similar fate, though I did play him longer and did some raiding as well. Once he had a good set of armor and the raiding guild I was in fell apart due to drama, I stopped playing him.

Interestingly enough, I’m not getting the same feeling at max level in LotRO. I’m not sure if it’s the tempo of the game or the sheer volume of areas and quest lines present, but for the time-being I am finding plenty to continue working on. I still have places I like to explore. Even places I’ve been before are so beautifully rendered, it’s more like visiting an art museum again rather than seeing the same old crap. I have a few traits to work on still and a couple of Rift Armor pieces I’d like, but neither one is a concern at this point. I can pretty much crush any even-level mobs without too much hassle.

The Book quests are a constant source of amusement. Though I’ve completed all of them thus far, there’s a big push in my kinship about getting up through Book Eleven in preparation for the upcoming Book Twelve so I’ve been helping different groups of folks with those. We ran book 5.8 the other night which was a lot of fun. Some of the group members had tried before in PUG groups and hadn’t gotten the boss at the end down so it was great seeing their reaction in fellowship chat when he finally keeled over. It’s worth noting too that the Book quests get a lot more interesting and dramatic as you get higher in the chain. I highly recommend them if you haven’t done them.

I’ve also been involved in some interesting and fun things with the kinship besides the standard gaming stuff. We have regular RP events which are fun. A couple of us started a lowbie group in LotRO which plays once-a-week. We’re all Hobbits helping out in Thorin’s Hall where we haven’t quested before. I also put together an all-burglar run in Goblin Town the other night. We snuck around most things, fought when we had to and in the end took down both the Goblin King and the Troll boss along with his handler. The amazing thing is: there were only three of us in the group. Conjunctions, crowd control and debuffs played a huge part in our success. I’m looking forward to putting together another one of these, perhaps in Carn Dum or Ungaruth with more burglars.

Overall, I’m still happy with LotRO and still finding a lot of neat stuff to do in spite of having a “completed” character.


In Other News:
In other news, I’m still in WoW on the weekends playing in a “noob club” there. In spite of the coming weekend being the Superbowl we’ll still be on and smushing things. We play in the morning so if we wrap up around the normal time, I’m sure most of the Superbowl stuff won’t have started yet. I’m not really invested in the game at all. The Steelers and Redskins aren’t in it so I don’t really care who wins. I’m just hoping it’s a good game.

I’m also beginning work on a story of my own. I’ve been reading fantasy books (George RR Martin, Tolkien, JK Rowlings, amongst others) for a while now (like since I was 12). I figured, what the heck, may as well give it a shot. I have written a number of snippets, some of which have merit, but am mostly working on the world-building part for now.

Gaming in 2007.

Here’s a look back at my gaming in 2007 ala the year end retrospective.


Lord of the Rings Online
The big thing in my gaming in 2007 has been joining up with LotRO. I started 8.5 months ago in open beta and here I am, three expansions, three “main” characters and 50 levels later. My Hobbit Burglar is now sitting at 50 with two pieces of Rift armor and his very own house. This past weekend I managed to complete, with the help of my kinship mates, the Burglar class quests which also got me a my third epic trait “Stick and Move” which opens up my critical event skills when I evade attacks (not just on critical hits). Probably a good thing for PvP or soloing but I’ll keep Sweep the Knee and Exposed Throat for increased conjunctions during raids. (Sweep the Knee reduces the cool down on my leg sweep opener and keeps me from breaking stealth when I do it; Exposed Throat is a critical strike chain ending with improved damage and an increased chance to start a conjunction).

I came to LotRO with a close group of friends from WoW and watched as all of them left me to return to WoW. While I miss them, I have made new friends in LotRO and became an officer in a kinship of some of the best gamers and wonderful people ever.


World of Warcraft
I ended my status as a full-time player. It was a wonderful time and a lot of fun. I met some great folks and we had many a fine adventure in Blizzard’s world of Azeroth. At 2.5 years, it is hands-down the longest time I’ve spent in any virtual world.

A group of friends and I keep a small weekly gathering going called the Noob Club. We level together in a stable group and each week set a level cap so we’ll always play together. Thus far it’s been a great success and we’re having a lot of fun with it. With the club, I get something I hadn’t had in WoW for a long time – a dedicated group to play with. Grinding solo can get old fast so it’s a nice change of pace to be able to just play the game with friends. The monthly price is a bit steep for just playing a couple of hours on weekends, but it’s worth it for all the fun we’re having.


Everquest 2
Inspired by Van Hemlock's Operation Cheapseats I decided to expand my gaming horizons a bit and travel the road not taken. EQ2 is a well-done game in many respects but failed to grab my interest the way WoW, City of Heroes or LotRO did. Just learning how the game works seems to be part of the game and it can get old quickly. I found the combat interesting and the crafting was great but overall, I decided that once my whirlwind tour was over, I would end my time there.


Looking ahead to 2008
What will 2008 bring? More LotRO to be sure. Book 12 is due out in February, I believe, and the first paid expansion is coming up. The Noob Club in WoW has been a success so we’ll keep going with that as well. There are a bunch of games I’m hoping will be awesome including Warhammer Online. I hope it can do PvP well-enough in an MMO to give lie to the belief that it can’t be done. I don’t care about gear or levels or how my toon looks, I want fun. Make PvP fun and people will do it for nothing.

Pirates of the Burning Sea seems interesting in a never-really-even-considered-it kind of way. Ship-to-ship combat seems like a really cool idea. Most of the reviews seem to be mixed at the moment but I’ll see how things pan out. One point of interest is the response Mystic Worlds got from the CEO of Flying Labs. Pretty cool that a company is paying attention to the chatter us blargh-u-sphere types are blasting out.

Regardless of what games you play or whether you play any at all, may you all have a happy and safe 2008!


~ Khan

What’s happening - Some recent developments in my gaming

Video Problems
My Dell XPS system uses dual video cards for improved performance. It works great … as long as you have two working video cards. For a couple of months now, I’ve been getting a lot of distortion in my games along with red and green colored dots all over my screen. To experiment, I shut down my SLI and ran on one card at a time. Sure enough, one card is trash and the other is fine. So looks like I’ll need a new video card sometime soon. LotRO runs well enough on one card at medium graphics, but I’m looking forward to getting a replacement for my old Nvidea 7900.


Raiding
I went on a Rift raid last week with my kinship. We took down Thrang, the last boss before the Balrog. It was quite the battle, but we were victorious. Three minstrels seems to be key in that particular battle along with placing yourselves in the small alcoves by the stairs to avoid getting shot at. After Thrang fell, we looted him and he dropped the opal for the reward turn-in armor. And I won! Woo! Now my burglar is sporting his Rift armor head piece (which looks like a hood with a mask).

While I like the ideas LotRO has about in-game armor, I’m also thinking that it’s somewhat silly considering the Lore. Bilbo and Frodo, with a few exceptions, were dressed in coats, vests and other normal Hobbit clothes for their adventures. Bilbo only wore armor during the Battle of Five armies and Frodo, I think, only when he was trying to sneak to Mt Doom with Sam. Long story short, I’m looking forward to the Book 12 changes in appearance – one will be able to create a look for your character independent of the items they have equipped. Yeah, I’m a dork like that.


Dramaz
Last time I posted about a little blow-up my kinship had over some raiders and communication issues. Well, one officer is gone and a couple more people left the kin to form their own. The rest passed quickly and we’re back to doing our thing: having absurd amount of fun together.

Niche Economics of Game Development and the WoW-Killer

Hooray! You made it past the title! You earn 2500 Battered Shields (sadly abbreviated as BS). You will soon be able to obtain such fabulous Battered Shield awards as … um … yeah. I don’t have anything like that. But gratz on making it this far.

The topic of my post today was inspired by a post made over at Mystic Worlds about the MMORPG Holy Trinity of WoW, EQ2 and EvE Online.

She writes:

“For any new game to break into the market with a splash and hold on to subscribers beyond the hype, they must confront the Holy 3. If they don’t, players will simply drift back to one of the three or where ever they came from, once the shininess is gone. If you can’t do fantasy with as much polish, excitement and broad appeal as WOW, then why they hell are people going to stick around to play your game? If you can’t provide a game with more depth for the so-called serious gamer, and do it with the visual brilliance, diversity, lore and expansive content of EQ2 or DOAC, the question is still the same. Why the heck would I pay to play? If you’re going to base a game on out-of-body combat, whether it’s in the skies or on the seas, you’d better do it at least as good as EVE or I just can’t be bothered.”

While I agree that recent gaming efforts have been lacking the initial wow-factor (no pun intended) of the games she lists, I think what we’re seeing, and will be seeing more of, is a turn to niche games.

LotRO will never, ever be as big as WoW. Ever. It had a great release. It features alright if not a little clunky game play. The raids at end-game are at least as interesting as those in WoW with regard to the technical coordination involved in the fighting -- perhaps not as difficult but definitely as fun. Yet every person I know that came from WoW to LotRO has returned to WoW.

What’s interesting to me, however, are the patterns I’m noticing in the people that stayed:
- Lord of the Rings fans (people that loved the books and probably liked the movies).
- People that couldn’t care less about shiny gear. Most of the comments I hear about people’s gear is about appearance attributes such as matching or looking silly rather than looking god-like or powerful.
- Casual Social types: people that enjoy small groups of friends that play semi-regularly and solo on occasion.
- Explorer types (Middle-earth is large and thanks to the rapid expansions by Turbine, there always seems to be new areas cropping up here and there).
- People that enjoy horizontal game play where you can get things which do not necessarily make you more powerful or advanced (eg: houses) along with the vertical, achievement type at which WoW excels (eg: leveling, “gearing up,” etc).

The people staying fit into smaller sub-categories of the gaming genre than those to which past game releases have tried to cater. As a result, I’d be willing to bet, that while LotRO’s subscriber numbers will always pale in comparison to the World of Warcraft’s numbers, as long as Turbine doesn’t drop the ball too badly there will always be a large enough player base for the game to allow it to continue. I suspect also that the subscriber base will be less fickle and less likely to jump ship at the sight of a new game - it’s interesting that while my friends returned to WoW after trying LotRO, so many of them were willing to leap for the “new shiny” in the first place.

I think where we’re seeing is similar to what happens in product development: niche markets. So company x does a great job in creating printer technology. But then company y comes along and builds a printer to create better-looking copies of photos. And another company (z) comes along to create a printer that works better for printing legal documents. Companies y and z will never be as large as x (if they just stick to their niches). But due to catering to niches and excelling within those niches y and z will have stable client bases that company x really can’t get close to since its focus is too broad. Companies y and z will be successful and solvent, just not as big as x got. And if people liked having printers that could do the whole show and didn’t mind mediocre photo or legal document print outs, many customers would also be interested in staying with x.

Getting back to the Mystic Worlds post, while much of her argument is, IHMO, right on the money (Go Big or Stay Home) I think games with lower overheads that don’t mind not being the next “WoW Killer” but just want a piece of the MMO pie will be happy and thrive as long as they work hard to cater to the niche(s) into which their customers fall. Thus, if my analysis of increasing niche games is correct, there will be no “WoW Killer” but there will be an increasing number of smaller, more focused games some of which may appeal directly to what you want in a game.

Thank your Officers

I'm an officer in a kinship in LotRO. I have been an officer in a guild in WoW as well as a second-banana GM and a kinship leader in LotRO during open beta. In my current kinship, there are some people applying for officer positions and I'm not sure why. Being able to help steer the direction of a kinship is neat but the best ones don't really need much steering if the recruiting process is sound. Most of the neat stuff I do can easily be blown out of the water by days like today.

*ding* A rant is about to commence. Please fasten your seatbelts and make sure your tray tables are locked and the seats in their forward and upright positions.

It all began when a group of friends and I decided to help a couple kinshipmates through the long and painful book ten questline. This questline involves much swimming across Lake Evendim so I really wasn't looking forward to it. But I was getting to help some folks with some stuff they needed so I focused on that and just swam my little hobbit legs off.

Then the tells start.

Officer A had send a private message to officer B explaining why he didn't like "hardcore" raiders in such a casual kinship. Officer B decided that rather than talk to officer A, he'd send the contents of the message to some raiders in the kinship but only the parts that make it look like officer A hates all raiders (which would actually be really funny since officer A is the raiding coordinator). Officer B blabs to several kinship members who start sending me tells to complain about officer A's out-of-context statement fragments.

Someone in the group, one of the officers, asked me why I was still on the shore instead of swimming again and I replied in /officer that I was talking to a member about something officer B said officer A said when I realized officer B was still online. Instead of attempting to diffuse the situation he started, officer B attempts to use the 'duck-and-cover' method of leadership by spending the rest of the night incommunicado.

Through tells the other officer in my Evendim group (three of us in the group were officers) inform me that the same individual has been assailing them with tells demanding to speak with the kinship leader, who wasn't online at the time, or to be involved with the officer meeting the next time we have one.

Throughout the rest of the Evendim excursion, I kept receiving / replying to tells, watched two members quit the kinship, assured the other online members that in fact, no, two members leaving does not mean we'll be disbanding the kinship any time soon and also apparently managed to help kill a bunch of stuff and get book ten done. Though I do remember riddling the troll on the way out of the building with our guardian behind me carrying the Palantir. I love doing that.

The drama passed relatively quickly after the two members left and once things seemed stable I logged for the night.

The situation outlined above was not particularly special or unique. I've also seen worse. A lot worse. It's bad in tells but worse when people are actually screaming at each other on Vent.

So thank your officers, those of you in kinships / guilds / supergroups / whatever. We make sure people get help getting gear. We help organize raids, events and whatnot. And occasionally we have to sacrifice our playtime to deal with silliness.

Two good things came out of the whole thing tonight:
1) I got to riddle a troll.
2) I remembered to write "beer" on my shopping list before the next officer meeting. That's going to be an interesting one I'm sure and I'm also sure I could use a drink for it.

More on LotRO Raiding

My LotRO kinship and I went through the Rift again this past Monday. Having downed a boss last week, we got together a group to push in further this week. We had trouble getting a full raid together from our own kinship and ended up getting members of an allied kinship and some other folks who were friends of kinshipmates. One person had already cleared the first and second bosses in the Rift, so those bosses were not present when we entered. Thus we went straight for boss three and four.

Not long after entering, we had a disastrous battle on the stairway after the giant room: we aggroed a group, then a group on the stairs and then got caught in a orc zerg followed by someone getting rezzed and moving too close to the patrols causing a second near-wipe. It seems that we got all ‘teh stoopid’ out of our systems with that little catastrophe because we annihilated the rest of the encounters we were in and lost very few people in doing so. No one got upset or whiny, I think everyone there factored the potential repair bills into account before they decided to go raiding.

Time investments:
We started the raid at 8:30 EST and ended it around 11:30. So that’s three hours of raiding. In WoW, we used to start around 7pm with an 11pm ending time. We raided for about an hour longer per night in WoW. On Monday’s raid, we did allow for periodic bio-breaks and a couple people afked here and there. Time-wise, I think the big difference between the kin I’m in and my WoW raiding guild is that in LotRO, we’re only raiding two maybe three days a week. WoW raiding we every night except one per week where, provided you got your farmed mats, you could do what you wanted. In LotRO, I hardly farmed anything specifically for raiding. I bought my potions and still have quite a few. I go through a lot of power and morale potions, but I also get a lot from questing. Money I tend to get just from killing mobs for quests, quest completion or vendoring trash. I imagine that people with gathering skills have no need to do much more than go gathering for an hour or two a week. I guesstimate that I’d spend about one hour in the game farming to cover the expenses for an entire three-hour raid. Pretty insignificant, IMHO.

Group play:
Just like in WoW, LotRO’s raids emphasis group play. It’s not to the point where one person’s activity / inactivity will kill a group, but people have to have a good sense of where they need to be and what they should be doing. On Monday’s raid, we had a number of fights where our Hunters had to kill adds or the Lore Masters had to mez certain mobs. Both groups did exceptionally well. In one incident, we were pulling a group of five elite master types and the Lore Master and burglars were called on to mez targets. Our group coordination at that point was downright scary. We ended up with five mezzed mobs. No duplicates. Just five mobs wobbling around stunned. We all had a good laugh while the Guardian pulled them to us. A couple came bolting at once towards the end but we dropped them all with no problems.

LotRO raids seem to be more forgiving than WoW’s raids. A reasonable amount of coordination will be fine. And there’s even some wriggle-room for occasional bonehead mistakes. Like the time I hit a mob with enrage (a Burglar ability which causes them to run around a group randomly aggroing people). It was good for getting a mob off the Minstrel, bad when the poor main tank was trying to round the mob up and worse when the silly Hobbit Burglar can’t seem to keep up with the mob to apply another trick to remove the enrage one. So the mob ran around the group with the Guardian and I in tow. We were quite a sight. No deaths resulted but I was glad when that was over.

Gear and Stats:
Being a former WoW player, I take the condition of my gear somewhat seriously. I want to make sure I have the hit points, power and other stats to ensure I am effective in a group. My hit points at the moment hover around 2600 with no buffs. I compared myself to my kinship’s main tank: he has around 5000 hit points unbuffed. Then I took a look at our second main tank for the evening. 2500 hit points with buffs*. He was out in the fray tanking elite master dragons and such with fewer hitpoints than I have with no buffs. Gear matters less in LotRO. We did have some very talented minstrels with us (both of whom have at least some teal raiding gear) which I’m sure helped a lot. Gear is not irrelevant. It’s nice to know however that a lack of gear on one person isn’t going to cause massive issues for the whole raid if it can be compensated for by gear / talents / skills in another class.

As far as stats go, I’m trying to get all my traits moved up around 6 or 7. I have had to grind a lot of mobs to make sure I get the traits completed but I only have one trait stuck at 5, the rest are up to spec.

Overall, I view LotRO’s raiding system a lot more favorably than WoW’s. There’s less time investment needed, less material investment needed and you’re still in for some challenging, fun fights. It’s worth noting that final instance bosses are still incredibly difficult (Turbine increased Thorog’s difficulty in Helegrond so he is insanely hard at this point) but most of the bosses can be dropped with good timing and coordination.

All the stuff above when combined with LotRO's practice of providing high-quality gear from crafting puts raiding in even better perspective: it's another fun thing to do. It's not the be-all end-all of the game. If you want to raid, raid. It will be fun. If you don't like raiding, no biggie. There are other things to do and other ways to get gear for your character.


* I'm not sure how he managed such a low number. Gear explains part of it. Perhaps also he needed to work on some of his traits too.

More Book Eleven Stuff

More on Housing:
I think I have my Hobbit home the way I like it. I have Tom Bombadil’s music playing most of the time. I have a Breakfast table I made in the middle of the main room and everything is colored and arranged the way I like it.

During the Harvest Festival, I got one neat item: a Black Mushroom pot. During the Spring Festival, I helped some lady in the Shire plant some things. I got some ok rewards (pipeweed and some recipes) but didn’t think much about it. There was some mention about coming back in the Fall to follow up with the work I had done, but no indication as to what the reward might be. I went back for the Fall Festival and got the Mushroom pot. I think it’s kind of neat. It’s just a small pot with three mushrooms in it that I can place in a small floor slot. So rare are these that I’ve heard of them selling for 6 gold on most servers in the AH if you can find one there. And I have two of them (one from my main and another from an alt that is also a farmer.) I haven’t decided what to do with the second one yet. I would like to give it to a kinship mate who would like to hang on to it (your very own pot of mushrooms would be a very Hobbity thing to treasure). The money doesn’t really appeal to me that much: making money is easy and I’d rather make someone happy to have something rare than get a bunch of virtual cash that I’d just spend on virtual crap.

New Content:
High Pass and Goblin Town were introduced in this update along with a new epic quest series: Book Eleven. I haven’t had a chance to get to the Book Eleven quests yet as I am still on Book Ten. For those who read the Hobbit, you may remember Goblin Town and the High Pass as the areas Bilbo, Gandalf, Thorin and the other dwarves passed through in route to the Lonely Mountain. The zone is an addition to the Misty Mountains area above Rivendell. It is a very nicely done zone. It’s always snowing there. There are wargs, wolves and, of course, goblins all over the place. Goblin Town itself is in a cave complex with all kinds of twists and turns. It’s really easy to get lost in there. Of course, you can also see, and dethrone, the new Great Goblin. You can visit Gollum’s cave and retrieve Bilbo’s missing buttons for a trait reward. There are many new quests in the area as well.

Along with the new High Pass content is some new content in the Trollshaws near the Fens by the Bruinen Gorges. The zone includes a stream with several large bodies of water (not Evendim Lake big), many new quest NPCs, a new elf camp located in some beautifully rendered ruins and, by my count, three instances containing level-appropriate solo content from 40 to 50 or thereabouts. The instance areas are very well done. As an explorer type, I’ve had a lot of fun just sneaking around in them, taking down random mobs and just goofing off.

Burglar Stealth Cool down:
For those that haven’t heard the screaming from the Turbine forums, there was a change to Burglars in the most recent update. The change is the addition of a ten-second cool-down from the time you exit stealth until you reenter it. In reading the forums prior to the change, you’d think this was going to be the end of the world. Like most of the changes Turbine makes to the game, it actually had fairly little effect on my play style. At the most, I have been standing around for only a second or two after combat with an even-leveled mob. Gray mobs, I no longer bother stealthing for. I suppose the change would most effect those interested in either 1) gathering while sneaking around or 2) playing a burglar in the PvP zone. I’m not sure the channel time for gathering, but anything less than ten seconds would mean standing around for a bit and the possibility of being spotted by a mob. Burgs can still sneak to the node, however, giving them an advantage over other gatherers trying to get to hard-to-reach stuff. The PvP change would effect burgs that like to stealth and then instantly re-steath to drop from visibility once spotted. Not being a big PvPer, the change doesn’t effect me that much. It’s worth noting that a number of people on the Turbine forums are complaining about PvP imbalance (not just due to Burgs) and from their complaints I think the issues with Burglars are relatively small potatoes.

One burglar problem is getting locked into combat if you one-shot a mob coming out of stealth. I ran through most of Goblin Town with a group of kinship-mates stuck in combat because I didn’t want to have them standing around waiting for me to log out and back in. Hide in Plain Sight and Hobbit Silence have no effect on the bug, I’m in combat until I log out. Compared to the locked in combat bug, the stealth cool-down is a non-issue for me. One tactic I employ to keep the locked-in-combat bug from happening is to strike from stealth using a lower damage attack. Yes, this gimps my dps but I’d rather pass on the giant opener than risk having to log off and back on every other minute or two.

Raiding:
I went on my second Helegrond raid this past weekend. I’m raiding with a fairly mature group of people so it’s a pretty casual atmosphere. No yelling, lots of joking around and everyone taking their role seriously while they’re doing it. We farmed the spider boss and the drake bosses as usual. We also took another stab at Thorog (sp?). That guy is TOUGH. As part of our strategy this time our burglars, including myself, ran to the high platform in the instance where Thorog lands and heals himself. The idea is that we do a named conjunction to interrupt the heal. We stood there for what seemed like ten minutes while Thorog destroyed the better part of our raid group. Then he flew up to where we were. We executed our conjunction (all yellow) and interrupted his heal! Hooray! Then he turned around and fire-breathed on us, killing us all instantly.

Other Stuff:
In other news, a couple members of my kinship (3, actually) are leaving the game in spite of the content updates. The main issues for them are real life issues and not necessarily related to game play. Another friend of mine is actually coming back to the game after a long break. He played WoW for a bit and decided he didn’t care for it (I think his highest-level character was 50 or so).

Comings and goings in any game are not strange, but there do seem to be a lot more people siting RL reasons for leaving or taking long breaks from LotRO over WoW’s typical “I’m quitting and here’s why everyone else should too” given reasons. This may be indicative of the general age bracket the game appeals to (older people with families / careers / school verses a younger crowd) or it could just be the people I hang around with.

A Place to Call My Own

Well, it’s finally here: LotRO’s Housing update. At first I was determined not to get swept up in the whole thing. PHAIL! A kinshipmate and I went on a tour of the Shire and bought a couple Smials right next to each other. She opted for a smaller one and I got a deluxe one. She and I are two of fairly few Hobbits in the kinship and we both decided that Hobbits should live in the Shire if at all possible. The rest of the kinship is men and elves (we have very few dwarves) so they were out getting homes near Bree or in Falathorn.

Overall I am very pleased with the way they implemented housing. Once I purchased my home, it was mine and no one else could gain access except me. The first thing I did, once I figured out how, was to allow access to my kinshipmates. (When you’re near your home, you get two additional buttons on your navigation circle: one to set permissions and one to toggle to design mode.) You can allow no access (the default) right up to total access to everything including the vault and decorations if you want. I opted to give the kin visitor access. I will probably allow public visitor access at some point. You can also add specific people if you want to.

Once I had the place and the access permissions set up, I went looking for furniture. Each instance has a furniture shop in it but not all shops sell the same stuff. Also, the places people have been getting rep with have items you can purchase for your homes as well. You can tell by the statues people have in their yards what group(s) they are affiliated with. Sometimes the effect is a bit like having a statuary rummage sale on your lawn, but it’s neat to be able to show off your hard work for getting rep.

Rep items:
- Tom Bombadill music box from the Mathom House (plays the ambient music from Tom’s house in my house).
- Dwarven yard statue from Thorin’s Hall rep instance (which is too huge so it sits in my housing storage box for now)

Shire furnishings:
- A couple of scholar bookshelves for the study
- A Hobbit bed
- A couple of birch trees
- An additional fireplace for the bedroom.

Breeland:
- Chairs
- A long table which a cook can turn into a very nice looking breakfast table with dishes, a lit candle and food on it. (Note – this is a “special” item which requires a special item hook).

Falathorn:
- Shire Oak Tree (why these aren’t available in the Shire, I’m not sure – it’s an awesome tree though and it’s friggin’ huge). Most of the rest of the elf furnishings look gaudy to me.

Thorin’s Gate:
- Iron chandelier
- Tall candle holder things
- Tapestries and pictures
- A little keg in a wheelbarrow for my yard.
- A mossy well for my yard
- A bunch of rugs

I used the trees to turn my rather plain lot into a wooded lot. I added the keg wagon and mossy well for lawn ornaments. I could also shuffle around things as I saw fit. I arranged one room to be my Hobbit’s bedroom complete with rug, bed, small scholar’s desk and a little fireplace. There’s no fire in the fireplace but it adds a certain charm to the room.

The other off-room became my Hobbit’s study. I have two large bookcases and a scholar’s desk covered with books in the middle. There’s a chair beside the fireplace for sitting and reading. I added a heraldry picture to the wall as well. In time, I hope to be able to add a map of Middle-earth (if one exists in-game). As an adventurer, I imagine him planning his escapades in this room and would like to fill it with items from his adventures.

The main room was tough. It’s enormous and even when using all the hooks, it looks like a vast chasm. In the center I put a large, red rug and my specially made breakfast table. Over the table hangs my chandelier. Along the sides I added a couple more pictures and some chairs and a small table I got from a housing quest. True to my roots in web design, I set things up, took them down and reset them up in different ways until I was happy with the layout of the place.

My gripes with the system are few. Every object has a name and, if you have object names turned on, it’s like walking into a floating catalog of the contents of someone’s house. As soon as I enter a house, I’ll turn the floating names off so I can take in the visuals without having text labels all over the place.

Items have a fixed orientation within their slotted areas. At one point I tried to put a chair in front of my fireplace only to find that the chair’s fixed position faces away from the fireplace. I tried changing it by removing it and adjusting the position from which I was adding the chair to the hook. No matter what I tried, it always faces away. I ended up putting a table there instead. Having a chair in front of a fireplace but facing the opposite direction looks kind of silly to me.

The table hooks don’t allow for chairs to be placed around them. My breakfast table sits openly on the floor like a buffet table rather than a place you’d actually want to sit and eat. Along with this is the fact that other furniture hooks are too far away from each other. If I wanted a number of chairs around in a circle so my friends and I could sit and talk, I can’t do it with the hooks that are there. I’m hoping there’s a special item I can get to put a set of chairs or a table and chairs in the center of the room. Something like a living room set would be neat and make it feel more like a home than a museum.

Overall, I have been enjoying setting up my house. I’m looking forward to actually using it for stuff. Parties! Woo!

Raiding

Today was my first experience raiding in The Lord of the Rings Online. My kinship has been doing weekly raids for a month or so now with some other allied kinships. I abstained at first due to level (much lower than 50 and you'll have trouble hitting the mobs). Even after I dinged 50, I didn't jump right on the bandwagon. I had been in a couple raiding kinships in WoW and figured I'd hold off.

Then it happened: one of the kinships in the raid alliance created a drama thread on the forums of my kinship about how they felt disrespected and used because we had decided to create a separate raid with more of our own members present from the two largest kinships in the alliance. The last raid we were on with them resulted in a slew of complaints to our officers (myself included) about the behavior of some of the other kinship's members. As I understand it, I was not on the raid, there was much screaming at other raid participants on vent and some loot drama that happened. The reports reminded me about everything I hated about WoW raiding. The storm settled down quickly and the other officers and I agreed to end the old alliance in favor of a new one with just the two largest kinships.

I went to Helegrond with them last night. It was actually a lot of fun. We took down the first boss and then proceeded to take out the four bosses at the entrance (we wiped once largely because we were trying a new strategy, once we switched back to the old one people knew better we crushed them with only a couple dead). Not knowing what I was doing, I just used my main assist and hit whatever he was hitting. We ventured further in and took out the spider. As a wrap-up to the evening, we attempted the big dragon boss (Thorag?) and got owned. I actually died twice: once when I was just trying to get into position (he set fire to the bridge I was on) and once after I rezzed and rode back in on my pony.

One thing I've become a lot more familiar with in LotRO is the graphics / advanced graphics options. Most of the time, I can run it on very high. For most of the raid, I used medium. For the spider boss, which is very graphically intensive, I ran on low graphics. The changes helped quite a bit in dealing with lag issues and display problems. It's a nice touch in a game as graphically intense as LotRO to be able to switch around my settings so easily to accommodate for game conditions.

And another tip if anyone else experiences element deformities such as horizontal slices (pixels or sets of pixels which extend from the edges of objects to infinity): turn on the "synch to refresh rate" in advanced graphics. I turned it on and haven't had many problems since. It will take up more resources on your machine but it makes things look a LOT better.

Ding! 50!

My Hobbit Burglar dinged 50 (max level in Lord of the Rings Online) the other day. Now I can wear the class-set gloves I got as a drop a week or so ago. Yay! I've been spending my time at 50 going back to some of the areas I hadn't explored as thoroughly as I would have liked to on my first trip through. The Trollshaws in particular is a massive zone with a lot of variety to it and lots of ruins to check out. I need to work on my traits to get up to spec. I've also been working my way through the epic book quests and taking some time to run Carn Dum and other instances with kinship mates. In-between all of the stuff listed above, I've also been roaming around in the Ettenmoors more often. As the only PvP zone in the game, it adds a bit to the excitement of questing. The problem I have with it is the PvP: like most MMOs I think the PvP in LotRO isn't all that great.

The Current and Near-future state of MMOs

Tobolds had an article on his blog about the doom-casting around MMOs and how many bloggers are all pointing to the same dark morass 2008 will be for MMOs and saying “Doom! Doooooooom!” He also thought it would be interesting for some kind of counter-point discussion. Not being one to shy away from rambling on about poorly-researched subject matter, and also having been in a blogging slump lately, I considered it prime time to dust off the keyboard and dazzle my readers with my foresight, insight and overall mastery of the English language.

Then I came back to reality, and wrote this instead:

Player benefits of the current MMO slump:

1) Rather than play new, players can cross-pollinate. 2008 will be a good time for players to play other established games which they may not have considered. World of Warcraft, Everquest2, Guild Wars, Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes, to name a few, have been going well for a while now. Players can break away from the games they may be tiring of and try another one that has already been established for a while. Who knows? Perhaps in trying a game you dismissed at first may introduce you to a really great game.

2) An opportunity for Sleeper Hits. While most of the big-name MMOs seem to be delayed or cancelled, perhaps this is prime time for an MMO from a small name developer to leap to the front of the pack and impress people with awesome game-play / neat stories / whatever floats your boat. The industry as a whole could use some fresh blood. A company of any size could really shine if they bring something revolutionary to the table in 2008.

3) Games with room to grow. Many people love being in on the ground floor of The Next Big Thing (tm), but how about getting in on a game which is being refined. Lord of the Rings Online needs some more work with regard to combat fluidity, quests for certain levels and some other tweaks but it’s getting there. Tabula Rasa sounds like it needs more content. I imagine they’ll probably build it sometime. You could be one of the folks that got in at the ground level and, by playing and offering constructive feedback, you could help to make a good game great. People love the current polish of WoW, but seldom seem to remember the MONTHS of server problems, log in queues, inventory problems and crashes that came immediately after the launch. Tomorrow’s refined game started today as a passable, not-that-bad-but-not-that-great game.

4) Go the ^$%# outside. Another benefit of not having a lot of new gaming options: no excuse to stay cooped up inside.

All that, of course, is from the player perspective.

From the perspective of the MMO companies, I think they are engaged in a great struggle. How does one make an MMO in a post-WoW world? Whether you like the game or not, WoW pretty much defines what a release and continued development in a great game should be. I view WAR’s delay not as a failing on the part of Mythic, but perhaps a success: they’re not going to release a game that’s crap and if it is so far from being worthy that it won’t be releasable for a good long time, then it’s best to pull the plug and get to retooling it now instead of knowing that there are problems and trying to release it anyway.

I don’t remember where I read it, but one gaming insider said that no one remembers when you release something late if it’s good, but everyone remembers when you release crap too soon. I’m sure I paraphrased that badly, but the attitude of releasing worthy games is a good one. In the end, it will strengthen the genre and provide us the users with ever-widening sources of viable game play whatever our personal preferences may be.

If we have to wait for the Next Big Thing(tm) in gaming until late 2008 or 2009, that's cool by me. If the game companies are worth their salt, there should actually be a number of releases that should be quite good whenever it is that they can be released.

LotRO Housing

Some exciting news for those of us looking forward to the housing update for the Lord of the Rings Online:

There is an interview with Jeff Anderson, President & CEO of Turbine, on Warcry about the housing update (including some screen shots of Gollum).

Raiding

Last night I participated in my first raid in LotRO. It wasn’t an instance, it was against a spider boss named Bogbereth (or “Bog breath,” as my Kinship leader calls her). Having tackled the world dragons in WoW, I was expecting a lot of carnage on our side for not so much reward. Actually, we did exceptionally well. This being our first raid as a kinship, everyone level 45 and up wanted in. In short order, we had all the people that wanted to come ready and in Gath Forthnir for the raid. We went from GF into the spider lair, crushing everything in our path. We wound up in a dead end filled with small swarm spiders which we quickly demolished. Then a couple of elite spiders appeared and we took them out too. Then it was her: the giant spider queen herself.

Anticipated raid time: half-an-hour. Actual elapsed time including travel: 18 minutes. We were done so fast some of us, such as myself, had to stand around a minute to think of other stuff to do. I ended up on a kinship run to get some folks caught up with their book 7 and 8 quests. My groupmates were also nice enough to help my sneaksy hobbit butt get back to the place where I needed to complete book 9.1.

I thought back to the Bogbereth raid experience when I was reading an insightful post on Hardcore Casual about WoW Raiding. Most of the LotRO raiding I've hear of has involved less time and effort than raiding in WoW. I'm rather heartened by it - not that I'll get "easy epics," I could seriously care less about cartoon armor for my cartoon guy, but that I'll be able to see raids as just another fun thing I can do rather than a crappy-paying second job.

Ten Years of Ultima Online

Gratz to the folks over at EA for the ten year anniversary of Ultima Online.

One interesting comment included the following quote from Pimps and Dragons.

Playing a virtual-world game takes some getting used to," Garriott told me. "You have to realize that the world is what you make of it. Unfortunately, that means most likely you're going to have a relatively mediocre life.

An interesting observation and something I’ve been telling the folks trapped on the raiding and PvP reward hamster wheels for a while. Just because a game company gives you something to do in an online game doesn’t mean you HAVE to do it. Just because a game company doesn’t give you something to do doesn’t mean you can’t do it your own damned self.

Role play, create fun events, go exploring and have fun!