I’ve never played a character at the level cap of an MMO as much as I’ve played my Warden in recent months, and still I’m yet to set foot in a raiding instance. Dungeon instances in most MMOs just don’t interest me outside of the conditioned desire to gain better equipment for my character; Dungeons & Dragons Online is one of the few games I’ve played where dungeon running actually feels anything akin to the tentative exploratory delving that early pen and paper games often evoked, and only then if one was adventuring with a sympathetic party who were there for the experience (–noun: a particular instance of personally encountering or undergoing something) rather than the experience (–noun: abv. XP; reward for undergoing repetitive stress and tedium in a particular instance encounter).

I think this is, in part, due to the fact that LotRO has a fairly forgiving level of mudflation with each expansion, where in other MMOs a new expansion heralds the fact that characters who have defeated the greatest enemies of the land find that overnight they’ve become The Captains Average: Avengers of Mediocrity, while anyone who has not set foot in a raid instance is harshly reminded just how easy it is for the developer to negate all their efforts and reset their power to a Level 1 equivalent. That’s not to say that LotRO doesn’t have this, but it is far less extreme than in other MMOs that I’ve experienced. As such, I find that I am more willing to work on my character at the level cap, rather than reach the level cap and consider that to be the end of the game, not wanting to waste time grinding for gear that is never going to compare to that earned by raiders, and which will be entirely obsolete by the next expansion anyway.

As well as the slightly kinder mudflation, there’s also the numerous activities to undertake which will improve your character in a more permanent way than the grinding gears of gear grind tend to allow. I’ve taken to crafting, something with which I don’t normally bother, being as I am of the

1) Select gatherer profession
2) Sell everything on the Auction House
3) ???
4) Profit!

sort. I’m one who generally doesn’t find it terribly compelling game-play to stand around watching my character whittling three hundred spears, before flogging them all to an NPC vendor for a hundredth of the price of the raw materials. And playing with spreadsheets and applications to maximise profits on the Auction House is, in my mind, one of those activities which resides in a village a little too close to the ‘Is a Game’ / ‘Could be doing this in real life for real money’ border conflict.

In my case, Farming was a splendid example of this. My character’s vocation is Woodsman, where each vocation is made up of three professions, in this case Woodworking, Forestry and Farming. Woodworking and Forestry go together, gathering with the latter and crafting very useful items for my Warden with the former (once I’d got past all the pointless intermediary stages). Farming is the ugly stepchild of the vocation, the point where Turbine felt they’d try to force the interdependence crafting hand by giving most vocations a third profession which was generally dependant on a profession unavailable to that vocation. Farming provides items for the Cooking profession, and as such is fairly useless on its own; anyone who is a serious cook will have picked the Yeoman vocation, which includes both Cooking and Farming thus making themselves self-sufficient, such that trying to supply the cooks of Middle Earth with high quality ingredients is utterly pointless. I did notice, however, that I could produce pipe-weed with Farming, a cute cosmetic consumable which allows characters to blow smoke rings of various entertaining designs. Thus I began to level Farming, and I quickly found a way to do so with as little effort as possible, as MMO players are wont to do. Farming is one of the few professions where you can buy all of the ingredients from an NPC vendor, being as it is, technically, a gathering profession. Farming consists of two stages, sowing a field of seeds (using the ingredients you buy from the NPC vendor) and then harvesting that field once it is sown. What I quickly worked out was this:

• Both stages give you points towards your crafting level.
• The sowing gives you more points than the harvesting.
• You still get the points for sowing if you don’t then harvest.
• Ingredients are cheap enough that you can buy all that is required to get your entire crafting level.
• You can queue up sowing for as much as your inventory of ingredients will allow.

Therefore, for each level of Farming, it was a simple case to calculate the ingredients required to complete each level, buy them at the NPC vendor, stand my character in a field and tell it to ‘Make All’, and then go and do something more interesting while I waited for the game to play itself. There was one caveat to this, which was what made the thing amusing to me: every now and again I needed to go and press the Shift key so that the game client didn’t log me out.

I pondered on that for a bit.

The game client was essentially saying “Well, you haven’t done anything significant in the past half an hour, I’ll save myself some resources and kill your connection”. It did this while I was actually ‘playing’ the game within the parameters of the design. You know you have quality game-play design on your hands when your players will be booted off your game because your own server thinks ‘Heck, he hasn’t done anything for ages, he’s either link-dead or actually dead, time to clear the ol’ connections’. There’s clearly a balance to be struck here: A Tale in the Desert is at one extreme of the scale, where you have to hammer your own armour out from a sheet of metal using individual hammer strokes and where most people probably walk around in armour which looks like a pineapple that’s been humped by a randy elephant. Lord of the Rings and its ilk are at the other end of the scale, where crafting is like government controlled manufacturing: phenomenal amounts of natural resources are poured into an inefficient process which churns and chugs away for time immemorial before one half-bent sword drops off the end of the production line and promptly shatters into a hundred pieces, while only a marginal increase in crafting expertise is achieved.

Crafting isn’t the only thing I’ve found to do to improve my character outside of dungeon instancing, however. There is my skirmish soldier to improve in order to make my skirmishing easier. Skirmishes are an area of content that can be run solo or in a group, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we eventually see dungeons that allowed skirmish soldiers to tag along, allowing groups with fewer players than the Middle Earth Metric Standard of ‘six’

“None shall pass! Or six shall pass! No other amount shall pass, however!”

to undertake the content anyway. As far as I’m concerned there still aren’t nearly enough MMOs pinching ideas from Guild Wars. Except Guild Wars 2, those guys are totally ripping it off, if you ask me. There are also plenty of incidental improvements to the character to be had, most of which are just ‘quality of life’ items, but on the whole I find these to have far more lasting impact and worth than an incremental armour upgrade. There are various teleports to areas of the world which can be earnt through various deeds, for example. A lot of these are locked behind reputation requirements, but they are generally accompanied by other niceties such as cosmetic outfit items, mounts, and the like: items which will last and be used by your character long after that piece of teal armour has been vendored. It’s subjective of course, and one man’s idea of what’s worthwhile is always going to be different to another’s, but the nice thing about LotRO is that it offers so much to do for a player who isn’t interested in raiding, things which aren’t just restricted to doing daily quests for tokens to get the armour set that is slightly worse than the latest raiding version on display on top of your nearest major player hub mailbox. It’s a Make Your Own Sandbox kit: a wealth of options unrelated to raiding, which you can pick and choose your way through; craft today, skirmish tomorrow; go hunt reputation items, or complete deeds; finish the epic Volume content, or explore areas you have yet to visit – there’s always somewhere.

Raiding doesn’t have to be the only thing to do at the level cap, there are ways to provide variety and rewards outside of the gear grind, and I can’t imagine I’m alone in thinking that I’d be deliriously happy with that sort of alternative end game in any MMO that chose to implement it.

“But this time I was ready for the grind. I headed over to pick up Mr Flapnoodle, this time leaving my clothes with the confused but otherwise relieved dwarf, and then headed into northern Angmar to hunt the hundreds upon hundreds of Angmarim I’d need to complete my reputation grind, nobly riding naked to battle but for my cape flapping restlessly in the wind behind me.”

You may have noticed the rather exceptional Victorian undergarments apparent on my character; yes, even when your character isn’t wearing any armour in Lord of the Rings Online they’re still more modestly covered than the heaviest-armour-wearing female warriors of other MMOs.

Alas there’s no evidence of Mr Flapnoodle in the screenshot, but I think he was busy steering the horse at the time.

Always remember, though, the best way to grind in an MMO is naked but for a cape and a small sock puppet.

Now to go and have a word with the elves of Mirkwood, I think there are some orcs there that I could go and eat food loudly while smacking my lips near, Mr Flapnoodle says they hate that.

I recently undertook a reputation grind with my Warden in Lord of the Rings Online, another of those grouting duties that I usually avoid on my various characters, only ever achieving maximum status with the various factions in MMOs through the incidental advancement that occurs during the course of levelling a character. Being at the level cap and not being of a raiderly mindset, however, I find myself wanting to overpaint the canvas of my character in other ways. Of the three ‘c’s that advance a character in an MMO –Completion, Customisation and Cultivation– only Cultivation is restricted at the level cap to just two areas of advancement, funnelled as it is into the primary palettes of raiding and PvP. Of course, Completion and Customisation can both be advanced through raiding and PvP, but there are also other shades of game-play in which the two can be mixed.

In terms of LotRO then, Cultivation is advancing the power level of your character through the usual MMO channel of ever-increasing item levels; Completion is all about fully fleshing out the character, achieving all that there is to achieve in the game: collecting all the deeds, reaching maximum reputation rank with all the various factions, exploring all the nooks and crannies the game has to offer; and Customisation is all about making the character you want, be it through cosmetic items, mounts, titles, housing, or character builds. Many areas of Cultivation will also offer ways to advance Completion or Customisation, but it’s very rare that, say, Completion will offer a way to advance Cultivation once you reach the end game. For example, completing the not insignificant achievement of ‘What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been’ in World of Warcraft grants the player a mount, something which may be cosmetically appealing (Customisation), a form of status recognition for your hard work (Completion), but which offers nothing in the way of advancing your character’s innate power level (Cultivation).

It’s fairly apparent as to why this situation exists in these MMOs: the fact that character power level is based primarily on item improvement, items which are made redundant with each expansion of the end-game, means that rewarding a chest piece for ‘What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been’ would be pointless as soon as the next expansion is released. Or would it? Blizzard have already introduced the concept of heirloom items, items which increase in power as your character does, could significant achievements such as ‘What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been’ reward items that increase in power with the character and maintain a power level equivalent to end-game raiding rewards?

Back to the reputation grind, though. The chain of events which led me to grind away for reputation was itself interesting. I’d decided to complete the Virtue traits on my character, getting them all to the current maximum of level ten. To do this I had to perform various deeds, which for the melee-based traits generally involves using sharp pointy bits of metal to convince mobs to shuffle off their mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible. The trait I was working on at the time required me to kill three hundred orcs in Angmar, something which was time consuming but not a challenge since I had long out-levelled the area, so it was a suitable time to listen to a podcast or two while roaming around a camp of orcs and slaughtering them with wild unhindered abandon, the sort of one-sided fight equivalent to dropping a great white shark into a heavily populated hospital swimming therapy pool. Grinding a deed in this way is a bit like weight training for will power: you have a little counter in the top corner of your screen which counts up as you start to kill orcs, but three hundred seems like an impossible task, especially after you spend what seems like an eternity slaughtering away like the Tazmanian Devil in a bathtub of bunnies, only to look up and find that you’ve killed just ten orcs. So you start trying to trick your mind, ‘Right, we only have to do that twenty nine more times and we’re done. Twenty nine isn’t a very big number is it now? So, let’s do another ten. Can you give me another ten reps? Okay, here we go then: one, two, three… feel the burn… four, five, six… keep that sword arm nice and straight… seven, eight, nine annnnnnnd ten. Good! And relax. Shake it out, have a breather, and then we’ll do another ten’.

Such tricks only last so long however, and then you start to go mad: you start to move around as you fight such that the dead orcs make pretty patterns on the ground with their corpses, or spell out rude words that can be seen from the air by low-flying Nazgûl; you try to find interesting weapons in your inventory to kill the orcs with, bludgeoning a captain to death with a haddock, and then stabbing his second in command with a hat pin; then you progress to trying to find various unique ways to initiate combat: standing near the orc camp and talking loudly on a mobile phone, for example, or running around and altering all the heights of their office chairs, or standing uncomfortably close behind on orc and reading its copy of the Nazgûl News over its shoulder. By the end of the session you’re running around naked save for your cape, half an orc skull balanced on your head, and orc eyes pushed on to the end of your toes. Your right hand still holds your sword, but your left hand is now Mr Flapnoodle –formed from a pouch made of a warg ear with orc nipples for eyes– who tells you what to kill next by whispering in your ear; the orcs have learnt to fear the judgement of Mr Flapnoodle, and you obey because he’s hidden your teeth somewhere inside your face and you need them to become Queen of the Monkey Bees.

I don’t normally do reputation grinds, and now you know why.

Having finished killing the three hundred orcs, who weren’t nearly as big a challenge as the three hundred Spartans I’d killed the day before, I sold all the junk I’d collected and found myself with a bag still half full with reputation items. Seeing as they were effectively free from my earlier exertions while attempting to complete the Orc Genocide deed, it seemed silly to thrown them away, so I put my clothes back on, left Mr Flapnoodle in the care of a confused looking dwarf who seemed to be trying not to throw up, and made my way over to Esteldín to hand in the reputation items with the rangers there. The Rangers of Esteldín, an elite band of warriors who remain hidden from the enemy by carefully guarding the location of their secret base, never telling a soul, never letting on, never revealing in any way where they come from. Not even a hint. ‘Hello, we’re the Rangers of Esteldín! Where are we from? We can’t tell you that. Are we from Esteldín? Who told you that?! Gentleman, we have a spy in our midst! We, the Rangers of Esteldín, will not stop until… hang on…’ Anyway, having handed in all the reputation items I’d gathered to the newly named Rangers of SHHHHH IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE A SECRET DAMMIT I found that I had reached the maximum level of reputation with them, and as such I had a look at the rewards on offer. Of course there was nothing in the way of Cultivation, but they did offer a new mount, which obviously appealed to the Customiser in me. It was going to cost me five gold, an amount which my character can comfortably afford but which is nevertheless not an insignificant expense, so I did a little research in order to make sure it didn’t suffer from the Horse Eye of DOOM or any other such mind twisting deformity. Alas, although the horse is without strange features it is also a little plain, and I couldn’t bring myself to justify the expense for another mount that I would probably never use because I already had several handsome specimens. I did, however, notice the Prized Angmar’s Free People’s Steed while I did my research, which is possibly the best looking mount I’ve seen in the game. And that was it, my flame of desire was suddenly fully fanned, I had a goal, covetousness was upon me, game-play had emerged from a chain of unrelated events, and all that was required of me was to grind out Kindred reputation with the Council of the North.

But this time I was ready for the grind. I headed over to pick up Mr Flapnoodle, this time leaving my clothes with the confused but otherwise relieved dwarf, and then headed into northern Angmar to hunt the hundreds upon hundreds of Angmarim I’d need to complete my reputation grind, nobly riding naked to battle but for my cape flapping restlessly in the wind behind me.

I made a bit of a Middle Earthian faux pas the other day while talking with m’colleague. I was burbling garrulously about my Warden’s adventures in Lord of the Rings Online’s most recently added zone, Eregion, and how it was a pleasant diversion while the Volume 3 content remained out of service due to the Rescue in Nûrz Gâshu skirmish needing repairs.

As a brief point of order, Rescue in Nûrz Gâshu was available for me last night, thus I was able to… ‘happily’ is possibly the wrong word… ‘doggedly’? I was able to doggedly continue with the Volume 3 content. Rescue in Nûrz Gâshu is definitely a skirmish that cries out for the player to increase the difficulty and then intensively farm the heck out of it. It could become a sort of ranch for skirmish mobs, where orcs and goblins are bred, corralled and slaughtered before their carcasses are shipped off in exchange for skirmish marks. There’s even the standard bonus reward the first time you run the skirmish each day, like some sort of agricultural subsidy from the governor of Middle Earth. But now I have an image of ranks of orcs all connected to milking machines in unseemly ways, and I won’t tell you what’s coming down the tubes, but suffice it to say that the thought of Weetabix coated in Crème de Menthe is even less appealing now than it was when I first conceived of it. So let’s move on.

More observant players of LotRO, having read my first paragraph, may have noticed the deliberate mistake contained therein. Some of those readers may have rushed off immediately to the Comment Cave, donned their spandex outfits, and begun drafting the latest in vigilante justice against the evil forces of Being Wrong on the Internet. Let’s wait for them to finish posting their comment, which probably starts ‘I think you’ll find…’ and should, as always, be delivered in the tone of someone wearing a cravat, stood on a hearth rug, and pointing reproachfully with the bowl of their pipe while looking down their nose at you.

So yes, the new zone is Enedwaith, not Eregion. I quickly corrected myself upon realising that I’d been blathering on about an entirely different zone:

“Sorry, I meant Enedwaith of course, Eregion is an entirely different place.

I mean, they both start with the letter ‘E’, of course.

And both have a quest flow progression that starts at the top and works its way slowly down the zone, branching off left and right for quest objectives as you go.

Stopping at new quest hubs along the way, each with its own horse point.

With many of the quest hubs called Echad SomethingOrOther.

And swift travel available between quest hubs after you’ve completed a certain number of quests in the zone.

The points between quest hubs being populated by angry wolves, humanoids, boars, and crebain.

With green flowing plains punctuated by improbable impassable landscape features.

Rivers splitting them in two, although admittedly Eregion’s has run dry.

And…

Possibly it was an easier mistake to make than I had otherwise realised. The zones are even placed side by side, and I pictured the newer Enedwaith as the sort of neighbour who moves in next door and promptly steals all your design ideas and renovates their house so that it looks exactly the same as yours, only newer, and with more expensive furnishings. The people of Eregion must have been mightily annoyed when they woke up one morning and found an entirely new region next door that wasn’t there the day before, and which was eerily similar, except everything was new and shiny and unexplored. I suppose it explains all the bumper stickers that I’ve seen sprouting-up on horses in Eregion recently:

“From the home of the ORIGINAL legendary item drop.”

“Eregioner’s enter Moria from behind.”

“My zone’s been Ranger free since 1248.”

“Eregion: our goats won’t get your goat.”

“Honk if you’ve got an E-rection for E-region!”

“Remember: ‘Enedwaith’ rearranged, with a bunch of letters taken away and others added, spells ‘Rubbish’!”

I also imagine that, like rival college fraternities or sororities, the two regions are constantly performing pranks on one another; Enedwaith placing traffic cones down the length of Eregion and thus forcing the horse routes to ride adventurers off the cliff at the top of the Misty Mountains, or into the side of The School at Tham Mírdain; Eregion taking revenge by painting all of Enedwaith’s goats black then rubbing itching powder onto each goat’s genitals.

Still, at least Eregion is a nice zone in which to play, or so I found on my multiple runs through it, and so Enedwaith has been similarly pleasant so far, in a ‘dating a person who has an appealing personality but looks spookily like your ex’ sort of way. I do keep getting them confused, however, where I’ve found the best way to tell them apart is to look at the level of wolf that I’m fighting. Then again that’s a dangerous precedent to set, next we’ll be coding all zones by the level of wolves they contain, and we’ll have conversations like

“Yeah, we were in ‘Wolves 23 to 29’ last night, got a bit bored with running around ‘Wolves 15 to 22’, really. I suppose we could have gone to ‘Wolves 17 to 24’, but there’s not so much to do there.”

Not to mention the fact that they sound like section quotes from the Book of Wolf in some strange bible.

“And now a reading from Wolves 8:14

Be strong and of a good courage, fear not though thou be constantly spammed with stupid fear effects. Nor be afraid…for the Lord thy God, he it is that doth go with thee to stab a wolf in the nose; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. But he may let you limp for twenty to sixty seconds if he has run out of wound salves.”

Then again, classifying zones by the level of wolves found there would certainly be an easy way to standardise zone description across nearly all fantasy MMOs…

My Warden’s adventures through Tolkienland have been prematurely halted, like an angry dog chasing a cat through the back yard, only to be yanked to a yelping standstill by its collar chained to a post next to its kennel. My Warden has been busy chasing members of the Grey Company around the countryside of Middle Earth with the frenzied haste of a hyperactive Border Collie trying to round up sheep on a bouncy castle. Flinging herself with tongue-lolling grinning enthusiasm from one corner of Middle Earth to the other, and then back again, as she seeks out the rangers who have sworn to protect the heirs of Isildur. It turns out that one of those rangers, Golodir, has got himself into some trouble (spending too much time drinking in the company of the dwarves of Moria, no doubt) and Corunir wants some help to rescue him from somewhere in the depths of Nûrz Ghâshu. Unfortunately, upon arriving at the entrance, I found the Nûrz Ghâshu theme park to be closed with chains wrapped around the gates, the painted words ‘Coming Soon’ dribbling down a sign which dangled at a lop-sided angle from where it had been hastily hung. After all my running around, antics and adventures, trials and tribulations, I had finally been halted by an ‘out of order’ notice. Had I not been warned in the comments by foolsage, and again by splendidly informative sites such as A Casual Stroll to Mordor, I would have been Clark Griswold standing dazed and confused in the deserted parking lot of Wally World. As it was, I just shrugged my shoulders and decided to work on something else in the meantime, while awaiting Turbine’s fix for the issue with Nûrz Ghâshu World; apparently you’d get stuck on one of the rides and be unable to get off, and even now they are still helping heroes of Middle Earth off the whirligig, who then stagger around green-faced and groaning, before bending over with their hands on their knees, and hurling their leftover food buffs into waiting plastic buckets. There’s no real schedule for when Turbine will fix the skirmish, which is utterly outrageous, I mean it’s not as though they’ve been ever so slightly busy over the past few weeks or anything.

Congratulations to Turbine and Codemasters on a pretty painless transfer and resumption of service, which seemed to take less time than had been advertised – a miracle in the MMO space, outside of that hallowed alternative dimension which houses Trion’s Rift. I’m not sure whether Turbine’s gathering of all its pretties and preciousess was an amicable arrangement, but nothing untoward occurred, and my concern that Codemasters might rename every character to Traitorous Pooface and change the characters’ heads into pairs of crusty orc buttocks before they left the Codemasters servers, was thankfully unfounded. I also had slightly more realistic concerns that increased latency would occur and thence cause havoc with the careful timing of the Warden’s gambit-building attacks, but so far –on the anecdotal evidence of playing for a few evenings– everything appears to be pretty much as it was when under Codemaster’s rule.

And so, with progress halted on Volume 3 I switched the solo spotlight over to deeds and skirmishes. Having enjoyed the refreshment of the new (to me) skirmishes unlocked as part of Volume 2, I decided to take a look at the two relatively new (to everyone) skirmishes released as part of LotRO’s Update 3. I was pleasantly surprised at the level of challenge they provided, and although I didn’t suffer a loss in either, I came within a hundred hit points of defeat while fending off a particularly numerous company of angry Gauradan in Icy Crevasse, and I nearly failed the final boss fight in Attack at Dawn. Perhaps the feeling of being challenged will diminish as I run these skirmishes again, but I couldn’t help but feel that this was the sort of challenge that I enjoy in an MMO; the trouble is that I find it hard to identify what makes this sort of challenge enjoyable over the challenges presented by, for example, raid dungeons.

Perhaps it’s the simplicity of the challenge: it’s not terribly difficult to work out what needs to be done, and there isn’t a great deal to remember, but correctly executing the strategy required to defeat the fight still takes a certain level of concentration and competence, which makes the fight more involving than the usual ‘two drunk people standing opposite each other and taking turns to slap each other in the face until one of them passes out’ found in most soloable MMO content; these fights were tense, fraught with endangerment, and somewhat manic. Importantly, although the general strategy was known, execution of the fight required that strategy to be modified on the fly as the fight progressed in response to events.

The fights also feel less gimmicky than many of the staged fights in MMOs, and therefore perhaps it was the fact that it felt less of a game that I, as the player, was thus able to relate to the situation in the context of the characters. Certainly the final fight of Attack at Dawn, where you must stop goblin messengers trying to escape with the location of Esteldín, while also dealing with the boss, felt more compelling and less like the usual LotRO-skinned Sonic the Hedgehog boss fights that I’ve experienced in many of the dungeons. Hmmm, Sonic was always chasing after gold rings, had a name beginning with ‘s’, and spiky armour. Lift-up Sauron’s robe and I bet he’s wearing bright red sneakers with white stripes under there.

There’s also the fact that when solo I can change my tactics in an instant, something which is generally removed from group game-play by design. I think this, ultimately, is where raiding breaks down for me. It’s not that I don’t enjoy playing with others –the most enjoyable times I’ve had in MMOs have been as part of a group– but the challenge of raiding leaves no room for individual expression within a group, it seems to boil down to fixing everyone’s role to the Nth degree, and then having people perform those roles as perfectly as possible. In part this is down to the way players always want to optimise encounters. And yes, in part it’s down to the fact that we’re not a flock of birds and don’t have a genetic predisposition to rapidly change course as a group without smacking into one another. Mainly, however, it’s down to the fact that in most MMOs you defeat a boss before the fight: if your strategy is sound, then you have defeated the boss, as long as you follow that strategy. There is generally no “That’s not working, let’s try this” during a fight, it’s a case of “That didn’t work, let’s try this” after a fight, and for me there is a world of difference in the experience between those two forms of strategy. The former is for planners and managers, the second is for those who prefer to fly by the seat of their pants. Neither is wrong, raiding in its current standard form is absolutely fine, but it doesn’t interest me as a form of entertainment.

Everything debuffs my character in Lord of the Rings Online or so it seems; I can’t so much as take afternoon tea without wounding myself when picking up a teacup, or poisoning myself on an egg and cress sandwich, and the less said about how one gets a disease from a length of Battenberg the better.

Of the various categories of debuff, however, ‘fear’ is the one that I find most curious. For a start it seems to be the most popular debuff among minions of the dark power, an understandable concept until you consider the fact that after my character has killed their three thousandth warg without loss of their own life, are they really, honestly, going to be intimidated by wargs any longer? Consider a circus lion tamer entering the cage every morning and yelling “HOLY CRAP, A LION! HELP! LIONNNNN! Ahhhhhhhhhhhohhhh wait… ah ha ha, ohhh I’m feeling foolish now”. I suppose it could be the case that my character isn’t afraid of the wargs per se, perhaps the wargs just have a really good propaganda department feeding them slogans to shout during a fight

Hero: “Have at you, wargs!”

Warg 1: “[Growls] Did you know that fluctuating aggregate demand is destabilising the economy?”

Warg 2: “[Barks] Food prices are set to rise exponentially!”

Warg 1: “[Tweets] Interest rates on Rivendell properties will double in the next financial quarter.”

Hero: “Tweets?”

Warg 1: “[Barks] Yeah, I’m broadcasting some of these to my warg friends on the Internet.”

Hero: “Ah.”

Warg 2: “[Howls] Unemployment among Middle Earth heroes is at 4.5%, its highest rate for two ages of man!”

Hero: “Noooooo!” [Bites fingernails]

I checked the fear debuff the other day and it said that my character was ‘unsettled’, which sounds less like a fear of the unknown and more the morning-after result of a dodgy takeaway. I suppose it could be trying to reflect the sudden panicked realisation that if you do suffer a catastrophic takeaway-induced toilet emergency, you’re securely strapped into a highly restrictive human-shaped tin can. Unless you’re a female warrior in plate armour of course, then you just need to drop your knickers, if you’re even allowed to wear knickers. Of course we all know they do wear knickers really, because the first time anyone puts on one of those full-plate schoolgirl skirt things that pass for female armour in an MMO, they always do the ‘are there really knickers up there?’ check. [Cough] I’d better just check the camera is working. Scroll in. Scroll in. Scroll down. Scroll down. Tilt my head a bit to the side… wait that won’t work. Scroll in some more. Ooop, too far, I’ve gone into first person view. Scroll out. Scroll down. Annnnnnnnnnd, I think those are knickers. Are they? It’s a bit dark. [Cough] I’d better test the gamma controls, just to make sure they’re working too…’

In my MMO, any time the player’s camera viewing angle intersected with the Up Skirt plane, an elite monster would jump out from up there and attack. Bonus experience, however, if it jumps out from your character’s skirt and attacks the person ‘innocently’ standing next to them.

Everything seems to debuff, as I mentioned earlier before I went slightly off track; ‘slightly’ as a rollercoaster would be slightly off track if it had left the theme park and was comfortably overtaking traffic in the outside lane of a nearby motorway. While soloing my way through Volume 2 I had stacked debuffs from a variety of mobs to the extent that my character had reduced Might and Agility, drastically reduced Armour and Morale, and close to zero Fate or Willpower. Sometimes I wonder if there wasn’t a miscommunication between development departments:

“What the hell is wrong with the Warden in this instance, it has half the effective power that it normally should have, how the heck is that heroic?!”

“Hey look, we did just what you asked, you said you wanted to see it tank like a pansy so…”

“Panzer.”

“Huh?”

“I wanted it to tank… like a Panzer. As in the tank. Rugged. Robust. Powerful. Death dealing.”

“Ah. Not limp, yellow, slightly fragrant, but ultimately fragile, then?”

“Who on earth would want to play a game where their character spends most of the time like that?!”

“Well we did wonder.”

Debuffs are, of course, also linked to the exciting ‘Did you remember to buy potions?’ mini-game, where you venture fifty yards into an instance and then have a debuff of every colour instantly slapped on your character, at which point you realise that you forgot to stock up on potions; even better when you did stock up on potions but find you’re facing mobs of a slightly higher level than usual, for which you need slightly higher level potions. This leads on to the slightly more morally ambiguous ‘Oh, look, we happen to have potions on the LotRO Store’ mini-game, where the player balances the value of traipsing all the way back to a quest hub to buy potions against the real world cost of summoning a stack immediately and conveniently from out of the microtransactional aether.

Of course even if you win the ‘Did you remember to buy potions?’ mini-game, there’s often little point in using one during a fight:

“I fear you!”
“Hah! I use a potion!”
“Okay. I fear you again!”
“I… can’t use a potion because it’s on cooldown. Bugger.”
“I fear you again!”
“Alright, alright, no need to rub it in.”
“Sorry. [whispers] I fear you again.”
“I heard that!”

Even if they don’t restack debuffs, most MMO sessions consist of fighting a succession of similar mobs, thus waiting for the fight to end and clearing the debuff does nothing, because the very next mob will pop it straight back onto your character again. So really the potions are only useful for the feariest of fear debuffs, where your character is in real danger of death, rather than the more minor risk of being intensely irritated at having to auto-attack everything to death: because one of the more annoying fear debuffs (for characters without a dedicated power regeneration ability) reduces Will and Fate –responsible for your character’s power regeneration in and out of combat– meaning that in any lengthy fight your character spends most of their time gasping for power, even when chugging power and fear potions as soon as they’re off cooldown. In addition, it induces downtime by forcing the character to wait while they regenerate power between fights. Papua New Guinea has a more reliable power supply than most of my characters.

Of course there’s a counter to this: the various food items in the game which can be crafted and will grant your character a boost to power regeneration great enough to overcome the worst of these anti-power fear debuffs. Of course I predict that this will simply lead to an arms race where mobs cast more powerful fear effects, and player characters counter this by cooking up richer foods and eating them in greater quantities. Daytime TV shows in Middle Earth will introduce regular cooking segments where Aragorn extols the virtues of cheese pudding and chips in combating a fear of wargs, and Gandalf shows us a cheeky little soufflé which can cancel the unwanted attentions of the undead. Soon we’ll have these comically giant roly poly heroes waddling around the countryside with their mouths full of toad in the hole and jacket spuds. New players, upon encountering a high level player, will suffer an immediate fear debuff as their minds try to comprehend these gargantuan amorphous near-spherical blobs who wave their swords wildly around from their little stump appendages, while biscuit crumbs spill down their fronts as they try to communicate in ‘munmph’s through a mouthful of custard creams. In response to the fact that the players now naturally cause fear and confusion in each other, the minions of The Enemy will be forced to drop their now redundant and petty debuff tactic, and instead focus on other ways to debilitate the players, such as building large flights of stairs and narrow doorways. Thus, in a curious twist of fate, the forces of evil create some of the most beautiful feats of architectural engineering that Middle Earth has ever seen.

Of course ‘stair lift’ tokens will be available on the LotRO Store shortly thereafter.