Category Archives: lotro

A scholar always treads on the path of righteousness

It’s a scholar’s life, being a scholar in LotRO. The other day I sought to improve my scholarlyness from Apprentice to Journeyman, so I schlepped over to Ered Luin for a chat with some Elf there.

“Ah, Zoso” she said “to prove to me how scholarly you are, I want you to compose a poem”
“Fair enough” said I; “There once was an Elf from Nantucket…”
“No, no, no. I want a ballad about Aiglos. You’ll need a Ruined Second Age Trinket, which you can obtain from vases found in a few terribly perilous ruins inevitably infested with hostile beasts, three Cryptic Texts from those same vases or possibly looted from the corpses of assorted monsters, and the Lost Stanzas of Aiglos which I gave to another random adventurer who promptly headed off into the middle of nowhere and got himself killed slap bang in the middle of an incredibly dangerous area.”
“Erm, right. Peril, death, peril, killing, danger, rifling through the pockets of blood-stained corpses, peril, poetry. Sounds like fairly standard academic research. I’ll get right on it. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Unless… well… it’s just I’ve been doing a bit of farming in my spare time, as us Historians are wont to do, and I just completed a quest for Farmer Barleymow over there to progress from being an Apprentice Farmer to Journeyman.”
“A quest, eh? That must have been challenging. I’ll wager you had to seek out an incredibly rare seed, protected by vicious birds who’ll give a nasty peck if you try and take it from them, and then you had to fertilise the seed with the dung of an albino Auroch, of which there are only known to be two, and it had to be watered with the tears of a Hero of the Second Age.”
“Not exactly, no. I had to read a book.”
“A book?”
“Yeah, The Kitchen Gardener: Grow Your Own Fruit and Veg by Alan Titchmarsh. It’s really good, lots of step by step guides, detailed pictures, it’s got a five star rating on Amazon.”
“But you had to ride for many leagues to obtain this book, no doubt?”
“He had a copy on him, just gave it to me. Or I could’ve got it delivered by 1pm the next day if I had to. Very convenient. So I was thinking, see, if there’s any profession where you ought to be able to improve your proficiency through reading, surely that would be a Scholar?”
“You’d think, wouldn’t you? Nah. Bugger off and kill some goblins.”

A bargain is something you can’t use at a price you can’t resist.

The general unwritten rule of polite society in Lord of the Rings Online has been that if you are a high level character killing mobs in a low level zone in order to complete a deed, you should give way to characters who are at the correct level for the content if they happen upon the group of mobs you are grinding. It’s basic courtesy of course, although the more green-skinned among us might question the nature and personal gain of being polite or generous to another person, but the community in LotRO is one of the few places where I’ve often found the rule to be adhered to in the main, without even the need for peer enforcement.

Until the game went free to play.

In part I think this is because there are a great many more low level characters running around in this new freemium era. In addition, however, there now exists an item in the LotRO store that accelerates deeds, making each valid kill count twice and thus halving the number of kills required; when the item is activated it creates a temporary buff on the character that has a relatively short duration of around fifteen minutes and which, as far as I can tell, cannot be paused in any way once it has been started.

MMO players have a hard enough time being good to one another as it is, and now there is the potential for them to have an item – for which they paid – ticking down its relatively (in MMO terms) short duration and doing them no good if they happen to stand aside and let someone else go first. It’s a bit like those game-shows where a contestant has a set amount of time to run around a supermarket and fill their trolley with as many items as they can, and if they make it back before the clock runs down then they get to keep whatever is in their basket.

“Right, Lego Lass, you’ve made it to the final. How are you feeling? Excited? No need to be nervous, you know what you’ve got to do: you’ve got fifteen minutes to kill as many wolves as you can. Okay my dear, take yourself to the starting line. Can I have fifteen minutes on the Kill Deed Buff Timer please? Thank you. Ready? Then let’s play Shopping for Slaughter! Three! Two! One!”

[A claxon sounds and the audience begins to bellow encouragement]

[Lego Lass runs around one-shotting wolves and shoving them into a shopping trolley, occasionally shoulder-charging a low level player character into a stack of baked bean cans and grabbing the wolf they were about to kill]

To my mind Turbine have created an item that actively encourages the sort of selfish behaviour that a large part of the community had been resisting. Perhaps it’s more an indication that this is an item that one should steer clear of purchasing? Deeds are tiresome tasks, however, and although that shouldn’t really be an issue to any dedicated member of the MMO Player Party (motto: ‘Entertainment through repetition! Repetition through repetition!’), they do become an excessive drain for each successive alt you create, and as an avid altoholic I can certainly testify to the temptation that such an item presents.

I believe this is another one of those areas where a company engaging in cash shop dynamics needs to tread with care and consideration, because as with any change to the dynamics of a game’s fundamental design in a certain area (no matter how small and insignificant that change may seem), the chaos effect of such a change can have a much wider ranging impact on the game as a whole, with ramifications that are often surprising in their nature, but predictably deleterious in their effect. The difference is that the subscription of a standard MMO is constant: players know that no matter what they do, the cost per unit (in this case one month of play time) remains the same; in addition, the duration of one unit runs in the order of a month or months. Cash shop items, however, tend to have units of duration that run for at most days, more often hours, and possibly even in minutes, and yet everything in an MMO such as LotRO, which has converted to F2P, is generally set up to require activities based around the original subscription unit of months. The final issue is that having to make a purchase for an item from the store impresses on the player that they have spent their money on this item, and thus if that item is wasted because, say, the mobs they intended to grind away at have suddenly become inundated with other players doing the same, and the next nearest spawn is five minutes away, the player has a far more immediate perception of loss than if they had had to waste five minutes of their £15-a-month subscription travelling to another spawn.

Crafting accelerators, for example, seem like a good use of this mechanic: halving the materials and time required to grind out the various tiers of crafting professions, and which can only be spoilt if you have failed to gather the correct amount of raw materials beforehand; crafting accelerators will not bring you into direct competition with other players in an area where the game has not been designed for such competition, which stands in contrast to the kill deed accelerators.

In conclusion, with the urgency demanded by these short-term purchased buffs, I predict a rise in the number of shopping trolley related accidents in Lord of the Rings Online in the near future.

Long distance information

Melmoth’s quest-ly pondering set me thinking about related subjects, like the supporting tracking and logging mechanism for quests.

Back in the Proper Good Old Days, the quest log was a piece of paper. You ran up to an NPC and asked if there was anything you could do for them (none of this glowing punctuation nonsense), and if you were very lucky they might drop some hint about something that might be relevant. Nothing so vulgar as “go kill Bandit Leader Geoff in the bandit camp on the outskirts of Swindon, two miles north east of here, I need his sword.” No, more “I hear there are some bandits in the area. Yes, they might well have a leader, people say his name is Geoff. Apparently Bandit Leader Geoff has a lovely sword. Yes, I would really like a sword very much like that. It would be terrible if something happened to Geoff, though, WINK WINK. No, I don’t know exactly where he is. Maybe over there somewhere *waves vaguely to the west*.” The game wouldn’t insult your intelligence by recording this or anything, you’d jot it down on a post-it note, and get confused when going around a supermarket later “bread, yup, milk, yup, Bandit Leader Geoff’s sword… huh, probably down the kitchenware aisle with the cutlery…”

I think it might have been plausible deniability, in case the NPC was investigated for Incitement To Murder or something, though it could go a bit wrong if you misinterpreted the hints, came back with Geoff’s sword (with Geoff’s bloody hand still clamped around the hilt) and the NPC shrieked “I just wanted you to go to a blacksmith and have him make something similar, you maniac!” Still, at least it was better than the proposed Mime Artist faction in an early alpha of EverQuest who would’ve given all their quests through the medium of charades:

“It’s a… quest! Three words. Right. First word… sounds like… eat? Swallow? Oh, what you’re eating… tablet? Pill? Pill, yes! Sounds like pill… bill, fill, kill… Kill! First word, kill. Second word… tenth word. Wait, I thought it was three words? Second word… oh, that is the second word, ten. Kill ten…”

Anyway, over the course of time the quest mechanisms evolved, quest givers became more obvious, add-ons or in-game features recorded objectives and your progress towards them and things generally improved (or “were dumbed down to the point of infantilisation, here I am, brain the size of a planet and you’re patronising me by recording all this information that I’m perfectly capable of writing a large spreadsheet to support, cross-referencing three years of accumulated research, oh all right I’ll go and kill those ten boars but I won’t enjoy it you know”, depending on your point of view). When Warhammer Online launched, its vaunted Tome of Knowledge was a splendid thing, recording where you’d been, who you’d spoken to, how many of them you’d killed, and what weird random things you’d clicked on in case they were an unlock. Warhammer’s quest log is also part of the Tome of Knowledge, where the splendidness is slightly tempered by being coupled to a straightforward “go to camp, talk to the punctuation, do quests, return to the punctuation” PvE quest-hub structure, and further shackled by a limited number of quests it could track, as m’colleague and I posted about at the time. I suspect “so near and yet so far” features like the Kill Collectors were great ideas that proved tricky to implement really well, and with RvR being the main post-launch focus it just hasn’t been worthwhile to go back and seriously revamp them.

I’ve been hitting quest log limits in Lord of the Rings Online as well; where back at launch it seemed there was a bit of a barren patch in the 20s were you had to do every single quest you could get your hands on to eke out enough XP to level up without too much grinding, there are now a plethora of options; from assorted skirmishing, festivals, questing and crafting I’ve pretty much out-levelled the Barrow Downs without setting a foot in the place so I just cleared out a bunch of quests around there to make room for new ones in the Lone Lands. It’s not really a problem, the old quests were all obsolete so I wasn’t missing out on much (apart from scratching the nagging completionist itch), though a bit of an expansion in the quest log as a whole could be nice (for a mere 1,995 Turbine Points, perhaps). What’s slightly more irritating than the overall limit is the active tracker, that can only monitor five quests at a time. I frequently have to fire it up, deactivate all the quests it’s tracking, find the (possibly) relevant quests in the log and activate tracking for them, and then repeat the process whenever you go somewhere else.

Here’s hoping The Old Republic and other forthcoming games might solve some of these minor annoyances. If nothing else, the Star Wars universe surely allows for remote communication such that you don’t have to physically return to a questgiver every single time, something a little more difficult to plausibly work into fantasy settings without resorting to good old “magic”. Though maybe…

“Right, Mayor, here’s a tin can with some string through it. I’ll take this tin can on the other end of the string, and when I’ve killed ten thugs I’ll shout into it, and then you can shout back to tell me to kill the ten ever so slightly different thugs who stand really close to the first lot who’d completely slipped your mind when you originally handed out the quest.”

The Lord of the Rings Online Drinking Game: Free-to-Play Edition.

Equipment

Two (2) Large Buckets
One (1) Mr Tiddles, your favourite teddy bear
Four (4) or more (>) Comfy Cushions
One (1) Pint of Bitter
One (1) Hundred (Ten (10) times Ten (10)) shots of spirit

Setup

Place the buckets within easy reach of your computer, scatter the cushions around the base of your chair such that they will soften the landing should you fall from it, and place Mr Tiddles within arm’s reach.

The Rules

Every time you see a Hunter, take a sip of your pint.

Every time you see more than three Hunters in an area together, drink a shot.

Every time a Hunter pulls a mob that you were blatantly about to engage in melee, take a sip of your pint.

Every time a Hunter pulls a mob that you were blatantly about to engage in melee when there were at least twenty seven other mobs of the same type within their range that they could have picked from instead, drink a shot.

Every time a Hunter runs past you, stops, turns around, and then starts following you everywhere you go, possibly in the hope that they can pull a mob you’re about to engage in melee, or perhaps nip in and steal a quest objective while you’re fighting the boss guarding it, or maybe they’re just lonely and want I DON’T BLOODY KNOW WHAT, JUST LEAVE ME ALONE WON’T YOU, drink two shots and wipe away your tears on the back of Mr Tiddles’ head while you rock back and forth cuddling him.

WARNING: It is a legal requirement that if you intend to spend more than five minutes in any zone in the level 1-30 range while playing KiaSA’s LotRO F2P Drinking Game you must phone advance notification through to your local Accident and Emergency department. Registering with the local organ donation centre is optional but advisable, and if you register now you can get a 7% discount on select organs by using this code: KIASAKILLEDMYLIVER.

True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic.

The trouble with heroism is that it’s such a terribly fine scale on which to balance one’s character. In addition, heroic deeds are often weighed against the deeds of everyday life: if everyone in your neighbourhood charges into battle against overwhelming odds and wins through on a daily basis, what do you have to do to stand out as a hero? At the Battle of Thermopylae where the Spartans stood against the might of the Persian empire, we know of a few names of the mighty – Leonidas, Dilios, Artemis and Astinos – but there were three hundred men in all, surely each one a hero by some measure, and yet few are named. I imagine nobody has even heard of such characters as Geofficles, Normancrates and Colinstopholes, but they were there fighting to the bitter end too. Well okay, Colinstopholes wasn’t, but he had a note from his mum saying that he needed to be back home at the end of the second day for a dentist appointment.

Take my level sixty five Warden in Lord of the Rings Online, for example. If she travels to Mirkwood or Enedwaith she will find wildlife which, although no mortal threat, can keep her entertained in combat for far longer than you would think reasonable for a demihero (one assumes that the main cast are the true heroes) of Middle Earth. Take her back to Ered Luin where she first began her journey, however, and she can hit a wolf so hard that there’s a very good chance a Higgs boson particle would be detected in the subsequent imploding bloody-mist of lupine limbs. The problem as I see it is that MMOs suffer from a sort of relativity of simultaneity, and the issue stems from the fact that the player’s frame of reference for observation into the world differs from that of the player’s character. The illusion of progression from the player’s point of view is that their character gains in power through stat increases and levels. The frame of reference for the player’s character, however, is travelling with the content, and much like a person standing on a train, the player’s character is moving through one world (the overall progression of levels in the game) while their surroundings move with them (level-appropriate content appears no different to the level-appropriate content of ten levels ago).

Therefore, it’s terribly difficult to give characters a truly heroic feel in a world where the player character’s frame of reference moves with them at all times during the normal levelling progression, especially when this frame of reference is different to that of the player who observes it. It’s not that a player can’t feel heroic, but to do so they must step out of the natural flow of the game, and perform quests for NPCs in low-level zones for little to no gain on their own part. Van Hemlock reported on a recent podcast of returning to Forochel with his level sixty five Guardian and doing just that, and there was a feeling of heroism to it – single-handedly saving NPCs from invaders with little effort – but there is no recognition of it in the context of the world as a whole. One can’t help but feel, as with the wolf in Ered Luin, that it’s a bit like the thirty four year old me of today travelling back in time to punch-in the teeth of the ten year old school bullies who made so much of my life hell during those formative years: easy and deeply satisfying, yes, but it would hardly build me as a character, or give me a heroic reputation.

There are other examples in LotRO where your character is elevated to the level of so great a hero that you actually start to realise that, perhaps, being a hero of the sort sung about in the Old Songs is not really what you want either. I took my Warden through the whole of Book One of the epic storyline over the Christmas period. I hadn’t managed this on any character to date, so I gritted my teeth and prepared myself for a lot of staring at horses’ arses. The way in which Turbine allows players to solo through what was otherwise intended as group content is to provide an inspiration buff to a solo player who enters a dungeon instance, essentially it is Turbine’s ‘iddqd’. The thing is that this buff is designed to boost to heroic status those player characters who are at the correct level for the content, such that when you take a character who is twenty or thirty levels above the content already, you get something almost… monstrous. My Warden is reasonably well geared for a level capped character that has not stepped foot inside a raid instance, and as such she has six thousand five hundred hit points. A top-geared raid tank character would probably be reasonably expected to have somewhere in the region of eight thousand five hundred, perhaps higher. When I entered Helegrod, the final instance of Book Five aimed at characters of around level forty, the inspiration buff transformed my Warden into an entity with somewhere over thirty thousand hit points; I couldn’t tell you precisely, I lost count somewhere near what seemed like infinity.

Wardens are also a power hungry class, being that they need to build their gambit abilities quickly, they eschew the somewhat sluggish standard swing timer that frustrates me on so many other characters in LotRO, and are able to fire off their abilities as fast as the global cooldown will allow – which is very fast indeed. So the Warden can suck down power faster than Linda Lovelace on a nuclear fuel rod, and yet I couldn’t make a discernable dent in my blue bar for the entire time I was in the instance. It changed the experience from heroic epic to tragic comedy, where I just waltzed around looking for my quest objectives while half the instance followed me around, ineffectively shouting and shoving at me, as if I had just recently dropped my gourd. The absolute moment of realisation came when I was confronted by yet another nightmare of the undead world, which my character promptly one-shot in the nether regions sending it screaming back to the netherworld (so shouldn’t the netherworld be the place where genitals go to die?), and I noticed that it was called a Terrible Fell-spirit. “Nothing terribly terrible about that” I thought to myself, unless of course they didn’t mean in the sense of ‘exciting extreme alarm or intense fear’ and actually meant it in the sense of ‘extremely bad: as of very poor quality’. I can picture the spirit returning to the land of the dead, a spectre with a clipboard greeting its return:

Spectre: “Welcome back! How many heroes did you kill this time?”

Spirit: “Uh… none”

Spectre: “But you fought at least one hero, correct?”

Spirit: “Uhm, yes.”

Spectre: “And?”

Spirit: “She kicked me in the genitals so hard that I became destabilised from the plane of mortal existence.”

Spectre: “Ooof! Hang on… you’re a spirit, you don’t even have genitals!”

Spirit: “Yeah?! Try telling that to my poor aching genitals! If you can find them.”

Spectre: “You really are a terrible spirit, you realise that?”

Spirit: “Well duh, it even says so on my name tag.”

It didn’t make me feel heroic, however, it just made me feel sorry for them. The spirits of the instance weren’t to be feared, but pitied. I imagined a force of woolly-hatted protestors from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Apparitions) bumbling their way into the dungeon and trying to prevent me from killing more undead – the irony of which being totally lost on them – by linking arms in a circle around the poor cowering defenceless minions of the Dark Lord, and attacking my character with a particularly scathing leaflet campaign. I didn’t feel like a hero, I felt like a cheat, and as I absentmindedly punched a Nazgûl into unconsciousness while trying to avoid the more dangerous and threatening PETA protestors, I realised that being an epic hero isn’t necessarily all it’s cracked up to be.

I have drunk, and seen the spider.

“The Beleriand damage type is particularly strong against spiders, insects and ancient evil”

So says the tip on one of Lord of the Rings Online’s loading screens.

You have to wonder about the kind of people who invented that damage type.

“Ack! Ethel? Ethel!”

“Yes Agnes?!”

“Fetch me my slippers would you dearest? I’ve got a nasty little blighter running across the floor here that needs a whack.”

“Oh my, what is it?”

“A spider, dear.”

“Beleriand slippers, then?”

“Yes dear, of course my Beleriand slippers, what else am I going to use for a spider? And anyway, I’ll be needing them for the Dark World-eater I found behind the sofa too.”

Stormwind shell shock.

I think it was probably the point where a werewolf wearing a top hat and plate armour, and riding a ‘hilarious’ two-seat rickety rocket, had pulled up and hovered alongside my character on the entranceway to Stormwind that I realised that Azeroth was no longer for me. I had been standing there marvelling at the giant Christmas wreaths on the walls of Stormwind, which it has to be said, stood in stark contrast to the fractured ramparts which still glowed from the recent molten assault of the great dragon; the wreaths were so impossibly large that I wondered whether they were a by-product of the giant dragon itself, that perhaps it had simultaneously destroyed half of the human capital while decking other parts of it in festive decorations, as though I were witnessing the aftermath of some sort of screwed-up Azrothian edition of Pimp My Capital City. I pictured the dragon with fluttering eyelashes, hands clasped together and held against one cheek, as it admired its handiwork – elemental destruction set off beautifully against red bows and be-baubled Christmas trees.

New Wave Cataclysm, dharlink, ver’ popular in New York zis season.

Later, I stood in the midst of the fractured city – it having only recently avoided total annihilation by the narrowest of margins – and I watched the NPC winter revellers standing around in their hot pants and boob tubes; saw the line of gargantuan drake and dragon mounts blocking the doorway to the bank; observed the attempts at serious role-play by people who were constantly being blocked from one another’s sight as flying carpets, mammoths and naff-punk trikes were parked inconsiderately on top of them; gawked as characters with weapons large enough to cleave a moon in twain ran around in their underpants as they barked borderline racist /yells; and witnessed a female werewolf in a festive bikini performing the dance moves to Lady Gaga’s Poker Face on top of a nearby mailbox.

At which point my mind snapped. Okay, snapped more. Than usual.

It’s understandable, I suppose: the past year or more of my MMO time has been spent predominantly in Lord of the Rings Online, a quiet and considerate game with, on the whole, a quiet considerate community that stays respectful to the setting of Tolkien’s world, and where the most outlandish thing to happen is if someone in the Prancing Pony breaks out their lute and plays a particularly daring version of Muse’s Exogenesis Part Three. Some particularly salacious sort might even tap their foot to the rhythm. Heaven forefend if one of the female elven characters should flash an ankle at a passing dwarf, the whole server would be a-whisper with the scandal of it for weeks after. Of course it’s not that prudish in reality, but when you visit somewhere such as Azeroth, where the average armour outfit of a female character would be enough to make a veteran porn star blush and consider retiring from modern life to a convent, LotRO seems so terribly reserved. I suppose it’s the contrast that is so dramatic, like a lifelong member of the Amish being bundled into the back of a van and dumped in the middle of a Las Vegas casino (KiaSA lawyers are ready to speak to any TV executives interested in the rights to this new reality TV show, working title: Amishion Impossible); I’m sure spending any length of time in Azeroth would once again slowly desensitise me to the sheer ludicrous mania going on around every corner, but having unceremoniously dumped myself out the back of a van into the middle of Las Azeroth, I found myself forcibly repelled from the game.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with Azeroth, you understand, just like there’s nothing ostensibly wrong with Club 18-30 holidays, or college frat parties, it’s just that once you’ve lived a quieter more reserved life of gentle evenings with a nice glass of red and a good book in front of an open fireplace, it’s hard to go back to whipped cream and beer bongs and some strange man’s penis being repeatedly beaten against your forehead while someone screams in your ear to eat the green jelly out of the lady’s underpants faster. World of Warcraft seems to me to be the College Humour of the MMO world; whether it has always been this way, whether it has slowly developed into this parody of its former self, or whether my world view has changed over the years of playing MMOs and writing about them here, I’m not entirely sure. Did World of Warcraft create its community, or did the community twist World of Warcraft into the bizarre carnival of lunacy that it seems to have become? Perhaps one feeds upon the other, a curious Ouroboros of culture, unable to break away from the self-feeding spiral of one-upmanship in outrageousness.

All I know is that it seems that I have tired of eating green jelly with curly hairs in it, and these days much prefer my MMOs akin to quiet evenings spent with a good book.

It was the best of grinds, it was the worst of grinds

Even as m’colleague’s Cataclysm box languishes in the depths of a snowdrift somewhere, I’ve cancelled my WoW subscription. Got through the very first Worgen area, it was all very nice, but I just haven’t logged in since with everything else going on. Any of war (and indeed hammering) in Warhammer, fleet adventures in Pirates of the Burning Sea or heavy metal thunder in World of Tanks can quite happily take up an evening, but I’ve really been pulled back into Lord of the Rings Online.

I gave up on LotRO just after launch somewhere around level 27, when I recall content was getting a little thin and starting to involve a lot of travelling. This time around I’ve just hit level 27 on my new main character, I’ve hardly been outside Bree-land since getting through the introductory areas, and I’ve still got a full log of mostly outlevelled quests that I’m loathe to abandon. There are general quests, the storyline book content, dungeons, crafting, skirmishes and most recently Yule festival quests.

There’s been debate over holiday or festival quests ever since someone decided that just handing out sweets wasn’t a proper celebration of Easter and a repeatable “Collect five chocolate eggs” quest would be much more fun; nice additions to in-game lore or immersion breaking intrusions, fun little fluffy diversions or pointless grind interfering with normal play, implementation and player response varies considerably. LotRO seems to have some pretty well established regular events, and with this year’s Yule Festival there’s also a whole new zone, Winter-home.

There’s some interesting stuff in Winter-home. Snowball fights are always good. The theatre, where random players get called up on the stage to take part in a short play by performing suitable emotes, is rather fun, and the audience get to show their appreciation of a fine performance with a shower of petals, or lob rotten fruit if the acting isn’t up to scratch. The general tone of the zone is slightly unusual too (very minor spoilers follow, if the story is of great concern): it’s a festival town, where the Mayor ensures guests enjoy fun and games and feasting to excess, but they do so at the expense of exploited workers. Some quests involve helping the downtrodden (handing out festival coins, that could be bartered for in-game rewards, to beggars left on the streets after they helped build the town up), others keep them suppressed (moving those same beggars on so they’re not cluttering up the streets for the nice guests). Eventually you can work your way up to a final quest in the zone and either threaten to expose the Mayor’s corruption to secure better conditions for the workers, or help the Mayor put down a possible revolt, keeping him in power.

I actually felt bad moving beggars off the street, especially as your heartstrings are tugged a bit more by the game telling you they stumble off, frozen, without having collected anything, mumbling “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb anyone”. The final quest is a real dilemma, though; obviously The Right Thing would be to help out the workers, but the rewards for doing so are some tatty old clothes. Help out the Mayor, he’ll give you a really spiffy costume, including a top hat. Yes, a top hat. Many RPGs reward you for being virtuous, a classic example would be ridding a village of some terrible monster threat, and the poor farmers offer you the few copper pieces they can scrape together to thank you, you say “No, honest tillers of the soil, you need that copper more than I, slaying the beast is reward enough for me”, and the game gives you bonus XP or some other sort of character improvement. As far as I can make out, though, the Winter-home quest gives you nothing apart from the tatty clothes and a sense of enormous well-being for helping out the poor, you really do get the good stuff from being a git. Brutally suppressing a revolt doesn’t make the Mayor have second thoughts, he doesn’t cry “What have I become?” and invite everybody in to share a goose, he just kicks the ringleaders out and carries on. It wouldn’t be so surprising somewhere like Warhammer where pretty much everyone’s a bastard anyway, but it’s a little more jarring in a setting like LotRO and could give you pause as the Mayor points out your hypocrisy in helping the workers when you’ve been enjoying the feasting and such as much as everyone else.

For a few seconds.

For unfortunately the effect is slightly lost by the sheer MMOG-iness of it all. In a single player RPG the themes could really be developed, but MMOGs have to account for the Content Devourers. You imagine the developers slaving away creating the zone, adding the NPCs, carefully scripting the theatre events to take account of all conceivable player behaviour (fully aware there’ll be plenty of inconceivable player behaviour, but you do what you can), then they stick it up on the test server and Geoff starts a stop-watch to see how long it’ll take players to completely exhaust the content that took so many man-months to create.

“Thirty eight minutes and nine seconds” says Geoff, thirty eight minutes and nine seconds later, and that included typing up an exhaustive guide and taking screenshots. So they shove a couple of extra-blatant time-sink quests in (Winter-home’s best, or worst, example being Tidying Up, where you get to run around and click on 30 glowy bit of rubbish, waiting for a second or two each time) and make you repeat everything ten times if you want the final reward, with a once a day limit on most of the quests. Couple that with the fundamentally unchanging nature of MMO content, and instead of a microcosm of the class struggle with a festive theme you’re stuck in a bizarre pie-eating purgatory. You force the beggars to leave town, they shuffle off sadly, but are back within a minute. Instead of driving them off again you give them some coins and they’re thankful. Next day you give them more coins, then kick them out of town, while hundreds of other players do the same. The theatre puts on the same six-minute play ten times an hour, and if you’re desperate for all the deeds for chucking petals or fruit you sit through it again, and again, and again… Even the impact of the final quest, where you finally have to choose one side or the other, is somewhat undermined; to salve my conscience I helped the workers on my main character, but I couldn’t possibly miss out on a top hat (come on, top hat!), so I whipped an alt through the 30 quests, beat up some peasants, got the finery, and stuck it in the wardrobe so any other character on the account could use it.

Still, I’m hardly in much of a position to complain about repetitive grind. “Have you played an MMO before?” is the refrain of every static group on hitting similar issues, you know what you’re letting yourself in for with these things. It’s not like I was forced at gunpoint to run through all the quests. Repeatedly. Twice. It would be nice if there was a bit more cohesion between Story, World and Making Bars Go Up, but when it comes to the crunch you know there’s only one that really keeps people coming back. So maybe I’ll try another ten runs of the eating contest for a new title…

Men are only as loyal as their options.

Despite having a number of MMOs on the go at the moment, including Warhammer Online, Pirates of the Burning Sea, and World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online remains my go-to MMO.

10 VACILLATE OVER WHAT TO PLAY
20 HOVER MOUSE OVER VARIOUS MMO ICONS ON THE DESKTOP
30 CONSIDER BUYING A NEW GAME IN THE STEAM SALE
40 GOTO LOTRO

There’s just something so compelling about the world that LotRO presents: environments in which it’s pleasant simply to exist. I’ve had to curb the time I spend on my static group character due to being in danger of rapidly out-levelling most of the rest of the group; let’s just say that daily skirmishes and rested XP are an unholy levelling alliance: a Wormtongue and Sharkey to scourge static group stability. Having maxed out crafting as far as I can without completing further crafting quests which are currently twice the level of my character, I’ve had to shelve my Guardian for the time being, but the land of Middle Earth continues to draw me in. I spent one evening chatting with kinshipmates (probably better as ‘kinmates’ but I’ve been spending a bit of time in Pirates of the Burning Sea as I mentioned above. Avast kinshipmates!) while I stood beside the fire in the Prancing Pony and played music to passing strangers, adjusting my .abc repertoire to include songs slightly more in keeping with the setting; Enya’s Caribbean Blue works quite well, Rolling Stones’ Paint it Black, not so much. The music system is just one small (oft overlooked) example of why, when it comes to immersing oneself in a fantasy world, LotRO is a world apart. Still, the urge was strong to do something ‘productive’ with one of my characters, after all, I think it was Fargo who defined the MMO player’s mantra while devising an algorithm for his Automated Online Role-Player:

* If there is a status bar, make it grow bigger
* If there is a number, make it higher
* If it moves, either get a mission from it or kill it

I needed to do something, and in LotRO, as in the books it is based upon, there’s always a road leading to somewhere new and interesting.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

“Where many paths and errands meet”; it’s almost as if Tolkien was foreshadowing the coming of LotRO and its errand-based ‘epic’ book content, where heroic warriors of the land spend most of the Third Age of Man carrying messages from one bone-idle NPC to another. When it comes to LotRO’s book content, the road really does seem to go on and on and on. And on.

There and, of bloody course, back again.

Twice.

Honestly, I sometimes wonder if Turbine’s developers took some of those famous phrases a little too literally.

However, having run multiple alts through the low level content while trying to decide which one to settle upon for the static group, I found myself not wanting to play another alt through the early content yet again, so it was upon my level-capped characters that I focussed. They’re pretty complete, or as complete as a non-raiding layabout like myself is ever likely to get them, but the one thing I’ve never managed to do on any of them is… Volume 1 of the epic book content. Thus it was that I grabbed my Warden – soloing machine and small fellowship compressed into a single set of tight leather armour – and began to pick away at the chapters of the book’s storyline that I had yet to complete. I hadn’t completed very much.

Returning to the book content in this way provides a strange juxtaposition of heroism. Turbine provides a buff that allows a solo player to complete the book content at the correct level but without the support of a fellowship; it’s a simple and effective solution to a common issue, namely that it can be quite tricky to find a full group of players all on the same specific step of the book content that you’re on. So Turbine provided a buff that only applies to solo players, if you happen to have a group then you can complete the book content as it was intended, but if you can’t find a group or simply want to go it alone, you have that option. If I were ever to be forced at gunpoint to describe Turbine and their philosophy to games in one word, an unlikely proposition I grant you…

“You! Into the alley, now!”

“Okay! Okay! Don’t shoot! What do you want?! Money? Here’s my wallet! Please, point the gun somewhere else! What? What do you want from me?”

“I want you to describe, in one word only, the general design philosophy behind the games and systems of Turbine, Inc, specifically in respect to their MMO Lord of the Rings Online, but also taking into consideration works such as Asheron’s Call 2.”

“Let me have a look at that gun again.”

Where was I? So the one word I’d use would be ‘options’. It’s another of the things that I enjoy so much about LotRO, that there are so many and varied options, for anyone not doggedly determined to level a character and to hell with any other form of game-play at least. There’s the cosmetic system, the music system, chicken play, monster play, exploration (via deeds or simply because the world is just so darned elegant and worth the appreciation), skirmishes, instances, crafting, housing, titles, and more. There are so many options outside of the standard quest hub shuffle, and now with the introduction of the LotRO Store there are options as to how you go about some of those activities. Let’s not kid ourselves, the LotRO Store is ultimately there to make Turbine money, but the fact that I have the choice to spend some of my money to avoid certain aspects of the game’s grind – aspects that have always been there and have not been introduced in order to force people into the store – can only be a Good Thing. I haven’t taken that option yet, I don’t think the current options are good value for me despite getting a large chunk of free points every month for having been a lifetime subscriber, but the fact that that option is available to me actually makes the grind less of an issue. I find that to be an interesting mindset, and it’s certainly one that works counter to Turbine’s intentions, but having the option to skip the grind makes the grind more palatable. The grind has become a matter of principle not of necessity, it becomes “I grind because the other option is less appealing”, rather than “I grind because I have no other choice”. Thus Turbine keeps me interested and playing their game, and although I’m not likely to spend points on skipping content at any point, a person playing the game is better than one who has burnt out on the grind because they saw no other option, because eventually a player will spend points in the store. Why? Options. The store caters to all tastes, be it stat tomes for the power gamers, cosmetics for the more fashion conscious amongst us, as well as the aforementioned items that allow you to skip various parts of the game’s grind. Eventually most players will find something that they want that’s available to them on the store. Even then there are still further options. Don’t like the thought of being nickel-and-dimed by the store? Then you have the option to subscribe and gain a large chunk of what’s available on the store as part of your subscription charge.

I’ve sidetracked ever so slightly, so I’ll come back to the curious juxtaposition of heroism another time.

My roommate got a pet elephant. Then it got lost. It’s in the apartment somewhere.

I do wonder how much trouble they have in the meeting rooms at Turbine HQ when trying to come up with things to put into the Lord of the Rings Online’s item shop. It’s a game where, despite the frothing rantings of the most rabid of Tolkien’s self-appointed hardcore guards of lore, Turbine have tried to stick to the spirit of the books as much as possible within a game world where boars reproduce by asexual spontaneous self-parturition, and enough of them have by now been killed that you could carpet the whole of Middle Earth with their hides. Three layers deep.

Mini-pets are one class of item that springs to mind. World of Warcraft has an abundance of them, and many players will, for example, go out of their way to spend some of their £15-a-month subscription to play a pared down version of a £5 Popcap game in order to obtain an, admittedly very cute, singing sunflower pet. Warhammer Online has also started to expand its mini-pet lines, and both games offer mini-pets for sale in their minimal digital shop fronts. Turbine doesn’t offer mini-pets, but it has got around to offering its own version of WoW’s sparkle pony; the Steed of Night is expensive and no better than the reputation-based mounts available in the game. However, requiring no time but ‘merely’ money to acquire, the new time-limited-offer mount provides an option for those who wish to shortcut reputation grinds or simply want to show off a bit.

Turbine’s marketing is really starting to push forward their promotion of the store too, understandable since it is the foundation of funding for further development of the game, but it’s a fine line they have to tread, keeping the LotRO store at the fore of player’s thoughts without it coming to dominate the game, break all immersion, and thus drive those same players away. Generally the item prices on the store have been well considered, with the prices tending to hover around the neighbourhood boundaries of Impulse Purchase and Teeth Sucking Indecision. The items themselves are also sensitive to the legacy of the game, with the new cosmetic items on the whole being exciting and yet in keeping with the general tone of the world, although the turtle-shell backpack, which makes the more compact hobbit form look akin to a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, is perhaps rapidly approaching the border guard of acceptability, armed with nothing more than a set of false papers, a fake moustache, and a rudimentary grasp of the native language.

Of course the Lore-master class is already able to collect non-combat mini-pets, with Radagast the Brown providing ample precedent with which to fend off the hardlore players, but it must be quite difficult for the developers to resist expanding that functionality to all players and then popping a small petting zoo of animals on the store for five or six hundred Turbine Points apiece. I can only surmise that either the pointy-haired bosses don’t have the level of control over game content in LotRO as they do in other games, or the ground-level developers simply haven’t told them about the possibility and are hoping that nobody notices Blizzard selling mini-pets on their store for £5-£10 a pop. Or perhaps the developers all sit around the table and invent reasons why it can’t be done:

Dev1: “Ah, no, can’t do mini-pets because we, uh, don’t have enough uh…”

Dev2: “… fur… texels? In the, um… badgerenderer pipeline…”

Dev1: “Yes, we’d totally overflow the, ah, yipyap wrapping… map…”

Dev2: “And then we wouldn’t be able to give the dogs a bone.”

Dev1: [rolls his eyes at Dev2]

Dev2: [shrugs ‘What?!’]

Mounts are another option where Turbine could go wild and yet have restrained themselves admirably thus far. The Steed of Night is an extravagance, sure, but it doesn’t sparkle, it doesn’t fly, it doesn’t breath fire or carry NPC passengers in convenient compartments on its back.

It’s not a sod-buggering faux-steampunk motorcycle and sidecar.

It’s a tricky balancing act that Turbine has to perform, and although I am quite fond of my mini-pets in other games, I’m also quite glad that they haven’t become an all pervasive item store status symbol within LotRO as of yet. It only takes one to see a Lore-master running down the street trailed by a train of various pets, mini-pets and mobstacles, looking like some sort of harangued medieval Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, to realise the detrimental effect that releasing mini-pets on Middle Earth would probably have.