“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.

I’ve stuck a rich vein of completionism on my main character in Lord of the Rings Online recently, and this past weekend I decided to finish strip mining the Volume 2 epic book content and then consider the prospect of Volume 3. Really it’s all about my deep-seated unreserved love for the Warden class however, because it’s the sheer joy I get from the concept of the lightly armoured, self healing, valkyrie shieldmaiden, coupled with the wonderful gambit combat mechanic, that keeps me returning to the game outside of the once-per-week static group in which I play my Captain; although perhaps a better name would be Capacitor there, since my character is essentially a store of Power and Morale, where most fights consist of dispensing these out to other players in the fellowship while making sure all relevant buffs have been applied. The support role of the Captain is certainly what I prefer to perform in a group, but the execution of the class is just a little larghissimo when compared to the frantic fret fingering required to strike the Warden’s classic power chords. The Warden is the Kinks’ feisty You Really Got Me to the Captain’s more sedate Eine kleine Nachtmusik, and when you’re going solo it’s best to play the angry fast-switching power chords, as my mother would have said had she ever been Jimmy Page.

The Volume 2 content was ultimately frustrating, as I’ve found much of Turbine’s alternative story-within-a-story attempts to be. There may be spoilers ahead. I’ll try to avoid them, but while there’s music and moonlight and love and romance: let’s face it, there’s a spoilery chance.

Once again it came down to the feeling of being a pageboy at royal court, running errands between important people, aristocracy so lazy that they can’t be bothered to walk the ten paces required to speak to the person in question. The person standing right there! You don’t even have to walk over there, just raise your voice ever so slightly, you lazy feckless… If you’ve ever watched Pixar’s Wall•E then you’ll know exactly the feeling that these epic quests give you as a player, you are essentially the eponymous Wall•E in a world full of comically overweight humans who can’t even look beyond the end of their computer screen to talk to the person next to them. Except they haven’t invented the computer screen in Middle Earth yet, so really, what’s their excuse? One character gave me a long and powerful speech regarding their concern for the local guards. So terribly concerned. It really weighed heavily on their mind, they really were awfully frantically worried. Such desperate anxiousness they hadn’t felt in a hundred ye… ALRIGHT. FINE. I’ll go and check up on them for you, shall I? Seeing as you’re so blastedly worried that you can’t be bothered to go and check for yourself when the guards are only just outside the front door of the inn; presumably it’s because you’re… you’re too busy waxing your ears, or whatever in flaming homo-erotica it is that you noble elves do all day long.

And then, every now and again, the tedium of playing messenger would be punctuated with a terrifying mission against nigh-on impossible odds in the heart of hostile territory, like being a paper boy in a quiet remote Welsh village where every now and again the newsagents gives you a route which takes you through Mogadishu. These encounters were plenty of fun, capturing and escorting the orc lord Mazog to Dul Goldur, and then assaulting the fortress to rescue the dwarf Bori, or that idiot twit lovechild of Dr McMadpants and Contessa Gormless von Doolally, as I lovingly refer to him. He’s essentially the cause of all the problems that you spend your time trying to set right, and when I finally came to rescue him he performed one of the most masterfully arse-witted NPC escort manoeuvres I’ve seen, including several near-perfect executions of the Corridor Pause with Incoming Elite Trolls, with only the Russian judge giving him below 10.0 (a still respectable 9.75), feeling that he didn’t get in the full two and a half tucks while blithering about hoping to draw aggro.

I think, for me, the story failed because I spent most of my time standing around having to listen to the un-reason of these halfwit NPCs, while it slowly and gradually dawned on me that I could just stab them all and nothing in Middle Earth would change other than the fact that I would be free. It’s something which is rubbed-in by the ending, which essentially sets everything back to how it was, except a few people have died unnecessarily and wouldn’t have done if I’d just been allowed to cut Bori’s tendons and go hunting for Mazog by myself. Once again Turbine employ the Magic As Plot Protection device, where your band of plucky heroes is rendered utterly helpless by Random Villain B so that he can monologue without the vexing interruptions of you trying to stab him in the face, an occurrence so common now that one wonders just what sort of mismanagement must be going on at Sauron & Sons Ltd. for them not to have cakewalked their way to victory already, given that they can render whole groups of heroes utterly helpless seemingly at will, or at least when it’s most terribly convenient. Perhaps they’re all too busy monologuing to actually get on with finishing the job.

Mixing in skirmishes as part of the book content was a cunning plan, allowing the more memorable infiltration and assault on Dol Guldur to be replayed by players after they’d finished Volume 2, while at the same time allowing Turbine to reuse content which would otherwise be played through only once per character. I’m quite favourable towards the skirmish system as a complement to other forms of play, and since there are nice rewards both practical and cosmetic, I was quite pleased to see my progress through Volume 2 being rewarded with some new skirmish zones to enjoy, especially as one of the pitfalls of the skirmish system is that it can get a little stale playing the same zones over and over. Of course, I took all my hard earned skirmish marks and Cannuilan campaign marks (the latter of which can only be earned through these later Volume 2 skirmishes), and bought my Warden the Winged Circlet I’d been wanting for her since I first saw a preview of the skirmish cosmetic rewards many moons ago.

So Volume 2 for my Warden is now complete, or at least the book content is; there’s an epilogue which I have begun, but there are several quests listed as requiring a fellowship and I’m under the assumption that these haven’t been tweaked to be soloable yet, but I’ll certainly have a look before moving on to Volume 3. I’ve completed the one part of the epilogue which was soloable, however, a final chapter in the story of the Moria dwarves, where they bury that which they claim caused all the troubles in the first place, and so I was surprised to see Bori standing outside the cave as they collapsed it. Personally I would have been delighted to push the whole troublesome group in and seal the cave behind them, but apparently that was a task too trying and terrible for a hero of Middle Earth, and so I was sent on my way to the start of Volume 3, where presumably some bloke needs me, with utmost urgency, to ask the bloke standing next to him whether he wants a chocolate bourbon to go with his cup of tea.

The Captain’s ‘buff sticks’ in Lord of the Rings Online are, for me, a perfect example of that general requirement to ‘be optimal’ in an MMO conflicting with the coherence of the game’s world, and thus creating inauthentic cultural norms. The Captain class has a range of buffs, many of which can be significantly improved by one of the limited number of ‘legacies’ available to their legendary weapon. These legacies were originally entirely random, and therefore what you’d expect to happen would be for a Captain to find a weapon with as many of these legacies that improved their all-important group buffs as possible, and for them to then cherish that item as though it were one of their own children. What actually happened, of course, was an approach which maximised the boost to the Captain’s buffs without sacrificing their combat capability. Therefore, most Captains would store a number of ‘legendary’ weapons in their backpack –three or four would not be unheard of– each of which having a number of the correct legacies to improve their various buffs, while the Captain reserved their primary legendary weapon (the most legendariest, if you will) to have those legacies which would improve their in-combat abilities. This heavily reflects the strange general juxtaposition within the game between legendary items as common-or-garden objects, and ordinary quest reward weapons as quite rare finds in the later levels.

“Buff sticks! Buff sticks for sale! Get yer buuuuuuuuff sticks! Don’t be a drain and a raiding bane! It’s never enough to bestow a basic buff! Get a buff stick, and they won’t think you’re a pri–Yes madam? Two buff sticks? Here you go. Thank you kindly madam and enjoy! Buff sticks! Get yer buuuuuuuuff sticks!”

If ever there were an unheroic, unlegendary, unwieldy image, it’s that of a Captain rummaging through their bags before a fight, rapidly switching weapons so that they have the correct legacy equipped to boost the appropriate buff before they cast it.

“Now hold on for a second because I know I’ve got the one-handed hammer that boosts my critical attack buff around here somewhere. And you, you need power, I think that’s on a sword… no, noooo, it’s the halberd that has the boost for regen buffs. Now we all need the morale buff, so that’s this giant pink 12″ vib… oh gosh, how did *that* get in there. Ha ha ha. Hum. Uh, no, it was the axe that buffed morale; although I suppose the vibrator could work…”

I mean, bless Turbine, but they took a fabulous idea in trying to give players a unique weapon which levelled and grew in power as they did –a real, honest-to-goodness, corker of an idea– and then created a character class which highlighted in bright white searing bolts of Istarian flame all the problems with the system.

“Legendary weapon? Why yes, I have six! But only one of them is really any use, the rest I just keep in my bags because they have a minor applicability once every five to fifteen minutes.” I mean, I have trouble with weapons providing improvements to buffs anyway. I can understand a buff that improves a player’s critical rating; I can imagine it as my Captain explaining the weakness of this particular enemy, giving tactical advice on how best to strike their weakest spot, but how does holding a mace in my hand improve this advice? The best I came up with was my Captain saying

“Now listen here Flannelian, striking at an orc’s weak point is very much like making love to a beautiful woman. Imagine my mace is a beautiful woman for a moment. Stay with me now. Okay, now take hold of it as though it were a beautiful woman. Go on, don’t be shy, take it in your arms. No, not like THAT! You FILTHY… grabbing the handle in that way! That’s the sort of person you are is it? A lust-filled deviant of the most deranged kind! Now apologise to my mace. Apologise to it at once! Apologiiiiiiiiiiise!”

Of course by this point the whole fellowship is slightly unnerved and explains that they’d really rather just get on with killing the two non-elite orcs who shouldn’t pose much of a problem to our party of six, and no really, buffs probably aren’t even necessary right now.

I sometimes wonder whether a badly designed system is simply one which can be abused, or is it the nature of all such systems that, as long as there is any level of flexibility inherent to it, there will also be a way to exploit it? I don’t think there’d be any major dissent if I said that LotRO’s legendary item system is one which is ripe for the abuse through optimisation of itemisation, moreover it positively encourages it. Whether one sees this as a good or bad thing is probably down to the needs of one’s inner being with respect to the MMO genre, needs which are as subjective, eclectic and cultural as any existential abstraction.

At the same time I imagine there is firm agreement that it’s a terribly appealing sentiment to own a named legendary weapon, one that has grown and battled along with its owner, and which, when coupled with the romantic samurai-like imagery of becoming one with a weapon and treating it as though it were family, is something that thrums deep hard blacksmith’s strokes on the blade of imagination within the forges of the soul.

Elrond: “Aragorn, son of Arathorn. I have thought for many long nights on that which you asked of me, and I have made my decision.”

Aragorn: “You mean?!”

Elrond: “Yes, Elessar.

We will strike fear into the heart of The Enemy.

We will once again forge a great bond between the houses of elves and men.

We will return to you that treasure of the ages thought lost.

We will take the shards of Narsil and craft the blade anew!

Henceforth you shall be known throughout the lands of this Middle Earth as Elendil’s heir.

And you will also provide a minor competency bonus to your fellowship’s parry rating.”

There was I in LotRO, hero of the North Downs, Orc Hewer, Known to the Men (and women; thanks Stan) of Bree, Hunter of Dark Beasts, Protector of the Free People, Foe of Night, Ally of Rivendell, Troll Slayer, and all manner of other titles. So many titles. They’re a bit like war medals I suppose, you point to one and proudly state ‘I got this for defeating undead in Haudh Iarchith, you know’ and the random stranger at which you’ve shouted, nods with a strained smile and slowly backs away. They’re generally congratulatory badges for being on the winning side of one particular genocide or another.

“Mr Warden, you have killed one MILLION orcs. Well done you. We hereby bestow on you a new title! You may now be known as Mr Warden, He Really Doesn’t Like Them Orcs Much Does He?”
“Uh, thanks.”
“Problem?”
“Well, it’s a bit of a mouthful isn’t it? Couldn’t I be called Orcslayer? Or Greenbane, or something?”
“You don’t like your new title?”
“Well, it’s just that…”
“No, no. That’s fine.”
“I mean, I…
“No, really. It’s fine. We’ll come up with a different title for you, seeing as this one clearly isn’t good enough for someone as special as you.”
“Oh really, I was just trying to…”
“Hmmm?”
“Never mind, I can see you have your arms crossed now.”

[Later, back at an orc camp]

“Mother, when is father coming home?”
“I’m sorry Anthony, father won’t be coming back.”
“You mean…?!”
“Yes dearest, I’m afraid he was killed recently by that greatest foe of our people, slaughterer of a million orcs, the one the humans call ‘Whinypants’.”
“I will avenge my father!”
“Of course you will dear.”
“You really think so? I thought you’d be all ‘Oh no, don’t leave me, Anthony! I can’t bear to lose you too!”
“Well, you’re a young only child whose father has been killed be a notorious genocidal maniac. Clearly you’re a hero in the making. Just bring me back something nice when you’ve finished laying waste to your foes, okay dear?”

[Later, at the home of a strange wizened old orc]

“Very well young one, I will train you.”
[Fist-pumps the air] “Yesss!”
“Let us begin. First, I need you to paint this fence.”
“What?! Paint a fence? What sort of… ohhh! Ah. Ah ha ha, wait, I see! This is like some sort of mysterious training ritual right? Where I paint a fence and do a bunch of other menial chores and I’m all like ‘WTF gramps?’ but it turns out to have been secretly teaching me the ancient fighting art all along, which I then use to destroy my sworn enemies! Right?’
“Don’t be daft, I’m just an old orc and I want you to paint my fence.”
“Oh…”
“And when you’re done there, wax my horse will you?”
“Well what do I get out of it?!”
“A thick ear if you don’t get on with it. Oh very well, I’ll give you a gold piece. IF you do a good job; that means I want to be able to see my face in the horse’s arse.”
“If you want to see into a horse’s arse just look in the mirror.”
“What was that?!”
“Nothiiiinnng.”

Actually, that’s probably more of an accurate analogy for titles isn’t it? It’s a bit like bob-a-job week for Scouts, where you do a bunch of random menial tasks for complete strangers for money. In the rest of the world it’s called slavery, but in the UK Scout Association it was called Character Building^[TM]. Of course the reality of it was that once a year you’d have a bunch of kids knocking on doors, risking abduction, only to be a) Told to bugger off, b) Given a pound coin in order to get them to bugger off, or c) Worked harder than a lone prostitute on a prison ship, given a pound coin, and then told to bugger off. Which is why you always find those grizzled eight year olds sitting around camp fires at jamborees, pointing to badges on their jumpers and saying ‘Got this one back in ’97 after washing the corns of a hundred and fifty old ladies at the local nursing home’ while wide-eyed newcomers stare with awe and admiration, and other veterans whistle through their teeth, or sit quietly hugging themselves with tears gently welling along the bottoms of their eyes.

So, being the Bob-a-job King of Middle Earth, it shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise that when I rolled-up to the dwarf encampment in Moria the first job I was given was to escort an old lady across a road. Or an old dwarf through a treacherous mine full of danger and death, same difference. Oh how I’ve loved escort quests in MMOs in the past (and I use ‘love’ in its sarcastic pejorative participle), and escort quests in LotRO are no exception. We all know how escort quests work: you speak to an NPC and then they run off and try their damnedest to get themselves killed while you try to keep them alive, with the judges awarding bonus points if the NPC manages to take you down with them. The dwarves of Moria seem particularly keen on this sport, and despite being doughty warriors and fearless explorers, they always seem to be getting themselves into situations that require you to escort them to safety. Personally I think they’re faking it; I think it’s a game they play amongst themselves because they’re bored, and if you check closely you’ll see they have Scout badges displaying columns of crossed-through lines for the number of heroes they’ve killed this way.

“Oooo. Ooooooooo. Help me Adventurer! I’ve… uh… I’ve sprained my beard and can’t get away from this…. [looks around] large… [looks around some more] small… mushroom, here. Ooooo, I think you’ll have to escort me out of here [sneaks a glance sideways at the adventurer]. I’m sure there will be a reward for safely returning me to my kin.”
“Can’t you just make your way past the… uh…”
“Mushroom.”
“… past the mushroom yourself?”
“I’m afraid I’ve sprained my beard quite badly, I really can’t move without aid. I can barely muster the energy to speak [fake cough] I’m so… w-weak. [sobs unconvincingly]”
“[mumbles] Fine.”
“Sorry?”
“Okay! Okay. I’ll do it, alright? I’ll escort yo…”
“HUZZAH! I’M GONNA KILL ME SOME HERO… UH GOBLINS. CHARGE! I’M AN UNSTOPPABLE AGGRO MACHIIIIIiiiinnnnnneee [runs off into the distance at breakneck speed] COME ON WHINYPANTS!”
“[sigh] I’d better get a new title for this.”

I mean, these dwarves attack everything, including the stuff that’s just standing around minding its own business. Poor innocent gredbyg, eating rock, oblivious and uncaring about the world around it, and suddenly BA-CRUNCH! and there’s this crazy dwarf taking a few wild swings at it with his axe before running off to do the same to its mates. For the player it’s like being the designated driver on a pub crawl which includes amongst its members ‘permanently embittered Frank’, who always manages to get his pint spilt and then demands righteous vindication because fifteen pence worth of beer has slopped from his glass onto the floor. So you’re dragging Frank from the bar shouting “Leave ‘im Frank, ‘e’s not wurf it!” while Frank flails about trying to break your grip, and subsequently manages to spill the pints of several other ‘permanently embittered Franks’ from different pub crawl groups, who all start lashing out at random as well. It’s like popping a balloon next to a box full of nervous feral cats.

What’s worse is that, as a Warden, I’d easily grab aggro from the crazy dwarf and keep myself self-healed, so he’d get bored at this and bugger off up the road to see if he could find a troll and spill its pint. And as we carried on in this fashion, I began to worry that he was going to chain-aggro his way right back to Thorin’s Hall, only stopping when he mistakenly thocked Dwalin on the nose. It got to the point where he was attacking stuff that didn’t even have a pulse, as long as it represented some way of getting me killed he was determined to fight it, or die trying, hopefully taking me with him. “An unstable rock fall?! Attaaaack!”, which was when I ended up trying to force him not to attack “No, you don’t need to attack the cave lichen. Jus… just… no… just… look… stop it… stop… it… STOP!”, and that was when I slipped and accidentally stabbed him through the neck.

Thankfully there were no witnesses because we’d killed everything in a seven hundred mile radius, so I gradually back-heeled his corpse under a nearby outcrop of rock while whistling innocently, tip-toeing and craning my neck to look up and down the path every now and again to make sure no one was coming.

I slowly made my way back to the dwarf camp, having to take a few detours to avoid several desperate dwarves who pleaded to be taken to safety after becoming stranded with devastating fractured toenails, crippling severed eyebrow tendons, or catastrophic girdle failures. When I arrived I put on my best ‘I’m so sorry, he didn’t make it’ face, but imagine my surprise when I entered the office to find myself staring at none other than the King of the Aggronauts himself, with a bandage around his neck and a look that could fry bacon at fifty paces. I exclaimed how glad I was to see that he had made it back safely, and asked whether I could have my reward now. However, I got the distinct impression that the mood had turned sour, so decided to quickly vacate the room full of angry dwarves that like nothing better than to incessantly pick fights with anything that can be vaguely considered to be a carbon-based life form.

I never did get paid, but I did get a new title. You can call me Mr Warden, Hated By Escort NPCs. Best title ever.