“So yeah, here’s how it works. We burglars have this skill, right? The skill is on a reasonably long cool-down but it has a good chance to hit the enemy. Now *if* it hits the enemy it will stun them for six seconds, but there’s also a base twenty percent chance that it will trigger a damage over time debuff on that enemy. Now *if* my skill has hit and *if* the damage over time debuff has been triggered then I roll 1D6 and the value on the dice indicates the power of the debuff, with 1 being fairly pointless and 6 being powerful on any basic or signature level mob, but fairly unimpressive on elite level mobs and above. So as you can see, it makes for a really exciting ability, because essentially nothing happens most of the time, and then all of a sudden – BAM! – a moderate DoT debuff that wouldn’t worry an asthmatic vole! Neat huh? What about you, Runekeeper, what sort of abilities do you get?”

“Well… I have this one skill, on a three second cool-down, which calls forth a fiery apocalypse and delivers death and ruin to everything between the heavens and the land in a radius of fifty yards from the point of casting.”

“Oh. Oh nice. But what else does it do? I mean, is there a random chance that it will rain badgers? Some sort of unpredictable chance of it causing anything it hits to sing Barbra Streisand’s Woman In Love? Will it cause your nipples to spontaneously shrivel and turn green if you roll an even number on a 1D10?”

“No, no. Just the universal destruction of all living matter. It’s quite basic really, when you put it like that.”

“Sounds a little bit dull. I mean where’s the excitement? Where’s the gamble? Where’s the spark of surprise and the element of joy when something unexpected happens?!”

“Well, I suppose there’s the part where if it crits then it wipes out all life in a three hundred mile radius and I automatically win whatever dungeon I happen to be running at the time. I guess that’s kind of neat in a random sort of way.”

“Ye… bu… tha…ah Ah! But! What else do you bring to a group other than breathtaking, almost god-like, levels of damage?”

“Well not a great deal.”

“Ah then. Ah -dear sir- ha!”

“I mean, I suppose I have healing powers that would make Jesus rage-quit a group. I can’t do the fish and loaves thing though; I did try once, but I just ended up incinerating the waiting crowd when I crit my basic fire attack while trying to cook the loaves.”

“Yeah? Well I can turn invisible! Hah, there! Where am I now? Poof! Where did I go? Eh? I mean, okay, it’s utterly an pointless ability other than for skipping the odd roadblock of crap mobstacles, and it’s all but entirely useless in a group setting, but it does mean that I can flick V signs at overpowered classes without them knowing!”

“I can hear you, you know. And I, uh… I can still see you. Is that a V sign?”

“Oh, hah, right. I forgot that it only works on enemies. If they’re four levels below me. And looking the wrong way. And blind. Even then they still have a chance of spotting me, and usually do. But that’s the fun of the gamble though, right?!”

I really like adventuring through Moria, but as I make progress through the zone on my most recent alt in Lord of the Rings Online I find myself experiencing the usual frustrations. The place is claustrophobic, as it should be, but for the wrong reason.

A large part of Moria is comprised of tightly packed corridors which are littered through their entire length with conveniently spaced mobstacles. Moria’s feeling of claustrophobia comes from the fact that, unlike the overland zones, there’s nowhere to run to in order to avoid the aggro of these mobstacles. Nowhere to run to baby, nowhere to hide. I wonder if this is the reason why I’ve read several blogs recently which have talked about trying to avoid Moria altogether, instead levelling via regions such as Eregion and Angmar, the epic book content, and skirmishes, until they are high enough level to move straight to Lothlórien. Do not pass through Moria. Do not collect 200 rusted dwarf tools.

I think it’s a shame that people don’t enjoy Moria because I feel it is a stunning and ambitious zone: entirely underground, with imposing dwarven architecture towering over bridges that span chasms of unfathomable depth, it is a three-dimensional realm which has a level of internal consistency and integrity not often seen in MMO zone design. It is oppressive; the weight of the rock hanging above the player character’s head as they travel the hewn paths of stone is tangible. The relief that one feels when finally being released from the dark depths into the sunlight of Lórien is palpable, and it’s hard to resist the urge to squint your eyes into that bright daylight, even though in reality it is no more than a very minor ambient change in foot-lamberts emitted from one’s LCD window into that world.

Although the lack of sunlight and seasons makes Moria oppressive, the use of darkness is purely relative to the outside world. There are no dank unlit corridors where the player swings their torch about in an Indiana Jones fashion, using it with urgency to highlight features of their surroundings from moment to moment in order to relieve their claustrophobia one cobwebbed corner at a time. As I mentioned earlier, the claustrophobia in Moria comes from knowing that accidentally aggroing too many mobs will likely mean death because there are no safe spots to return to once you’re any distance away from the sparsely separated quest hubs. It is a form of danger, granted, but when it is the only one used it quickly devolves from terrorization to tedium.

The lack of true darkness in Moria caused me to think further on the use of claustrophobic elements in MMOs. For example, MMOs pride themselves on their weather effects, and yet I don’t remember experiencing fog to any great extent with respect to claustrophobic game-play. I’m talking a proper pea souper, rather than the sort that just gives your graphics card a breather by turning down the draw distance a bit. In external MMO zones fog could be an easy way to introduce claustrophobic fear as a player travels. Instead of slowing players down by placing a line of blatant mobstacles all along their path from here to the horizon, it wouldn’t hurt to be creative and try to introduce some atmosphere. Have a fog descend on the player as they travel, with the shadows of various creatures looming in and out of view (was that an ogre flanking around us, or were we simply passing a tree?) and the sounds of animals and monsters floating around the player, sometimes close, sometimes far away, with a random chance within the game engine of them turning into an actual encounter. I feel that this is an example of a claustrophobic mechanic which would be entertaining: it would be short lived, atmospheric, and hopefully get the heart pumping a little bit faster. Compare this to the pursed-mouth resignation one feels when looking at a long Moria corridor or a path through a forest in any MMO, each lined with a conveniently spaced row of Pacman pellet mobstacles, more akin to the challenge of a slalom course on a ski slope than high adventure through dangerous territory.

So I’m enjoying playing a Burglar in Lord of the Rings Online at the moment, but what is a Burglar if common misconceptions are to be avoided? As unwize mentions in a comment to that post, there is a possibility that Turbine themselves are a little unsure as to the real role of the Burglar class within the game’s group content, and being new to the class myself, I would have to hazard a guess that part of this exasperation on the part of experienced Burglar players stems from the class already having had at least one major revamp along with continuing tweaks to specific class mechanics since then.

So what is a Burglar not? They are not a primary DPS class, although this is perhaps an area that Turbine are struggling with. They are not crowd control specialists, but they do bring several powerful crowd control abilities to the table; I think it’s fair to say that Burglars are to crowd control as Captains are to healing – they are not the first choice in that area, but can perform admirably at the job given a lack of alternatives and when traited accordingly. And, perhaps most importantly, they are NOT Buglers. I do not like to ‘blow my horn’ in front of other people; patting me on the head does not ‘set’ me to play Reveille at first light; if I am a Hobbit my title is ‘of the Quick Post’ not the Last Post. My role in a group is not to signal the start of an orc hunt!

And breathe. And relax.

I am not THE BOOGIE-WOOGIE BUGLE BOY OF FELLOWSHIP B!

And breeeeaaaaathe.

So what does a Burglar do? Like the best and arguably most enjoyable of utility classes, it seems that they do a little bit of everything.

The Burglar has a number of short term debuffs called Tricks which can be spread liberally, one per mob, and help to reduce the attack potential of a group of mobs. Personally I like to picture my stealthy little hobbit running around tweaking nipples, yanking wedgies, pulling hats down over eyes, and tying shoelaces together in order to distract and demoralise his foes. Of course this breaks down a little bit when it’s a pack of wargs you’re fighting, but a true Burglar is a master of stealth, and is therefore quite able to sneak some shoes onto a warg’s paws before initiating combat, thus allowing them to tie the warg’s shoe laces together during the fight. And now you know why they call such shoes sneakers.

The second part to Tricks is that they enable a number of other Burglar skills to operate. These skills are generally more powerful abilities on longer cooldowns which require a Trick to be active on the target before they can be used, and which will remove the Trick when they are used. So the Burglar generally spreads Tricks around amongst the mobs, and then juggles adding Tricks to the main target while removing them with their Trick-powered skills. Think of it as a sort of Charlie Chaplin routine, where Charlie kicks the villain in the pants and, when the villain spins around, rolls between his legs and head-butts the villain in the groin as Charlie sits up from the roll looking confused; as the villain doubles over, Charlie then tweaks the villain’s nose, rolls through his legs, hops up, turns around and kicks the bent-over villain in the bum such that he falls into a puddle of mud, whence the villain looks up dazedly into the camera with his mud-covered face, in a light-hearted comical fashion. Then, while the villain is still prone, Charlie leaps onto his back, pulls his head back and slits his throat with a dagger, before severing his spine at the base of the neck, just to be sure.

C’mon, admit it, Charlie Chaplin would have been even cooler if he’d done that last bit. Anyway, that’s the primary role of the Burglar as I see it: it’s a Charlie Chaplin meets Sweeney Todd sort of affair.

The Trick mechanic in itself is quite fun (especially if you have a slightly wild imagination), but the Burglar has so much more going for them. Like the Captain, the Burglar also has a set of skills on a ‘response chain’, skills that are unusable until a certain event occurs, which in the Burglar’s case is whenever they score a critical hit (and later also whenever they evade, if they choose to slot the Stick and Move legendary trait). In Charlie Chaplin terms it’s the moment where he’s suitably rendered his foe inoperative but can’t resist giving him one final kick in the pants while the fellow is down. These skills generally lead to more damage for the Burglar, but there are also some useful utility abilities, such as the chance to start a fellowship manoeuvre.

Starting fellowship manoeuvres is not unique to the Burglar, but they are the only class that can reliably start one at will. Other classes will trigger a fellowship manoeuvre on certain events, such as when a Guardian is stunned during combat, but the Burglar has specific skills that will start a manoeuvre if they successfully hit the target. Fellowship manoeuvres are powerful events which can easily turn the tide of a battle when performed in a well coordinated group, so you would think that this would make the Burglar an absolute ‘must have’ in any group, but the skills which trigger it are on such a large cooldown that they are once-per-fight emergency buttons, more akin to a Captain’s Last Stand than a really class-defining mechanic. The ability to start a fellowship manoeuvre at will is clearly very useful from a tactical point of view, but when you have a number of other classes in a group with chances to start manoeuvres, what seems as though it should be the defining power of a Burglar becomes somewhat diluted in the sea of unpredictable but reasonably regular occurrences of the fellowship manoeuvre event.

Really I’ve only scratched the surface of the Burglar here, the class has all manner of other utility skills, not least of which is the ability to enter stealth, from where the Burglar can strike at targets for extra damage – after picking the pockets of eligible targets, naturally. Burglars have a very nice fire-and-forget debuff which increases damage to a specific target, and remains active until combat ends, the Burglar deactivates it, or the mob manages to resist it. There’s the Hide in Plain Sight skill, the equivalent of Charlie hopping inside a conveniently placed barrel as his pursuers stand around looking all about themselves wondering where he could possibly have vanished to; of course, in the Sweeney Chaplin/Charlie Todd version this enables him to then pounce out and fillet the confounded villains with a devastating critical strike, should he so choose. There’s the signature Riddle, a suitably Bilbo-esque ability, allowing the Burglar to keep a humanoid opponent stunned for up to thirty seconds as long as the target takes no damage and which, when traited for, can be used to pretty much permanently keep one enemy out of the fight for as long as the Burglar chooses. And although I haven’t gained the skill yet – my Burglar only being in his early thirties at the moment – the Provoke skill will cause the threat generated by it to apply to the mob’s target instead of the Burglar, thus allowing the Burglar to aid, say, an off-tank with holding aggro on a mob.

The final mechanic I want to talk about, and one which sounds rather fun but is probably actually quite frustrating in the normal run of play, is the gamble. My character is not really high enough in level to have experienced this properly yet, but at the basic level he gets a skill on a fairly lengthy cooldown which when activated will randomly pick one of four effects similar to those found in a fellowship manoeuvre, but understandably of lesser magnitude and which only apply to the Burglar. What makes this mechanic potentially both fun and frustrating is that one of the Burglar’s class trait lines allows them to increase the number of abilities that will have a chance of applying a specific type of gamble under specific conditions, and thus it adds a level of ‘tactical unpredictability’ to the Burglar’s combat performance; a lucky run could see the Burglar perform in such a way as to put most other classes in the shade, where an unlucky run will yield no additional benefit – not a huge problem in itself, but I imagine it’s problematic for raiders who require a more consistent performance and could otherwise be heavily invested in one of the other two trait lines for a solid, albeit slightly more mundane, boost to abilities. Still, there’s a reason why the trait line is called The Gambler, and I’m resolved to trying it and seeing what it adds to the class.

Who knows, with random and unpredictable boosts to his abilities, I’m already starting to picture Charlie Todd transforming into the Hulk on occasion, just to really mess with the genre.

The Burglar is the latest class which I have picked to play in Lord of the Rings Online; I’m quite a fan of utility classes when they’re thoughtfully designed, and the Burglar is one such veritable bag of proverbial tricks. The initial problem I found with the class was, as with many things in MMOs, not due to the thing itself but with other players’ perception of it. Although any fan of Tolkien’s work worth their salt will readily understand the type of Burglar being alluded to in the title of the class, the general populace (more ‘general’ than ever since the game went free-to-play) will take most classes at face value, and as such, a character that can enter stealth and dual-wield weapons is quite clearly a stabby Death Machine. Optional theme song: I’m Just A Death Machine to the tune of Girls Aloud’s Love Machine.

There are many common misconceptions amongst players in MMOs and it’s something developers should constantly be striving to guard against; I believe that if you expose players to the targets of their misconceptions early in the game, through tutorials which then go on to explain the true nature of things, you can create a greater level of harmony within the game’s community. Knowledge leads to understanding, and understanding leads to sympathy.

Alas, without understanding, a great majority of players will judge a book by its cover. Worse, they’ll take the book and stick the cover from their favourite book on it instead, and then judge it based on whether its content matches up to that. And then they’ll bend the pages back and break the binding, and I hate that, and … this metaphor isn’t really going anywhere.

In summary so far: Books. Covers. Judgements. It’s all starting to sound a bit biblical.

Anyway! Perhaps what we really need is some sort of publicist class for MMOs. The Max Clifford class would run around extolling the virtues of the various misunderstood player classes, driving much needed publicity for those roles that are underplayed and misunderstood. The local herald in Bree could yell headlines such as BURGLAR CLASS ATE MY HAMSTER, and then the publicist class would put some spin on it and everyone would have a good laugh, but the Burglar would also be foremost in their minds when the next Kill Ten Rodents dungeon raid came along…

As an example of such misconceptions, I would offer to you a simple excursion into the Great Barrows with a pick-up group. The Great Barrows is the first major dungeon that players encounter, and is therefore the place where a bunch of strangers (often including a number of new players) all get together, try to coordinate themselves, and attempt to execute a number of flawless battle strategies against tough opposition without really knowing their own class’s capability in a group role, let alone those of other classes. In short it’s the perfect recipe for a Good Time.

Where I use ‘good’ quite, quite wrongly.

And where the infinite expanse of foreverness implied by ‘time’ doesn’t really do the experience justice either.

Of course, with the recent influx of new players and the fact that Turbine have changed the dungeon system, such that running any dungeon will now reward you with a number of tokens which you can spend with a vendor to gain armour set pieces, and which is now also coupled with a dungeon interface that lets the group teleport instantly to the dungeon from anywhere in the world (sounding familiar?), dungeon running with pick-up groups has become a lot more impersonal.

Therefore, instead of the usual polite greetings and ‘how do you do’s at the start of a dungeon run, followed by an exchange of business cards, and perhaps a short but powerful Powerpoint presentation on the complexities of your class and what paradigms you can leverage in order to empower total performance for your group’s orc-stabbing synergies, you instead enter a dungeon and get:

“Good morning, my name is Dildo Daggins and I’ll be your Durglar…uh, Burglar today. What can I offer the group? Well, I’m not a rogue in the traditional sense, but instead I offer a complex class combination consisting of debu…”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.”

At which point (and I expect primarily because I’m a hobbit) I’m flung bodily into a set of angry Dourhand dwarves, with yells of “shut yer pie hole and get stabbing” falling away rapidly behind me as I sail through the air. And, unfortunately, what happens next only serves to strengthen their misconceptions, because much like an unsuspecting cat jokingly launched by their owner’s swept arm into the path of a large but altogether harmless dog which the cat had otherwise been calmly observing with tail-swishing disdain from the lofty safety of a chest of drawers, my Burglar can do nothing at this point other than that which instinct dictates: spread his limbs as wide as possible in order to futilely attempt to enter some sort of glide path, while at the same time making as many of those limbs as sharp and pointy as possible. Upon landing in the midst of the somewhat bemused targets, the Burglar then proceeds to slash away at everyone in the immediate vicinity – including himself – like some sort of frenzied cross between Loony Tunes’ Tasmanian Devil and Kick-Ass’s Hit-Girl, before leaping away and alighting on a nearby corpse, his back arched and hissing all the while. The rest of the pick-up group look on in wide-eyed pale-faced horror, some with hands clasped over mouths that blockade bulging cheeks, as my Burglar pants and stares frantically around, wild eyes peering out from behind gobs of gore dripping from his hood. A short pause follows before he’s suddenly freaked-out by the shadow of his own cloak, leaps six feet straight up into the air, and then attempts to escape by failing to run up the sheer face of a nearby wall. Finally he determines to regain some dignity, and so sits himself nonchalantly down and begins to lick his toes clean.

Of course the Burglar really offers far more than DPS to a group, in fact it could well be considered a secondary or tertiary role, but the common misconception is still sadly rife. I hope to expound in another post on what makes the Burglar special, along with the joys I’ve experienced in playing the class, but at least for now with this post you have hopefully found some level of understanding of what it means in Tolkien’s world when they call someone a cat burglar…

There’s something about level thirty two in Lord of the Rings Online, and I’m starting to wonder if Douglas Adams wasn’t off by ten in his estimation of the Ultimate Answer. I now have four characters at level thirty two, and although one of them is a member of a static group who will surely continue on past the illustrious company of the others, my character screen at the time of writing looks like one of those uncanny messages in a movie, delivered by some unknowable force which is attempting to communicate with the puny minds of humanity in the only way it knows how.

32. 32. 32. 32.

You do have to wonder about these superior alien intelligences sometimes: whether the colleagues of this particular intelligence are looking over its shoulder and smirking as it tries to reveal the secrets of the universe through the medium of levels displayed on the character login screen of a middle-aged man in the south of England. The problem with the English is that we’re pragmatic and generally unperturbed by events, but also a bit slow:

“It’s most strange, darling. All my characters in this game seem to stop at exactly the same level, and I just can’t explain it.”

“Never mind, dear, I’m sure you’ll work it out in the end. Speaking of which, have you figured out what to do with that mysterious piece of alien technology that you found in the garden last night? It’s just that it’s still hissing and smoking frightfully, and it’s making a bit of a mess of the living room. And I think it may have disintegrated the cat.”

“Well no, not yet, I’m afraid I’ve been quite tied-up with the conundrum of my MMO characters to be honest. Anyway, the device has me a bit stumped, it seems to have a panel that requires a couple of numbers to be entered, and the symbols carved on the side seem to indicate some sort of massive evolution-of-species event, but I’ll be blarmed if I know what those numbers could… Oh damn and blast! I’ve just got another character stuck at level thirty two!”

“Perhaps I’ll take it down and show it to the ladies at the WI, dear. Mrs Cranny-Futtocks is a bit of whiz at the Guardian crossword, perhaps she can work it out.”

“Right you are. I’m going to roll-up a Lore-master; I haven’t gotten one of those to level thirty two yet. Sixty five! I meant sixty five. What in the seven hells of Bexhill-on-Sea is it with the number thirty two?!”

I mean, not all of my characters are at level thirty two, there are a few level one placeholders (which probably shouldn’t count) and the rest are level sixty five. It seems that level thirty two is a mid-life crisis for me when it comes to my character relationships in LotRO, the point where we either decide to buckle down and get on with one another, or we split in bitter acrimony and lengthy divorce proceedings.

Perhaps levelling a character for me is a bit like some sort of fictional soap opera marriage then:

• Initial Courting (Levels 1 to 9) – Enthusiasm is high. Everything is fresh, new, exciting and unknown. We spend most of our time hiding our relationship from disapproving peers, but those who do find out will tut and mutter “It’ll never last” whilst exchanging knowing looks from behind their cups of tea and slices of Battenburg.
• Marriage (Level 10) – The hidden potential in my new partner is suddenly revealed and I decide to commit to them. We have a huge tacky wedding, and at the reception afterwards all my previous characters sit at tables, looking miserable, and plotting our downfall.
• Period of Sustained Happiness (Levels 11 to 20) – It’s the honeymoon period, life gets tougher but we both plough on through it together, unstoppable. Ratings soar and we are featured on the front of the TV Times.
• Niggles Start to Set In (20 to 23) – My new character seems not to be developing that much as an individual any more, almost as if they’ve given up trying now that we’re both committed and comfortable. I, in turn, find myself not putting as much effort in to the relationship as I ought.
• Rough Patch (24 to 30) – Things start to get tough. Everything is a slog. Every little thing is a problem, and every problem is their fault. Most of our scenes involve lots of shouting and throwing vases and cats across the living room at one another.
• Breaking point (30 to 32) – This is where the character divorce happens, usually after the dramatic discovery that I’ve been having an affair with a low level alt from two doors down the character selection screen.
• Happily Ever After (33 to 65) – If I make it this far, then it’s usually for keeps, and we grow old to the level cap together, whereupon one or the other of us is written out of the show after tragically dieing in an explosion resulting from a high-speed bowls collision.

Other reasons for me getting stuck at level thirty two could include the fact that it’s a power of two, and my brain – having been wired to deal with them – is only running a very basic 32-bit operating system (which would explain a lot). Thirty two is a Leyland number, and as we all know Leyland were a British motor manufacturer famous for their cars breaking down, so it’s a suitable point for my characters to break down too; but it’s also a happy number, so I’m not sure how that works – perhaps I’m glad for the chance to level a different character. Thirty two is also the freezing point in degrees Fahrenheit of water at sea level, which would explain why, when I get a character to level thirty three, their level rarely gets frozen again. A full set of teeth in a human adult, including wisdom teeth, is thirty two in number, so maybe this represents the point in character development where I start pulling teeth. And in the Kabbalah there are thirty two Kabbalistic Paths of Wisdom, so perhaps it’s simply the case that I’ve finally reached MMO enlightenment.

It could be any of those, really. I mean, it’s either that or just a curious coincidence that got turned into a slightly demented blog post. Which doesn’t seem terribly likely at all.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”