Triumph of the Flying Jetski

My SWTOR Trooper hit level 25, and obtained his first real mount over the weekend.  It looks vaguely like a giant hovering Jet Ski, and it adds 90% to my out-of-combat travel speed.  The added effect of this boost can be overstated when you consider that all characters get a permanent 35% non-combat sprint boost at level 1 as of patch 1.2.  The mount only takes half a second to activate, but it disappears nigh-instantly upon combat, so it definitely isn't worth mounting up between packs of mobs.  Still, it's a marked increase in speed while crossing the outside world.

The big black things do not appear to be functioning cannons.

The main reason why I was able to pay the 43,000 credits for the training and the vehicle was courtesy of SWTOR's crew skill system.  Each character is allowed three professions, and it appears that the intent is to take one crafting profession, one gathering profession (which procures basic materials for the corresponding crafter), and one mission skill (which procures rare materials for the crafter, and other miscellany).  However, pretty much all mission skills appear to operate at somewhat of a net loss of credits, probably to balance out the fact that you can have two or more missions going at once while AFK. 

Instead, I've gone with Slicing - an odd gathering skill that does very little for crafting but does find literal safes full of credits scattered around the landscape.  There are also slicing missions and I've had extremely mixed luck with these, generally breaking even.  (I've heard these were more lucrative in previous patches.)  While I suppose it's hard to complain about breaking even while earning skill points, in general I'm sticking to the guaranteed returns of looting lock boxes. 

Meanwhile, my other two slots are occupied with the Biochem crafting skill and Bioanalysis gathering skill.  Bioanalysis produces all the materials I need to make common medpacks (potions) and stims (longer stat buffs) with Biochem.  There are some NPC costs associated with training and materials, but in general this is a very low cost way to obtain all of my consumables.  So, I'm basically getting everything my character needs and operating at a net profit from crewskills alone, which makes all of my quest rewards and drops pure profit. 

I hear mixed things about the other crew skills, and I can't make use of any rare recipes I learn through reverse engineering (a process in which crafters are reimbursed for destroying the common items they make for skill points) for lack of the associated mission skill.  That said, I would not hesitate to recommend this particular combination to any other newbies looking to purchase their first speeder.  

Triumph of the Plain-er Horse

Telaran riding school requires that you stick your right elbow out to the side just so.

Having hit level 50 in Rift, I was finally eligible to snag the top 110% speed mount.  By virtue of the "digital collector's edition" (which is suspiciously like a microtransaction), every character on my account gets a 60% mount for free the moment they can access a mailbox.  There is a boost to 90% available for 35 Plat at level 30 (I think it may have been higher at some point?) but I decided to set my sights on the 125 Plat for the maximum mount speed. 

This was actually the first time in recent memory that I actually went farming for the purpose of collecting gold/plat.  Stacks of crafting materials from most harvesting nodes in Shimmersand sell for something between 3-10 Plat on Byrial Guardian side, so this was not especially painful.  While I don't think I have really done this since about 2007 (the first epic flying mount in WoW, launch era LOTRO), I didn't really mind it.  If anything, having a "primary" goal of traveling the zone to harvest more cash actually made it easier for me to convince myself that I might as well finish the quests that require killing the mobs guarding my loot.  This is something that has gotten lost in more recent MMO's, where it feels like I usually have all the cash I need as I need it. 

Since I haven't capped out any endgame factions yet, my two choices were the weird two-tailed lion-cat thing that Guardians can get in Sanctum, or a horse from the scholar faction that I apparently capped through world events the week the game launched.  I decided to go with the plain-er option because my CE turtle mount and the raptor mount I got from a world event both scale to the speed of my fastest mount for when I want to look more exotic.  On the plus side, I now have three separate appearances for my top riding speed.  On the down side, most faction mounts are set to cost the full 125 plat if I ever reach the required faction level.  Perhaps I will eventually be awash in plat, but for the moment this approach (which World of Warcraft fixed with riding skill back in 2006) would seem to discourage additional mount purchases.

Anyway, I'm now free to roam Telara at a noticeably faster speed.  This impacts travel times for everything - quests and especially zone events - in a way that makes me wonder if someone (myself or Trion) made a mistake in designing this in such a way that I was hobbling around at the lower speed until now.  Now that I have the upgrade, getting such a large boost in one shot is rewarding, but this was definitely something that was harming my enjoyment of the game up through this point.

Telaran Riding Tip: Lean to one side or the other so you can see around the giant thing on your horse's head.

Triumph of the Leaping Lizards

In principle, I don't spend all my time earning raptor-related mounts, but that happens to be how things worked out this week.  There were two time-sensitive things going on in EQ2 at the moment - the always clever annual Halloween event, and the second part of an expansion prelude event that seeks to concoct a lore explanation for why we're suddenly getting Beast Lords. I'm not currently paying for an EQ2 subscription, but this is precisely the scenario where an EQ2X account comes in handy.  So, I dusted off my Inquisitor and got to work.

The Saliraptor, which comes in black for crafters and white for adventurers.

The events I came for were basically what I expected, but the visit reminded me that I had yet to obtain the game's new "leaping" mounts.  SOE promised that flight would remain an exclusive perk for high level Velious expansion owners, but they did also just spend a fair chunk of time redecorating most zones in the game to allow flying mounts.  The compromise was a new set of leapers for characters in their 30's, and "gliders" for characters in their 60's.  I never bothered to do these quests because Lyriana can already fly under her own power.  My mid-30's Inquisitor, on the other hand, was in the right level range, and promptly completed the questlines for both the adventuring and crafting forms of the leaper.

On the ground, including in areas that are not yet flight-enabled, leapers are slower than regular ground mounts.  The difference, in flight-enabled areas, is that they can jump.  Really high.  Like on top of buildings and up sheer cliffsides high.  The leapers also come with immunity to falling damage, which means that you won't kill yourself by leaping off a cliff or jumping towards a bridge and missing. 

It's an interesting mechanic - the jump is high and long enough that you can basically avoid combat almost as well as if you were on a flying mount, but this method takes a bit more attention to ensure that you don't fall off narrow landing spots, get stuck under terrain, etc.  Touching down on the ground also helps spot quest items, some of which aren't visible from too high above the terrain.

(The level 60 version supposedly adds a slow-gliding option that increases your travel distance and control.  I can see some value in this - when the leaper hits the end of its forward momentum, it basically drops straight down like a rock, in a way where a slow-falling mount would manage to coast across.) 

I've never been that fond of player-controlled flying mounts - I think that what we give up in terms of avoiding/trivializing content is not worth what we get from the experience of flying over the world, and I think that 99% of the benefits can be achieved with either NPC-controlled flight or player-controlled flight in specific constrained areas where being able to steer actually contributes to gameplay (e.g. airborne bombing runs).  As far as compromises go, the leaping lizard is not bad.   

What I'm Working On: Vanguard

Tell that tree that I've had enough of its amateur shenanigans!

My "what I'm working on" update for Vanguard is less of a current work in progress than something I got done on the way out of town for vacation.

I was finally able to get off of the newbie trial island, hitting level 11 in both adventuring (Disciple) and Diplomacy.  The last quest area would have been very tough to solo, but was fine with a second person - fortunately, there are people running around the temple during peak hours.   

The Lucky Charm bracelet, for completing the newbie adventuring line.  The item is much prized because it goes on your diplomacy outfit but gives you adventuring stats, and cannot be earned in any other way besides completing the newbie island as a new character.  Also note that it will be sent into your diplomat bags automatically if there's room - I spent about 5 minutes trying to figure out where it went when I obtained it. 

As I had anticipated, getting into the game's real world did indeed make a big difference.  Unlike the generic lore of the starter island, the game's original starting areas have lore that is tailored to each race.  Meanwhile, parts of the game begin to make sense than they did while staring at page after page of UI's - for example, the equipment tab for your mount allows players to swap in different colored barding on the same mount model, where every other MMO just has the player buy multiple mounts that are pre-outfitted.  

Triumph of the horse that let me choose the color of its saddle-blanket equivalent.

For me personally, the thing that really stands out about Vanguard is the variety of non-combat quest options - the crafting and diplomacy quests are a refreshing change from the normal MMO world where violence solves everything.  That said, this area bumps into the area where my impression of the game and its older UI is the the weakest, namely travel.

Intercontinental travel is handled by a system of teleport crystals - for a very small fee, players can teleport to the location of their choice, and the NPC's will even offer breadcrumb quests to all the level-appropriate locations in the game.  Once you're actually in the zone you want, though, your only guide is a compass that does not indicate altitude, or even whether you're on the right continent. 

The second diplomacy quest once you're off the newbie island points players at one of the game's major cities, which I had never heard of and was not located on the continent I was on.  First, I went to the correct coordinates, which were clearly indicated on my map even though they were on the wrong continent.  Then I somehow missed a turn and ended up in the city docks, trying to figure out why I couldn't get to the coordinates which were up above on top of the cliff.  A few steps later, you're sent off to another city on yet another continent, and again it took me a while to figure out that the new location was not actually in the place the compass seemed to be pointing to. 

Fans of the sandbox and immersion may argue that this system is realistic (real people may assume that you know approximately where famous cities are) and leaves more for the player to figure out on their own.  Fair enough, and perhaps this would have impressed me back in 2005.  Today, the fact that it takes 5-10 minutes to ride my horse from the teleport point on the outskirts of town to a Fed-Ex quest objective that I actually know how to find (and will immediately leave for the next mission) is a dealbreaker by the second or third time it happens. 

A shiny flight beacon, for a "how to use the rental flying mount" tutorial.

Overall, I liked Vanguard better than I expected to, despite some arguably unfortunate design choices (such as sending free trial players to the highly generic newbie island).  On some level, complaining about sandbox in one of the last sandbox-like MMO's standing is like rolling on a "PVP" server and complaining about being ganked - if you don't like it, you picked the wrong place to play. 

And so, I wandered off without much fanfare.  Not because I was out of things to do, or because I hated the game, but simply because there were other things that I would rather spend my time on.  I guess that's a mixed review, but I don't especially fault the game for it, and I hope it sticks around for people who enjoy it. 

New Travel Philosophy For Cataclysm

Late in the Cataclysm beta, players were less than pleased to hear that Blizzard abruptly removed the portals previous found in the previous expansion capitols of Shattrath and Dalaran. With the game moving back to the original world, it no longer made sense to have those cities serve as the main player travel hubs.

At the time, Blizzard claimed that players lacked the context to understand the decision, as there was the two week period prior to the expansion in which the portals were gone while everything players actually wanted to do remained in Northrend.  Having spent more time in the world of Cataclysm, both at low levels and on my two level 80+ characters, I understand what Blizzard was getting at. 

With the new, more linear format present continuously through leveling, most parts of the world are now areas that players visit once and never return to.  It's still more convenient to be a class that can teleport to a class trainer (Mages, Druids, and Death Knights) and then use their hearthstone for the return trip, but that's a moot point if you don't have to make the return trip at all because you finished that part of the zone you were in. 

(To make it even easier, the new zones of Cataclysm can all be accessed via portals in Stormwind/Ogrimmar, and guild reward items can grant players additional teleports to those cities if you really don't want to set your hearthstones there.) 

As someone who plays a mage, I still think that the difference between mages and everyone else is a bit too large.  Even so, this only really matters between level 30 (when you start questing 2+ flight path hops away from your capitol city) and level 60 (when you gain flying mounts and move to expansion content, which now has its own class trainers).  With questlines that span multiple zones for no good reason largely removed from the game, long travel times are primarily reserved for world events and archeologists.  Even I don't see much to complain about there. 

To Rent Or Buy The New LOTRO

LOTRO's free to play headstart kicked off yesterday with relatively few issues.  Allarond is alive, well, and mostly as I left him. As a former subscriber character, all restrictions on trait slots, bags, currency, and mounts remain lifted.  He also retains free access to the two current expansions, including most of the game's endgame group content.  More importantly, I can now drop in for social calls with my kinship and world events without having to subscribe for an entire month in order to do so. 

To Rent or Buy?

Note that the "unlock" costs $2.50 PER HOUR. Realistically, I'd call swift travel a subscriber only option.

Though new options are always a good thing, I cannot recommend LOTRO's non-subscription service in the same terms that I endorse DDO's version of the model.

It is possible to get from the end of the free starter areas (approx level 20) to the start of the first paid expansions (Moria, at 50, and Mirkwood at 60 are non-optional purchases even for subscribers) without paying, provided you are willing to grind for Turbine Points at a rate of pennies per hour.  However, non-subscribers will be trying to get by with less content, no rested exp, and longer travel times due to the lack of swift travel.  Your gaming experience will be less fun, and your character will end up worse off for missing easily obtained quest and explorer deeds in the zones that you choose not to purchase.

My advice to a new player looking to get the best bang for their buck out of this game would be:

1. Level to 20 in the starter areas, going to farm deeds in the other racial zones if you run out of quests.
2. While you do this, order a retail box of the Moria expansion, currently available online for under $10.   Do not activate this key until you're done with the newbie areas, so you can have your full month of subscription time to work on areas you don't already own.
3. The moment you log in while subscribed, you permanently unlock all restrictions on traits, bags, and gold for that character.  (Collectively, these cost far more than the $10 to unlock.)  You can also complete the in-game quest to unlock the riding trait once you're level 20, unless you hate that quest badly enough to pay Turbine several dollars not to have to do it. 
4. Spend the month of VIP time working on quests and deeds in the Lone Lands.  This will give you an idea of how long each zone will last.  If you clear out the Lone Lands in a week or two, buying content by the zone is probably not for you.  Otherwise, if you're halfway or more through when your month runs out and you choose NOT to resubscribe, you can probably skip buying the Lone Lands and instead purchase some other zone (North Downs or maybe Evendim). 

Note that game time cards are available online for significantly less than $15/month, and that Turbine is continuing to offer the $30/3 month subscription as of now.  Subscribers receive 500 TP per month on your bill date, regardless of how you pay.

If you sign up for a three month sub after the Moria box subscription runs out and save all your points, you should have enough on hand to buy the Mirkwood expansion when you need to raise the level cap to 65.  Moreover, the expansions include all of the level 50-65 content; if you can get from level 20 to level 50 during the four months of VIP time, you can let your subscription lapse and ultimately reach the level cap with both expansions purchased for something like $40 out of pocket. 

Paid Travel

Fun Fact: Turbine apparently prefers that you not screenshot their prices. To get around this, I had to open up the store window and then click outside it in the game world to re-enable the screenshot key.

One final thing I will note is the addition of two types of paid maps to the Turbine store.  One type are consumables that will teleport you to various locations in the game.  Apparently the "lore" that says that only Hunters and Wardens get to teleport around at will is for sale if you're prepared to slip Turbine a buck or two under the table. 

The other maps, more interestingly, offer an alternative to the game's racial and reputation teleport spell system.  Players have always been able to supplement their hearthstone-equivalent with a racial trait that sends you back to your racial home city.  More recent patches have added reputation rewards for other locations (I believe on a shared cooldown, though I have yet to earn any of these).  Now you can purchase maps for any of these locations (including the home cities of other races) in the LOTRO Store.

Subscribers may or may not care about these options due to swift travel.  That said, the map to Rivendell (for non-elves, elves would want Bree instead) is a huge perk for non-subscribers, or really anyone leveling a character in any of the adjacent zones (Trollshaws, Misty Mountains, Eregion).  Though LOTRO has some quests that use excessive travel just to pad out completion time, my bigger complaint is usually when you're two zones away from a trainer/bank, or when you're switching between zones.  Having one additional teleport point, even if it's on a shared cooldown, does a lot to help avoid that situation.

You can argue about whether this sort of thing should be available in game.  At its current price, though, I think that most players are going to get enough use out of the one extra city map to justify the expense (which is less than the monthly stipend for subscribers).

Lacking Replay Incentives

Runes of Magic provides players with "free samples" of a variety of cash shop items, including "marking ink" (can be used to mark any location) and "transport runes" (used to teleport to these locations at a later date).  As you can see, I've been using the inks (which are also available cheaply via daily quest tokens) to mark the major cities in the game as I reach each one.  I have yet to actually use a rune to teleport to any of these locations.

Though the game does provide alternatives - a hearthstone equivalent and an NPC teleport service - the main reason why I'm still sitting on all of my runes is that it is very rare that I ever feel I *need* to backtrack.  I travel to a quest area, I complete all the local quests (or maybe all but one or two group quests that I will come back to solo at some higher level), and I leave. 

Why Backtrack?
This particular feature of games is by no means unique to ROM - the unused teleport runes just happen to be an especially noticeable way of keeping "score" to show just how little use I have had for worldwide travel on a scale that most games do not offer.

Pretty much every game offers some reason to go back to quests that you have yet to complete (assuming that there actually are enough quests that you have extras left over, which looks like it will no longer be true of ROM by the 30's).  In ROM the reason is experience for your second class, while WoW has its achievements, EQ2 has AA's, LOTRO has deeds, and DDO has favor.  Once you've completed the quests once, though, it's usually only a small subset of repeatable endgame content that actually provides any real push to return.

(DDO is an exception because literally all of its content can be repeated on higher difficulties for additional favor - in my view, this aspect of the game is part of what makes the purchase of adventure packs feel more compelling than even larger amounts of content sold in paid expansions for other games.)

The world behind
This aspect of vertical advancement - complete one zone and move on - is creating some of the genre's biggest challenges these days.  It is very challenging for developers to provide any kind of group leveling path because the inexorable upward movement of the player population means that there won't be anyone left at the lower levels to group with.  It is challenging for atmosphere, as supposedly remote areas are overrun on expansion launch day and populous towns are deserted a year later.  This approach is also clearly taxing development budgets, as it calls for more and more content at a faster rate than even the largest studios can sustain.

At the end of the day, perhaps the main solution will have to be providing compelling differences in gameplay (either revised quests or compelling class choices for alts) in the hopes that players will re-roll.  It will be very interesting to see what Cataclysm - with possibly the largest scale revamp of a leveling game ever to hit an MMO - does to WoW's demographics.  Will longtime players re-roll, zoom through at 85 for achievements, or just wonder why this feels like a shorter expansion than some?  That said, it wouldn't be all bad to have some reason to revisit locations in the world beyond the occasional Fed-ex quest.

Connecting New Players With The World

Motstandet has a post up praising the immersion offered by FFXI's harsh travel system.  More than anything else, this system was the reason why my stay in Vanadiel back in 2006 lasted for a mere 5-6 weeks.  At the time, soloing was not really an option beyond level 10 or so and you could not get a group if you weren't in the correct zone (which may or may not be the zone in which the group would eventually be leveling).  As a newbie, I lacked both the knowledge and the resources needed to pull off this travel successful.  The problem was not that travel was hard, or that it was time consuming, but that it literally prevented me from getting where I would need to be in order to play the game.   

That said, I look at EQ2's new travel map system, and I'm not sure that they haven't gone too far in the opposite direction.

The New EQ2 map

You could argue that EQ2 travel was in need of a user interface overhaul.  If you were in Qeynos and wanted to get to the Enchanted Lands, you needed to know to take the boat bell to Antonica, from Antonica to Thundering Steppes, from Thundering Steps to Nek Forest, and finally from Nek to your destination.  (At least, I think that was the order.)  The process took about 10 seconds of gaming time but it also triggered a total of four loading screens, and a newbie might legitimately not have known which way to go. 


(Another absurd example: I could never remember what subzone of Freeport the Research Assistant lived in, so I would instead ride the carpet to Sinking Sands, carpet to Butcherblock, run to hills and fly to Gorowyn to use the RA there.  The lore openly weeps that I'd travel all the way around the world because the Freeport city guards could not tell you where in their own city the Research Assistant lives.  Then again, I suppose they might be mean enough to do that on principle.) 

In the new interface, you click on any bell anywhere in the world and get the above map.  You can pick any zone - including some inland destinations that did not previously have bells - and you'll appear right there.  Wizard and Druid portals also use this new UI, but offer slightly different destination (including newly expanded options from the last two patches).  If your guild hall has all three travel options, you can teleport instantly to at least one point, and possibly as many as three, in every single zone in the game. 


Location and Context
I will concede that it is more likely that I will correctly identify continents on a map of Norrath now that I actually look at one on a regular basis.  Given that zones were already broken up with loading screens that might encompass vastly different distances, the amount of additional harm done by moving to a single map is minimal compared to the previous clunky UI. 

At the same time, this approach kind of removes zones from their geographic context.  Previously, if you wanted to ignore the breadcrumbs and just go exploring, you knew that Nek and TS were your hubs and you could branch out to there in search of something in the right level range.  In a more-connected world like Azeroth or Vanadiel, you would literally walk to the edge of the current zone and the next zone over would be aimed at a higher level.  In EQ2 today, if you want to go somewhere new, you'll have to start clicking at random, load up the Wiki, or go to the new "storyteller" window of the quest log (which will flat out tell you where to go). 

At the end of the day, I still think that there has to be a system in place so that a player who has somewhere to be - especially because they're looking to join a group - has a way to get there quickly.  I'm not opposed to working for that privilege through rep grinds, consumable daily quest rewards, or gold or whatever, and I definitely support making players reach each location at least once on foot before they can insta-port there.  (This was part of EQ2's druid rings, and they removed it for the new patch.)  However, there are enough other obstacles in the way of group content without also having travel block access.

EQ2's solution may be better than WoW's approach, which is to literally teleport you instantly to a dungeon on a continent that you've never even visited, if that's what the random group finder picks.  Still, I'd be happy to give back a little of this arguably excessive access to get a little bit of that sense of zone progression back. 

The Role of "Optional" in the Item Shop

"…these guys are still leaving plenty of money on the table still. If players will pay $25 for just a mount, can you imagine what they’ll pay for the next expansion pack? Wheeee. Come on SOE, make the next expansion pack worth $150. Come onnnnn. Doooo eeeet!! I’m just waiting to see how crazy they go with this."

- Darren, the Common Sense Gamer

"But the main thing to take away from the article is thus -- if you don't like the practice, don't buy into it. Don't angrily bitch to developers, don't slit their throats on the forums, and don't make a scene. You can let them know exactly how you feel by simply telling them that you don't want this in your game, and then by following through and not buying the item (or items) in question. If it doesn't sell, you can be sure that it won't be coming back.

- Serafina Brennan @ Massively

There's been a fair amount of blog fodder already on SOE's decision to release an item store mount for $25 - identical to what Blizzard decided to charge a month earlier. These two quotes from opposite sides of the issue - Darren thinks that the market is stupid for accepting this price point, while Seraphina admits to being tempted now that the $25 mount is something she actually wants - do a good job of highlighting what I believe to be the central issue in this story: the "optional" price increase.

The option and the vote
Darren's idea won't work for the simple reason that expansion packs are mandatory purchases. I like EQ2 reasonably well, but I would not pay $150 for a future EQ2 expansion. Without the current expansion, continuing to play the game would not really be an option either. As a result, increasing the price on this mandatory item would actually cost SOE revenue that they otherwise would have received - a $40 expansion box fee plus a $15 monthly subscription. Perhaps they're leaving money on the table from people who would pay $150, but the alternative apparently leaves even more money on the table from people who will NOT pay the higher price.

By the same token, the fact that this additional purchase is optional renders Serafina's point moot. The two options in this rigged election are to support El Presidente or stay home and watch other people vote yes. Not giving SOE and Blizzard additional money that you were not giving them to begin with doesn't register as a vote for the opposition unless you're willing to cancel your subscription outright. If people were doing that in any significant numbers, we wouldn't be seeing a proliferation of $25 mounts.

The problem, then, is where the impact on the actual game lies. On this point, the Cash Cat is far worse than WoW's Sparkle Pony.

What exactly are you buying?
WoW's vanity mount is pure vanity - it moves only as fast as the fastest mount the player already owns, complete with all of the level, cash, and achievement requirements thereof. On the other hand, the EQ2 cash mounts come with 65% mount speed and some increased combat stats, and are usable at level 1. If you want to ride that fast, you'll have to level to 80 and grind out some faction or run some raids - none of the character on my account currently have access to anything faster than the low 50's.

Back in the old days, where most leveling was done in grinding groups, mounts were more of a luxury item. By contrast, the modern questing model is literally built around the frequent use of travel time to break up the grind. I'd guesstimate that my EQ2 characters spend somewhere between a third and half of their time traveling places. Suddenly, a 65% boost to travel speeds is a pretty big deal - not only does it reduce travel times, but it increases the proportion of your gaming session that you can spend doing things that directly earn you experience (killing mobs, looting items, etc).

The good news is that the heirloom mount is actually a bargain compared to the other, more temporary forms of experience boost available in EQ2's cash store, as the mount is permanent and can be shuffled to your alts through the shared bank. The bad news is that this move illustrates a continuing trend to make the game's best incentives into optional cash store purchases.

Next stop?
This type of model has become increasingly popular because - for the moment - it appears to be free money. As I said, very few players will cancel a game on principle because of this type of transaction, and many more would consider canceling a subscription in the face of a price increase.

In the long term, though, I'm concerned that this type of trend diminishes the value of player accomplishments. The content difficulty treadmill ensures that you don't actually get more powerful relative to your latest challenge. In many ways, the cosmetic rewards - outfits, furniture, mounts, pets, etc - are the most durable incentive rewards in the game. In EQ2, all of these are now available as additional purchases, and the custom station cash versions are often more impressive and unique than their in-game counterparts.

The danger for the game is that seeing a price tag placed on these items will encourage players to consider their worth more closely. This could create a perception that choosing to do without is the thrifty thing to do. Sure, it might be worth $25 not to have to grind out that pesky faction, but, if I can somehow squeak by without a mount at all - perhaps by rolling up a class that has inherent runspeed perks and does not need mounts - I get to keep both my time AND my money.

In a genre that is so heavily based on incentivizing players to reuse content, encouraging them to put more thought into how much exactly they value those rewards may not be the smartest long term move.

Phyrric Victory Of the Additional Off-White Horse

Allarond finally completed LOTRO's Volume I, wrapping up the launch game's epic plot. Part of the reward package features a "grey steed". This horse is not only functionally identical to the rep reward horse I previously obtained in Lothlorien, it also looks nigh identical, other than different saddle blankets.


The Lothlorien rep version of the horse, both are "fast" mounts with 150 morale/hp

An Epic Fed Ex Run
The grand finale of the quest line was genuinely impressive, but it was unfortunately marred by the most idiotic Fed Ex-fest I've ever had the displeasure of playing. There's a large chunk of Volume 1, Book 15 in which players have to make no fewer than five round trips out to a questgiver located in the middle of nowhere in the Trollshaws, a swift travel route and then five minutes on a player mount away from town. In the most egregious stretch, the player leaves Rivendell only to have the quest giver ask them to return to Rivendell to ask the stable dude to send over their horse and then journey back to the wilderness to report on this one-line conversation.

All told, these five trips in and out of the Trollshaws, representing a solid hour of travel time for a player with all the relevant swift travel and recall skills (map, personal and kinship housing, racial teleport, reputation-gated swift travel routes), require the player to kill one mob and participate in one session play story flashback that isn't designed to be difficult. There is absolutely no reason why the player needs to do personally make the other three trips, other than to pad out the questline with an extra 30-40 minutes of travel time.

LOTRO has always been a high quality game, and the final instance dungeon at the end of all this travel time delivers. It also wraps up the storylines that players have been working on since level one, in a way that solo players have rarely been included in an MMORPG. Unfortunately, LOTRO's weakness - lack of quantity - spills over into diluting the quality of the questline as well. "Added one group dungeon" does not sound as impressive on the patch notes as "added a twelve stage epic book quest, including soloable content". As a result, everyone has to slog through a questline that feels like a waste of time.

LOTRO Travel Satire

In my summary of LOTRO, I wrote about how often quests make players travel to remote enemy camps repeatedly. Frandoc in my LOTRO guild pointed me to a post by a player named Aereana, who has written a fantastic satire of the way LOTRO questgivers think. An excerpt:

Dwarf: Excellent work my elf friend, but the news is ill. Our spies say that Larry, Curly and Moe have doubled their efforts to bolster the orc forces. Return and thin their forces! Defeat 5 siege masters and 5 berserkers and deal a demoralizing blow!
Me: I told you Larry, Curly and Moe are tough. I've fought them twice now, don't you think I should deal with them? Or maybe go straight to the top and take care of Bob - I've fought him twice as well and I can take him.
Dwarf: Such an errand would be folly elf! Thin their forces and they will be driven back!

The sad part is that five followups to the same camp from the same questgiver is an exaggeration, but three is pretty common. Sometimes there's another questgiver with quests in the same camp who might send you back a fourth time if you didn't juggle the two sets of quests in precisely the correct order.

It reminds me of the quest in Evendim where a hobbit says he simply does not believe that there are no boars to eat in the zone. Players need to spend at least 30 minutes supposedly looking for boars (you can do whatever you want with the time) to convince him that there are, in fact, no boars in Evendim. What does Turbine do to follow up on this satirical take on their own quest design? Send you to kill 10 bears instead.

Five Game Features I'm Thankful For

In honor of Thanksgiving, a few game features that I'm thankful for (and wouldn't mind if other games copied):

Currency, mount and quest item storage


Basically all of the major games offer some form of out-of-inventory storage for items players are obligated to collect. In WoW, it's mounts, minipets, keys, and currency tokens. In Warhammer, it's currency tokens and quest items. LOTRO also stores certain quest items (monster parts, not items players use on something) and will be getting a mount panel, but is sorely lacking in token storage. EQ2 has a very inconsistent system, with some mounts and minipets classified as spells and others taking up space. (EQ2 tokens do not get a separate tab, but many are heirloom and thus can be sent to bank alts.)

Either way, developers are learning that, if they expect us to collect things, they need to provide some way to store them.

Travel with tradeoffs


Between LOTRO's reputation/deed-based swift travel routes and WoW's Argent Tabard, there's an encouraging trend toward allowing players to get to places where they have already been through the local quests more quickly.

Meanwhile, I got an interesting item from the low-level Hunter's Vale dungeon in Warhammer - a cloak that offers a 50% runspeed buff that breaks on any damage, with a 5 minute duration and a 20 minute cooldown. This cloak is a clever low level travel time solution for getting back to town that does not take the place of a true mount for later in the game.

Overall, I'm not always opposed to in-game travel on principle. I just think that the travel needs to be limited to reasonable amounts of time. In my view, this kind of solution offers a creative compromise that doesn't totally remove distance from the game, but also does not punish players with large amounts of travel time for the crime of actually attempting quests (which tend to send players places).

Any race, any class
This is an EQ2 innovation that adds a flavor of uniqueness to the game's characters.

Turbine and Blizzard stubbornly argue that their lore forbids certain class combinations. Though it's true that Tolkien's Hobbits don't practice magic, the overwhelming majority of Hobbits are also peaceful agrarian folks who do not put on heavy armor and wade into large packs of foes swinging two large weapons. It is understood that player characters are not part of the helpless silent peaceful majority - if every NPC in the village were as capable as the players, they would be able to handle all of the local threats themselves.

The fact is that the lore is vitally important to the developers when they're trying to justify limiting options on the character generation screen, but completely dispensable when they want to slap Mr. T's head on player characters or set up their travel and death systems in such a way that it makes sense to jump off of cliffs as a shortcut back to town. There's no reason why the player characters, who are by definition exceptional members of their societies, cannot be exceptions to narrow lore restrictions.

Cosmetic, Dye-able Outfits


Warhammer has armor dyes and EQ2 has cosmetic armor slots, but only LOTRO offers BOTH dyes AND not one but two cosmetic armor outfit slots. When I complete a quest, the first thing I do is check whether one of the quest rewards looks unusually cooler than what I have on. A quick trip to the broker allows you to dye your latest trophy to the appropriate color. In Allarond's case, I realized that I had collected some armor that would look great in green for the journey into Mirkwood, while the second slot allows me to preserve my old navy-blue look for traveling less forested locations.

Text-assisted vendor sales interface

The vendor interface is one area where Blizzard has inexplicably declined to make significant improvements to WoW. Items accumulate in your bags randomly as you loot them, and it is up to the player to scan each icon individually to determine what it is and whether to sell it. By contrast, LOTRO and EQ2 have alphabetically sorted lists that display the name of the item and allow you to safety lock items you don't want to accidentally vendor.

These things may seem like minor touches, but they do a lot to streamline the process of clearing out your bags at the end of the day's adventuring, and I wish that Blizzard would borrow one or more of them.


That's my list, what features are you happy you have in your game of choice?

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Reflections of a Moria Late-comer

Allarond hit level 60 in LOTRO over the weekend, putting him at the level cap with just over a week to spare before Mirkwood arrives and raises it. What have I learned as a late-comer to the Moria era?

Top-notch Solo Content


I came to Moria expecting it to keep me entertained for a month or two. I guess that's approximately how long it lasted, but the quality of the experience was much higher than I expected. LOTRO's Moria is not just a large cave full of orcs, goblins, and Dwarven ruins. Instead, it offers substantial storylines and a variety of terrain that includes firey pits, watery depths, and snowy mountains.

Turbine can't match the high production value features seen in the new content Blizzard crafted for Wrath of the Lich King, such as world-altering phasing and a new turret/vehicle interface to offer a change of pace from the quest to quest grind. Even so, I'd set the two expansions up head to head for solo content available in a single play-through any day. Turbine nails the execution on the otherwise standard PVE content of Moria, weaving in Tolkien's lore with some of their own storylines to create a well-polished experience.

(FWIW, I've used almost all of the leveling solo content to get one character to 60, with about a zone's worth of level 60 content that I'm saving for the level cap increase next week; if you switch between the Alliance and the Horde, your second WoW character will have far more different content, even counting the similar quests, than your second LOTRO character can expect.)



The Downsides
The picture of the Moria era is not perfect.

In my view, crafting in the game is essentially WoW's system with longer "watch your character craft" bars, a more confusing mix of ingredients to buy from crafting vendors and create through subcombines, and a random chance to fail to craft your item (while consuming all your reagents) that can only be eliminated via a one-week cooldown recipe that isn't even available until you complete several reputation/skill grinds (two of which I have yet to complete on Allarond). At no point during the leveling process was I able to produce any jewelry that I would actually wear, and I probably would have saved time and cash purchasing food cooked by other players from the broker rather than buying the ingredients to cook it myself.

I've discussed my thoughts on the game's not-so-"legendary" item system in the past, so I won't wade into that particular timesink again here. Though I personally have not done group content, and therefore have not had to deal with the radiance grind, it is apparently bad enough to drive some players from the game.

And finally, we have the game's travel system. Even Pete at Dragonchasers, who generally supports longer travel time, concedes that LOTRO travel gets irritating when you actually want to go somewhere to accomplish some task - which is, essentially, the entire point of quest-based PVE leveling.

I really want to like the game's travel for tying travel shortcuts to local quest deeds and reputations, but the process of getting anywhere until you finish the grind in question is far too painful. I spent a lot of time reading blogs while Allarond rode the invincible goat somewhere, and that's simply not a good gaming experience.

On To Mirkwood
As a late-comer to the Moria era, arriving after the expansion's last non-paid patch, I missed a launch that Zubon describes as a "development debacle". One would expect that Turbine will be working hard to avoid a similar fate for Mirkwood, especially if they are effectively planning to charge for content patches henceforth.

Regardless of how the new experiment turns out, though, I'm prepared rank Moria as a success. The game delivers high quality solo-PVE content, backed by the rich lore of Middle Earth, and is well worth the visit no matter what happens to the business model down the line.

Triumph of the Tame Riding Goat

Allarond was finally able to scrape together the gold he needed to purchase his rep reward riding goat, so he gets his obligatory picture on the blog.



Commenters here have been somewhat dismissive of the value of/need for the Moria goat. Unlike WoW, mounts aren't a free pass to ignore all monsters and terrain while flying at quadruple your normal speed from point to point throughout the (post-2007 portions of the) game. Unlike EQ2, mounts aren't a passive buff that automagically boost your speed appropriately in situations where mounts are allowed.

Instead, LOTRO mounts have limited speeds and extremely limited durability - a few hits from most mobs will kick you off your ride and force you to get by on foot. It is true that Moria has a large number of relatively narrow hallways full of enemies where the use of mount simply isn't viable. However, it also has a fair amount of vast and somewhat empty space (in particular, anywhere near just about any zone line) where having a mount can save you a lot of time.

There is still a broader design question of whether the reputation (and, to a lesser extent, gold) costs of the goats continue to make sense when the expansion arrives and Moria is reduced to a temporary leveling area, rather than hosting most of the endgame. I finally obtained the mount a significant portion of the way through level 58, which puts me very close to the point at which I will no longer need it.

Even so, I don't have any buyer's remorse on this particular purchase. If nothing else, it's a souvenir in a game where all the other mount options to date are horses (and, really, it would be hard to justify much of anything else in the lore).

Flying Mounts For All?

When I bought flying mount training for my Tauren last week, I was puzzled that the trainer only wanted 200G. I had previously been to the trainer, seen that it cost 600G (which was more than I had), and went off to earn the money by mining and herbing while working on Darkspear troll quest rep for another project.

Apparently, I've been the beneficiary of an undocumented change from patch 3.2.2; the cost has been slashed to 225G, and they also placed it on Ogrimmar rep, allowing me an additional faction discount.

The change was needed to meet the goal of the mount changes - flying mounts for everyone at level 60. In fairness, I might have been able to afford the original price had I not spent all of the character's money on epic ground mount training back before they nerfed that price to the ground, but 600G (plus another 45 for the mount) was a pretty steep mountain for a newbie to climb.

That said, I wonder whether this goal was a good idea. It's one thing to accelerate leveling for alts of experienced players, who can buy the heirloom book to allow their alts cold weather flying as they start Northrend (financing all of this through their levle 80 mains). It's something else to hand the ability to fly to new players who have not seen Outland before and will have flight taken away from them when they reach the latest expansion. (I can only imagine that Blizzard will reduce or eliminate the cost for Cold Weather flying when Cataclysm hits.)

The fact is that flight breaks a large number of quests, even in Outland (which was supposedly designed with flight in mind). That's why they didn't enable flight when players first hit Outland, and why they took it away at the start of Northrend. Post 77 Wrath was, for many players, their first experience having flight while leveling. Going back may not go over well.


One of numerous quest mobs you can fly right up to on your new flying mount.

Midway Through Moria

Allarond and the Well of Doom

When I haven't been blogging about Cataclysm, I've been making some progress through LOTRO's Moria expansion. Allarond has hit level 55 (out of the expansion's level cap of 60) and has cleared out the first two zones' worth of solo content inside the mines. Without further ado, the good, the bad, and the silly.

The Good: Challenging Solo Content
As I've written before, the devs face a lore conflict with content in Moria. Even with party members like Gandalf and Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas, you don't quest in Moria; your quest is to get out of Moria alive. The Epic Book story implies that things will take a turn for the worse, but the early going has been just like any other MMORPG, pacifying the mines one quest hub at a time.

That aside, the solo content is absolutely excellent. For reasons I've discussed at length, WoW doesn't offer much in the way of challenging solo content and EQ2 tends to jump straight from easy solo content to group content. Moria has really pushed my Champion to the limit in ways that I haven't seen in other solo games of late.


An NPC healer keeps me alive in a solo instance boss fight

Some of this is accomplished via fast respawns, frequent patrols, and "signature" boss mobs that are tougher than regular enemies. The game also offers solo instanced content, sometimes including helpful NPC's to assist with the tanking or healing duties. Meanwhile, the game manages to tell a story of the the Dwarves attempting to take back their home.

The Bad: The Disposable Advance-able Item System
Turbine hyped the Legendary Item system as a way for players to have their own version of the named weapons the Fellowship of the Ring carried into battle. Unfortunately, the Turbine needed another timesink more than they needed the system to be any fun for players.


The relic slot machine

A legendary weapon's base DPS is based on its level, but all of the weapon's stats are randomly generated when you pay a forgemaster NPC to "identify" it for you. I've identified 20 or so legendary weapons so far. The majority had totally useless bonuses, a handful offered marginal or situational bonuses, and one or two weapons were actually worth considering. So there's a random number generator, that's fine in and of itself.

Then there's the relic system, which will seem to WoW players like an unholy union between disenchanting, jewelcrafting, and a slot machine. Relics are obtained primarily by breaking down existing legendary items. Of the six relics in any given tier, 4-5 of them will have irrelevant stats for your class. Moreover, the only ways to get higher tier relics are A) to level up the legendary item before you deconstruct it or B) to combine five current tier relics for a random chance at random relics from the next tier up (again, remembering that most of those relics will be useless to you). Fine, yet more RNG.

The problem is when you foolishly attempt to use your hard-earned relics in your latest randomly generated weapon.

You get to reforge your legendary item every time it gains 10 levels, rescuing all of the relics you had slotted in it. Bear in mind that you might have had to combine a hundred tier 1 relics to get up to one useful tier 4 relic, so you want to get those relics back if you're going to stop using a weapon. You're obligated to take your first weapon through to level 10 to enter the mines in the first place, and I have gained more than two whole player levels since - the expansion only added ten - without gaining enough item experience to recover my relics from that initial starter weapon at level 20.

What if you find a great new weapon and you can't wait to try it out, but your most valuable relics are currently sitting on a weapon that's halfway between reforges? Now you get to lug around a weapon you don't want, with its exp gain slowing the rate at which the weapon you're actually using can advance, just so you don't get penalized for the mistake of foolishly sticking with it the last time you had the opportunity to recover your relics and cut your losses.

(Adding insult to injury, the starting weapon cannot gain combat or quest exp when it is not equipped as your actual weapon; you don't just have to spend exp on it to get your relics back, you actually have to keep using it, unless you're prepared to swap it in for quest completion and/or the exp-granting runes that you sometimes recover when breaking down an item you have previously leveled.)

In a similar vein, because weapon legacies are entirely random, you have no good way of predicting whether the one that just dropped is "close enough" or whether you're going to come across a far superior option right after committing to at least ten levels by socketing your precious relics.

Overall, the system not only fails at its stated lore purpose - how often did we see the members of the Fellowship breaking down their weapons for parts? - but it also removes all the fun of the supposedly customizable items. In practice, any given weapon I have found will not have more than two stats that you want to improve anyway, so there isn't really that much in the way of difficult decision-making for lack of options. It is too bad that Turbine decided to exploit this system to create an endless and frustrating grind, because it was otherwise one of the most interesting concepts in the expansion.

The Silly: Death Travel
As we all know, you totally don't get to teleport in LOTRO because that would break the lore. Only, two of the classes get to "swift travel" instantaneously off-camera to a large number of locations in the game. But, since I'm not one of those lucky classes, I need to run places. Unless I get lost trying to run past a bunch of orcs en route to the 21st Hall. The path that I couldn't find while running as if I was being chased by a pack of hungry worgs was immediately apparent once the not-so-hypothetical worgs in question bit me until I fell over of demoralization and then decided that they were too bored to eat my defenseless body.

So Allarond found the 21st Hall for the first time by clicking the "retreat" button. This had the unfortunate side effect of incurring a 10-minute "defeat" debuff. After unlocking the local Invincible Goat Travel Route, I decided I might as well ride back to the settlement where I had been questing previously. I went AFK while riding the Invincible Goat, confident that none of the orcs, goblins, man-eating bats, and vampire-women would dare mess with my invincible goat. I came back to see that the goat was about to ride past the Chamber of the Crossroads, another small quest hub. I happened to have a quest to go there, so I hopped off, unlocked the local branch of Invincible Goat Travel Ltd, and went to talk to some Dwarf.

Then I noticed a giant well in the center of town (see the picture at the top of the post). I couldn't resist, I had to know what would happen if I jumped in. The answer was a deed and a title for having jumped in the well, poor Allarond falling over again from the demoralizing embarrassment of having plummeted several hundred meters, and yet another Invincible Goat Travel route unlock when the handy retreat button caused me to find yet another town I had never visited.

Remember kids, handing out a title to reward players for flaunting the game's health system (there's no instant healing in the lore, so all your "damage" is actually morale) is fine. Allowing the other seven classes access to the same array of swift travel that the two lucky chosen ones get, on the other hand, would be totally devastating.

Reflections on Moria

Oh hai, giant sight gag.

Overall, I'm enjoying the game pretty well, despite its major new feature (the legebdary item system). The content and the zone design are both excellent. The gameplay is challenging and exciting. Even with all the stretches to the lore, it is legitimately fun to climb over a mountain ridge and discover the carcass of the Balrog lying where Gandalf left it.

I'm not in a hurry to clean the expansion out - if I was, I would probably have hit level 60 by now, and there is zero chance that the legendary item roulette will keep me in the game a single day beyond when I run out of actual content to complete. Regardless, the quality of what I have found in the game is enough to make up for the shortfall in quantity.

According to the Wiki, the later chapters of the Epic book storyline do actually require groups, so it is certainly possible that I will eventually find myself cut off from the narrative that is the game's greatest strength. In the mean time, though, Moria is definitely shaping up as a great place to visit as new content is available, even if I wouldn't want it to be my MMORPG home year-round.

More Early Re-Impressions of Moria

As you may have noticed from my post on the LOTRO lore, Allarond rides again in Middle Earth after I finally cashed in on an insanely good clearence deal for the Moria expansion.

(Aside: I was not expecting to enter my expansion key and receive 30 days of game time - WoW most certainly does not include time in their expansion boxes, and I'd heard that the same was true for most games' expansions.)

Overall, it's been a positive experience. I feel obliged to offer that disclaimer, because this post may come off a bit nit-picky and negative. This is a minor drawback to the game's frequent retrials - I've had plenty of opportunities to come back and notice the major improvements to the game, so those are all old news. Now that I'm actually spending some time in game, I'm free to notice minor and not-so-minor places where the game has NOT improved while I've gone.

The Rigors of Travel

Somewhere on the other side of this ditch, the slope becomes shallow enough to climb. As far as I can tell, the only way to figure out is to run into the wall until you find a spot where you can make upwards progress.

Travel so far has not been too painful. I have a one-hour hearthstone equivalent that I can place at a location where I am questing, and a second one-hour racial swift travel spell to return to the town of Bree. Sadly, my horse will not go into Moria, so I'm going to be mountless for probably the majority of the expansion (there's a rep grind involved in claiming a Moria-capable goat mount).

The game's auto-mount travel system is slow but offers players the opportunity to hop off the ride mid way, using it as a shortcut to get places without fighting the local wildlife en route. I'm still a bit disappointed to find a network of invincible goat taxis in Moria, but I guess I wouldn't like the place very much if there weren't any.

One major feature, which I noted during a retrial, is that one of the outdoor zones in the expansion allows players to unlock nigh-instant "swift travel" routes to old quest hubs through completing the local quest deeds. In practice, this system has worked out very well. I end up unlocking the swift travel routes just as I finish each hub, so it isn't a huge waste of time if I discover that I missed a quest and have to backtrack.

Inventory and Crafting


LOTRO starts new players off with a total of five 15-slot bags, which seems outright generous compared to other games. Then you loot a warg and collect five separate items. The hide is for crafting and the claw is a tradeable item used for a class quest. The paws, the tooth, and the ear are vendor trash, each of which stacks to 10 items. If you're killing a lot of Worgs, you'll end up with a lot of stacks of items. Thankfully, the default UI displays the vendor value of everything you are carrying, so that you can tell what to trash WHEN your inventory gets full. It's often worth pitching a weapon worth 5 silver to make room for a paw worth 2 silver, because you're going to end up with a stack of 10 paws, and you can't stack the weapons.

I wrote about the new crafting guilds during a retrial. LOTRO uses an irritating "critical success" crafting system, where you have to pump out dozens or even hundreds of non-crit items that no one wants to get the ability to have a CHANCE of creating a crit success item that someone might actually pay you for. The crafting guild tackles this in two ways - players can create items that are worth rep instead of vendor trash, or players can use these tokens (the recipes have a cooldown) to guarantee a critical success on certain recipes. This was a huge improvement.

Item Advancement


The article I linked back in November points to the defunct Massive Gamer site - suffice it to say that Sanya Weathers warned me to go and complete the quest line to unlock the use of legendary weapons FIRST and then complete the remainder of the content outside Moria. If you do not do this, you can expect to have to grind out 20K weapon experience, at about 70 item exp per kill after having completed all of the local quests.

Fortunately, I was warned, and had plenty of quests to do outside the mines while I worked on leveling up my new weapon. I can see tremendous potential in this system, which allows you to customize your weapon over time. The only problem is that most of the possible attributes are not very good.

My weapon's bonuses include "rend bleed damage" (I don't even have a skill called "rend", nor anything that specifies that it causes bleeding damage, maybe this is the passive damage proc that spears cause?), damage with a horn attack whose primary purpose is an AOE stun, and two defensive abilities (one active, one stance) that I don't use because they gut my DPS, and every second that I extend combat is another second in which an additional mob, respawn, or patrol may come to kill me. When I "reforged" the weapon at level 10, I was given the choice of one of two new bonuses, both of which were similarily situational. There are a handful of highly powerful and useful abilities, they're just buried on a random table along with a dozen not so useful ones. The end result is that the only good use for my points is to enhance the weapon's base DPS - which is still lower than the crafted weapon I had been using before the expansion.

The thing is that none of this is accidental. Turbine is counting on the miniscule odds of actually obtaining a perfect weapon to provide a continual time sink of replacing your current weapon with a slightly better one. You know, this reminds me of the time that Gandalf vendored Glamdring after getting some random mob drop, and how Aragorn broke down Anduril for parts after beating a raid encounter.... oh wait, no, that's exactly what did NOT happen with the named legendary items that this system explicitly refers to.

No escaping the deed grind


One thing that I hadn't noticed was that my quest log is now 3 slots larger than it used to be. Apparently, you get an additional slot for every 10 deeds you complete. I am very disappointed that Turbine decided to put this sort of a bonus there.

Players will complete the deeds for quests and exploration relatively easily in the course of normal play, but many of LOTRO's deeds are no more interesting than "go kill 300 orcs". Killing 300 orcs is fine when the only reward for doing so is cosmetic, or when the orcs are one of several alternatives for obtaining the reward. The thing is that LOTRO's deeds are tied to "virtues", stat bonuses which stack with gear and cannot be obtained by any other means. For reference, I get significantly more stats out of the traits I have slotted than the "relics" that are socketed in my legendary weapon, or from any two pieces of gear, and none of my virtues are actually capped. Going without virtures is like going without pants - you can do it, but there's no reason why you would want to.

Virtues are currently capped at 10 ranks, even though there are more than 10 deeds that award most of them, so players do not need to complete every single kill deed in the game. They do, however, need to pick at least some of the kill deeds, or forever accept lower stats than players who did not. Once you're done killing 300 goblins in the zone of your choice, it's time to kill 300 animals in a different zone for a different virtue. You can only equip 5 virtues, so you used to be done once you're done with those fifty deeds (some of which were easy quests etc). Now, instead, they're pushing you to keep on going if you want to expand your quest log.

Isn't this "optional"? Sure, in the way that everything in an MMORPG is optional unless you've been kidnapped by power levelers who will shoot you if you don't level their characters for them. That does not mean that the trait grind is a good idea. Being sent around the countryside to slaughter thousands of NPC's with maybe a sentence of explanation of why they need to die is probably the least interesting aspect of the game. Having done so once has frankly taken a huge bite out of my interest in trying other characters, who would have to start the pointless kill grinding all over again from scratch. On top of all that, the system devalues the game's otherwise deep cosmetic title system, as players who want the stat bonuses have to FIRST earn the cosmetic titles.

In short, Turbine should have worked to REDUCE the emphasis on this system. Instead, they realized with shock and horror that some players might be finishing just the traits they needed and then skipping the rest of them, and they had to rush off to find some other incentive to rescue the rest of their timesink. I am not impressed.

What I expected and what I did not
Overall, I did not expect to be thrilled with the state of Turbine's endgame timesinks - I've gotten pretty tired of WoW's versions of the same, and Blizzard's are far more involved than telling players to grind 300 orcs. Traits and reputations weren't enough to keep me interested in the game the first time around, and it doesn't look like continuously replacing "legendary" items will change that part of the game substantially.

One thing I did NOT expect to find was significant challenge in the solo game. I had initially concluded that my Champion had been nerfed, but I've since heard that they actually made a conscious decision to buff mob damage across the board for the expansion. The result has been precisely the sort of solo challenge that I've been missing of late - WoW's solo content is trivial, while EQ2 content tends to jump straight from easily soloable to needing a few group members very quickly.

So far, Moria has been a stretch of pushing the envelope to see what exactly I can accomplish. Even if Turbine's "endgame" does not deliver, and the deed system discourages me from making alts (in fairness, I also did not have a second class I was dying to try in the original game, though the new Runekeeper class from the expansion sounds interesting), it looks like there are easily a few months of quality dungeon-exploring entertainment to be had here. If that's my last word on Moria in a few months, that's certainly not a total failure in my book.

Time-Consuming Is Not The Same As Difficult

There is an entire genre of blogpost these days grousing about how Blizzard is dumbing down and trivializing World of Warcraft, removing all difficulty from the game to cater to those stupid casuals who won't get off of the poster's digital lawn, etc. Well, Cheerydeth hit level 38 last night working on the old classic quest Mudrock Soup and Bugs, a basic kill 15 or so turtles quest located just outside Theramore. I first did this quest on my Pally sometime circa January 2005, again on my mage back in August 2005, and yet again on my hunter sometime in early 2006, so I'm relatively familiar with the then and now comparison.

2005 (The Good Old Days)

A level 38 character would not have a ground mount at all. They also may or may not have all of their spell upgrades currently trained, as 100G was a lot of money back in those days, and I definitely remember passing on upgrades for spells I wasn't using as I tried to save up. Once you got the mount at level 40, it would kick you off and force you to spend 3 seconds (and a non-trivial chunk of mana for Pallies and Warlocks) remounting if you set hoof in shallow water.

The best way to reach Theramore was to fly from Ironforge (the likely home of your 1-hour cooldown hearthstone) to Menethil Harbor and await the boat. If you were coming from Booty Bay anyway, you could take the boat to Ratchet and physically run south on foot - there was no neutral flight path in Ratchet at the time, and I'd guesstimate that the un-mounted run took about 10 minutes, assuming you didn't try to go through the middle of the easily avoidable Murloc camp. In principle, you could also spend some massively long time on the auto-bird from Auberdine. However, the only way you would have gotten there would have been by taking the wrong boat from Menethil, unless you were for some reason fond of grinding Centaurs in out-of-the-way Desolace.

Present (WoW Patch 3.1)

The basic ground mount became available at level 30 about a year ago, and learned to tread water (same swim speed as an unmounted character, but you don't have to wait to remount when you emerge). The advent of the minor glyph means that my rogue can now sprint across the surface of the water at mounted speed for 15 seconds at a time, which significantly decreases the time it takes to get out to the rock where Nat Pagle lives.

Getting to Theramore is substantially easier. Mages have a direct portal. There is a flight path from Ratchet. Anyone can bind their 30-minute cooldown hearthstone to Dalaran (extra teleportation for Cheerydeth courtesy of the Inscription profession), take the portal to the Caverns of Time, and make a brief ride through the Tanaris desert to fly to Theramore.

Soon (Patch 3.2)

The originally level 40 mount will drop from level 30 to level 20, and the faster epic ground mount will be available at level 40. The casting time will also be reduced to 1.5 seconds, which adds up if you're mounting and dismounting frequently enough.

The thing is, I don't see the supposed challenge that has been taken away from the next generation. What was harder about spending more time watching your character auto-run? The one additional mob that you might decide to stop and fight after it dazed you? Does that outweigh the dozen additional mobs you will be able to fight during the time you will save in transit by being on a 100% ground mount at level 40? What was more challenging about a 10-minute quasi-AFK autorun from Ratchet? The chance that you'd be distracted by the baseball game you were watching and forget about the one camp of murlocs? (Ironically, Blizzard actually added some aggressive mobs amongst the non-aggro turtles, extending the portion of the beach where the player needs to pay at least some minimal attention.)

Access to content
The fact is that the actual content in old world Azeroth isn't as bad as people think it is. The old quests lack the custom scripted eye candy events of Northrend, but the underlying gameplay is the same as anywhere else in WoW. The difference is that the developers didn't think twice about putting the followup to the quest I did last night in Dustwallow Marsh all the way on the other side of the world in the Swamp of Sorrows. There isn't really any added challenge in taking a boat, no fewer than three flight paths (you couldn't queue these up either, so you had to dismount and talk to the flightmaster at each stop to take the next leg), and a run across a zone patrolled by aggressive, PVP-flagged orc guards to kill a dozen spiders either. However, old school WoW's exp curve required that players clear out a much larger proportion of the game's total content, and the hope was no doubt that players would stumble across some of the handful of Alliance quests in the Swamp.

Personally, I think the move to level 20 ground mounts is a good change (try running across Ashenvale without one sometime), and the move to level 40 epic ground mounts is unnecessary but largely harmless. I would have instead added more of an emphasis on regional teleport hubs (e.g. adding Theramore and Stonard portals to Dalaran) with players using local travel by flight paths and mounts to reach their final destination. I would also add a requirement, present in EQ2, that players actually visit a given location before being allowed to teleport there in the future.

Some bloggers, often ones who proudly declare that they don't like WoW anymore (sometimes backing that statement up by actually not playing WoW anymore), argue that players need to be forced to spend time watching their characters travel places, even though that time is largely non-interactive, in order to see how big the world is. I would argue that it's the content of the world, rather than its sheer size, that is really impressive. Cutting down on travel - not eliminating it entirely, but streamlining the process of returning to locations players have already reached - allows players to retain a sense of the scale and layout of the world while putting more of the content front and center.