LOTRO Legendary Customizeables Re-re-revised

Back in 2008, Turbine said a lot of good things about the forthcoming Legendary Item system.  The items were described as "mobile quest hubs" that would grow and stay with your character, much like the signature weapons carried by the Fellowship of The Ring.  What we got instead was a random item generator expressly designed to churn players through an indefinite number of disposable "legendary" items in the hopes of one day obtaining the perfect setup.  The game's most recent patch has finally replaced that system with a mostly time-based item customization system. 

Legacies Before And After

Allarond's rune is now fully customized with maximum bonuses to Ardour stance for soloing.

Since the LI system revamp in the Mirkwood expansion, your new item would start with 2-3 "major" legacies - upgradeable stats that generally improve DPS.  As you gained item exp, the item would get 3 additional legacies, which would typically be "minor" legacies that do more quality of life improvements (e.g. decreased cooldown on a Champion's sprint).  There was a chance that you would instead get an additional major legacy, but this didn't matter that much because the odds of having four random major legacies actually be useful weren't that great.   

With the changes, items will always start with 3 major legacies, and continue to have a random chance of obtaining an additional major legacy in place of a minor during the early levels.  Now, however, you can salvage the legacy of your choice from an item that has reached at least level 30 (relatively quick) and use it to replace a legacy of the same class (major replaces major, minor replaces minor) on a different item. 

You now definitely want an item that has a fourth major legacy, and you're slightly better off if the item comes with at least some of the legacies you want, since replacement legacies start at a low quality tier that will limit your ability to upgrade your weapon (until you grind more tqo upgrade the legacy quality).  That said, everyone can now have items with four major and two minor legacies of their choice given a relatively finite amount of grind time. 

Relics, Currencies, and Scrolls

The other big change to the system is a revamp of the relics used to fill the slots on your items.  You still obtain these relics by destroying priceless "legendary" items you have leveled, but there are now more stat choices available spread across fewer tiers, and there is a currency associated with the system that can be used to counteract the random number generator. 

Before the change, obtaining a specific tier 6 relic meant combining an exponentially increasing number of lower tier relics until you got lucky.  Now, you get a "shard" currency for breaking stuff (legendary items down into relics, and relics down into just shards) which can be used to pay to exchange your relic for the one you want.  The same system can be used to obtain most of the hard-to-get item scrolls (which have also been added into the cash shop, gogo free to play), and even new legendary items to level. 

(Speaking of the shop, the ability to unlock a seventh and eighth slot for additional items is cash store exclusive.  The formula for dividing item exp amongst your items awards more total exp for having more items equipped, so these additional slots ultimately mean faster acquisition of relics and shards.) 

A change in perspective

There was always an odd contrast between the ideals behind LOTRO Legendaries - in Middle Earth, a sword that glows and does +1 damage to orcs is a heirloom to be named and handed down for generations - and the disposable nature of gear in an MMO. Much like Moria's other major new mechanic, the hated Radiance system, the implementation fell far short of Turbine's aspirations.  When Narsil was broken, they saved the broken pieces for hundreds of years until there was a worthy heir of Elendil who deserved the reforged blade.  You don't replace that sort of thing with the first random quest drop you see. 

Under the circumstances, changing the system from a mostly random time sink to a mostly time-based time sink is an improvement.  While this does mean that weapons can now have cookie cutter builds, which would have been highly improbable under the old system, I don't quite know of anything exactly like this in other games.

That said, I can't help but look back and what might have been and feel that what we got here may not have been a fair trade for what we once were promised. 

Bring the loot, not the fun

"Unfortunately, most people (myself included) are not running heroics for challenge, they are running them to get loot. "
- Anonymous commenter on my Friday discussion post

MMO players pretty universally blame WoW's dungeon group finder, introduced in Patch 3.3, for a variety of social ills; players relying on the "anonymity" of cross server groups to misbehave, class role imbalance, and decreased dungeon difficulty are blamed on the system, and players of games that aren't WoW dread the day that their game gets a dungeon finder. 

I would argue that my anonymous commenter's point, not the dungeon finder, is the real threat.  Daily dungeon quests designed to bribe overgeared players into trivial content they no longer need in order to fill groups for late-comers have reduced a once fun activity into a grind that is only worth the time if the run is quick and successful.  A working dungeon group finder could be the cure to these social problems, rather than the cause. 


Fallout of the Crusader
In patch 3.2, Blizzard abruptly upgraded all the emblem drops in the Wrath dungeon game.  The same dungeons we had already beaten six months ago would now drop emblems good for loot from two raid tiers above the difficulty of the content.  The daily dungeon quest would now drop emblems for three tiers above the content.  (Both drops would be upgraded an additional tier in patch 3.3.)  In the comments of that post, I wrote:

"The issue is that this change reduces the entire pre-Ulduar game into an exercise in maximizing your emblem/time ratio. Players who actually need loot from 5-mans are undergeared, potentially slowing players progress, and therefore won't be welcome in groups. You can't entirely blame elitist players for this - the way RaidID's currently work, you don't get to form a second group and try again if your first group downs at least one boss in the daily dungeon but fails to finish the zone.... Convincing raiders to run trivial 5-man content appears to be the point, not an unintended consequence. "

(I get a lot of predictions wrong on this blog, but I feel pretty good about that one in hindsight.)

The massive item inflation had become necessary because Blizzard was itemizing four sets of loot per dungeon, to accommodate both regular and hard modes in both 10 and 25 man content.  Before this change, it had actually started to become difficult to find groups for five-man content because anyone who raided at all no longer had any need to use the content.  This left fresh level 80's stuck with extremely limited options to get starter raiding gear - some three or more tiers above what they had when they hit 80.  Blizzard decided to approach this problem in 2009 much like they're continuing to approach a variation of it in 2011 - attempting to bribe players (in this case, raiders) to carry newbies to their entry level loot rewards. 

The dungeon finder, introduced a patch later, may have exacerbated these issues by adding the anonymity factor to the groups.  More important, the popularity of the now extremely easy content - a single DPS character in Icecrown raid gear might do as much DPS as all three of those leet 2K DPS players from a year earlier in the very same content - popularized the idea that players should be rewarded for trivial content on the off chance that someone in the group still needs the loot drops. 

Was there another way?
I actually enjoy reasonably challenging single group content.  Blizzard's decision to prevent players from ever graduating from this content removed the challenge not by changing the content itself, but rather by ensuring that groups would be overgeared.  In turn, the system itself only worked because the content was so easy - demolishing these old dungeons isn't that much fun, so it was ONLY worth doing if you were nigh certain of the rewards.  Now that dungeons are hard, the groups are a much tougher sell. 

I've done low level dungeons using the system, and you do sometimes get overgeared players (usually decked out in heirlooms), but usually you get a relatively reasonable group.  The problem was that there simply aren't enough players of a specific level/gear range on a single server to reliably fill out groups. Perhaps a cross-server dungeon finder WITHOUT a daily dungeon quest would attract players who actually need the content but don't overgear it to such an extent that they can afford sloppy gameplay if they wish to succeed. In the long run, this approach might have been the far less harmful solution to the problem. 

Tank Solution: Larger Groups, More DPS Slots?

Tank motivation is a pretty popular topic in the wake of Blizzard's latest bright idea, so here's a quick drive-by musing for folks, so here's a drive-by discussion point. 

Rohan suggests that distributing the responsibility of the tanking (and healing) roles among multiple players might lessen the pressure and therefore make players more willing to tank. He suggests that 2 tanks, 2 healers and 2 DPS might work.  Chris@Game By Night's experience with public rift groups suggests otherwise, as players would rather wipe and fail than switch over to healing, even when most classes have passive healing options that play almost identically to DPS. 

What if we went in the opposite direction?  The current holy trinity calls for 1 tank, 1 healer, and 3-4 DPS, but it seems that far more than 60% of players only want to DPS.  If you're not going to blow up the entire holy trinity/aggro concept (which no current aggro-based game can do in a patch), and you can't convince players to move over to the tank category, why not change the numbers to match how players actually behave?  Perhaps 1 tank, 2 healers, and 7 DPS would reflect the actual preferences of the population. 

There are problems to overcome.  That said, pretty much all of these games already offer a raiding format that is about twice as large as the default group but only utilities a single tank - if anything, this would lessen the degree to which single group content fosters 2-4 times more tanks than there are slots for in raids. 

Thoughts? 

WoW Tank-Finder Incentives

Blizzard has announced plans to "bribe" (as Tobold points out, their words) players to tank 5-man heroic dungeons in an effort to address "unacceptable queue times currently being experienced by those that queue for the DPS role at max level".  The bribe will consist of gold, stuff that can be bought or sold for gold, and a chance at rare cosmetic pets or mounts.  This is like giving an aspirin to someone who just walked in with a gunshot wound; I don't know that it will cause significant harm to the game, but I also doubt that it will solve the problem. 

What It's Not: Gear
Blizzard chose not to include gear on the list of rewards, and I agree with their reasoning.  Tanks (and, to a lesser extent, healers), already get groups faster and thereby obtain all of the existing loot faster than DPS can due to shorter/instant queue times.  Paying out more "valor" currency per dungeon run will help existing tanks finish getting all the gear they want and then stop running dungeons entirely at a faster rate, but my guess is that people who are both interested and capable of switching to tanking for faster currency gain have already done so. 

Perhaps adding raid-quality DPS loot (tank loot is not an incentive for people who don't want to tank) might convince more DPS to make the jump, but that way lies the item inflation that trivialized the group content of the last expansion.  More to the point, as I've argued in the past, offering this type of incentive does not magically convince players that they like an activity that they previously disliked.  Instead, this is precisely what leads players down the road of viewing gameplay as something to be gotten over with as quickly as possible, with all the negative community effects that brings. 

What It Is: Optional
So, instead of gear, Blizzard is offering minipets and non-raid dungeon mounts (of which there are about five in the game).  I don't have a problem with this, but I suspect that many players who actually care about this sort of thing already have large collections of each.  In order to increase the tank pool, you would need significant numbers of DPS who are capable of tanking and enjoy having cosmetic stuff but don't enjoy obtaining them through the currently available methods.  I'm sure the number is non-zero, will it be enough to reverse a trend that has seen queue times triple or quadruple since Cataclysm? 

This problem begins and ends with the fact that modern holy trinity based MMO's require players to tank and heal in proportions that do not reflect player willingness to assume these roles.  I have yet to see any evidence these "bribes" do anything to resolve this problem.

The Instant "Queue" Difference

Since I've been back in EQ2, I've been surprised to find myself running group content on an almost nightly basis.  EQ2 dungeons can be lengthy, and I really struggled to ever complete any group quests on the old, underpopulated Lucan D'Lere server.  On my newly merged home of Crushbone, however, I'm finding groups nearly instantly, and that's apparently enough to convert me into a primarily group player overnight. 

Lord Bob would prefer if I go back to soloing stuff, since he's pretty sure that I can't solo him.

EQ2's Dirge class plays pretty much exactly like a typical DPS, but it's actually a buff-based class.  My personal DPS would not be great even if I was as experienced and well-geared as my PUG peers, but I offer substantial buffs to the team just for being present.  How significant?  It's not uncommon to see groups that ALREADY HAVE A TANK AND HEALER advertise that they're LF1M Dirge.  I've posted that I'm LFG for a specific instance and been immediately invited to a group. 

As a matter of game design, this is probably not a good thing, and I'm sure it would irritate me to no end if I were playing any other class.  As the recipient of the free instance invites, I'm glad that more people haven't figured out how all you're really giving up is your spot on the damage parse in exchange for non-existent "queue" times (not that EQ2 has a dungeon group finder queue, but even WoW's queue doesn't do much better than having groups advertise that they're LF1M: you). 

More to the point, I'm pugging instances and enjoying it.  I've done five PUG's of level 90 content in the last two weeks, four of which were successful and the last of which broke up at the last boss primarily because a bugged door caused a member of the group to be stuck outside the instance.  A few years back, I would have told you that solo content was an absolute requirement for me to play a game, but dungeon finders and public rift groups and instant Dirge queues are telling me differently.  I don't dislike groups, I just dislike spending time that I would like to spend playing the game on LOOKING for groups. 

Lessons From A EQ2 Harvesting Donkey-Bot

The new EQ2 expansion added another chapter to the famous "Gathering Obsession" questline, in which players are tasked with harvesting large quantities of everything that isn't nailed down for a kid named Qho Augren.  The reward is your very own, developer-sanctioned harvesting bot. 

The new chapter
I'm told that once upon a time, the Gathering Obsession line could only be started at max crafting level, and was at least partially designed to get players to harvest some of the less desirable resources just to get them out of the world.  I could see how this might get irritating.  Fortunately, the modern version of the quest can be worked on as you level, advancing harvest skills that you already want anyway.  (Ironically, I now intentionally don't harvest bushes and dens after I complete my quest updates, to leave them for people who need them for the quest.)

The new update has the kid sending the player an in-game mail asking for a harvest pass through the content from last expansion.  This is much easier than the mid-level versions, because modern zones are designed with specific types of harvestables concentrated in specific subzones.  When you finish the mining updates, you leave the mountains and head to the forest, where there are fewer rocks.  So, despite the high numbers (50 of each resource, with 2-4 resources from each type of node), the harvesting portion of the quest goes by quickly.  

I snagged two rare harvests while I was out gathering, one of which I crafted into an upgrade for one of my key buffs.  The rest is an amusing sight-seeing tour, that ends with the player receiving one of the Augren family pack mules.  The mule, like a previous guild hall amenity, can be tasked to harvest for you in any zone from 1-90 every two hours. 

Two design points
There are two things that I take away from this exercise.  The first is the somewhat odd quirk that EQ2 harvesting is in a place where it is perfectly acceptable to task it out to an NPC.  The real money is in rare harvests, which the NPC's do not find (or perhaps keep for themselves ;)), so apparently it's just assumed that the basic materials for leveling and quest recipes are going to fall into your lap.  Most of the current tier materials aren't even found on Velious with the new expansion content.  It's an interesting case study in NPC-automation, as, for example, SWTOR plans to task out the actual crafting to NPC companions. 

The other thing is that a seemingly odd task - getting players to clear out unwanted harvesting nodes (rather than, say, not having the bush of berries no one needs share a spawn with the node of ore that everyone does) - becomes more entertaining when you do weave a story that comes back to the player level after level.  MMO's have always had significant NPC's, but it feels like there is a growing recognition that relationships with NPC's matter.  Qho - the somewhat notorious kid that people alternately tolerate or love to hate - literally makes the new chapter of the quest, which would have been pretty pointless (gather some stuff from zones you've outleveled, run around, pay some money for a final reward). 

As an added bonus, now I don't need to loot my guild harvest box for low level materials if/when I go back to do some of the new low-mid level tradeskill quests.  :)

True to her word, Lyriana proceeded to take Qho to the Forgotten Pools to introduce him to Lord Bob, an experience that sent the kid crying back to his mom across two zones and an ocean.  Lyriana claims that she knew nothing bad would happen to him, and points out that she did indulge his remaining requests afterwards.

Attack Of The Dice

EQ2 is one of few games that has an in-game excuse for April Foolery - Bristlebane, the god of mischief and thievery comes out to play for a world event that includes killing 10 rats (multiple times), chests shaped like the Companion Cube from Portal scattered throughout the world, and the opportunity to win various Dungeons and Dragons Dice in honor of the late Gary Gygax. 

The holiday was actually one of my first serious experiences with the game back in 2009, and it's gone through only relatively minor tweaks.  Every year seems to add another quest or two - this time out, it was two additional types of dice and a literally rainbow colored horse.  It's random, light entertainment, but it's fun.  Sometimes that kind of laid back activity is a good change of pace for an achiever-oriented genre.