Mirkwood Day 1

Yesterday was the launch of LOTRO's Mirkwood mini-expansion. As promised, I received the expansion for "free" in exchange for having my billing cycle set to $30/3 months. (I didn't actually pay for my current time card, because Best Buy wanted to get rid of their Moria inventory that badly, and it appears that I will have the option of canceling before I'm actually billed for that subscription if I'm so inclined.) The patch was done in about two hours, and I'm told it ran in the 400 MB range - for reference, WoW's 3.3 patch has downloaded nearly 1 GB of files so far, so you can draw your own inferences about the amounts of new graphics and sound files in this mini-expansion.

On logging in, I got spammed with half a dozen system notices. I automatically gained several rep levels and transportation routes - notably, it appears that they retroactively increased the rep reward level for the introductory quests in Lothlorien, so that players do not need to do repeatable quests to be allowed into the woods (a pre-requisite for access to the new expansion areas).

Though I did get a notice that the changes had refunded the customization points on my legendary items, I don't get the sense that the Legendary Item system was changed as dramatically as Turbine's marketing would have us believe. I identified some new items and they appeared to be as random as ever, and I also got one of the "good" legacies that are supposed to be "rare" beyond initial identification on a reforge of an item I was about to break down to free up its slot. It appears that the slot machine time sink is still the point of the systen.

(Galadheru, one of the members of my kinship, told me that he had been grinding out the item exp bounty experience quests on a daily basis so that he could try out a bunch of new items when the revamp arrived, and that he also felt that the "improved" legacies still resulted in some lackluster weapons.)

There'll be time for more commentary later, when I've spent a bit more time in the expansion. For now, if nothing else, Turbine can declare victory on the relatively smooth expansion launch.

Two trips down memory Lane

WoW players got their 5th Anniversary present early; a revamped version of the original Onyxia raid, tuned for level 80 players and today's smaller, scaling raid groups. Players who logged in this week also received a mini-whelp pet. They also added Mr T to the game. After all, allowing Tauren Mages would destroy the lore, but having a friendly Night Elf sitting in the middle of Horde territory putting Night Elf Mr T heads on everyone is fine as long as it coincides with a cable TV ad campaign.

EQ2 players, for whatever reason, had their anniversary presents arrive a week or so late. Besides a few in-game festival quests, the real treat was a one-week-only questline that had players visiting scaling solo instance versions of one dungeon from each of the game's expansions. (The lore forums believe that the mysterious figure who sends you on this quest is Norrath's missing God of Dreams.)

Overall, WoW's version probably took more development time and work to accomplish. It also provides a timesink - another level 80 raid dungeon - that will stay with the game for the rest of the expansion cycle. Even so, EQ2's little trip down memory lane seemed more genuine and enjoyable. Sometimes, it actually is the thought that counts.


My Sarnak with the various souvenirs from the holiday on display in his home

The Cost of Console Gaming Hardware

Having written on the cost of PC gaming hardware in the past, I feel it's only fair to give console gaming hardware equal time.

I've been keeping an eye on the price of the PS3 over the Black Friday weekend. The new sleeker version of the console retails for $300 and includes one controller and a component video cable. If you want a remote control for the machine's much-touted Blu-ray playing capacity, that will cost you an extra $20. If you need an HDMI cable to plug into your HDTV, that's going to be an extra $10 (if you get a generic one, $40 if you buy the official one from Sony, or from most retailers).

In short, you can expect to sink two years' worth of MMORPG subscription fees into hardware, which is a very expensive hood ornament for your entertainment center until you spend more money on something to actually use with the system. Games retail for $60 and often can't be counted on to last more than 10-20 hours. Is it any wonder that, at those prices, gamers are renting or re-selling games in greater and greater numbers?

Console gaming has numerous advantages. Players don't have to worry about their system specs, because every game was designed to play on the same device. The variety of gaming experiences you can expect with a console and an all-you-can-rent plan is far greater than you're going to get out of 1-2 MMORPG subscriptions. I'm just saying that the cost is nothing to sneeze at, even before you get into expensive peripherals (hello, Rock Band) and not-so-microtransactions (which gaming publishers have somehow managed to brand as "DLC - downloadable content", an acronym that deliberately does not mention cost).

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.

Do we need friends more than groups?

In the comments on my last post, Zizlak states that Warhammer's loot system in keeps does not harm the overall experience; if you don't win an item outright, you can eventually get the same item via tokens from killing enemy players. My gentle prodding at failing to land a loot bag after placing second in a particular keep siege aside, I agree with his point. Unfortunately, this is a problem for repeatable content incentives.

MMORPG's rely on in-game rewards to motivate players to spend their time on repeatable content. This works when the reward at the end of the line is genuinely rare and valuable. It stops working as the rewards become readily available (e.g. you already have dozens on mounts and minipets) or easily replaceable (e.g. you are still leveling, or every patch includes a gear reset). When that happens, rewards cease to be an effective incentive for doing repeatable content that is not enjoyable on its own merits.

In a more traditional group game, your team-mates provide some of the entertainment that makes each evening's gaming experience different from the previous one. Everyone who raids has some quip about the raid leader or some anecdote of a mistake that is more amusing than annoying in hindsight.

By contrast, the solo player has only the content itself, generally with a fair dose of AFK-travel time and random number generator mayhem, to keep them entertained as they repeat the same content daily. This is fine as an activity you do while waking up in the morning, or as you look for a group, but falls short if it becomes the sole point of your day's gaming.

In some ways, Warhammer and WoW's efforts to place players in groups with people they do not know might actually be doing those players a disservice; technically they're in a group, spending time doing group content, but without the camaraderie that accompanies actual friendship.

Warhammer Retrial Verdict

My 10-day Warhammer retrial concluded over the weekend. During that time, I leveled a new Zealot to rank 12/RVR rank 10. What have I learned about the game?

The Challenge of Keep Siege Numbers

On my last night in game, I finally managed to catch up with one of Mythic's heavily touted "open RVR" (read: non-instanced) keep sieges. Mechanically, the warfare was relatively simple; try to protect the players with the battering ram until they beat the door down, and then zerg up the stairs to kill the keep lord. Hold the keep, or various other objectives, for long enough and you can expect substantial exp and RVR exp.

Unfortunately, the non-instanced nature of the battle reared its head pretty quickly. With equal numbers, fights devolved into zerg-fests, with neither army able to make substantial progress. Otherwise, the team with the larger numbers won, waited for the victory bonuses, and went off to attack the next zone. The team with smaller numbers either tried to hide behind friendly NPC's or retreated to attack a different zone. The open warband I joined took a number of keeps and battlefield objectives, and failed to take a number of additional ones, but rarely found that perfect, ideally balanced fight.

PVE is still filler?


I was also able to participate in a fair amount of PVE content, including the Hunter's Vale group dungeon and various public quests. From the healer's perspective, this content was all relatively straight-forward. The production values were decent, but it occasionally felt a bit simplistic; some public quest bosses simply damaged the local tanks faster than I could heal them, while in other cases I ended up spending most of my time doing (minimal) DPS for lack of damage to heal.

Overall, the group PVE content is reasonably well done, but I'm not sure that I'd take it over group content in any of the other games that I play. I could see this content getting frustrating pretty quickly if you were forced to repeat it in search of drops (which was required for keep siege gear at the game's launch).

What Mythic has done right
As I noted previously, Mythic has removed logistical barriers to group content, and also managed to make group healing fun for a longtime solo veteran like myself.

Beyond that, I have been very impressed with Mythic's willingness to leave no stone unturned in the quest to improve the game. It can't have been an easy call to remove Fortress sieges from the game or start all new characters in a single racial pairing to ensure population, but someone made the call that these changes were for the best.


Unfortunately for Keriak, the "Vegas style" loot distribution is still in the game - I walked away from this siege empty-handed.

The Bottom Line
I won't be continuing with the game for now. I'm at a point in my personal gaming life where I'm looking to decrease the amount of time I spend on rehashing repeatable content instead of trying new things. By design, Warhammer makes heavy use of repeatable content in an attempt to encourage grouping.

Even so, I'm glad I took the time to come back and make my peace with Warhammer Online. Over the year since its launch, the game has actually delivered on most of its promise. If the game had been in its current state at launch, we might be looking at a very different MMORPG market today.