Lord of the Rings

Over at Mind-Bending Puzzles, they’re concerned that the spike of players coming from the World of Warcraft have pretty much all left. Lord of the Rings Online was hailed as the PC MMO of the Year by Gamespy, and claims over four million characters and the second largest MMO in (presumably) the world since they mention “critial acclaim from around the globe”. VOIG tells a slightly different story. They say LotRO is holding steady at about 300K subscribers, which would mean, hmm, 4 million divided by 300 thousand hmmm just over thirteen characters per active account. Talk about a bad case of alt-itis… there aren’t even thirteen character classes. ...

There’s been a lot of topics going around the blogosphere, and I’ve been holding off on them because, well, I don’t really have anything groundbreaking to say about them. But, what the heck. eBook Readers First up is a non-MMO one, but something I’ve covered extensively in this blog – eBook readers. “Ask Slashdot” fielded a question from a reader who asked Which eBook Reader is Best? The comments fell predictably into the camps that felt nothing could come close to the experience of reading an actual book; PDAs, cell phones and laptop computers were more appropriate for the task; Sony’s Reader comes from Sony and nothing more needs to be said (these are people angry less for the SWG NGE than for Sony’s rootkit adventures and their role as a quarter of the allegedly evil* RIAA). I use my Sony Reader every day, and daily rediscover old friends – yesterday brought Fred Saberhagen’s “First Book of Swords” and Julian May’s “The Many-Colored Land” onto my Reader. I didn’t comment on Slashdot, though, because… well, commenting on Slashdot on matters of opinion is pretty pointless. I doubt many would be sympathetic to my “I use a Reader because it looks good and is REALLY EASY TO READ” stance anyway. ...

Keen made a post decrying the “dumbing down” of MMOs – people head for easy mode at every opportunity, and seeing that, more, even easier, games are made. A vicious spiral that ends in “Hello Kitty Adventure Island”. I thought I rather reasonably suggested that there were hard(er) MMOs out there – FFXI Online, EverQuest, and Lineage 2 among them – and that they weren’t exactly burning up the charts. Keen replied that the whole point of his post was that games are getting easier, not that old games were harder (and in fact, that tended to support his point). ...

Shut Up, We’re Talking! #12 is up. I had the pleasure of being part of it, along with Grimwell (SOE EQ2 Community Manager) and Tom-Tom from Gamer’s Mind. Thanks, Darren, for being such an awesome host! Darren really knows how to keep the discussion going and moving to interesting places. I was positive I’d have nothing to say :P

Yes, I am rushing through Lord of the Rings Online. There’s way too much exciting stuff happening in EverQuest 2 to stay away much longer; the release of Neriak and the dark Fae; Kunark coming in the fall; LotRO has to be done and finished by then. Book 3 deals with the fight of the Dunadain – the Rangers – against the tide of evil creatures coming from the North. They have taken over the ancient city of Fornost and are spread throughout the plains of Dol Dinan. ...

The Hobbits, we find at the end of Retake Weathertop, have made it safely to Rivendell. With them out of harm’s way, for a time, it’s up to the numberless heroes of the world to do their part. In Book II, we find the source of the Red Marsh’s evil, the immortal Red Maid, and redeem some long-dead shades who broke an oath and must now be summoned for one final mission to save them all. ...

Lysistra and the Good Humor man at level 27, in Trestlebridge I joined a group last night and we were amazing, we were on fire, we went around the North Downs killing… spiders, and wolves. And I think we may have killed one or two bears. Seriously. Not since the original Dark Ages of Camelot has a MMO reused the same couple of models in so many different ways. I have three or four different titles from killing spiders. This isn’t an epic. It’s a spider-killing simulator. ...

Young Frodo, to you has fallen the most perilous task. You must bring the Ring to Mordor. But first, kill twenty boars and bring me their tusks. I will also require their hooves, but I won’t tell you that until you get back with the tusks. Oh! Young Lysistra is come out of the West, Through all Ered Luin her blade was the best; And save her good Halberd, she weapons had none. ...

* Gandalf points a new player toward the next step in her Quest.* I logged my Champion in to Lord of the Rings Online last night, turned in the quests I had been saving, and then stopped along the bridge to Bree and asked myself if I shouldn’t just log out and forget about the entire game. The /ooc chat was infantile, my kinship is made largely out of grade school kids, Bree itself was as laggy as Stormhold on a bad memory day, and, let’s face it, the game has almost nothing to do with the books on which it is loosely based. In LotRO, everyone knows Tom Bombadil, pals with wizards, and ridicules dwarves. If the books had been based on the game rather than the other way around, Farmer Maggot’s hounds would have been picked off by a hunter hidden over the horizon. ...

In Lord of the Rings Online, you don’t need a healer… until you do. And then, who are you going to get? Well, you could use potions, but they have a 1 minute cooldown, are fairly expensive, and don’t heal much. Only two classes have a group heal – minstrels and captains. The captain has a small heal (about 160 points at the current level cap of 15, vs a player’s typical hit points of 700-800 at that same level), followed by 30 seconds of 6 (yes, s-i-x six) hit points every five seconds. And this wimpy heal is on a one minute timer and can only be cast when a mob has just died. ...