Lord of the Rings Online Revisited

My reaction to the LOTRO beta can be found at this link.

I've actually been playing for the last month and started a subscription. The game is much improved since beta. I also updated my PC, which really shows off the gorgeous amount of detail in the game world. It can be an adjustment coming from something as colorful and stylized as WoW, but the graphics definitely fit well with the lore and themes. The LOD is still ugly, but I've learned to deal with it.

One of the best things about the game is how much the developers interact with the community. Book 10 goes live this month with countless changes based upon player feedback. Book 11 is also due out this year. The goal is to put out as many free updates as possible, not just tweaking classes but adding in new content across all levels.

The main reason I got tired of WoW was the focus on high-level content. I never leveled a character beyond 54. But I leveled at least six characters into their 30s, and even more into their 20s. I like to try everything, but nothing ever got added to the low-level game. It was always Wailing Caverns. Over and over. No soloable instances.

Developers should not put all their focus on the people who burn through all the content, get to the highest level, and raid over and over. Yet ultimately those are the people who bitch the loudest and threaten to quit because now they have nothing to do. Boo hoo.

Try enjoying yourself.

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A good example of the way that players can completely subvert design intentions is LOTRO's Monster Play.

Monster Play can be accessed once your character reaches level 10. You can make one of each class of monsters (or "creeps," as they're called).

Creeps were designed to be considerably weaker than player characters (or "freeps"). They're the underdogs. The best way for them to win is zerging.

Turbine never planned on making Monster Play a focus. They didn't consider that some players might grow attached to their creeps, often to the exclusion of their freeps.

They also assumed, since players can be monsters at level 10 but must be at least level 40 to enter the PvP zone as a player, that monsters would greatly outnumber freeps. This was a faulty assumption for several reasons:

-As a creep, you are dropped into a PvP zone without a revealed map and no idea what to do. If nobody is willing to help, you will probably leave and not come back. A lot of first-time creeps are on for five minutes, then leave and never come back.

-You are also much weaker than freeps. If you get into a skirmish you will probably die A LOT. Again, five minutes can turn someone away forever.

-The entrances to Monster Play are in out-of-the-way places in major cities. They also don't show up on maps. Some people have probably gotten into the higher levels without ever knowing where to access Monster Play.

-Some people do not enjoy PvP.

I would hazard about 50% of players try Monster Play and only about 10% stick with it long term. When you factor the "flippers" (people who PvP as both freep and creep) the number of creeps rarely gets above 40-50 at a time, max. Sometimes much, much lower.

What this means is that more often that not creep and freep numbers are balanced, but the deliberate imbalance of creep stats/skills puts them at a very, very noticeable disadvantage.

Turbine could've just left it at that, explaining that PvP was never a priority for the game (which would be true).

Instead the Senior Content Designer engaged the community and collected tons of feeback from PvPers. Book 10 is going to introduce a lot of changes to Monster Play to make the creeps more viable for the long term (including access to your monsters from the login screen).

I'm sure there will still be a lot of work (after all, how do you balance something that is meant to be unbalanced?), but the process of actually dealing with a community is pretty great to see.

Player vs. Bullies

A few weeks ago, I started a Warlock character in WoW on a PvP server (Thunderlord).

I though the name Creyve sounded badass for a life-draining master of Demons.

After about a month, I have decided that PvP only exists as a way for players to live out their fantasies of bullying the weak. That's the only explanation. It's clear that Blizzard is uninterested in changing this situation.

I write this post on my blog because in the forums it would only earn me a "L2P (Learn to play) noob!" and "Go to an RP server, fagg0rt."

But this is really just to share my observations and ponder another way. There has to be some kind of middle ground PvP.

For about the first 20 levels everything was fine. This is because most of my quests were in green areas. Green areas are owned by your faction (Horde, in my case) and enemy players cannot engage you in PvP unless you attack first. This is reasonable.

In yellow and red areas, you get flagged for PvP.

Welcome to the Gankfest.

Level 30+ quests are almost uniformly in yellow areas. You might be thinking, "Well, great, all the people of similar levels will be in those zones, ready to fight, gaining PvP skill."

Wrong. Nobody ever attacks unless they have a huge advantage. Fighting three bears of your level? Expect to get backstabbed when your health is at 1/3. Then run to your corpse and hope that some asshole isn't camping the damn thing.

Of course, you're lucky if you get bum-rushed by someone within four levels of yourself.

Typically, it's a level ??? Probably a level 60. Good luck hitting them at all. And you have no defense whatsoever.

In fact, your skills are worthless. There is nothing protecting you from the predations of powerful player-characters.

My Warlock has a detect invisibility spell. But it only detects lesser invisibility. But I don't give a shit about lesser invisibility, because anything that has it doesn't pose a threat.

I've leveled at about half the normal rate, even with bonus XP, because I get constantly ganked while questing. This has nothing to do with my character or how I play, because there's nothing I could have done to prevent my character's death. No time to hearth, my Voidwalker sacrifice doesn't protect me for long, I can't fear higher levels with much chance of success, everything I try to do gets interrupted.

Of course, mention this, and people get defensive. They lash out. "You chose to play on a PvP server. It's your fault."

Right. I'm sorry, I expected some kind of game. Maybe where my input actually mattered. Not a system where I pay money to allow complete strangers to waste my fucking time by forcing me to run to my corpse five times in a row.

It's not as if there are no solutions to the problem of ganking. Dishonor was floated for awhile, but Blizzard decided it wasn't worth the hassle.

Has anybody ever seen a decent PvP system that doesn't encourage a cycle of virtual abuse?

Everyone I know pushes for Level 60 mostly so they can one-shot players twenty levels below their own.

Won't somebody think of the lowbies?