Just when you think it’s safe to check out my.lotro.com, I’m back blogging!

I just finished reading Orion’s blog post on upcoming faction/reputation changes and thought I’d offer my usual unsolicited (and perhaps unwanted) feedback.

In general, I like the ideas that he’s put forth and think they’ll help with the motivation to gain favor with different factions.

Here are some things that I’d like to see changed:
1) For reputation items, it would be nice to have them changed so that they don’t eat up as much storage space. In my house, I have a storage container that’s full of various types of reputation items because they aren’t sizes that can be turned in (or I’m maxed on the characters that are high enough to turn them in on). One easy idea would be to alter the reputation bartering so that instead of getting 300 per 10, you get 30 each. That way, I can turn in whatever I have at the time and not worrying about storing the partial stacks. The other idea which would be great is to make them (and other barter items that are bind on acquire) be virtual currency that goes into an unseen container that doesn’t count towards my usual storage slots. Then, when I go to barter, it’s taken from this storage if they are there. You can make this a “click on” effect to convert a stack from the virtual storage to physical storage (for selling/mailing of non-bound items) and back again.

2) Do away with equipment type rewards and focus more on cosmetic/role-playing/fun stuff. The problem with equipment with stats is that it’s difficult to balance. On one hand, you don’t want to make it too watered down because the average player won’t be able to achieve it by a level that it’s valuable for them to achieve it. However, if you make it too powerful, then the people with high level alts can farm rep items/crafting mats and get their alts items that are over-powered. Make it simple and do away with items with stats. Instead, focus on items that are nice visually to go with the cosmetic abilities of the game. Also, think on other ways that you can expand the system: herald skins for captains, instruments for minstrels, non-combat pets for loremasters (and perhaps for others), etc. Perhaps mix and match the reps and crafting for fun (aka non-stat differences) items. For example, farmer of some rank + mathom society of some rank allows access to different type of pipe weed. Or tailor of some rank + some faction rank allows a runesatchel buff that causes the healing effects to glow for a different color than green…can expand this to other skills/classes. For example, a hunter’s arrow can trail energy colors or look vaguely like bird flying towards their targets. This could also be made more valuable if weapon/shield skins were allowed. For example, you could skin a shield with the symbol of a faction once you get high enough level to get the rep item. Obviously, you’d have to keep some of them matching, like you could only skin a spear with a spear or a longsword with a longsword, but the underlying technology is probably already there. Also, you could consider faction options to dye or to unlock cosmetic changes like hairstyles.

3) Tie in the heritage options a little bit. For example, you could have a slight rep starter if you choose a heritage with a faction (maybe 500?). Not enough to make a major difference, but as a starter. You could balance this by perhaps having a slight minus to another faction or mark it off as minor enough not to bother. You could expand this slightly by having the horse point always known to the character even if they haven’t been there (but they will still need any level and/or rep requirements to be met to use it).

4) Multiple reputation rewards: Have some small items that reflect getting reputations with varied factions. These can be titles, cutscenes, cosmetic items, etc. For example, getting to Kindred with Rivendale, Galadhrim and perhaps Mirkwood Elven could give you an “Exalted Amongst Elven” title (or something better..my mind’s blanking) and access to a nice cosmetic item. While getting to Kindred with Galadhrim, Moria Miners and Moria Guards could give you a “Peacemaker of Moria” title and a cosmetic boost.

5) Convenience: The idea of having an instant port back to the faction’s home town is one idea. Another is to open up the network of swift travel points throughout the world. For example, if I’m in 21st Hall and want to go to Rivendale, it takes a long time to get there if I’m not an elf, hunter or warden. It’s a bit faster once I get up some reputation with the Galadhrim so that I can go 21st -> Lothlorien -> Rivendale. Expand on this and open up swift travel more between points on the map with reputation upgrades. For example, I hate going to Tal Brunen. No matter where you’re coming from, you either have the long haul from Rivendale or OG. By the time I have a decent rep with Rivendale, assume that I’ve already been there enough that I’m familiar with the scenary and have a swift travel option to/from there. People will be more motivated to grind rep if they see it will save them time in the long run.

A couple of weeks back, I finally decided to buy a house inside the game. That meant I had several decisions to make.

Step 1: Big or small? Well, I’ve got a few alts that will be needing horses soon and then they’ll need books if I don’t get luckier with drops than I have been, so I really didn’t want to wipe out Niida’s bank account by buying the bigger house for ~7-8 gold. So, I decided to be content with the smaller 1 gold one.

Step 2: Where? This was a tougher decision. I’d been to all the homesteads before for various reasons, so I had some ideas. I considered three primary factors: location, the looks of the house and the looks of the neighborhood.
-Location: For location, I ranked the dwarf houses the highest. It’s the closest to a major city and takes about a minute to get to the stable and quick travel to any of the others. It’s not as much a factor for Niida since she can fast travel anywhere, but for my alts, it’s a nice factor to have a quick way to get back to the primary cities. The hobbit homes are a lil more of a ride to the nearest city, but not that bad. The elf houses are probably equivalent to the hobbits, but I rated it slightly lower due to the fact that no one much goes to the elf starting city. Dead last is the Bree homesteads. It’s a long haul from Bree. It might have been convenient for a while to have close access to the Lone Lands for my alts, but most were already moving out of there anyways. Decision: No to Human housing.
-House: The human house was the best in terms of layout and appearance. Hobbits were just a hair behind..only losing a few points due to the low ceilings. Dwarves were ok, but I’m not too fond of the stony dungeon look where you don’t get any sunshine (albeit virtual). Surprisingly, the elf houses were dead last. I didn’t like the small house lay out with the two story stack of rooms. The bigger houses would probably be better, but wasn’t in the market for those. Decision: Definitely no to the elf houses.
-Neighborhoods: The only one that really stood out was the dwarven neighborhoods..and not in a good way. The layouts were confusing and the underground look was dreary. I spend enough time in the darken gloom of Moria lately wondering “Ok…I see that up there…now, how do I get there?” without adding to it with my choice of home. Decision: Hell no to the dwarven homes!
So, by process of elimination, I decided to go with a home in the Shire.

Step 3: Buying the house. I like quick and easy access. I wanted something where I could get between my house and the neighborhood entrance quickly. I also liked having a house that was close to the neighborhood vendors. After looking through the listings for a bit, I found a house that was close to both and had a good layout of the yard. So, a gold or so later and I was the proud owner of 1 Wending Way in my neighborhood. For those that aren’t familiar with the layout, that’s just inside the neighborhood gates and to the left. It’s also very close to the vendors. Ideal location for my purposes.

Step 4: Decorating. So, you’re all jazzed about having a new house. Then, you realize “D’oh! I need stuff to put in it so it doesn’t look like crap.” I had a couple of trophies in my vault that I pulled out and put up. Then, I bought a storage container because I’m too much of a packrat and keep a lot of stuff. In it, I placed a lot of cosmetic items, shards and reputation items that can be shared between my various characters. Then, I started jumping between all the housing vendors. At each, I scanned over the various pieces that they had and bought a few. Plus, each had an introductory quest where I was able to pick up a few items for free. I also picked up all the recipes for decorations that I found and sent those to my various alts to learn. Through buying and crafting, I got things to a decent state. I then scanned over the auction house to see what was up there for choices. I saw Summerfest items and remembered that I had tokens that I had gotten while doing the quests for the title. (I had considered getting the horse..until I saw how it looked), so I ended up buying the bed and painting to spruce up my place.

Step 5: Repeat Steps 1-4. After getting my house, my regular group in my kin that I adventure with decides to all get houses in the same neighborhood. So, I start getting pressured to move. Finally, I give in to keep the peace and check out the neighborhood. They had decided to move into the Bree location which definitely wasn’t my first choice, but one I could live with. It did have nice house and neighborhood design even if I didn’t particularly like the location. I started looking around and there was only one small house available and not a particularly great one. I’d also been a bit unhappy with the way that the small house was limited in what could fit in it. So, I decided to look at the larger houses and found one that I was happy with. Bye bye to another 7+ gold. Moved in and there’s a lot more space to fill in the new house. With my previous decorations, it still looked bare. I’ve been slowly filling it in over the last few days.

Some comments on housing:
Changing houses: Changing houses means that you forfeit all of the cost of the first house. You don’t get to sell your old house. You have to “abandon” it which means that you give up the cost that you initially laid out for it. Would be nice to get something back on it..half or a quarter..even 10% would be better than nothing.

Decorating hooks:
For those who aren’t familiar with it, you get a number of places that you can add furnishings and other customizations into your house. For example, in my original small Shire house, I had 80 interior decorating hooks and 12 exterior hooks. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not. For one thing, part of them are for things like floor/wall color, floor/wall pattern and background music. While it does add to the ambiance and is a nice feature, it’s not actual furnishings. The other thing is that each hook only holds one type of object. Furniture hooks hold things like tables, chairs, statues, etc. Wall hooks hold bookcases, paintings and fireplaces. Floor hooks hold rugs. Thin hooks hold things like candlestands, flowers and some chairs. Yard hooks hold trees, bushes, statues, wells, etc. Within each category, there can be size categories. For example, there are small furniture items and large furniture items. Small items can fit in small or large slots, but large items can only fit in large slots.

There are several issues with this system:
- When you’re buying a house, you don’t get to see what types of slots you get, where they are at or how many of each type you have. When I bought my first house (the small one), I found that you get virtually no large spots. Most of the spots are small which really limits what you can place in them.
- The system is not customizable in what hooks you can get for a house. Once you buy a house, the number of hooks, their type and their placement is fixed. That means that you’re probably not going to have the right mix of hooks for your tastes or even if you do, they’re not going to be where you want them. In my current house, I have a surplus of wall space but would kill for more furniture space.
- The placement of the hooks isn’t the best in the world. One example is that you can buy tables (large furniture) and chairs (small furniture). However, the large object hooks aren’t near the small furniture hooks, so you can’t actually put the chair near the table as if you were going to sit at the table.
- The one-size-fits-all methodology doesn’t always work well. For example, if you place a painting in a large wall spot, it ends up hanging at waist level instead of eye level (unless you’re a hobbit).
- There isn’t a good way to preview what an item actually looks like. Here is a link on the lorebook for all the small floor items which are all rugs. If you notice, the icons for all of them are the exact same and there is no “dressing room” for decorations like there is for clothing (that I know of. If there is, please please PLEASE tell me!), so you can’t tell what they’ll actually look like without getting them and placing them in a house. Unless, of course, you’re lucky enough to see them in someone else’s or find a screenshot elsewhere online. In the above example, you have no idea what colors half the rugs are..you can guess from the themes, but might be wrong.

From the above, I would like to suggest the following improvements to the system (assuming of course, that they can be implemented):
- Instead of fixed spots for the hooks, it would be nice to be able to place them. There would have to be limits, like having floor objects only on inside floors, etc. That way, I can place objects close together or far apart to meet my desires. The coding of how the objects look on the surface is already done. The only drawback I see is extra memory to store the location of the hook.
- Be able to choose what types of hooks that you have. You get X hooks and you can choose to place them. If that’s too much, then allow at least some of them to be swapped.
- Have a preview system for objects so that you can see how they’d look before you buy/acquire them.

Probably should have combined my suggestion on legendary items with this post as they both involve legendary items, but oh well, what’s done is done.

One of my earlier posts was on the names of my various characters and where they came from. This one is similar, but focuses on the names that I’ve given my legendary items. So far, I’ve only gotten items for Niida (hunter) and Elzwei (loremaster), so only have a few names.

Niida’s Crossbow: Momoka the Farslayer Like a lot of my names, this one also comes from anime. It’s based on the character Momoko from Tenshi no Shippo (Angel Tails). Changed the last “o” to an “a” to break up the long string of “o” sounds. The title “the Farslayer” comes from Fred Saberhagen’s “Book of Swords” series. Farslayer was the Sword of Vengeance whose power was that it could be hurled at a target and would pass through all obstacles to pierce the heart of the intended target. This fit in quite well with the “Heartseeker” ability of the hunter. In fact, I’ve thought about making a macro to shout “For thy heart! For thy heart, who hast wronged me!” when I use that ability. I’ve since replaced my original Momoka with a new crossbow, but it inherited the name when it reached 10th level.

Niida’s Axe: Meiko the Cleaver of Evil This was the first melee weapon which I’ve since replaced. I was so tempted to be stupid and name it “Theodore the Beaver Cleaver”, but luckily, kept from doing so. Meiko was named for Hand Maid May from the series of the same name. Mei is the romanized form and I add the “ko” to tie in with the Momoka. The “Cleaver of Evil” was just a generic name that had an echo of my original silly name for it.

Niida’s sword: Lumiere the Sword of Light This replaced my axe as it had a couple better legacies and higher base damage due to the higher level. I will probably replace it. Since the Cleaver part of the axe name wouldn’t really apply to a sword, I decided to go with a totally new name. This was named for the character Lumiere from Kiddy Grade. The “Sword of Light” came from the fact that Lumiere is French for light.

Elzwei’s Staff: Shou the Branch of the Tree of Knowledge Shou comes from the lead character of Mamotte Shugogetten. The rest ties in with Elzwei’s loremaster class and scholar profession and should be self-explanatory.

Elzwei’s Book: Ryuuk the Tome of Life and Death Ryuuk comes from the shinigami in Deathnote. The story revolves around a book which has the power of life and death, so it seemed appropriate. I thought about being a bit more obvious and calling this “Ryuuk the Deathnote”, but thought that was a bit too blatant.

That’s all that I have right now. My next character up to legendary level will probably either be Hinoki (rune keeper) or Nanowyn (champion), so I’ll have to be thinking what to name the next ones.

So, how about all of you? What’s your legendary items names and how’d you come up with them?

Legendary Items: How “Legendary” are they when they drop like candy? Sort of defeats the feeling when you have to farm for the right qualities. Seems to me that it would be better to allow the weapon to grow as you choose. However, I can see the problem with this from a developer side: it would take a lot away from the grinding aspect of the game (aka time consumption aka money from the subscription). Though, I think that a compromise could be reached. Allow the the properties of the weapons to be chosen, but require materials that needed to be found in order to do so. This can be done in a few ways. One is that you have to go find the materials themselves. For example, a bonus to ranged crit could require the eye of a high level bird mob which drops randomly off of the appropriate mobs. You’d need a greater quality of eye (aka from a higher level mob or a rare drop) to get to higher and higher tiers of crit. Another is similar to the current system. You’d deconstruct items to get the appropriate materials to level your legendary weapon’s properties. The difference is that you’re not deconstructing other legendary weapons, you’re deconstructing the normal weapons that drop. The quality of materials that would come from the deconstruction of the magical weapons would be affected by the level and quality of the weapon deconstructed. In the end, it probably would end up still being about the same type of grind. The difference would be in flavor because it just doesn’t seem right to be destroying legendaries.

White Hobbits Can’t (or perhaps just shouldn’t) Jump
Last night, our regular group went into Moria for the first time together. I had been the only one to spend any time in there, so I ended up showing them around. We only had two deaths and one sort of close call the entire night and all of them were the hobbit minstrel jumping. The first time, we had just did the quest at the beginning where we killed eight goblins and the messenger. We were running back to turn it in. One thing that I’ve caught myself doing a few times is nearly going off the cliff overlooking the goblin camp instead of making the turn back into the entrance area. Well, this time was no exception and I barely caught myself from going over the edge. The minstrel who was following right behind me didn’t stop when I did and went tumbling over the edge. Luckily, the goblins hadn’t respawned from our clearing yet or it would’ve been hairy. After that, a greater distance was kept when following me for some reason

Later in the night, we were running around doing several quests in the Great Delving. After killing the Grodbog Queen, we went east up the stairs to grab one of the mirrors. I knew a shortcut from my explorations to the next mirror and said “Ok..jump down here and it’ll save us time.” I jumped as I said “Be sure to get a good jump” because if you don’t, you end up tumbling way, way down into a chasm. Right as I landed, I get the “.. has died to misadventure.” message from the minstrel not quite jumping far enough. Luckily, the revive spot wasn’t too far away.

As we were finishing up for the night, we were in the Chamber of the Crossroads. In the middle of the camp there, there is a big well that appears to be pretty deep. For some reason unknown to me, the minstrel decides to see how deep it is and jumps down into it. We get a return of the “died to misadventure” message and the revive spot ends up being way down in the waterworks where none of us had been yet.

So, my advice to hobbit minstrels is: look before you leap to make sure that there is a visible bottom and make sure you leap far enough.

#4 in a series, collect them all.
Part I
Part II
Part III

Today’s topic was suggested by Fionnuala: comparing the trait system in LOTRO vs. the talent system in WoW.

Those of you who are familiar with WoW will want to skip the next two paragraphs as it goes over the basics of WoW’s system for those who haven’t experienced it. We’ll all meet up after that for my thoughts. One note is that I’m comparing the WoW system vs. the class/legendary traits, but not including the racial traits as I don’t think they fit in with the class discussion.

In WoW, you get a talent point starting at 10th level and gain one per level up. You can then invest these in a talent tree that is tiered. Each tier requires 5 points (cumulative) in the previous tier. For example, to gain access to tier 2, you need to have spent five points in tier 1. But they don’t have to be invested in specific tiers. So, for tier 3, you have to have spent 10 points in tiers 1 & 2. But that could have been 5 points in tier 1 and 5 in tier 2 or 10 in tier 1..or anything inbetween. Though, certain talents also require others as prereqs. So, when you come down to it, at 70th level (current max), you have 61 points to spend. You can invest these in one tree or split them amongst the three. The different trees can be for different roles. For example, the paladin trees are DPS, tanking, and healing. Or they can be for different niches within those roles. For example, the mage trees are fire, ice or arcane. It affects the damage type that you do as well as some of the crowd control abilities that you may have.

In addition, you also have a set of glyphs that open up with levels. These are divided up into 3 major glyphs and 3 minor glyphs that open up roughly every 10 levels or so. Plus the glyphs themselves have varying level limits (in addition to the soft level limits of having to have the abilities that they affect as well). The glyphs can range from major (transforming a heal from a direct heal to an area of effect or a heal over time spell) to nice (dropping a costly/space consuming component from a spell) to ok (slightly bonus to damage/healing/mitigation) to just cosmetic (making a target turn into a penguin instead of a sheep for a polymorph) to pretty much useless (mana reduction on a spell only cast out of combat when your mana regen is high anyways). I’m not going to talk about this much as it’s not as major a factor in general as the talent system, but I wanted to mention it for completeness.

Here’s my breakdown and thoughts of the features of both systems:

1) Progression: In WoW’s system, you gain something each level from 10 on via a point. However, this could range from a very minor ability to a major one. In LOTRO, you start gaining slots at 15 and gain every six levels for a while, then it jumps around from 2 to 14 (depending on if you include legendary slots or not). There are pluses and minuses to each system. It’s nice to gain something each level, but having the gains in chunks that matter when you get one is nice. My main problem with the LOTRO system is the non-linear nature where you can gain the traits quickly between some levels and then go a long period of time without gaining one. I think trying to smooth out the gains and make them more linear would help. Overall, I think either system would work, though.

2) Learning: In WoW’s system, it’s pretty simple: you gain a level, you gain a point. You spend that point and you learn/gain the ability. In LOTRO, once you hit the appropriate level, you gain knowledge that a class trait exists, but then you have to work on it to learn it. Even though it’s more time-consuming, I do like the LOTRO system as it caters more towards people investing in their characters rather than power leveling. The only issue that I have with some of them is how they are obtained. For example, healing traits are usually very simple to obtain. You can sit in the city and spam them on yourself or others to raise them up. Others are very much a pain to obtain. For example, take quality of mercy for hunters where you have to get critical hits with mercy shot. The ability is on a cooldown, plus you have to have the necessary focus and power to use it. Then you have to hit with it (random number generator). Plus you have to crit with it (random number generator again). Oh, and this has to be on a mob that is high enough level to get experience on. And btw, make sure that you’re not capped out on the trait increase for the day.

Similarly, I like the idea for legendary traits. Having new, powerful abilities for the classes be rare and special is great. However, basing this on random drops sucks. Currently Niida is 53, so I’ve been kiling mobs that are 40+ for over a dozen levels. In that time, I’ve seen 0 hunter books dropped and only a lore-master book drop. I ended up having to buy two books and most of the pages for Rain of Thorns off the AH in order to get them (still don’t have the third book). That takes away the special feeling of “I earned it” and diminishes it to “I paid for it.” Even after getting the books, I had horrible luck farming the pages and probably average around an hour of playing time per page for the Bard’s Arrow trait. In comparison, I had a friend who had a Captain. When we were grouped, she had just hit 40 and a book dropped for me. On my Loremaster, I had three pages drop off one kill and I currently have all the three legendaries on her even though she’s seven levels lower. Granted these are probably extreme examples, but it shows how frustrating that basing something on random number generation can be. I think it would be better to have the legendaries based on class quests of some sort. I don’t mind them being challenging, but make it something that I can control via my playing ability rather than being at the mercy of the random number generator.

In short, I like LOTRO’s ideas, but I think that random number generation needs to play much less of a part in it, especially in how legendary traits are obtained.

3) Level of Detail: In theory, there’s a lot of big deltas in how you can set up your character in the WoW system vs. what you can do with the LOTRO system. One way of thinking about it is that it would be like building a truck with a lot of small legos vs. a few big legos…you get a lot more detailed truck at the end. However, that’s only in theory. In reality, there are two things about the WoW system that breaks this analogy. First is that there are some talents that are pretty much mandatory to take in trees. You really can’t have an effective build without taking them. Secondly, because of the prereqs for the talents and the facts that you have to have points in lower tiers to move up, you sometimes have to take crappy, ineffective talents to get the good ones. So, instead of having the choice of big yellow legos or small yellow legos to build your yellow dump truck, you have the choice of big yellow legos or groups of multi-colored legos glued together to build your yellow dump truck. Now, the choice isn’t so clear. WoW’s system is complex, but a lot of the complexity is unnecessary because you have useless choices and mandatory choices. LOTRO is the other extreme. You don’t have many slots, but a lot of choices for those slots.

In many ways, they can be similar. In WoW’s system, you might have to spend 5 pts in a talent that gives you +1% damage to a skill before being able to spend a couple points in a talent that shortens the skill’s cooldown by 50%. In LOTRO’s system, you’d get a trait that might given you +5% damage and 50% cooldown. So, they can amount to the same thing..just whether you get it gradually or all at once. I think that LOTRO’s system can be better in ways. This way, you have discrete blocks that are focused rather than building trees that may force people to spend points on things they don’t want to get the things that they do.

4) Tree mixing: In WoW, you generally have to go deep into a tree to be effective. Of the 61 points available, people will generally have to invest at least 41 in their main tree to be good. In LOTRO, it seems like you have a bit more flexibility with your choices since the tiering isn’t as powerful. You do still have the modifiers that happen when you get multiple traits from the same tree, but they aren’t as mandatory and they stop after four being slotted.

5) Changing: In WoW, there are two ways to change your talents. In the first one, you go to the trainer, pay a fee and all your talent points are refunded. You then have to respend the points. This is true whether you want to change one point or all of them: you still have the same fee and you’re refunded all of them. In this system, LOTRO is much better as you’re only charged for what you change and only have to deal with moving around the things that you change. The other way is the dual talent system. You go to the trainer, pay a huge fee and you get access to a second talent tree. You can then switch between the two trees as an out of combat spell. This allows people to switch between DPS/Tanking/Healing or PVP/PVE trees without paying a fee each time. Changes to either of the trees once setup follows the first system, though. Something like this would be nice to have for LOTRO as well.

Anyways, that’s my incoherent ramblings on the two systems. What do all of you think about the systems?

Hopefully, I won’t disappoint anyone, but this post isn’t about Johnny Cash or his music. Just a catchy title for my ramblings about names.

As I mention in my earlier post about my characters’ names, I try to come up with names for my characters that might be used for real names in a fantasy setting. While LOTRO does have some naming policies, they don’t seem to do a great job policing them at times or miss some of the obvious cases. While I can appreciate the desire to be silly at times (for example, I had a hard time not naming my legendary axe “Theodore the Beaver Cleaver” last night), here are some guidelines that I try to follow when picking a name.

1. No real life names. Whether you intend it as a tribute or a mockery, I don’t find either very acceptable. Most people play the game to escape from real life and its various ills, not to be reminded of them. So, no. I don’t care to see “Sarah Palin the Moose Killer” running around.

2. No objects/adjectives/combinations of the two. The objects apply whether you’re talking about fantasy objects “Blade” or real life objects “Milkandcheese”. Most adjectives don’t work as real names either…and if you use them for names of Dwarves, you might get Disney after you. Doubleword combos of these are usually either bad or extremely overused: “Deathblow”,”Bloodknife”, etc. Pretty much stay away from names with any of these words in them as they’re way overused: “Blood”, “Death”, “Moon”, “Skull”, “Star”, “Sun”,”Bone”,”Knight”,”Shadow”…probably a few others that I’m missing. I do think they can be ok when used as surnames, though.

3. Don’t use your class/class function/class abilities as part of your name. “Tank”,”Heal”,”DPS”,”Minstrel”,etc don’t belong in names. It’s especially bad when you mix them up and use them for a different character for whatever reason. For example, in WoW, there was a mage (not a priest) called “Coolmedic”. Don’t ask me why.

4. Not really a separate rule, but a note about rules 3 and 4 combined. If you have someone that has an adjective and class combined where they’re bragging like “bigdamage”, “leettank”, “niceheals”, they generally fall into two categories: they suck or they’re an arrogant prick. In either case, you should avoid them. This is a rule of thumb, so there may be exceptions, but they are few and far between.

5. Punny names fall into two categories: those that aren’t amusing from the start and those where the amusement dies off fast. Think of the long term and don’t do it. Letgomyass the elf will get old fast.

6. Think of your friends/kin who have to type your name or say it in voice chat. Xyzipolstykmipl may seem like a fantasy name, but think of those who have to spell it. (Yeah, I know. I’m guilty of this a bit myself with Onomatopeia. What can I say? I’m not perfect.)

7. Stay at least vaguely within the genre. I don’t think it’s too bad to pull names from other places, but don’t get things that are clearly out of place. “Superman”, “BillyBob”,”Seethreepio”, etc don’t really belong in Middle Earth.

8. Variants of any of the above where you intentionally misspell words/use l33t speak are even worse. “Kewldamage”, “Leettank”,”Pwnsyou”, etc. should be deleted on sight without the opportunity to rename their characters.

Agree? Disagree? Your name mention above? Got other guidelines that you’d like to add? Let me know!

A bit of a delay between the last post and this one due to a combination of factors. First, I was out of state on a family trip (slightly more pleasant than a field trip to Mordor ). Then, my computer decided to die, so I replaced it and have been working on getting the new one set up. Always a big chore to get everything reinstalled and setup like I want it again. Anyways, enough of my non-game-related rambling, so onto the game-related rambling.

In Part I, I talked about things which LOTRO did better while in Part II, I talked about things where I thought WoW did a better job. This part is a bit of a mixed bag where things are both better and worse in ways as well as things that fit in either plus or minus that I forgot in the first posts.

First, I forgot to mention surnames in the positive category. I like having these in the game as a role-playing aid. (Though, unfortunately, some people just use them to add to their lameness instead).

Next, there’s the skill system. On the positive side, I like having that you always get a skill point increase for crafting an item of that tier (unless you’re maxed, of course). WoW’s random system of “Do I get a point or not?” could be very frustrating at times. I also like the system of mastery where you can make the critical items once you’ve put the time into maxing out your skill. On the negative side, the names seem so plain for the items in general. For example, last night I made a “Holly Bow” with my Supreme level of woodworking. That doesn’t exactly inspire awe with its name. Would be nice to have some better names in general to make the items seem a bit more special. Another negative is having to go to specific places to craft items, such as Esteldin for the Superior Workbenches. The concept makes sense and I could see it for special items (like for example, items requiring a shard) or top end items. But having to have it for every single item of that tier is a bit of an overkill and leads to a lot of wasted time/expense traveling. I dread when I have to do this more with my characters that aren’t hunters. I’ve got into it a bit with my Scholar Elzwei, but luckily, she’s an elf and has the Return to Rivendell trait to help out with that.

Titles are another thing that I think is a bit mixed. On WoW, they were generally rare/hard to get other than a few that were pretty much jokes (Jenkins, etc). On LOTRO, you get one for about everything you do. I do like the variety and the fact that you don’t have to go to ridiculous lengths to get one. However, it seems like that there could be a middle ground where you have some variety, but they are a bit more rare so that they seem more special.

Mail attachments are a negative. Since I have alts of every professions, I’m constantly sending crafting items between characters. Only having one attachment per mail leads to a lot of mail being sent. I much prefer WoW’s system where you could attach multiple items in a single mail. Also, in Wow, if you had a mail without any text in it..just an attachment and you removed the attachment, it would auto-delete. Those two items save a lot of item when moving items between characters.

Guilds/Kins are a lot alike between the games. Two things that are different are houses and banks. WoW didn’t have kinhouses like LOTRO, so that’s a big improvement in LOTRO. It’s nice to have a place to congregate and the ability to fast travel there. However, WoW had a better system for sharing items between members. They had a guildbank that was accessible from anywhere that the personal bank (vault in LOTRO) was accessible from. So, you could share items without having to make a special trip to the kinhouse like you do with LOTRO’s system. I think that encourages people to share more as it’s not as much time and effort to do so.

I just recently (night before last) got my first legendary items, so can comment a bit on it now. Still a newbie to it, so not too in-depth, but need to mention it as a plus. I love the idea of a weapon leveling as you do and having your own special item. One thing that I don’t like so far is how prevalent they are. Perhaps I’ve just been lucky, but I’ve been having lots of them drop via random drops in Eregion the last couple of nights. It just seems to take a bit of the shine off legendary items when they drop so frequently.

Well, I think that’s the end of my ramblings for now. Will there be a part IV or not? Don’t know yet. If I find enough things to comment on, there will be. If not, I’ll blather on about other stuff. Wait and see.

In case anyone missed it, it seems that there’s a Design A Horse contest on the main page now. I think that this is a great idea and hope that a lot of people compete and we get some nice new mounts into the game. So far, I’ve been a bit underwhelmed by the mounts. The initial mounts are ok, but a bit bland. The summer festival one I find a bit gaudy and don’t think it really goes with my characters very well. The ones that I might can get from reputation or quest rewards might be better, but they’re a bit of a ways off for me. Would be nice to see good decent visual upgrades.

Here’s what I’d like to see for a mount system (though, obviously this would be complicated to do):
- Have a mount creation system similar to the character one where you can change colors, add features (splotches of different colors), saddle/blanket designs, body style, etc. In other words, make the mounts tailored a bit more towards the owner’s tastes. LOTRO has done a great job in things like the outfitting system so far and I think this would be a good addition in that vein.
- The initial design would be set when you first purchase your mount. Subsequent changes would be handled by going to a “horse groomer”, cost a fee and be more limited in what you can do. (Pretty much like the barber for our characters).
- Make the saddle/blanket/bridle on the mount be more 3 dimensional. Right now, the blanket look more like tattoos than blankets.
- Let us name our mounts (or have them named by a random name generator when we purchase) as a role-playing tool. It would also be nice if we could have the name appear when we mount/dismount (Niida hops on her noble steed Ed, Niida dismounts from her noble stallion Ed) or when we’re mounted (Niida ).
- One concern might be how this would factor in with the current system of having reputation mounts. The answer is that to have the current reputation mounts instead unlock options for color or barding. The initial choice could be fairly limited with colors being unlocked through reputation with various factions (You’re now able to select a mount with that lineage by brokering with vendors). Also, you can buy specialty barding from reputation vendors. For example, the summer festival mount might because a summer festival blanket instead. It would also allow another use for professions: to make barding (probably off of rare, one-time use patterns). If you wanted to get even more complicated, you could make trade-offs based on the type of barding. For example, the heavier the armor, the less speed boost you get, but the harder it is to dismount you.

Anyways, that’s my idea. What do you think? Aye? Neigh?

In Part I, I talked about five areas where I thought LOTRO beat WoW. In this article, I cover the flip-side of the argument: five areas where I think LOTRO could improve upon to be as good or better than WoW.

The first one is one that I’ve heard others mention quite a few times, so I’m pretty sure that it’s not just me: respawn rates are insanely fast. I would say that the majority of my defeats are due to things literally respawning on top of me. For example, today I was on my loremaster Elzwei killing mobs for exp/reputation item drops and came across a group of two close enough that I couldn’t pull just one. No problem. I stunned one and focused on the other. It went down and I turned to face the stunned one. Should have been fairly easy, but I noticed that this one seemed to be hitting me quite a bit more than it should have. Ok..my cakewalk somehow turned into a “I can take this, but I’ll probably be one hit away from dead at the end.” situation. True enough, I took the second mob down but had about 100 hp left. I had a second of triumph before the mob hit me again and killed me. I was confused as to how a dead mob had killed me until I saw movement and realized what had happened. After I had killed the first mob and turned my camera to face the second, the first one had respawned almost instantly and was pounding me from behind. What I had thought was one mob was actually two. I normally keep my camera panned out a bit to catch things like this, but since this was a ranged mob, I didn’t see it because it wasn’t close enough in to see. This is kind of an extreme case, but it’s not unusual for our group to clear through a gauntlet, kill the quest mob and turn around to see the mobs we cleared on the way in already respawned. Earlier this week, the game crashed on me right after we cleared a group. By the time I logged back in, that group had already respawned. Just in general, the respawn rates probably need to be nearly half what they are now to be a lot more playable.

Races are another area where I think that LOTRO could improve. One reason is that the balance seems a bit off. For example, Elves suffer from lower morale/morale regen and fate in exchange for improved agility and disease/poison resistance. This doesn’t seem to be a good trade-off because the resistance improvements are so slight as to be negligible and agility isn’t a great value to all classes while fate and morale definitely are. The differences make sense from a lore perspective, but the balance for gameplay seems off.

The last three are all related to travel, but separate aspects of it.

The first is the ease of travel. I hate having to select each and every leg. For example, today I wanted to go from Rivendale to Esteldin. I was 38 and it requires level 40 to do a direct (and quick) travel there. So, I would have had to go to Ost Guruth. From there I could go to Bree. I would have to go to the other side of the town, then from there, I might be able to go to Esteldin (not sure if it’s available at my level or not). If not, I would have had to go to Trestlebridge, then to Esteldin. Give me an option to ride to Esteldin. I don’t want a discount or a quick trip option between every two points (though, I definitely wouldn’t turn it down), but having this unnecessary interaction is just irritating. Give me a ten minute break to go take a bio and make a snack instead of a three minute trip, walk across town to the other stable, another three minute trip, select the next destination and a four minute trip.

The second travel-related item is to cut back on the unnecessary travel. One of my friends says that she feels sometimes like we’re the “Middle Earth Fed Ex” because we’re always delivering packages/messages from place to place. Obviously, there has to be a good degree of this, but the parts where we have to go back and forth between the same two or three people multiple times in a row gets old. For example, the Gammy Boggs questline where we run back and forth between her and her next door neighbor. Makes you want to pick one of them up and carry them over to the other’s house.

The last thing is the questline that you have to go through to get your horse. Not only is it boring and tedious, but it doesn’t make sense. “Sorry. I won’t sell you one of my overpriced horses for over 4 gold unless you jump through these hoops (both figurative and literally) for me.” I swear, if some enterprising young horse breeder opened up a competing stable, I’d pay him 5 gold instead of the 4.22 gold just not to have to go through that crap again.

Ok, that’s five of my gripes. What do you think? Agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think.

Going to get a little bit ambitious now and plan a multi-part series. As I mentioned in my introductory post, I played WoW for about two years before starting LOTRO. Many consider it the standard for MMOs right now, so I thought I’d compare and contrast the two games from my perspective. I’ve only gotten up to about level 42 in LOTRO, so I can’t comment on the end game content yet. So, this is mostly from a low to mid level point of view. (In WoW, I had done end game content up through the beginning of Ulduar before I quit).

I’m going to start off with a few things that I think LOTRO got right when compared to WoW:

1) Outfits! In WoW, you had no control over what you looked like unless you wanted to sacrifice stats. In Burning Crusade days, the equipment was very different and you had a lot of people who spent time looking like “circus clowns” with horribly mismatched, garish combinations. In Wrath of the Lich King days, they went to the other extreme: virtually every piece of equipment looked the same. So, pretty much, everyone looked alike. I really like the outfit system as it allows a lot of different looks for people without making them look like they’re color blind (well…some do, but unfortunately, that’s intentional on their part).

2) Class mechanics! In WoW, it didn’t seem like there was a lot of differences in class mechanics. A cat druid used the same combo point system as a rogue. Warriors and bear druids used rage. Everyone else used mana (until they introduced the rune system with death knights). A lot of the abilities seem to get more and more homogenized as they try to balance everything. In LOTRO, every class seems to have more unique systems. For example, the guardian, warden and champion can all tank, but do so with different systems. The warden’s gambit system is complex, but fun in its challenge (at least to me). The guardian is a mostly reactive system: when you block or parry, you get to do something else which might activate yet another ability. The champion is the combo builder. None of them feel like the others.

3) General chatter! Not sure if it’s the players or what, but so far, the general chatter seems more mature and less spammy on LOTRO. In WoW, I got so sick of the constant garbage in the general/trade/etc channels that I shut them off. How many times can people repeat the same old Murloc/Chuck Norris/etc jokes? Plus there are the people that seem to just try to be as rude and offensive as possible. So far in LOTRO, I’ve ran into very little of that. I’ve never even had to consider turning any channels off in LOTRO. Again, not sure if its moderation or just a better class of players (except you. Because you’re reading this, you’re obviously a very intelligent and gifted person of fine tastes.), but it’s very pleasant.

4) Friendliness! This comes somewhat hand and hand with the above, but the people seem to be less cut-throat in general. Sure, I’ve ran across a few people who will grab that resource/mob after you’ve cleared to it on LOTRO, but it’s a rare occurrence as opposed to a constant thing on WoW. I’ve found a lot more LOTRO people who are willing to toss a heal or help kill something than I have the who just want to try to screw you over.

5) Housing! I don’t have a house for myself..and probably won’t for a while as I buy horses for all my alts as they hit 35. But I do like the idea of having housing for people and guilds. Our kin’s house is very well decorated and fun to look around. It’s a big money sink, but I can see where it’s a fun one that people enjoy.

Ok. That’s it for today. Tune in…err….”soon” (”soon” being a time between now and infinity) for part 2.