“In the
place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark but beautiful and
terrible as the Morn! Treacherous as the Seas! Stronger than the foundations of
the Earth! All shall love me and despair!”
Rarely in my blog or in my game will you see me complain. I love that
GMs and Turbine employees come to read my articles and I have only nice
things to say about life in Middle Earth. I optimize the system as it is given
and make the most out of it and have a grand time doing it! However, I jot down
things that I would like to see differently and have made a list over the
years.
Today,
I present the “Top 11 things I would
change when I rule Middle Earth”. Oh sure, there could be more things to say like… I would rather not have
wide-sweeping class revamps each year, and I would rather quests and details be
fixed rather than releasing content at the fast-pace it has felt like it has
been coming. However, these 11 things are ones that seem very
easy to change.
(1) Runekeepers need an In-combat rez.
This one is my greatest peeve in the game; I have written about it before (rune-keeper-dev-diary-riders-of-rohan).
The RK is supposed to be able to be traited and built
to be either a squishy strong DPS class or squishy strong Healing class,
but not at the same time.
Not that I begrudge Captains as they are one of the coolest
classes in the game, but even Captains have an in-combat and out of combat rez.
A Captain is effective enough to be the tank… has the best buffs… good damage…
heals well enough to be main healer in many situations… AND has a rez. But a
RK, one of the main two Healer classes, has no combat rez. If I group with a
Captain now in a group smaller than a Raid, it is implied that he is in charge of Healing and I am going DPS.
The only defense for not having a combat rez is that RKs must “see
the future” and use “Do not fall this day” skill. It has a 10 minute CD. On a break
in combat, it is gone and you wait for another 10 minutes. It has a very narrow
use. To be successful with it… either you expect that at some point you will
lose the tank or the healer (not you) and you have applied this Pre-Rez, or you
have in an instant, foreseen that someone else in group was about to die and
chose to let them die versus healing them. As is more often the case, someone got agro for a moment, got one-shotted, and the group is headed for a
wipe… unless there happens to be a Captain with you to do what any Healer
should be able to do.
So
yes, Healing class needs a
Combat Rez. Make it a trait, legendary, long CD, whatever. Just make it playable.
(2) More Housing hook flexibility and
Evictions: This is a two-part peeve involving Housing. Thankfully,
these issues are scheduled to be worked this year. Here’s hoping.
Housing
Hook flexibility and storage: The hook system for laying out items is very limited. There
are so many housing items in-game but so few places to put them. Between the
lildanas and myself, we have a kin house and a deluxe house. We have filled
every hook in both houses, filled every housing chest, and DanaOnar’s vault is
filled with 120 more housing items. Most every one of these items are items
that are either Bound, Unique, or only found at Festivals. I don’t keep around
anything that I can go get from a vendor out in the world. That said, I
can’t go see any new barter housing items in Great River, Rohan, etc… I have no where to put it or even
hold it in the vault. Further, the lotro store has some very cool housing items
to Buy, but I have no place to put anything new because of hook limitations.
See
some very cool Property Guards I bought (u10-virtues-and-property-guards)
and would totally spend more money on more if the hook and housing system was
improved.
If I
want my yard to look like a festival threw up on it, that should be my
prerogative. I play a game called “Webkinz” with the lil hobbits and just as an
example of what a simple game like that does with housing, I can literally put
anything anywhere (and expand the house to as big as I have coin to afford). If I want
to line every space on the floor with trophies I can. If in lotro, I want to
pit two Draigoch statues facing one another or have 32 snowmen standing in
phalanx formation out in the yard, that should be doable.
Housing Evictions:
That is silly to leave a house abandoned for years and have it not be available
to other players. I surveyed the lildanas’ neighborhood and found that 80% of the
houses were locked due to non-payment. Around where I live (Lorien), you cannot
abandon a house and not pay taxes on it. I read that this portion of my pet
peeve is scheduled to be addressed in Update 11, which will be sometime “soon”.
Preliminary indication is that houses that have been abandoned for more than 6
months will be foreclosed.
(3) Shared Coin: We
now have a Barter Wallet that can share barter items that are Bound to Account,
yet if you want to share coin between characters, you have to send it through
hobbit mail. That is ridiculous and needs to be fixed. Two ways to fix it are
to either make coin a shared feature in the Barter Wallet or to make a portion
of the “Shared Storage” of items a shared bank.
The
best reason I have been given as to a downside to shared coin is that the limit
for coinage is 9999 gold, 999 silver, 99 copper. Yeah… I am sure that affects a
large population (she says sarcastically). Fine, fix the upper limit cap if it stands
in the way of implementing a better shared coin bank.
(4) Longer friend list, notes section: The
friend list in lotro allows only 50 names. It should be much longer; I would
propose that 2000 is a more reasonable number. The 50 limitation cuts the list
so short it is almost not usable at all. Finding people with alts is an even
more difficult problem. Further, the friend list needs a good notes section.
Forgive
me if we spoke more than a week ago and I forgot who you are. A better friend
list would help bring people together… which is kind of the point of an MMO.
(5) More Dances:
There need to be more dancing emotes in the game. There are currently 10 dances (plus
the basic four); 8 are from festival, 1 is an Inn League Jig, and 1 is from Enedwaith. I think that 30
is a good target for the game. Oh, before you choke on your breakfast coffee,
let me suggest to roll them out periodically. Festival is a great time and
place to introduce more dances. Target releasing 1 per festival or 4 per year.
That isn’t too much to ask.
(6) Permanently Unlocked Battle instances: The
3 Angmar Battle instances and the Battle of Lorien need to be unlocked and
accessible via the Instance Finder. Bonus points to Turbine if the battles are
actually scalable with suitable Mark rewards; however, I would accept just
unlocking the instances so that people could see them. Right now, these are
four instances that most people never see which make them a wasted resource.
(Update 05/12/13: Rats, each instance must be unlocked 20 times before the next opens, not the 10 that I wrote in this paragraph on first edition.) The
3 Angmar instances are The Battle of Aughaire, The Battle before Rammas Deluon,
and The Battle of Rhunendin. They are accessible only in Gath Forthnir in
northern Angmar and are staged that Aughaire must be beaten 20 times “per
server” before Rammas is opened, then Rammas must be beaten 20 times before
Rhunendin is unlocked. However, the counter resets frequently and sporadically.
I would bet a gold that 99.99% of players have never seen the final battle
Rhunendin. I have been looking for 3 years and have never seen it unlocked on Arkenstone. (In case you wondered why I don’t just go slam through this level 50
fellowship instance repeatedly until I personally unlocked Rhunendin,
additionally, it has a 3 day Cooldown before it can be accessed again… the
counter will reset before I could get through that many Cooldowns.)
The
Battle of Lorien is accessible from the city of Caras Galadhon in LothLorien.
It is also a locked instance requiring the “Preparations” quests to be done a
certain number of times per server, and the counter resets periodically.
Fortunately on Arkenstone, Lorien rep and passage is often desirable and
this Battle stays open about half the time, although it is hard to access as one must travel to Caras Galadhon and
accept the quest to be able to enter the instance. It also has a 24 hour CD.
(7) Shorter and uncoupled Festival
Consumable timer: The festivals allow for some new emotes to
be bartered. You consume a certain number of “emote consumables” and learn to
do this emote as a skill. When the consumables were first released, they had a
reasonable Cooldown timer, around 1 - 2 minutes. That made it feasible to
actually get through 300 consumables in a reasonable amount of time.
During
Yule fest 2011, the consumable CD timers were tied together and the timer was
lengthened to 5 minutes (youll-yule-festival). Therefore, 300 uses for deed completion now
takes 1500 minutes (25 hours), or to do six deeds, you are looking at 150
hours, not counting any lost seconds between the 5 minute CD resets. With exception
to very few difficult deeds, almost no deed in the game takes 25 - 150 hours to
complete. The long timer that is tied to other consumable uses is completely
unreasonable.
(8) No Moors multi-boxing: Here
is the problem as I see it. When a multi-boxer appears in the moors, the entire
focus and game changes. (how-to-cheat-in-moors)
Instead of thinking about raids and outposts, all activity becomes focused on
one person, “where is the Multi-boxer?” As a lone entity, no one is going to
stand up to a foe that is doling out 6 times the damage with the push of a
button. It will take a group to coral the one multi-boxer. (Update: BTW, I have no qualms with people multi-boxing, just don't do it in the Moors where it is negatively impacting other players.)
It
is true that some occasions of this abuse of fair play might pass any policing,
but sometimes it is too obvious to be ignored. When I was asked how this might
be policed, the easiest answer is to write it into the code of conduct and have
it as a reportable offence. It is easy enough to report Gold Spammers and
Vulgar Harrassers. In my opinion, since it is directly interfering with others
game play, it is a worse offense than those and should be easy enough to at
least report and have some followup. Fortunately, like gold spammers, this issue doesn't arise often.
(9) Fix Broken festivals:
2012 went through the dark time of seemingly not being able to release a
festival without problems. The one that comes to mind at the moment has to be
“Farmer’s Faire” where half of the quests were broken (faire-hobbits-dont-get-drunk).
The Faire eventually got the hobbit quest to work, but ended with the “Golden Egg” and “Fishy, Very Fishy” still basically broken. It was estimated that 1
in 10,000 eggs were Golden Eggs; I think there were 6 golden egg winners in
Arkenstone for the entire festival, which is stupidly bad odds. “Fishy,
very fishy” was indeed very fishy also. No one in Arkenstone claimed to have
beaten that quest, which was to pull out 50 good fish before pulling a bad
fish, with the quest available once per day. As far as I understand, no one on any server actually did win this quest,
which trumps the Golden Egg on stupidly bad odds and poor festival design.
(10) Include older festival horses and
random luck horses in the lotro store: During most festivals, the
current horse and last year’s horse are available for barter; you can visit
them at Hengstacer Farm before you buy and undoubtedly I have included them
here on danania.net in All the Steeds. Occasionally, you can also buy the previous horse (the one
from 2 years prior from the lotro store). One horse that has never been in the
lotro store is the “2008 Yule Horse”,
since he pre-dated the store startup. He is one of my lost sheep that I would
buy if it were available. I recommend putting all applicable festival horses in the
store each festival (those older than the previous year).
Also, horses that are based on luck should periodically go to the store. A few
that I see in the stable (All the Steeds)
that people might want include
(a) “Skeleton Painted Horse” random drop in the
fall festival,
(b) “Hobby Horse”
random drop at the Yule festival,
(c) “Red
Painted Skeleton Horse” random drop from lootboxes,
(d) “Treasure laden
goat” random drop at treasure hunt,
(e) “Treasure Laden Horse” random drop at
treasure hunt,
(f) “Cave-claw Masked Horse” random drop at treasure hunt,
(g)
“Steed of the Duskwatch” random drop at 5th anniversary,
(h) “Lossoth Steed”
random drop at the 5th anniversary,
(i) “Steed of the Jester” random drop
spring festival 2012.
These
steeds are beloved by those who have them. However, none of these are extremely
special steeds like any of the Meta deed steeds that really mean something.
People who have them just got lucky at whatever slot machine was offering them.
I am thankful to have 7 of these I listed but would totally buy the Hobby Horse
and Red Painted Skeleton Horse (at typical store prices).
(11) Weapon slot and Class item slot
cosmetics: A common complaint I see is that if one gets a stupid
looking weapon, they just have to suck it up because you cannot change the way
it looks. I don’t need technical explanations as to how clothes can look
different but weapons cannot look different, just fix it.
More
direct to me though, my cosmetic pet peeve is that I do not want to see my RK bag, ever. Just make it invisible. I do
not have that option and I should. Either give me an “invisible” bag I can
equip cosmetically or a check box that I can hide its visibility (similar to
the other cosmetic slots that have a show/hide check box).
(Update 05/10/13: If you made it this far, follow onward to Silent-podcaster-1st-age-li-changes which gives a list of links where this article was reviewed by famous Podcasters!)
