“The valuable resource you just found can only be collected by your one alt located on the other side of the world.”

True fact.

This was a post from Altitis.

The MMO Law of Gathering Professions

To wit: 
Yes, unfortunately, that live embodiment of a complete lack of fashion sense in the middle happens to be my Runekeeper, waiting for a cooldown to finish to go and dispatch some undead creep. And apparently the undead are also immune to displays of bad taste.

LotRO offers a solution in the form of dyes that can be applied but I’ll have to confess that yours truly is a bit too stingy to spend money on that. The gentleman to my left, a guardian four levels above me at that time, was wearing a set. The lass on the right was level 40, go figure what fashion outlets they get in Rivendell.

Completely mismatched gear seems to be a common trait of several MMOs (and don’t get me started on the Subligar Men in FFXI…), almost to the point of becoming a reassuring feature that transcends many settings.

Food for thought: in the fiction works inspiring our MMOs, the protagonists usually start and end their adventure in the same armour (and often with the same weapons). In LotRO, players eventually get access to Legendary Items, a weapon and a class-specific accessory, which will level, can be imbued with effects and reforged as needed (but, I gather, still get replaced every so often).

I for one would be keen to see a game system where you start by creating the looks of your armour set at toon creation, then keep the same throughout your career, with enhancements no longer in the form of wholesale armour pieces dropping (hey, look, that tiny goblin just happened to have a blue mailshirt that amazingly fits my elf three times the size perfectly!) but rather an expansion of enchanting and gemming systems, where over time you reforge and mend and add in and gradually replace materials to your taste.

One can always dream. In the meantime, walking around like a poor impression of a clown or buying dyes off the AH seems to be the only way to ward one’s innards against unwanted spilling out.

This was a post from Altitis.

From Azeroth to Middle-Earth: United Colours of Clown Outfits

Are fantasy RPG settings still what you are most interested in?

Are you looking for a quite solid and still growing game that offers you a Free to play with microtransactions business model because you don’t want to subscribe in case you don’t really like it?

In my case, with a yes answer to all three questions above, I found that Lord of the Rings Online (or LotRO from now on) was the current best available game out there, as hinted in my last post.

I’m one of those people who like to research a bit before they jump into a new game, and since I have picked up Altitis again, I though I could just as well start sharing what I found out or keep finding out. So without further ado, here are some basic tidbits for the burned out Azerothian looking to start their journey in Middle Earth, home to a still expanding universe devised by J. R. R. Tolkien.

First things first: Free to play / Premium / VIP?

LotRO offers three different account types:

• Free to play: as it says on the tin – you download the game client and start playing. The game has free (as in beer) content that allows you to level to 30ish without a single dime spent. Through in-game achievements (“Deeds”), you will earn a certain amount of Turbine Points – those can be redeemed at the LotRO store to purchase additional content, perks and other features.
• Premium: Not enough Turbine points for what you want? As soon as buy any Turbine Points (for real money), even the cheapest offering which is at $5 converts your account to Premium. Beyond what you will use your additional Turbine Points on, Premium accounts come with a couple of additional perks: an additional character slot per server (free accounts start with only two toons / server but additional ones can be unlocked through Turbine Points), you can post things at the AH (5 auctions at a time, and if you need more – and you probably will, more post slots can be unlocked to Turbine Points), and chat / in game mail restrictions put in place to restrain spammers on Free to play accounts are lifted. And while Free to Play accounts are limited to 2 gold per toon, the Premium gold cap is at 5 gold instead.
• VIP: That’s the name of the monthly subscription. VIP gives you access to all the game content, grants you 500 Turbine Points every month, allows you to learn the riding skill through questing (Free and Premiums unlock it for 95 Turbine Points instead), lifts the gold cap, opens up 30 slots for posting on the AH and grants every toon you create during your subscription many additional perks that would normally be activated through Turbine Points. When your subscription lapses, your account gets “downgraded” to Premium.

What account type is right for you? The excellent site Mmorsel for Lord of the Rings Online (we’ll refer back to this site quite often) has a very comprehensive guide to help you choosing the best account for your taste. Personal recommendation: Start as free to play until you feel that you earn Turbine Points too slowly, then buy some and go Premium.

Also important to note: contrary to some other Free to play with optional subscription games I’ve tried, there seems to be no social stygma attached to Free2Play in the game. Then again, I’m playing on a server that was opened when F2P was introduced, so older servers might have some of that. I wouldn’t know, though I suspect many previous subscribers are now premium accounts.

Races & stats

First things, in Middle Earth all players are part of one same faction – upon joining you will immediately be drafted into supporting the Fellowship of the Ring and their allies against the darkness that dwells in Mordor and Isengard (well, not yet, those zones aren’t live at present).
If Azeroth left you with a strong preference for playing bovine, ovine, werewolfish, undead, blue or green skinned, horned or tusk-growing toons, you will find little joy in Middle Earth. LotRO sports exactly for races, hobbits, dwarves, humans and elves. And if you were one of the three remaining female dwarves in Ironforge, well, let’s just say that your next dwarf will get a big shot of testosterone and a beard. The other three races have a more noticeable distinction between both genders (the first indicator of this will be when you see the button labelled “Female” become clickable on the character creation screen).
As in your previous world of election, every race comes with a certain amount of racial traits. Some of them negative, but there are ways to remove these negatives later on, when you develop your character.
Some of the racial traits are quite self-explanatory. Others require a word or two of explanation, in particular stats:

• Might: You used to know it as strength. Governs melee damage, both the damage you deal and the one you mitigate.
• Vitality: Used to be your stamina. The more you have, the more health you’ll have (but HP are called Morale here). Vitality also provides damage reduction from normal and special (elemental, disease, poison etc) damage
• Will: The primary caster stat, it influences Power (those are the Middle-Earth version of MPs / Mana), magical damage and healing, as well as out-of-combat Power regeneration
• Fate: The secondary caster stat, influences both magical critical % and the amount of magical damage you deal, as well as in-combat health (morale, remember) and mana (power from now on) regeneration.

Note that magical damage is actually an inaccurate description. In LotRO, any special damage or effect is normally qualified as a “Tactical Skill“, and even classes that on the surface are no magic users will have several tactical skills in their arsenal. The “true” magic users are simply a lot more dependent on it.

For more details, we refer you again to mmorsel, who has several pages on stats depending on what type of toon you want to build. The starting point is their “How Stats Work” article.

Classes

There are seven free classes in Middle Earth, and two more that can be unlocked with Turbine Points:

• Champion: This is your typical melee DPS warrior. Wears plate, dual wields, hits hard and AoEs.
• Guardian: The traditional tank. Again, wears plate but adds a shield for additional survivability, quite difficult to kill. Enough said.
• Hunter: No surprises here, the archery class, using bows and crossbows to decimate their foes from a distance, but switches to melee weapons to produce some decent hurt in close combat. A big change though, in Middle Earth, hunters have no pets. Just you, your bow and the target. And traps. Hunters travel faster than any other class, and solo very well. Like in Azeroth, they are one of the more popular classes. And if you roll an elven hunter, remember that every possible smartass variant on Legolas has already been made multiple times.
• Burglar: The Middle Earth answer to the rogue. A stealth class, they are solid at debuffing and crowd control. Reputed to be more difficult to play than many other classes though.
• Minstrel: Sings & shouts heal or hurt on friend and foe. In groups, the minstrel will keep the others alive and add a series of buffs to enhance everyone’s damage. Solos much better than Azerothian healer builds. It’s usually the most desirable healer in the game – but since there’s a shortage of minstrels, the other healers get a spot.
• Lore-masters are a bit of a special case. Magic users (hence squishy), they’re a pet class with lots of debuffs in addition to their damage skills – a bit like a warlock. They’re using animals instead of demons as pets though, and have, I hear, off-healing capabilities. Like burglars, they group as a support class, both for their debuffs and CC abilities. Think a weird combination between shadow priest, warlock, and beastmaster hunter. In robes.
• Captains: mostly a jack-of-all-trades and support class, they offer many self- and party-enhancing buffs, can off-heal (and later even main heal with the right build), and come with a pet. A pet standard-bearer in fact, and if running around with a male bearing a rug on a pole can be perceived as awkward in certain social circles, the captain has at least a quick access to shade when the sun gets hot. Haven’t played this one yet and don’t plan to, for that matter.
• Wardens are one of the two unlockable classes. Take a hunter, give him a shield and plate armour, switch the bow for a javelin, add some taunts but also some basic healing, and you get the warden. The other main tank class in the game, it uses different mechanisms that the guardian, produces a higher damage output, has added survivability due to heals later on. The game-play is centered around skill combos for added damage, affects or threat. What’s not to like? Well the warden takes longer than a guardian to build threat, and groups will need to get used to that. And of course, it will cost you 795 Turbine Points to unlock it – around level 20 on another toon if you go the pure Free to Play route.
• The Runekeeper is the squishy magic user of the bunch, the other unlockable class. Very versatile, it nukes fire, ice and lightning like a mage or an elemental shaman, and every spell cast improves the potency of the next one. Or the runekeeper reverses gear and starts healing like a tree druid, with mostly single-target HoTs. Does the job of either pure DPS and produces a world of hurt, or serves as a competent main healer, with the same equipment, and able to switch roles almost on-the-fly, even in combat, although several seconds will be required before becoming effective. Main drawbacks? A tendency to go splat faster than any other class, with very low Morale (that’s HP, remember?) and some flimsy robes offering, well, limited protection against piercing, slashing and bludgeoning, go figure. The Runekeeper is also a pet class, it has a pet rock that works like a shaman’s healing stream totem. But hey, at least you can rename it, and it has an elven rune on it. Particularly suited for aspiring geologists.

Parting words

A couple additional hints:
Groups or parties are called “Fellowships“. Yes, like that ragtag band of adventurers who wanted to go and throw jewellery into volcanoes. Accordingly, LFG becomes LFF.
Guilds are called Kinships. Kinships have levels and those are a factor of the kinship’s age: the first levels are attained very quickly and add simple stuff like MOTD, officer chat or support for more members (kinships can accomodate a 1000 players very early, so that’s not really a major factor). Much later on, guilds can hold private auctions (still at the normal AH but only your kin can buy these) and eventually get a kin house. Did I mention that Middle Earth has player housing? No? Well, Middle-Earth has player housing. From level 15 onwards. With decoration, furniture and additional storage space. You can have your own hobbit hole. How cool is that?
Every week, there are promotional deals on the LotRO store, that is, some items discounted between 20% and up to 75% of their normal Turbine Points cost. Quest packs in particular tend to come up quite often. Every Tuesday, there’s an additional sale of some items on top of that. And last but not least, from time to time, there will be a double points promotion – the amount of Turbine Points you can purchase for real money doubles for a week-end or so.
Here’s where the other recommended LotRO resource site becomes an absolute must on your RSS feed reader. Not only will they announce promos and discounts a bit ahead of time, but whenever there’s something on sales, they will quite often also give an appraisal of whether it’s worth the investment or not. The writers at Casual Stroll to Mordor have been around since way before LotRO became Free to Play, and their advice is always worth reading – Not just on sales, for that matter

And this concludes our first step of this new feature. Stay tuned for more in the coming days.

This was a post from Altitis.

From Azeroth to Middle Earth: Account Types and Characters

Beyond the obvious (the backstory, the major themes of the world presented to the player), a major factor of immersion for me is when the game stops being a movie theater that only plays when I’m here to witness it and starts giving the illusion of existing for its own sake.

As I recounted on a comment on Tesh’s post, when I started playing WoW in 2005, it was after spending a couple of years in FFXI. And the defining moment that put those two games apart in terms of immersion was very early on, in one of the starting zones, when I stumbled upon a wolf charging and killing a squirrel.

It was a purely gratuitous detail, but it conveyed the notion that the wolf had “other things to do” than just mill around until a player comes and kills it as part of  any “kill 10 foozles, collect its pelts” grindy quest. But it was that one single event that gave me a true impression, back in the day, that I was playing in a persistent virtual world rather than a scripted movie.

In terms of design, another element also clearly highlighted the difference in terms of immersion between both games, the reaction of NPC guards to hostile monsters. In FFXI, back in the day, for all practical purposes, guards were simply animated statues. When a newbie bit off more than he could chew in the starter zones, and started to flee, the monsters would follow through an entire zone, and if they caught up with the player while he was reaching the safety of the nearest city, the player would get slaughtered right in front of the impassible guards.

More often than not, whether by accident or (sometimes) malice, such a flight would end up gathering a whole mob of hostile monsters, and if the player made it safely to the city, they’d mill about at the gates for about half a minute before going back to their original location, attacking any player they’d come across. But the guards and the monsters never “saw” each other or reacted to the other’s presence.

In World of Warcraft, the behaviour was designed differently: Guards react to threats and will defend, if not necessarily the player, at least their post, and usually make short work of any threat coming their way. And regardless of any other qualities those two games may have, it’s such details, rather insignificant to the player’s character in the grand scheme of things, that give the world a solid, consistent texture.

We all know the popular philosophical riddle: “If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”. In terms of virtual worlds, the question becomes “If no player is in the forest, do the trees fall at all?”. The answer to that question makes a huge difference in the “texture” a designer gives its virtual world, and defines the level of immersion. For decades, computer games have been set in worlds where “no” was the standard answer. For persistent online virtual worlds, going with “yes” opens a new can of worms, to decide how far this concept can be taken. It will eventually lead to the question of how much lasting impact a player or a group of players can be allowed to have on the world. But at the most simple level, having a world that functions, with a bit of randomness thrown in for good measure, independently of the player’s presence, is part of the details that make a big difference on how it is being experienced by the player.

This was a post from Altitis.

On Immersion: Do Trees Fall in Virtual Forests when Nobody’s around?

If SW:TOR features Tatooine in any meaningful fashion (that allegedly completely backwater planet that for whatever reason has been prominently featured in every single dirt-side Star Wars game even when it makes no sense, ie KOTOR settings), in particular as a newbie zone, I’m going to totally boycott the game no matter how well it does.

In fact, in an Old Republic setting, the following Star Wars tropes and locales are going to be a definite turn-off for me:

• Kashyyk and life-debted Wookies as henchmen
• Anything Endor-related

Yes, I know that many many Star Wars fans are attached to all of these, and that BioWare as well as Obsidian have already felt that they just couldn’t do without the inclusion of the sand ball and the enslaved furballs-you-must-save so the chances that these won’t be prominently featured are near to none, but still…

BioWare is betting the farm on their storytelling. Either the dirt rock is insignificantly backwater (but will undoubtedly see a massive boost to its tourist industry once SW:TOR is released), or it is the birthplace to thousands of jedi and sith alike and George Lucas will have to re-edit his movies yet again.

Oh, and happy 2010 .

This was a post from Altitis.

SW:TOR, My Line in the Sand