Remember the first book of quests, the final one being 6.8? You had to fight your way with a party through Carn Dum and reach the Witch-king. Any party wipe would force you to start over, with respawned mobs in the way. Beating that $#! quest felt like a real accomplishment. You now zone to the throne room and can do it solo, along with all the book quests. Really took away from the game’s experience. And a direct result of going F2P.
Another aspect I disliked more than the mounted combat was the chained quest nodes. It was so formulaic and repetitive in both Rohan zones, the southern Gondor area, even the expansion pre-Rohan. Reach an NPC, do a series of quests, get a last quest that leads you to the next NPC, rinse/waste/repeat. It pulled you through the new areas, but felt artificial to me.
Anyone thinking of saving their characters, I think pretty much all the servers are transferring now. I got mine moving to Landroval.
Evernight for life!
Finally had a new stab, turns out that with all the moving about the past few months I hadn’t been ingame for 2 months :(. Probably cause my inventory was full, and my banks, and bags and whatnot… on all characters…
And the store didn’t work.
So I searched some (DuckDuckGo!), and it turned out that “google-analytics” couldn’t be blacklisted, or the IN GAME STORE wouldn’t work!..
At least I have 20 extra bag slots now, and Google got to do their data-harvesting, so I guess everybody is a winner.
Do I lose characters if I do nothing? I don’t care what server they end up on, as long as they persist.
You might have to rename, or something. You also get a free title where you can “remember your old server”. So you might be “Tylertoo from Landroval”.
What I didn’t like about that was that you could pick any server name (at least I could), which means you could pretend to be someone from a server you didn’t play on (!!, I know)
They claim no, but who knows? They’ll become unavailable to play with after the new year, but you should be able to still migrate them.
I’ve been saying this exact same thing for years. WoW actually started this ball rolling by making the game so solo friendly, even right at the start of WoW, it’s now 10 fold that.
MMO developers have dug their own graves by making these games solo friendly, and caving into the constant whine of players to make their games easier and more accessible. Most people need to be forced to group, and end up making friendships in spite of themselves. The friendships are what creates retention, without that, it’s just a boring treadmill that gets old quick if you’re solo.
If I was going to make an MMO right now, I’d make it brutally hard, to the point where you had to group to get anything done. It’s the one thing no one has actually done. Every MMO that gets release gets easier and easier to solo in, and the decline just speeds up. You’d think by now someone would have figured this out.
Everquest was brutally hard and you needed a group to get anything done.
You could solo, but it was very hard.
I have no need to return to that kind of evil.
You tended to stand around trying to find groups because you can’t fight anything alone (anything meaning full. Could kill grey cons all day).
EQ is a bit less brutal now, and a bit more solo friendly.
EQ was a masochistic grind-fest and I’m glad it never became as popular as WOW did as it would validate their sadistic design choices.
That said, there is probably a much bigger market for that kind of games, now with DayZ etc.
LOTRO was also a bit heavy on the “forced-group” content, in so much that at the start I almost stopped leveling around 35 or so, until I found a group of 3 other people to group with every day, so we quickly hit 50 together. All the group and solo friendly content and design decisions they have since added to LOTRO has really improved the game. Even if I had just something like 10-20 minutes I would be able to login and do a quick skirmish or something to get ‘stuff done’.
That said; The biggest problem LOTRO has (in my opinion) is the number of items you can loot, task items and whatnot, taking up so much bag space. But I bet their biggest $ revenue outside of Quest/Areas is for bag space.
Looking forward to seeing a lot of new people on my server.
Daagar
2830
Wasn’t Wildstar the modern interpretation of this (Everquest rightly being the first)? And it didn’t pan out. There is a market for brutal hard MMOs of this nature, but it isn’t a big market (not big enough to sustain an AAA title). And among that niche crowed, they still seem to prefer EQ as the gold standard. Project 1999 is doing quite well for what it is.
Wildstar has always been pretty easy, as far as I know? I don’t think an MMO like what I’m proposing would be a big hit out of the blocks, but I do think it would have legs, and have growth over the long run, as you’d have actual player retention.
/shrug. Everyone and their brother has tried to release an MMO as casual friendly as possible, and all of them have failed. Maybe it’s time to try something different. I’m of the opinion that players don’t actually know what’s good for them, and will always whine for the easiest road possible, even to the detriment of their involvement and satisfaction concerning the game. To be sure, it wouldn’t be for everyone, but I would bet people would be surprised at how successful it was. The only way to build value in a made up universe where nothing is real, is to make things difficult to get. The easier something is to get, the less value it has, pretty simple.
If you made EQ more or less at it’s release state, with modern graphics, I’ll bet it would be a big hit. There are some quality of life things you can include, UI improvements etc, but the core gameplay of needing to rely on other people is what’s missing from every modern MMO.
I just started, so I can’t say for sure, but I’ve heard tell that it gets pretty brutal at endgame. That’s kind of why I want to try and get there. I’m pretty tired of easy solo MMOs as well. I liked em more when they were difficult.
DTG
2833
I’m moving my characters from Nimrodel tonight. Even though I haven’t played the game in over a year, I was a constant player up until then for a few years. I plan on returning some day (I have kept up my $100/year VIP sub).
I may never go back big-time, but this was the best MMO I ever played (vs. a few years on original UO and WoW). It was HARD when it first came out. I somewhat agree that it went too solo-friendly. When I started playing soon after release, groups were needed for many landscape quests, not just epic ones. But I appreciated the change after a while as my time became more limited (although I do miss fog-of-war on the maps). To me it’s as much a story-based single-player game as an MMO…a single-player game with a vast amount of content. These types of games just won’t survive at all if they REQUIRE group play, “MMO” description notwithstanding.
Moved to Gladden.
[edit] - and oh boy, 6 or so years of stuff from lvl 65 to 95 characters seems to probably be all there, but it’s all jumbled in different boxes. I managed to re-buy the same personal and kin houses (in a different neighborhood), but LOTRO will be an inventory-sorting game for me for a while. It doesn’t help that I haven’t played for so long. What the heck ARE some of these things ? :)
Maybe I’ll just start a new character along with my daughter and mine my jumbled mess of inventory for useful stuff as I need it.
Moved from Firefoot to Arkenstone the other day. Poked around in the server forums a bit and seemed a good fit.
Might try an instance if the population and community are worth the hassle - its been a while since I grouped in the game, and I haven’t check the world chat yet. It’s more of a lazy evening after a long day of work sort of a game for me, and I don’t mind if it’s gone more solo-able and casual over the years.
Does it cost you turbine points to migrate? I think it used to, but I hope with servers closing it’s now free.
Requested the move from Nimrodel to Arkenstone last night. Should be interesting to have all my characters together for the first time. I had a 55 Guardian on Arkenstone that was my first ever LOTRO character I started the month Shadows of Angmar (base game) was released. I played for over a year with several members of the old Everquest guild I belonged to years before, and we had a blast. Everyone sort of trailed off after that, and then Tom and some others here on QT3 decided to start over one night with a new guild on Nimrodel and I jumped in, and have resided on Nimrodel ever since (though haven’t played regularly in a long long time).
I think I will try to login at some point this weekend and play the inventory sorting and skill reassigning game DTG mentioned. Every time I come back to LOTRO it seems like I spend my first couple of nights figuring out what the hall happened since last time I was online!
It’s free. In your server world select screen there is a big shiny TRANSFER button. That kicks off a wizard that walks you through the process. You pick the server you are migrating FROM, then choose some or all of your characters on that server, then choose the server you want them migrated TO and it kicks off the process. It does lock your account for up to 6 hours while it migrates to avoid any mishaps, so best to do it at the end of a play session and let it migrate overnight.
I thought it was a really nice feature that you could move individual characters to different serves if you wanted, along with shared storage. While I just dumped all my characters to Arkenstone, it was really cool to have that option if I wanted it.
Thanks, Slainte, for the explanation. I’ll try that tonight.
I haven’t played in so long. Shiny new games keep coming along.
Timex
2839
Hey folks, I heard that they are shutting down some servers so characters need to move or something?
Does anyone know if I need to do anything if my character is on one of those servers being shut down, or will it be automatically migrated? Or can I just migrate it whenever I want later on?
I ask because I haven’t played this game for years, but I enjoyed it a lot and have a character that I started way back in the beta. I actually bought a lifetime sub way back in the day. I wouldn’t want to just lose my character if I can help it.
biosc1
2840
They are not actually shutting down until somepoint next year. I’m pretty sure they will ‘store’ your character if you don’t log in for a while. The transfer process is pretty easy (the only thing not transferred are items in the mail, so detach those first). Click Transfer when you log in, choose the server (I went with Landroval RE from Firefoot) and go.
Of course I logged in to do the transfer and have now added about 20-30 hours of gameplay in the last couple of weeks…stupid thing has its hooks in me again ;)
