I’m hoping they eventually go the WoW route, where you can use whatever mount model with the stats of the best you’ve unlocked. It’s pretty hard to switch off a 168-250 horse.
(The horse was pretty much a freebie-I logged in after not playing for 6 months, and instantly completed a meta deed they’d added.)
DT1
1962
I see your poopsock and I raise you an isolation box.
Starting on July 7, Long will be confined to a small wooden box as he is shipped from Bald Knob, Arkansas to Portland, Oregon. The 7-day trip will top 2,100 miles, and all the while, Long’s only contact with the outside world will be through Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), a massively multiplayer online game.
Being unable to unsocket relics from LIs without buying something on teh Store that costs 195 points is a pretty shitty change on Turbine’s part.
You still get a free unsocket at the reforging times though right?
Nope, they’re stuck in forever now.
I haven’t played the game in months and decided to push my 63.5 burg to 65th this past weekend. So I played a few hours Sat and some more Sun, and it was the 2nd day I discovered while reforging my lvl 63 dagger that the box for resetting relics was missing. I asked in glff and learned about the Store item that removes them. Sure, as a VIP I get 500 pts per month, but previously the game never forced me to use the Store like this, and who wants to run around with no relics while levelling a LI to 60 or 70?
Wow. Just… Wow. That’s pretty shitty. Okay very shitty.
It bothers me less than the stat tomes (which are technically available in game, but the drop rate is so low it’s basically a lie), but the F2P store is very much pay to win. Fortunately the game is easy enough that you can still win without the pay part.
However
- as expected, they continue to add really grindy game elements to force people to the store and
- a lot of store advantage items give pvp advantage
I also hate how many things they unlock at a character level, rather than account.
Marcus
1970
Well I just have to say that their phone support is awesome. I had an issue with my account and I was able to find the phone number to turbine easily on their site and everything was taken care of very quickly.
That’s pretty much my reaction. I haven’t touched the game since learning that this week.
Aren’t the stat books maxed at 5 per stat? That’s a lot of store points for not a lot of gain (at least that I’ve noticed), but I’m sure there are people buying 25 of them per toon. Man, that’s a lot of money per toon if people are going crazy with it.
5 per stat, for a 50 point increase per stat. It’s like having a couple extra jewelry slots if you buy them all. Costs about 50 bucks to apply all of them to a single toon. It’s mostly offensive because Turbine pretends they’re available in game, when, from a practical perspective, they are not. The actual performance boost is fairly minimal.
If you want to see the biggest performance boost it’s the store exclusive potions, about which few people seem to complain. Those things ARE consumable iwin buttons.
Ow. Woah. I’ve been a LOTRO supporter for a long time, and the F2P stuff hasn’t bothered me, but between naked cash grabs like this and the amount of grind it’s taking to get my Guard from 54 -> 55 the shine is wearing off pretty quick.
Grinding out relics is at least a lot faster now. A LOT faster. However, for some classes, the best in slot relics are no longer creatable, so you’re more or less forced to buy scrolls if you want to keep your best in slot relics.
StGabe
1975
How so? I got on this weekend to play a bit with some of the latest content (working on my Sailor’s Charm) and I saw a lot of changes but didn’t notice any increases in relic rates.
They cap out at Tier 6 now, and you can create specific ones you need.
I didn’t even notice that. Wow, so wtf happened to those tier 9s my hunter had on his bow? Shit, now I gotta log on and go see what Turbine did to my toon.
Really gotten back into the swing of things now! Did 3 kindred reputations past 2 nights, and working my way through Book 1 =) Biggest issue (as always) is that some of the fellowship quests are pretty much impossible to solo, even though you are 6 levels above the boss you are fighting. I guess I’ll have to go do some more Skirmishes to level my weapons to 20 (18 now) so I can get more dps out of them, and, well, Then there is the summer festival, so I need to do that, and then there are all the missing achievements that must be completed… There isn’t enough time in the day.
I have found that LOTRO at times has a VERY poor sound environment, for instance; when I am in Moria and there are NO Ambient sounds and NO background music playing. The atmosphere isn’t even tense, or “Explorative”… its just… Silent as a tomb. Sure, sometimes that is what you might aim for, but I feel that Turbine could have gotten a hint from Funcom’s Anarchy Online with their Sort-of-kinda-Dynamic Music. I still remember when I walked up to the first vista and as if, on queue, a piece of music started playing that fit with the scene wonderfully… From my years of playing LOTRO (2007+?) I can not recall a single instance of something similar… Eventually I just muted the game sounds and put on some Ambient background music in Winamp.
Another minor annoyance is that I didn’t level my BUR higher in PVP when I was level 50… (PVP Rank 5, and a few hundered points short of Rank 6, with a rating of 1934.) Now that I am 56 I can see that there is a lot of Rank 2-6 year available through 57-65… but I will be unable to get any of the rank 6 gear until I am 65 and can do PVP again. Hopefully they haven’t bumped it to 75 at that point, so I can actually get some equipment.
Also found nice bug with the plugin system. I couldn’t understand why none of my plugins worked except the first time I played, but digging through the .plugindata files, I noticed that, thanks to EU/US decimal delimitations, the game messes up when it stores the user profile data. As it for some reasons stores values as “1,00000” but the game client expects “1.00000”. So its either rewrite all the addons and possibly turbines functions, or run a script that replaces every occurance of “,000000” with “.000000” each time I start the game… Big fail.
You might want to adjust your audio settings. The recent updates really made changes to sound levels in the game. I logged in this weekend and couldn’t hear a thing, cranked my headset up to its max and could barely hear music at the character select screen.
Well, its not the low volume on some sounds, its the total lack of. I.e. at times you can hear ambient sounds such as wind blowing, or just “deep cave sounds” kinda like in the movies. Or a piece of music playing. But at other times the game is just dead silent except for my footsteps and combat sounds. I guess that Microsoft DirectMusic never took off ;)
But, thanks for the suggestion anyway, I’ll try to reset all my audio settings and see if it improves stuff. I sort of reset it when I changed from my Realtek to ATI HDMI for sound output, but I suppose its best to go into the configuration file and purge it with fire.
