What Does LOTRO Need?

Yesterday Massively OP reported that Standing Stone/Daybreak/Enad Global 7 had announced a new expansion bundle for Lord of the Rings Online which allows one to purchase the six expansions between the base game and the current War of Three Peaks expansion for one… price…. that is lower than buying all of them individually.

The headline at Massively OP declared that the bundle “smashes its huge barrier to entry,” a suggestion that made me grimace.

The LOTRO Expansion Trove if you’re were interested

While not exactly a “people aren’t wearing enough hats” level of analysis, if I were to make a ranked list of problems that keep people from playing the game, buying all the expansions would be far down the list, as it is something I suspect never becomes an issue for the vast majority of the people who bother trying the game.

The problem there is that, as with my list about EVE Online from a few years back, there are lot of things that are simply outside of the scope of reality to address.

Yes, thanks to EG7 giving us a peek behind the curtains, we know that LOTRO is a viable, money making concern, but its income is more in the range of “sustain the status quo” rather than “rebuild and revamp.”

Page 15 – Year to Date numbers as of Sep. 30, 2020

That number is only through Q3 2020, so we might be able to assume that the game brings in maybe $13 million a year.  That is sustainable, but there is no bonaza of cash for updates in that number, and it falls well short of the estimated $100 million the game was reported to have made back in 2013.

I was honestly a bit surprised when SSG decided to upgrade the client to 64-bit, though that was more of a long term survival plan than something that would make things better.  At some point in the not too distant future Windows will stop supporting 32-bit apps, so better to get that done before it is a critical item for survival.  Certainly that move did not improve the client’s actual behavior in any noticeable way.

And I fear that anybody who is holding out hope now that EG7 is running the show that they will pour a bunch of money into the game is going to be disappointed.  The idea of there being a console version seems so far from reality that the only answer could be a completely new game build for modern consoles, which would leave the current game out in the cold.

So LOTRO is likely going to stay pretty much as is, a cranky old fantasy MMORPG from 2007 with a difficult to read UI (at just HD resolutions, don’t get me started on how it looks on my new monitor) and a lot of mindless repetitive game play.  Has anybody ever counted how many bears, board, and wolves you slay following the quest chains to level cap?

What can they do?

They are stuck because at their current revenue they clearly cannot make any large changes to the game.  And they are even more restricted than some comparable MMORPGs because they have to stick with approved Tolkien lore and have a game that tells a linear story so the expansions are not independent.  EQ could copy Blizzard’s parallel expansions idea is they had the mind and the budget, but would LOTRO be allowed to even tinker with having Moria and Rohan as parallel experiences on the way to Mordor?

The EQ version would have 26 parallels

Without something dramatic… and I have my doubts about what would even qualify… making money off of new players seems unlikely, so they’re left with the MMORPG standard policy of farming the installed base.

One way to do that is via expansions.

The SSG team can’t simply crank out more expansions for revenue.  I mean, the are trying, but they have trouble keeping up their current pace, have made some customers wary due to lightness of the Battle of Three Peaks expansion, and they’re running out of places to expand into in any case.  They do have another expansion coming this year, but the next thing needs to be in planning.

The other way to farm the installed base is special servers.  LOTRO has played this card once already, and successfully so far as I can tell, with the LOTRO Legendary server of late 2018.

They can always just play that card again.  I am sure there would be a decent response to a fresh start.  But if they want something different, I have an idea.

I’m grabbing this idea from something Star Wars: The Old Republic did a few years back.

I call this the LOTRO Epic Storyline server.

Turn off the side quests… if possible… and tune the xp output/curve so that players can level up through the story just running the epic quest line.

Maybe you don’t even need a special server for that.  Maybe you just have players buy a token for a character on a live server that boosts xp for the epic quest line.  It would be a nice way to catch up and get past some of the less inspired content that lays astride the path to level cap. (Looking at you Siege of Mirkwood.)

There are problems to be solved with the idea.  You would have to have a mechanism to keep player gear up to level along the way.  And then there are the special mechanics like legendary weapons or mounted combat that players would need to be guided through.

But it seems like a possible, reduced if not low effort way to attract some players and boost revenue a bit.

Or is there something else they can do?

Addendum: I mean, besides irritating their installed base by making the awful legendary system even worse.

Leveling up Your Crafting Without Actually Crafting

Another one of those EverQuest II posts.  This time I ramble on about crafting.

Crafting has changed over the years in EQII, and the best route for leveling up your crafting as much as anything.

As with my running off at the keyboard about gear the other day, I want to start off with how crafting in EQII differs from WoW.

But there is a twist this time.  WoW crafting is very much the child of crafting in EverQuest, with skill points you get by crafting and recipes going gray and not giving skill ups after a while and all of that.  The WoW version of this was much streamlined from EQ, and took something of a departure in how much stuff any particular trade would let you craft.  You cannot/could not outfit yourself fully at any point when crafting in WoW.  You could sort of manage that with EQ, but I am not sure it was worth the effort, at least back in the early days.

EQII took a completely different tack on the crafting idea which stems, as I understand it, from a plan at one point to make crafting a parallel character class to the adventure classes.  I think Kendricke mentioned that once or twice in comments here back in the day.  (I wonder where he ended up.  Also, I found the comment on this post, where I was writing about crafting gripes back in 2007.)

While that idea got ditched at some point in beta, the basic structure of crafting was set and crafting had levels the way adventure classes had levels.  This led to some odd situations, since either your adventure level or your crafting level seemed good enough to unlock level gated content.  I recall figuring out quite by accident that I could get to The Enchanted Lands or Zek with my level 25 templar because he was already a level 35 alchemist.  Of course, I only figured that out after the guild got out and helped me do the access quest for Zek, but that is the way these things go.

Anyway, the evolution of crafting in EQII.  Back in the early days you leveled up by grinding away.  But there was lots of grinding to be done as getting to a finished product required you to start with raw materials and then go through several stages of production.  And there was the whole interdependence thing where to get to a finished product you needed something from one of the other crafting professions… unless you were an alchemist or a provisioner.

Fortunately I went down the alchemist path, so my various products… inks and washes and whatever else… were in high demand, at least from my guild mates.  This is how my crafting level got well ahead of my adventure level early on.  Higher level guildies would go out and harvest the stuff I needed to keep going if I would just stay in the crafting hall and crank out what they or their alts needed.

At some point along the way the concept of “vitality” was introduced.  This was/is essentially the EQII version of WoW rested experience or “blue bar.”  SOE wisely waited until Blizz changed the perspective from a penalty on people for playing too much to a bonus for people who were had been away before copying the idea.  Having that sped things up a bit, especially if you were an obsessive like me and have a trade skill going on each of your characters.  You could optimize by rotating to the character with the most vitality.

Meanwhile, crafting when through some convulsions as SOE first added auxiliary trade skills that let people craft their own secondary parts from other professions and then just did away with the idea of interdependence altogether, revamping the materials needed for recipes, removing intermediate production stages, killing off the quality levels in production, and somewhat simplifying the whole range of harvestables.

At the end of all of that you could just harvest some raw materiel, buy the fuel required, and craft a finished item in one go.  While people still moan about the removal of crafting interdependence, being able to just make stuff in one pass felt pretty damn good.  Your pet theories about complex cross-profession crafting can suck it.

You still leveled up the same way, though somewhere in the mix we got a new benefit.  We got some super bonus experience for the first time we crafted a particular recipe.  So leveling up your crafting profession began to involve crafting one of every single recipe in every level you unlocked… ideally while you had a good portion of vitality running… to move yourself along.

And then that first time bonus went away.  I don’t recall why, though I seem to associate it in the back of my brain with the return of Domino to the EQII crafting team and another round of changes overall.  It may have been a balance or fairness thing… some professions get a lot more new recipes per level than others… or it might have simply been to contain recipe profusion.

As a replacement we got crafting writs.

Crafting writs are small crafting quests that cover your fuel costs, take your crafting output, and gives you a small monetary award, some bonus crafting experience, and some status.

Level 87 provisioner writ

It was a decent system.  With your vitality full you could get a couple of crafting levels with five or six writs.

That gets us up to about the EverQuest II Extended era and the experiment of trying to bring the instance group to Norrath.  The former worked out well for SOE, while the latter was something of a fiasco.  We made a guild, which persists to this day (there is likely a “joys of having a guild hall” post in me somewhere) and worked on crafting, but the game still didn’t stick with group.  But while we were there a bunch of work went into leveling up the guild, a lot of it via Gaff doing trade skill writs. Between those and some heritage quests done as group efforts, we got the guild to level 40.

A cut from the guild event log…

That is about where my knowledge of crafting stayed.  It was 2011, the level cap was 90, and I only played sporadically after that, coming back for brief visits every year or two.  Writs worked okay once the level cap went to 95 and were even still viable, if a bit slow, when the cap hit 100.  But from level 100 onward the xp slope went way up and writ rewards took a big hit.

Level 106 armor writ… not much status…

You theoretically could use writs, but the xp ramp up was so big… as it was with adventure xp… that just crafting or doing writs would be a very long road forward.  The company clearly wanted to push people away from that. (All of those 100% bonus to adventure and trade xp potions I have in the bank are now useless.  I saved them until they had no value at all.)

That is where I had to go back and learn about the now standard trade skill quest line that comes with each expansion.  I first ran into this in the Tranquil Sea, which I believe came in with the Altar of Malice expansion.

Reward from the FSTC… that effect is useless now as well…

I did the trade skill quest line for the Terrors of Thalumbra expansion with Sigwerd as part of trying to get languages and past expansion pre-requisites setup to unlock more current content and get access to ascension levels to help me in the Plane of Magic.

That set and the Plane of Magic signature quest line done, I found myself at level 110 for adventure levels, so decided to pursue the trade skill quest line as well.

This was an odd diversion, in part because it looks like a adventure/combat series of quests at time, but it most assuredly is not.  I quickly learned that no matter how green the mobs looked to me, they are meant to be avoided and not fought.  They cannot be defeated except through special means that are part of the quest lines.

It sure looks like I could beat him…

It is, I suspect, meant to be level independent.  I am not sure I would want to try it with a really low level character, but in the instances your mercenary is removed and you are not expected to fight. (EQII remains inconsistent in telling you how tough a mob is even in their over-wrought, too much detail consider system.)

Also, aspects of it are kind of expensive.  The end of the quest line in the Plane of Magic requires six rare harvest items and, while you could hang out and harvest them yourself, that might take quite a while.

That pricey final combine

Also, you really need to know about what the quest lines require in advance to not spend a lot of time running back and forth.  At points there  will be items to harvest in the quest instances or you will need a special fuel that you can only find there.  But at other times you will need a pile of raw materials and fuel with you.  And it can be critical that you have it all.  At one point I was most of the way through an instance on Luclin, but forgot one of the raws I needed, so ended up engaged in the quest but without the sprayer I needed to engage the next two mobs in the instance.

I recalled back home, got the items, but then found that the quest was stuck in place, so I had to delete it and start it over again.  However, on the second run I was now out of materials to make the first item.  I already had it though, so could get to the two mobs and spray them, but the quest wouldn’t advance because it hadn’t recognized that I had made the first item.  So I recalled again, got fresh supplies, deleted everything, went back in the instance, made both items, got to the two mobs… and found that since I had already sprayed them they were now in the state for the next part of the quest, but I couldn’t advance the quest because I could no longer spray them.

So I left again, but I couldn’t reset the instance until the next day for whatever reason, at which point I ran through it again and got it right.

Some of you may know where I am

But I seriously suggest you go to the wiki and come prepared with all the stuff you need, because the quest chains can be a bit brittle.  The wiki even warns you now and again to bring double portions for this stage or that because of known issues.

Anyway, I have managed to run through the Plane of Magic and Luclin trade skill quest lines twice now, so have two characters at max level for their respective professions.

The kicker is, and this wraps us back around to the title of the post, at no time during my advancement through 20 levels of trade skills did I actually need to craft anything that was related to either profession.  I have a max level armorer and woodworker.  Not once were the skills for either needed.

That makes some sense.  These quests are for ALL professions and, as such, when you do craft… and you actually do craft some things now and then… you end up using a set of independent reaction skills with icons borrowed from other skills in order to make required items.

These are not my skill icons

This means that now, at level 120, my actual crafting skills are still where they were when I was at level 100.  EQII still has skills that need to be raised up through usage, going up five points every level, which was never a problem when we were banging out a few writs per level.  You can get those five points in two runs if you work at it.

Now though my skills are all at 500, but the skill cap for 120 is 600.  I am going to have to crafts a lot of stuff to bring those up to spec… or not.  I am not sure they matter all that much beyond a certain point.

So the way all this works in EQII is… as I keep saying… different.  It is not necessarily bad… I am pretty sure running the trade skill quests that come with each expansion now is more fun than grinding out writs or what not… but I did advance 20 levels as an armorer without needing to make a single item of armor.  I feel like I got my armorer’s GED or something.

Anyway, I keep going.  With two players at the level cap I now have a 40% veteran’s bonus for trade skills… which probably does me zero good for levels 100 to 120, but I have a couple of alts at lower levels, down where writs still mean something and crafting xp isn’t meaningless, that might benefit.

Bhagpuss posted his own bit of reflection on the state of crafting in EQII, which overlaps a bit with my own, but not that much.  I was already well past the 1,500 word mark when it was posted, so his chances of influencing or attenuating my output was minimal.

Will That be the Last Stick for Me?

There was a ping to go shoot a player owned starbase, a POS.  It was an NCDot tower over on the edge of Pandemic Horde space.  It wasn’t even fueled, so it was an easy kill… we just needed to be a bit patient.  It was a full sized Minmatar tower… as opposed to a medium or a small… so there were a lot of hit points to chop through to get the kill.  But unfueld meant none of the defenses were operating.

So off we went to shoot the stick, the tower that is the core of any POS.

Dramatic stick shooting screen shot

And as we calmly orbited this unresisting target I wondered if this would be my last POS shoot.

I have been on many POS shoots over the years.  One of the assignments for Reavers back in the day was to sit behind enemy lines and shoot their structures.  That was a time when SBUs and POSes counted for most of the options.

Now though, now the once common POS is slowly fading from New Eden.  The Onslaught expansion for EVE Online brought in new Upwell navigation structures to replace the last bit of practical POS functionality.  Two weeks later they turned off that functionality for POSes and they became little more than hungry safe bubbles in space.

So now I wonder that every time we shoot a POS, if that particular one will be the last one I shoot.  At some point, likely this year, CCP will remove them from the game and they will be no more.  So with each monthly update I look for signs that the end is nigh.

Not that the POS has disappeared from New Eden yet.  There were lots of them out there.  Over at zKillboard you can see a few get blown up every day.  But with Upwell structures they have started to be slowly abandoned.  Our unfueled friend was one of those, left in space, not worth the effort to keep running or retrieve.

So we shot it until it blew up, then shot the modules for good measure.

Tower brewing up

And so that became the latest POS I shot and, perhaps, the last POS.  I won’t know unless we find another one.

Happy Fifteenth Trogday

It was 15 years ago today, over at Homestar Runner, that Strong Bad email #58 introduced the character of Trogdor the Burninator.

The Homestar Cast

Back in those days, before YouTube was a thing, the now dying and soon to be dead Flash format was all the rage and the whole Homestar Runner site was created in it.  Now you have likely have to activate the Flash plug-in to see any of that and probably cannot see it at all on your mobile device.

But back then, in the dark days before YouTube, Flash was the shit for movies and games on the web.

Fortunately the Homestar team has moved much of their work over to YouTube, including Strong Bad #58.  (They also still produce new content, like the latest entry in the Dangeresque series.)

Now you too will be able to draw a dragon.

In celebration I am wearing my now somewhat aged Trogdor T-shirt today.  Meanwhile the Brothers Chap have converted the Trogdor Flash game over to HTML 5 so you can give that a try.

For those too young or who missed it back in the day, the Homestar Runner Wikipedia entry… or the Homestar Runner Wiki, because the internet will obsess about anything and everything… are there to aid your journey.

And if you are in or around Decatur, Georgia today there is an event to celebrate Trogday.

ATL fans! In honor of Trogdor's 15th Trogday, come out to the Wild Heaven Brewery (@BeerWildHeaven) in Avondale Estates this Saturday from 1-3pm! Have some cold ones and BECOME the burninator's beefy arm or his flaming peasant victim! http://pic.twitter.com/fwDEWsgroi

— Strong Bad (@StrongBadActual) January 10, 2018

Keep on burninating!

Would You Rather Fight Than Switch?

We got all sorts of new information about the upcoming Nintendo Switch console yesterday including price ($300), launch date (March 3rd), region locking (none), and that you can pre-order RIGHT NOW!

And of course there will be Mario Kart

Every gaming news sight worth that title has some sort of story up about Nintendo’s new console today, with more to follow as demos commence.  This is the moment we have been waiting for since the initial announcement back in October.

I have to admit I like the Switch on paper at least.  I like the size, the light weight design, the mobility, and the built-in screen that makes it a portable.  The latter is important in a one TV household.

Oddly, one feature that drew my attention is the ability to take a screen shot of game play.  As a blogger who charts his gaming journey through his writing, the ability to set a scene with a screen shot rather than the MS Paint that are my words has direct appeal.  Not sure that is a tipping point level feature, but it is interesting.

And then there is the price.  $300 seems like a good compromise price.  I think at $250 it would be a no-brainer purchase for people and that at the $350 mark that was rumored just before the announcement the Switch started to creep too close to XBox and PS4 territory so that you might have to start considering is games exclusive to the Switch would be worth the commitment.  But at $300 it is just far enough away that it can fall into the impulse purchase zone for some.

On the flip side, I am not really a console gamer.  We got a Wii back in 2007 and I picked up a PlayStation 3 in 2011 after the prices had gone way down.  The Wii got a LOT of play at our house.  My daughter and I used to play games on the Wii every weekend for hours and hours.

However, my daughter was 5 years old when we got the Wii and would wake me up early on Saturday morning so we could start playing.  Now she is 15, I am not sure she has seen a Saturday morning before 10am lately, and if she wants me to do anything with her on the weekend it is to teach her to drive so she can get her license in a year.

Meanwhile the PlayStation 3 has been mostly a video playing device since we bought it.  My daughter did enjoy Little Big Planet, but after that wore off it has been more about Netflix and Amazon Prime.  We could replace it with a Roku box if it wasn’t for the fact that it is also our Blu-Ray player.

And the last console I owned before those two was a SEGA Genesis back in 1992.  And the console before that was an Atari 2600 way back in 1977.  I’ve been a PC gamer since 1983 and online since 1986.  I never had a NES or a SNES or an N64, so lack any Mario nostalgia.  My Nintendo franchise of choice is Pokemon, which probably explains why we have more DS series handhelds (2x DS Lite, 1x DSi, 1x DSi XL, 2x 3DS XL) sitting around the house than the count of living room consoles systems I have ever owned.

So for me, while I like the idea of the Switch, I haven’t seen anything compelling that makes me want to run out and pre-order today.  $300 isn’t a bad price, but that same $300 would go a long ways towards replacing my 14 year old Dell 1600×1200 monitor with something bigger and better, which would have a much greater impact on my gaming… and would probably also require me to upgrade my video card.

That is where I stand.  I like the Switch.  At this point in time, if I was going to buy a living room console, the Switch would be a serious contender.  But there isn’t enough there yet to make it an automatic purchase.  It seems fresher than the Sony and Microsoft offerings, but it isn’t as magical as the Wii seemed back in 2006.

How about you and the Switch?  Any interest?  Time for a poll?

If the poll above doesn’t appear for you, there are always the comments below.