Category: MMO

Because of my recent playing of CoX, and chit-chat with Margie, I found this set of lists slowly growing, so I thought I’d toss them out there. Your mileate will almost cetainly vary.

Comparison caveats:

• I’ve played a lot less LotRO than CoX. I’ve only gotten up to the mid-20s with my highest on the former, vs. running two toons to 50 on the latter. So my full experience with LotRO is a bit limited in comparison, and CoX is the “baseline” against which I judge.
• I am a huge LotR/Tolkien fan — not quite as fanatical as I was back in high school or college, but still madly in love with the Rings Trilogy.
• I play LotRO mostly duoing with Margie.

Things I like about LotRO (particularly in comparison to CoX).

1. The scenery. The exteriors are just incredibly gorgeous, imaginatively but effectively evocative of Tolkien’s books, but further fleshed out. The interiors aren’t shabby, either. The world and environment have been lovingly crafted, and is the real star of the game.
2. The epic, heroic story line. Part of that is the books, but the game has done a lot to incorporate that without getting players too on-stage for the books’ tale. When LotRO is being heroic, it’s great. 
3. Mission variety. Margie disagrees (or, rather, seems to think it’s a wash), but I feel like CoX has a much more limited number of sets (interior/exterior) and mission types than LotRO. Maybe it’s the ability to take multiple missions at the same time, or the lush scenery that they take place in.
4. More shops. You can sell stuff practically anywhere to anyone, rather than spending a lot of time jumping around town to get to the one Nat Store when you’re in Indepndence Port.
5. I love time-not-logged-in credit on experience for characters. 
6. I think I prefer the “Defeated, a Bit Worse for the Wear” mechanic of LotRO to the “Back to the Hospital, gaining experience more slowly” mechanic of CoX. 
7. The PUG/LFF/general chat environment seems a bit more positive than CoX.
8. The crafting ingredients, so to speak — the stuff you pick up to do things — tend to be more controllable and makes more sense than the crafting system grafted onto CoX. Heck, the whole Inspiration bit always seemed a bit lame (“Wait, are these actually little pills, or concepts, or karma points, or what?”). And the who-remembers-their-names origin-specific DO/SO stuff is either underplayed (no actual game effect) or too complicated (trying to pick things out from the stores) for CoX’s own good.
9. The general mechanisms around buying/selling/crafting — recipes and loot and auction houses and crafting halls and sellers — and the interfaces to them are, by and large, quite a bit easier to use in LotRO than in CoX. While I feel like it’s still a huge time sink in LotRO, it’s a lot easier to figure out what something is worth, and a tad easier to figure out if you should sell it or auction it, in LotRO.   And while I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time running around in Bree between Craft and Auction Houses, it’s trivial compared to even the most convenient of setups in CoX (i.e., Steel Canyon, where the University (crafting), Wentworths (auction), two stores and a variety of contacts, plus the Vault, are all within a relatively easy distance (except you need a travel power to make it such), and I still end up spending several orders of inordinate time making it work. 
10. I like that you can take a large number of missions in LotRO, and that world tends to send you to clusters of missions — rather than the Steel/Skyway or Talos/IP shuffle, for example.
11. I like that you can see what level you are at all times.
12. I like that there’s no kill-stealing in LotRO.
13. It may be because of the preponderance of outside zones, but the distribution of bad guys (plus their “wandering”) feels more organic and natural than, say, CoX’s standard spawn points within each interior map and standard spawn groups for each type of foe. Plus it’s believable that there’s hostile wildlife all over the place, except for pockets of habitation (towns, camps, lairs, etc.) — while it’s not believable that the whole of Paragon City is actually overrun by street thugs and crime gangs.
14. I love that auction results are mailed to you, rather than having to revisit the auction house.
15. I love that you can send stuff (money, items, raw materials) to your other alts.

Things I dislike about LotRO (particularly in comparison to CoX).

1. The teeny-tiny freaking radar/map. It’s smaller than it should be by an order of magnitude. The amount of time one has to spend popping back and forth to the “big map” is proof of that. I don’t expect an entire CoX zone map, but something bigger would be very nice.
2. Too many missions that, well, aren’t heroic. “Can you go run back and tell Fred that I have the money I owe him?” Dammit, Jim, I’m an immortal elf huntress from Lothlorien, not an errand boy!
3. Too many suicidal NPCs, esp. of the type where you go and rescue them and they wander around, blundering into every bad guy in the immediate area. Granted, CoX had a few of these with the more recent issues (waves at Fusionette), but not to this frustrating extent. Too many cases where I just throw up my hands and say, “Screw it — let the orcs have him.” On the other hand, CoX has a lot more static NPCs (never-ending purse tug-o-war, police perma-cringing from gang members), and more mute NPCs (the perma-cringing cops are more vocally thankful for help than the AI cops you help against the AI villains in the newer zones).
4. Running around. Yes, the game compensates for it some (clustered missions, compressed distances, horses/stables), but CoX travel powers just simply rock. (I’m not sure how LotRO could get around this given the setting, though.)
5. Limited character options. I’ve only gotten into the mid-twenties with one set, and into the teens with another couple of toons, but I feel I’ve now “done” half the archetypes and most of the races. One elf hunter is a lot like another, it seems (heck, two hunters are pretty close, once you’re in the same territory). Yes, there can be subtle differences depending on traits, professions. etc., but those differences are trivial compared to what you can do in CoX with its plethora (and growing) of primary and secondary powers, a larger set of archetypes (if you consider CoV), and much more interesting cosmetic effects (character design). 
6. Limited storyline options. Within the caveats of the limited experience above, it feels in LotRO that “journey” for any given character is going to have much less variation than CoX, limiting replayability.
7. More logistical busy-work. I loathe encumbrance rules in any game. And between profession “hunting” and looting and selling and auctioning and crafting, it seems fairly easy to spend at least a third of your time or more doing stuff other than thwomping orcs. And, as far as I can tell, it’s really pretty much necessary to do so in LotRO (vs. CoX, where the crafting stuff was grafted on relatively recently, and theoritically is still fully optional).
8. Squishy characters. LotRO characters may be heroic, but they are easily overcome by numbers (or, rather, more easily than CoX characters).
9. What level am I? I know what level it says — but did I level since I last visited a trainer?  I know there must be an easy way to determine whether you’ve gone and leveled, but I haven’t found it.
10. I think I prefer the instanced mission arrangement of CoX to the common zones of LotRO, where other heroes might be running past picking up your treasure, making you wait for re-spawns (or letting you slip past without opposition), etc. It’s a bit of a toss-up, though.
11. Tell me again why I’m collecting Neeker-Breeker Wing Slime? And why someone will pay for it? And why I care
12. I miss @names. I like being able to globally hook up with a friend (esp. when it’s my wife).
13. I don’t like looting bodies. It’s realistic (using the term lightly), but it’s an annoyance. Even with auto-loot turned on. (This was one of the greatest reliefs when I played CoX this past weekend.). 
14. I dislike that if I want to give something to someone, I have to open up (and wait for) a trading window. I really like the CoX drag-and-drop (optional) interface.
15. Facing is a wash. It’s, um, realistic. It can also be a pain in the neck.
16. Having to trudge back to the mission contact is a pain. I don’t know how to mitigate that, given the setting — though a number of missions could be handled, for example, by just mailing a postcard back to the mission sender. And, yes, some missions don’t require returning.
17. I dislike that there’s no incentive (aside from being a nice guy) to help someone who’s in over their heads. That’s the flip side to the no-kill-stealing mechanism. (Perhaps a “the encounter owner / first damager gets full credit, while other damagers get a lesser credit” rule might be the best.)

None of this means I plan to not play LotRO, or that one game is the clear winner over the other. And, as I noted above, a lot of the above is my own play style and preferences. But, then, it’s my blog, and I’ll whine if I want to.

I haven’t actually been doing any online gaming in the interval — travel, illness, more travel, holidays, just not been in a gaming sort of mood.

Margie has been plugging away solo in both systems in the interval, though. Her Hobbit thief is up to 26.

My play drought might be shifting, though. Margie and I did some LotRO last night (let me say, I think Weathertop is faboo, visually), and I’m feeling a yen for some CoX building up in me (esp. to do some of the new I12 power combos and see what they’ve done in the Hollows — except that I12 isn’t in beta yet).

Chatting with Margie yesterday, she opined that one of the frustrations she finds is that you really need to stop active adventuring about an hour before you need to get away from the keyboard — since it take that long to (a) get someplace safe, (b) check mail, (c) hit up contacts you need to hit up, (d) sell stuff that you want to sell (to get things out of your pack, and to earn enough to spend on needful activities), (e) craft stuff you need to craft (to get things out of your pack), (f) put things up for auction that you’ve acquired or crafted (again, to get things out of your pack and to earn vital money).

While the same is true to a lesser degree in CoX (Wentworths can easily be a half hour visit every session), it’s less so because (a) you don’t really have to craft in CoX if you don’t want to, and (b) encumbrance / pack overflow is far less of an issue in CoX than in LotRO.

And, yeah, that is a bit annoying.

More as I ponder it.

Played a few hours of LotRO last night with our elf Huntesses and a Captain/Minstrel duo that Doyce and Kate were running. Amazing how, in non-scaled missions, having twice the members, a melee guy (plus pet), ranged-attack folks who get to attack at range, and a healer/buffer, can make a difference in mission success …

Plus it was fun hearing a musical coda to each battle.

Cleared some brigand and barrow missions which would have been tough on our own (as we’d already discovered on one mish). And it was fun to do some more group stuff. Thanks, guys — let’s do it again some time soon.

Been sort of slowly getting into the groove of LotRO, figuring out what works and what doesn’t, learning how much crafting / auctioning drives me nuts and how much just adds some change to my pocket. Becoming comfortable with death defeat and figuring out how much we can bite off to chew and all that.

Our Loremaster duo is up to 13, which is where our original Cap/Champ pair were when we got tired of them. I feel like the LMs are a lot more enjoyable (in a game with excessive running around, ranged attacks are da bomb). Our Hunter duo is at 19 now, and doing well, too (see previous note).

Margie is doing a fair amount of solo play; I occasionally get on for that, but it’s really about fourth on my list of things to burn my spare time.

I remain fairly happy with the game — not obsessive, but it makes for a pleasant passtime to leaven the TV schedule (or vice-versa).

Took the Elfgirls off to the Lone-Lands. One of the things I love about LotRO is just the richness of the terrain. In LotR, we catch just glimpses, the major stopping points and places of battle and the camps where dialog occurs. Part of that is that Tolkien portrayed much of the North as desolate wasteland after the fall of Arnor, but part is just the result of any novel — you don’t see what you don’t need to see.

Here, instead, off east of Bree, we have a semi-ruined inn, the fringes of a society being slowly pushed back by incursions of goblins. We have the remains of a fortress (complete with a “Minas” name), and backstory, and a combination of both the epic and the mundane, hints of what’s happening in the big picture even as we help Joe Yokel reestablish his supply chain back go Bree.

We went to the Forsaken Inn simply to close off a quest, but it’s hard not to click on all those shiny ring contacts, and, hey, we can do these three or four things all together without any trouble, right, and that would let us do this and that, and, wait, they want us to also go back and collect …

So we visited Minas Eriol a couple of times, only getting defeated once. We’ve learned to go slow and steady, and Hunters rock in terms of being able to (usually) pick the field of combat, which is fine until the little goblin bastards repop on top of you. 

If I have a criticism of the evening, it’s the necessity to allocate time at the end of the evening to go sell, level, auction, craft, etc. That’s true in CoX, too, of course — even moreso since the auction houses opened — but it seems moreso here. That said, I am sort of working my way to a sweet spot with what I want to be bothered with, and what I don’t. (Margie’s comment, dragging herself up to bed a bit after I was up there, was that she either had to spend an hour doing all the logiistics/management stuff at the end, or spend an hour in bed thinking about what she was going to do when she got back on next).

Overall, a good time. And beginning to think, parenthetically, of the whole Kinship schtick, and to what degree I might have an interest in our characters getting involved in something a bit bigger than the two of us. There would certainly be times when it would be convenient, or a break from our (very effective and enjoyable) duoing.

So Frelliel and Frellien finally got to Michael Delving  and learned the wonders of (a) auction houses and (b) farming (as in, y’know, actuall growing-seeds farming).

A good thing, too, because we were all full up on swag that we figured could be auction for Big Silver, which we desperately needed, having had to basically rebuild our active inventory from scratch due to major repairs (shakes fists at dwarves).

The auction house mechanism is pretty decent — a minimum price based on what you could sell it for directly, a chance to see what things are going for, etc.  Using the mailboxes is a clever way of delivering the results.

Margie observed that LotRO is all about the money.  Everything costs money (except getting missions).  It costs money to buy things, it costs money to level (slot talents, etc.), it costs money to travel (except by foot), it costs money to put things up for auctions and it costs money to mail them to other folks.  It even costs money to die, indirectly, due to repair costs.

It’s a restraining mechanism, to be sure, so I understand why it’s there.  But it does lend a mercenary air to the whole enterprise which I find sometimes a scosh jarring (though not necessarily incompatible with Tolkien’s world).

Which brings me to farming, and crafting in general.

So not my bag, baby.

“Here, let me plant some of these onion seeds I found.  Oh, wait, need to get some water (and water for farming, not water for cooking, can’t get those mixed up).  Okay, I’ve found a field I can plant in.  I’m planting now.  Now things are growing.  Now I’m harvesting.  Okay, got a few good onions out of that — but some poor ones, too.  Oh, wait, I can go back to the workbench and turn the poor ones into more onion seeds.  Great.  No, wait, I also need to buy more water.  Okay, now back into the field to plant more onion seeds.  Cool!  More onions!”

I’d rather be battling orcs.

So I need to find (for me) the right balance between direct sale of swag, auctioning of swag, and using of swag to grow (craft) more swag.  Which is a bit more logistics than I really care for, though I’m sure there’s a sweet spot that will satisfy me.  We’ll see.

And off to Bree.

Got an invitation last night by e-mail to do some fellowshippy stuff in LotRO with Doyce and Kate, so made preps to do so.  Kate, alas, suffered from technical difficulties, but Doyce got on and he brought an added Champ of the same level to join our Cap/Champ combo.

And, yes, it was a lot of fun.  We had to backtrack one mish in the epic storyline, but that wasn’t that big a deal, then we proceeded with it, and eventually it brought us to the “berserker Ranger you have to run ahead of to keep safe” mish, which we managed to pull off with only a minor misstep or two.

In the meantime, we were picking Doyce’s brains for gameplay advice, tips of this and that sort, and so forth.  We had the voice chat enabled, which made that a lot easier.

We played around three hours or so, then called it a night.  Many thanks to Doyce for the drive-along.

Tonight’s the last full night of the trial period.  Still not sure what we’re doing, but I feel like we’ve given it a good try-out.  We’ll see.