LotRO: Things You Forget About the Early Game

In my first stint with Lord of the Rings Online, I had a couple main characters who had made it through virtually all of the questing content–one was in Enedwaith, one was in Mirkwood, both of which were level cap zones at the time I took my first big break from the game.  And then I had several alts who never made it far enough to enter Moria.  So I was simultaneously playing characters throughout the available level range, and all the different bits of the game were still fresh in my mind.

In the few times I’ve returned to the game since then, including currently, I’ve focused almost exclusively on my two mains.  Those two have made a lot of progress and are both near the start of the Helms Deep expansion.  All of my alts, though, haven’t been given any attention at all.  So my top three characters are level 86, level 85, and level 37.  That’s quite a gap, and for the past few years I have essentially only played content between levels 65 and 85.

Recently, though, I dusted off one of my older characters who is currently working through Evendim.  Once I relearned how his skills work, which is actually different than my vague memories thanks to the Helms Deep class revisions, I started playing and was surprised by how much different gameplay is in the pre-Moria areas compared to the post-Moria areas.  Here are some things I’d mostly forgotten about which are more-or-less exclusive to the early game:

Racial Traits

Each of the four races has a selection of racial traits which they unlock by completing deeds, and then they choose which ones to make active in the limited number of slots.  One or two additional slots are unlocked as you gain levels.  Typically, you’ve unlocked all of your racial traits and decided which ones to use long before you ever leave Eriador, so in a way the whole system of racial traits ceases to exist as part of the gameplay you’re concerned with and the ones you’ve slotted just become background bonuses and abilities.

For example, one of my mains is of the Race of Man and he has the skill Return to Bree.  I’ve had that skill for so long, via a slotted racial trait, that I’d completely forgotten that it isn’t something just inherently given to all Men.  If you choose not to unlock and slot this trait, then you don’t get the ability to teleport to Bree.  I have a vague recollection of being excited to unlock this ability and perhaps working toward that goal, but for the longest time I have just taken it for granted along with all my other racial traits.

Class Quests

At levels 15, 30, 50, and sometimes 58, each class gets an exclusive quest or series of quests which is often a lot of fun and just helps emphasize the unique role that you play as opposed to the other classes.  One which I found particularly memorable was the level 15 Warden quest where you form a battle line with a bunch of other Wardens and defend Bree from a bandit attack.  It was fun and really helped me identify with my chosen class.

Unfortunately, by the time you emerge into the daylight from Moria, the concept of class quests has been completely abandoned.  This is something I’d really like to see them bring back, just to provide some more context for the specific role that you’ve chosen.

Buying Stuff from your Class Trainer

In the early levels of the game, your class trainer has useful items for you to purchase.  For example, Guardians can purchase shield spikes and Captains can buy different armaments to change their summoned follower.  Before long, though, these purchasable items are replaced by crafting recipes.  From that point on you don’t ever need to use your class trainer as an item vendor, you just need to interact with other players (perhaps via the auction house) to get the improved items that you need.

Legendary Books

One of the things your class trainer sells are three legendary books, which I believe you can purchase at level 39.  Then in the various zones around level 40-50 you try to find the missing pages for each of these three books, and when you complete a book you unlock a special epic skill.  It has been so long since I had to think about collecting pages that I forgot that some of the skills that my mains enjoy wouldn’t be available if I hadn’t done it.  I remember it being a real hassle to track down all of the pages, I think because it’s not clear which zones drop which pages unless you look online for more information.  So I don’t necessarily endorse the idea of adding something similar in the later game, but at the same time I think little systems like this help to add both depth and breadth to the game and I think that might be something which is a bit lacking in the more recent expansions.

Multiple Types of Resource Node

Most of my characters seem to choose a crafting profession which requires metal, so I’m very familiar with all the different ore nodes found throughout the game but less so with other materials like wood, leather, and farming ingredients.  When I recently revisited one of my characters who left off in Evendim, I was surprised by the presence of rare ore nodes in addition to the regular ones.  In that zone, Rich Iron is what you normally mine but occasionally you come across a Gold node.  In the starting zones, Copper is what you normally mine and Tin is the rare type, and I believe you can combine the two to make Bronze for completing those better crafting recipes.

Somewhere along the way, the game eliminated the idea of a rare metal type so all the newer zones just have one type of metal all over the place.  I’d forgotten that rare nodes even existed as a concept, until I came across one in Evendim.  It’s much more convenient without them, it can’t be argued, but at the same time there’s something fun about coming across one of the rarer types, like a special little reward during your adventuring.

Virtues

Perhaps others pay more attention to these traits than I do, but the whole game of selecting which Virtues to slot and then working to improve them is largely a thing of the past for me, similar to racial traits.  I can remember at one point studying all of the available Virtues and determining which ones would benefit my character the most and maybe changing my mind a time or two, but the ones I chose long ago are now perma-slotted for my characters so I don’t even think about them anymore.

Also, I stopped caring about completing the deeds which improve various Virtues when the requirements for completion became too cumbersome.  I just have no interest in hunting down 200+ enemies of a certain type in order to increase a Virtue that will have a somewhat negligible effect on my character’s performance.  I’m aware that getting your Virtues slotted correctly and maxed out is more important to end-game raiders and perhaps PvP players as well, but I don’t really participate in either of those activities and so they just don’t seem all that significant to me.  I suppose now that I vastly outlevel some of those early zones, I could go back and one-shot a bunch of enemies to quickly complete some of those Virtue-increasing deeds, but I’m just not sure it’s worth the time.

Money Woes

In the later game, you are showered with riches just through regular questing, and you can increase your income quite a bit more through the end-game group content.  At that point in the game, though, there is very little of significant cost which you still need to purchase, so the money just keeps piling up.  I think a lot of people end up shipping all of this wealth to their lower-level alts, and I’ve done that some too, but I usually try to resist so that I can have the “full experience,” including the pains, with each character.

In the early game, there’s a lot of stuff which is really expensive and which you have to work to afford.  The greatest example, at least in my time several years ago, was getting your first horse at level 35.  I know they’ve changed a lot with how mounts work and now you can get one much earlier, but I’m fuzzy on the details because I haven’t actually had a character acquire his first mount in a really long time.  But in my first heyday with the game several years ago, you couldn’t a horse until level 35 and it cost over 4 gold to get one.  On my first character, I barely had enough money to buy a horse by the time I was eligible.  And on my second character, I actually had to borrow money from my wife in order to get a horse at 35 instead of waiting until 38 or 39 or whenever I’d be able to save up enough.

The other big expense was purchasing a house, if you were interested in doing so.  I remember buying a regular (small) house and wishing that I could have one of those big deluxe houses.  And then finally I had enough money to get one, even if it bankrupted me for a time.  Now, though, I could purchase a whole village worth of deluxe houses and still have money in reserve.

I can’t remember the last time I paid attention to how much money I looted from each enemy, or how much the monetary reward for a quest turn-in was.  But I vaguely recall that I did pay attention to such things in my early days in the game, when there was a lot more stuff that I wanted than I was able to afford.  In the newer game, money has essentially become obsolete except perhaps for the auction house where prices tend to adjust themselves to the fortunes that players have available.  Although I haven’t used the Auction House much at all since returning to LotRO (I don’t know quite why, because it used to be of critical importance), if World of Warcraft is a guide then I expect that LotRO auction prices have skyrocketed because all of the veteran players with huge treasuries can support those prices.  That would make things much harder for the brand new player who doesn’t have a high-level alt to send him money when needed.

Caring About Loot Drops

In the early game, loot drops matter.  A random mob might just drop a sword or a helmet which is better than what you have now.  And even if it isn’t better mechanically, there’s a good chance that it will be an improvement cosmetically because generally things seem to have improved visuals as you move to newer and newer content.  But when playing through newer zones, I find that I hardly ever look at my loot except to get rid of it to make room in my bags.

There are several changes to the game which work together to diminish the importance of loot.  The first is Legendary Items.  Once you get your first LI, regular weapons are instantly obsolete.  There are some exceptions when it comes to secondary weapons, of course.  For instance, a Loremaster’s staff can be a Legendary Item but the sword in his off hand still needs to be of the regular variety.  But for the most part, weapons which aren’t Legendary become junk loot by the time you enter Moria.

I also find that the instant looting makes me pay less attention to what I’m getting.  I never seem to notice the text in the chat box telling me what I just auto looted, so I don’t even know what I’m carrying around with me until my bags fill up and it’s time to do some inventory maintenance.  But because of the token system used in the newer zones (see next paragraph), there’s never much of interest captured in my bags anyway.

In the newer areas, and also in Evendim, they’ve basically eliminated significant loot altogether!  Enemies will still drop the purple junk loot as normal (although a lot of it is no longer truly junk due to the Task Boards), but they don’t drop the sort of thing you might want to equip.  Instead, they just drop tokens which you then take to a vendor NPC and use them to purchase whatever you want.  The token system does eliminate a lot of the useless things that would show up in your bags and lets you choose your rewards instead of relying on the randomness of drops to provide it for you, but it also eliminates the fun of having some cool object appear in your bags after a heated battle.  Plus, the token idea is very “meta” — a bad guy would be carrying a sword, not a token you can exchange later for a sword!

Reputation

I already covered this with a blog entry dedicated to it, but it’s worth mentioning here as well.  In the earlier game, only certain quests reward reputation with a faction and you have to get a lot of your points by collecting the relevant loot drops and possibly crafting the special items which reward rep when you turn them in.  In the new areas, you essentially no longer work for rep because every quest rewards it automatically and you can reach the highest levels of reputation without trying or even being aware of it.  To me this is a big loss over what the earlier game offers, for two reasons: It essentially removes a system which some people enjoyed pursuing, and it makes the reputation rewards less special because virtually every player has access to them, almost as if they were available from regular NPC vendors like the Supplier or Provisioner.

Taxidermy

In the early game, special beasts will drop items which you can take to the taxidermist in Bree in order to get special housing decorations.  I completely forgot this was part of the game until just the other day when playing a low-level alt and coming across the taxidermy shop!  I don’t know exactly when taxidermy stuff ceases to drop, but my guess is that by the time you enter Moria it’s a thing of the past.  Perhaps this is because after a while, especially in Rohan, the game mostly ceases to introduce brand new monster types and instead just has more variants on orcs, spiders, and whatnot?  Off the top of my head, I can only think of the huorn (the evil tree-creatures) as the one monster type that may be brand new to the game in the higher levels.

Superior Crafting Stations

If you’re keeping up on your crafting, somewhere around level 35 you will run into the requirement to use a Superior forge, workbench, etc., in order to make the higher-level items.  This is significant because these superior locations are pretty rare, and you often have to travel far from your questing area in order to do your crafting — such as going all the way back to Thorin’s Hall for a Superior Forge.

At some point in the leveling curve, every crafting station you come across is a superior one and before long it becomes easy to forget that there are actually two different types.  This was recently jarring for me when I played a lower-level alt and ran into the Superior Forge requirement.  I’d pretty much forgotten they ever existed, just because my two main guys are running around in Rohan and it’s been forever since I’ve had to even think about it.

At this point, the Superior distinction seems like a big hassle.  But I remember when I was a new player coming across it for the first time, there was something cool about it, almost like an achievement that you could now make stuff so cool that it required better facilities.  All of the swift traveling back and forth from questing location to crafting location seems a bit annoying now, but back then it was just part of living in the world.

 

What Happened to Reputation in LotRO?

I started playing Lord of the Rings Online just after the Mines of Moria expansion was released; it came out in November 2008, and my account record starts in December 2008.  I’ve taken a couple substantial breaks since then, but I’m currently active again and making my way through the Helms Deep content.  A lot of things have changed with the game over the years, some for the better and some for the worse.  One of those that I think has become worse is the whole reputation system.

Reputation hasn’t actually become worse across the board, but the way it has been implemented in the newer regions is far less interesting than what they did with it in the early game.  This really came to light for me when I took a little time out to finally accomplish one of my goals from years ago, to get the Mathom Society horse.

The early reputation factions, particularly Mathom Society, Men of Bree, Thorin’s Hall, and Elves of Rivendell seem to have had a lot more thought put into them than what you find later on.  For one thing, they all have exclusive clubhouses.  You aren’t allowed to enter the Mathom House, the Bree Hunting Lodge, the Blue Stone Garrison, or Imlad Gelair until you’ve reached a certain reputation level with the associated faction.  It was a fun reward to finally get to peek behind those locked doors and gain access to the special vendors within.  These exclusive clubhouses mostly disappear from the game once you move on from these starting-zone reputation factions, although to my surprise the Riders of Stangard in the Great River area have an exclusive building.  I haven’t been inside the Stangard rep house yet but I’m very close to becoming Kindred, so soon I’m going to take the time to go back and do it just so I can see what’s behind that door.

There’s a lot of cool stuff available from early vendors too.  Like almost every reputation faction even up to the latest content, they have a unique horse available.  That has always been a big draw for me, and I spent considerable time to get my Men of Annuminas reputation all the way to Kindred so I could get their horse–and this was at a time when nobody was going to Annuminas because it was difficult, buggy, and all of its rewards had become mechanically obsolete thanks to power creep in newer content.

But perhaps a bigger incentive for me to get reputation with these beginning factions is the unique housing decorations they offered.  I was particularly excited to get all the dwarven statues from the Blue Stone Garrison for my yard, because those were very rarely seen since I guess not many people were bothering to go the distance with that faction.

I also worked to get to Ally standing with Mathom Society because of their huge yard items which I could put in my the yard of my Kinship’s house.  The only reason I didn’t go all the way to Kindred standing with them is because I thought the recipes for the required cooking items were a real pain because they required crit items from Farmers, the one crafting profession I haven’t really explored.  But the other day I finally gathered the ingredients and made my final 40 or so honey-roasted chickens so that I could get the aforementioned Mathom Society steed.

Unique housing items were standard rep rewards up through Lothlorien at least, but I think not long after that they started to disappear.  The one major exception is when you rebuild Hytbold in Easten Rohan — there’s a huge amount of housing decorations available there if you’re willing to put in the work to keep doing the daily quests and slowly bring the city back to its former glory.  Also, the various festivals remain good sources of housing decorations.  But otherwise, I think the newer reputation factions don’t offer much of anything in the way of housing items.

The early reputation factions also offer unique armor, which is all obsolete due to power creep but can still be really nice cosmetically.  In fact, years later my Loremaster is still cosmetically wearing his suit of Annuminas light armor.  Not only does it still look good, but it gives me the satisfaction of knowing that my avatar has a very distinct look amongst the sea of avatars on my server.  Also, I earned Kindred reputation with the Lossoth of Forochel but I couldn’t get their unique armor because it had to be crafted and I was the wrong profession.  I ended up paying another player 1 gold per piece for him to craft me a full set.  1 gold doesn’t sound like much to those of us running around in Rohan, but this was back in the days when you couldn’t get a horse until level 35 and even then you really had to work hard in those first 35 levels to make sure you had the 4+ gold which it cost to purchase one!  Since the advent of Free To Play, though, this Forochel armor has been sold in the cash shop which, to me, totally invalidates the work I put into getting it and the significance of displaying it.

New reputation factions still offer armor, nothing has changed there, but it doesn’t have the same level of cosmetic interest because virtually every player will have the reputation to get those items — it’s not something special you can attain to make your character stand out from the crowd.  This is because reputation has become built-in with every quest reward, meaning you automatically get it without even thinking about it.  More on that in a bit.

There are other unique or unusual items in the earlier rep factions, such as the jar of fireflies that you can get at the Mathom Society.  These are purely for role-playing benefit, they don’t have any mechanical bonus in combat, but they have a certain charm which adds to that of the overall game.  Also, some earlier factions offer unique crafting recipes, but I think these have largely disappeared with the newer factions.

The way you earn reputation points with a faction has also changed.  In the early game, you complete certain special quests to get reputation.  You will also find reputation items on the baddies you slay, which you can turn in for more points or sell to other players if you aren’t interested in the reputation.  And in almost all factions in the earlier game you can craft special items to gain reputation, such as the honey-roasted chickens I prepared for the Mathom Society.

In the newer game, though, it doesn’t feel much like an accomplishment to gain reputation with a faction.  Since every single quest in a Rohan zone gives you rep with that zone’s faction, you end up becoming highly rated with every Rohan faction whether you care or not.  The only way to not have that happen is to rush through a zone, like if you’re only doing the Epics in that area.  One exception would be the Survivors of Wildermore–you don’t get any reputation with them unless you do their special repeatables, and those don’t even become available until you’ve finished the regular questing in the zone.

I’ve just started playing through Evendim, the first time I’ve done it since the big revamp a few years ago (so it still seems new and strange to me that the Colossus is now a quest hub, although really that’s old news now).  I was surprised to see that Evendim reputation now drops like candy, just like in Rohan.  Every quest rewards reputation, and on top of that you get reputation for every baddie kill of certain types (Tomb Raiders, for instance).  Plus, there’s a task board where you can convert junk loot to reputation.  And if that’s still not enough, the baddies still drop reputation items like the Tomb-Raider’s Sash which you can turn in for even more reputation (and now you can convert them to rep instantly instead of taking them to a particular NPC).  So now, getting rep with the Wardens of Annuminus is trivial.  You will become Kindred with that faction just through regular questing, without even trying.  It’s hard to argue against the convenience of this, especially since I put in a lot of blood, sweat, and gold pieces getting myself up to Kindred back in the old days, but at the same time it feels like it diminishes the game a bit.  For every little convenience they add, it gives you one less thing to think about and the result is that the game starts to feel like it has less breadth.

Also, somewhere along the way they got rid of the concept of reputation turn-in items.  Things like gift mathoms, barrow treasure, and tomb raider sashes are still rewarded in the old zones, but there is no equivalent in the newer zones.  In the newer reputation factions, this has essentially been replaced by task boards where you can turn in various items of junk loot in stacks of 10 to gain reputation.  This might be more convenient, because you don’t have to seek out particular opponents who are known to drop certain reputation items, but it also seems a lot less interesting.  Plus, there is a whole secondary market around buying and selling reputation items which doesn’t exist in the later game. I’ll be the first to agree with anyone who says LotRO inventory management can be a real pain because of all the various items which drop, but reputation turn-in items are one thing I wouldn’t mind managing.

There’s also no need for craftable rep items anymore, since they are dumping so much rep on you just through normal questing.  That’s a shame because crafting those items was another way to earn crafting XP as well, instead of just banging out a million copies of an item that nobody will ever use.  On the other hand, they have added the “Processing” category to the various crafting professions which lets you convert, for example, ingots to shavings and back to ingots, over and over until they eventually run out–this allows you to build your crafting experience much more quickly and easier than making dozens of useless items which just fill up your bags.

In my revisit to Evendim I just found that the crafting recipes are still offered there, and probably in the other older rep factions as well, but in Evendim at least they seem completely obsolete.  However, as I mentioned at the top of this article, I finally achieved Kindred with the Mathom Society by making use of the reputation crafting recipes.  So maybe they aren’t completely useless after all.  At least not for the Mathom Society.  But I think in Evendim, where reputation works about the same as in Rohan, there’s no reason for anybody to use these crafting recipes anymore.

In short, it doesn’t really feel special at all to achieve a reputation standing in the later game like it does in the earlier zones.  Reputation used to be a significant part of LotRO’s gameplay and people would invest a good amount of effort and/or coin to achieve it, but in the newer zones and in at least one older zone (Evendim), it has become so trivial that they might as well remove the concept altogether.  I would hate to see that happen, though, since reputation was a significant and enjoyable thing to task yourself with in the game in addition to questing and crafting.

 

Star Wars Board Games

I was lucky enough to be a kid when the Star Wars phenomenon happened, being only 4 years old when the original film was released.  So I grew up with the original trilogy and all of its merchandising.  My brother and I had lots of action figures, ships, and playsets.  We had Star Wars collectible stickers which came in packs of gum just like baseball cards.  We had book-and-record sets where you’d follow along in a book as you listened to the story, and R2-D2 would give his trademark bleep and whistle when it was time to turn the page.  We even had Star Wars bed sheets.  I may have actually known the Star Wars franchise more from all of the various merchandising products that we owned than I did from the films themselves!

In addition to all that other stuff, we also had several Star Wars-themed board games.  Although I couldn’t tell you exactly how to play any of them anymore, some of them still stand out in my mind for either the Star Wars imagery, or some innovative mechanic or board design, or just because these were among some of the first board games I ever played along with classics like Candy Land and Monopoly and all the other standards.  I’m pretty sure that I liked these games mostly because of the theming, not because of amazing mechanics.  We didn’t own every Star Wars board game, but here are the ones I can remember playing.  Click on any picture to see a larger version.  I confess that I needed to refer to boardgamegeek to refresh myself on a few things since I haven’t seeen these games in over 30 years.

Star Wars: Escape from the Death Star

In this game, you had to move your Star Wars characters from the trash compactor to the Millennium Falcon, but only after disabling the tractor beam and collecting two sets of secret plans.  But then you had to fight your way through a web of TIE Fighters before finally making it to the rebel base and winning!  Check out the board:

If I remember correctly, landing on one of those blue spaces meant you had to draw a card.  I can’t remember what the DS spaces were for, but I have a vague recollection of maybe instantly moving to those spaces. Perhaps the text on the cards directed you to move to one of them?  You had to get to the three rooms with photos from the movie in order to deactivate the tractor beam and collect the two plans.  I remember that there were special blue cards that you got whenever you made it to one of those rooms, as evidence that you’d been there.  Then you could head to the Millennium Falcon and finally make your way through the TIE Fighters to safety.  Notice that the spinner has “Win” and “Lose” results in addition to numbers, that must have been how you resolved the space battles.  I don’t know what happened if you lost a battle, maybe you had to go back to the Falcon square?

Star Wars: Destroy the Death Star

I thought this game was completely amazing at the time, and after revisiting it I still think it seems fairly cool and innovative.  Definitely captures a major event from the film.  I can’t begin to explain how this game worked without first providing a shot of the game board:

Whew, there’s a lot going on in the picture.  First, notice the playing pieces.  Each player was given a clear plastic base with three X-Wing fighters of their chosen color.  These ships were separate pieces and they could be removed based on events that happened as you moved along the board.  So in a way you could say that each player had three hit points, and I think if your last X-Wing was removed from your piece then you had to go back to the rebel base and start over with a full squadron of three ships.  The green player in the center of the board only has one X-Wing remaining.

After leaving the rebel base, your squadron would fly along the outer ring and you’d try to get to the inner ring as soon as possible.  Only from the inner ring could you begin your trench run to try and fire photon torpedoes into the Death Star’s exhaust port.  It looks like if you missed all the early opportunities, you’d eventually be funneled into the inner ring automatically.

The coolest part of the board is the Death Star itself — it moves!  At some regular interval, perhaps before or after each player’s turn, you would rotate the Death Star one space.  This had two effects.  First, it moved the entrance to the trench run.  But more importantly, it revealed symbols normally hidden underneath.  You’ll notice that there are several notches cut out of the edge of the wheel.  I count two TIE Fighters exposed, one Millennium Falcon, two empty spaces, and the red Darth Vader space.  I don’t remember exactly what those symbols meant in terms of gameplay, but I think perhaps some of the events on the board had you count the exposed symbols to determine a result.  I also remember that the red Darth Vader was really bad, but I couldn’t say exactly how.

Anyway, eventually you’d make it into the trench and take a run at firing your torpedoes into the exhaust port.  If you made it, I think you won the game.  If you didn’t, then you exited the other end of the trench and had to continue flying around the inner ring until you were able to make another trench run.

This game still seems really cool to me, I’d definitely give it a play if I still had a copy!  I’m guessing the child-friendly mechanics might not hold up for me, but who knows!

Star Wars: Yoda the Jedi Master

This is a game I’d completely forgotten about until I came across it online, but I definitely remember playing it.  Here’s what the board looked like:

You had to walk the path through the trials and eventually make it to the end where I think you could eventually become a Jedi Knight and win.  As I recall, with each trial you had to keep moving around and around in that loop until you finally succeeded at that test, and then you could leave and make your way to the next trial loop.  Clearly the yellow and green spaces correspond to the two decks of cards, but I can’t remember what was different about each deck.

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi: Battle at Sarlacc’s Pit

That name is a mouthful.  But check out the awesome 3D game board!

I vividly remember setting up this 3D scene on of the skiff hovering over the Sarlacc pit, and I remember that the gameplay involved you knocking the Gamorrean Guards and other baddies off the edges so that they’d fall into the mouth below.  But other than that, I have no idea how this game played.  I’m guessing we didn’t actually play it much, or maybe we just used it as a playset instead of going through the actual game.  So my memory of this one is purely visual.  But it still looks cool!