I decided a while back to start a new fea­ture on MMeOw that focuses on the things I feel that could be improved in LotRO. I enjoy the game immensely, but noth­ing is per­fect. So what bet­ter than a fea­ture as sim­ply titled as “Things I Don’t Like About LotRO”?

This edi­tion focuses on item man­age­ment and bag space.

Unlike many MMORPGs out there, LotRO starts you off with all the bag space you’re ever going to have. You can buy extra vault space in major towns and your house has its own stor­age options, but there’s no pos­si­bil­ity to expand what you can carry with you. This sounds scary until you real­ize that you start off with five large bags to store every­thing in. This is more than some MMORPGs ever offer, although in some you can expand your bag space to beyond what LotRO offers.

Unfor­tu­nately, a lot of these spaces seem to be quickly taken up. You’ll need at least three spaces for your var­i­ous craft­ing tools, for exam­ple. Ene­mies tend to drop a sur­pris­ing amount of items and it’s not ter­ri­bly uncom­mon to get two, three or more drops from a sin­gle enemy. While most of it is stack­able, a good amount of it is not. Or at least was not.

To their credit, Tur­bine has been address­ing this issue in smart ways. A recent change led to the removal of many unstack­able (and likely use­less com­pared to what you’re cur­rently uti­liz­ing) equip­ment drops from ran­dom mobs. While ene­mies still do drop these items, a vast major­ity of the time they’ve been replaced with stack­able ven­dor trash. So instead of hav­ing a bag full of swords each want­ing its own indi­vid­ual space, you can have a bag full of stacks of 10 gloves, hel­mets, shields, weapons and so forth. This has freed up bag space con­sid­er­ably, allow­ing you to sell more junk and make more money while using less space.

In addi­tion, Tur­bine has also com­bined many craft­ing item drops. Pre­vi­ously there were sev­eral craft­ing items with unique names that did the same thing; sev­eral dif­fer­ent types of tails, for exam­ple. These have been com­bined into sin­gle items that can be more eas­ily stacked: tails, wings, etc.

So as you can see, most of that com­plaint has been addressed. I still have issues with the sheer amount of things you can gather and what seems to be an abnor­mally high amount of quest items. I guess it’s par­tially expected: how many MMORPGs out there let you have 40 quests at once? Item man­age­ment is arguably more impor­tant in this game than many oth­ers, despite the extra space . . . in that sense I sup­pose a lot of that blame is on myself.

My other issue with the bag setup is sim­ply that I, per­son­ally, have an extremely dif­fi­cult time dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing between the items in my bag. I’ve played quite a few other MMORPGs and I have never had as hard of a time find­ing the one thing I’m look­ing for as I have in LotRO at times.

I’m not sure what the exact cause of this is. The default icon size seems to be slightly smaller than it is in, say, World of War­craft but not so much so that it should be the main cause of my problem.

It’s more likely it’s a com­bi­na­tion of two factors:

1. Sim­ply that many, many items look almost too sim­i­lar within your bags.
2. Many item graph­ics just seem to be too detailed or complex.

For me this leads to many items just mesh­ing together and I feel like I’m look­ing at a big field of color. I have a dif­fi­cult time dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing between every­thing because a lot of it winds up look­ing the same to me. For what­ever rea­son, noth­ing just pops out at me like I feel it should.

With recipes, in par­tic­u­lar, I also have a hard time dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing between what I can use and what I can not. Unus­able items have a red line around them, which seems clear enough. The prob­lem is that recipes have a red background.Differentiating between ones I can use and can’t use is almost sur­pris­ingly dif­fi­cult. Writ­ing this down I’m sur­prised (and almost embar­rassed) to say I have a hard time with it, but I sim­ply do.

Here’s a com­par­i­son of LotRO’s inven­tory setup to World of War­craft’s default (read: no add-ons) inven­tory setup:

For me, the WoW inven­tory (the sec­ond image) is clear and well spaced out. I can look at these icons and have a very good idea of what they are, but more impor­tantly they’re easy to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between. For me, this isn’t true of LotRO’s setup.

I appre­ci­ate what LotRO is try­ing to do here. Some of WoW’s more cartoon-like aes­thetic sim­ply doesn’t work in LotRO. They’re also try­ing to allow you to quickly deter­mine the rel­a­tive qual­ity of an item through its back­ground, some­thing WoW doesn’t do by default.

How­ever, there is an add-on for WoW called Bagnon that does some­thing sim­i­lar. Instead of fully col­or­ing the item’s box, it sim­ply adds a col­ored halo around the item as shown here:

I feel the com­bi­na­tion of a larger default icon size, clearer and sim­pler item graph­ics and this halo con­cept might be a bet­ter fit.

Obvi­ously, none of this is game break­ing and I always find what I need (even­tu­ally). At the same time, I def­i­nitely feel there’s room for improve­ment and some time and frus­tra­tion could be saved by adjust­ing the setup.

Of course it’s pos­si­ble I’m alone in some of these thoughts, but what can I say? I can’t speak for every­one and I don’t pre­tend to. As such, I would be inter­ested in know­ing what prob­lems oth­ers have with this or other aspects of the game, if any.

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