A day or two ago, I managed to earn enough gold in LotRO to acquire both a horse and a house. While the transportation feature isn’t a new thing for me in MMOs, player housing certainly was, and I found myself glowing with accomplishment that afternoon.
At first, I thought houses were overrated in the sense that they were an additional money sink into the game, and that houses didn’t do much except give you the option to get more expensive storage than banks. Thing is, while that may be true in certain respects, there’s also a hook to player housing that I didn’t get from an outsider’s perspective: making a house a home is an adventure in and of itself.
In addition to the general questlines to acquire the house, it seems purchasing one opens up some starter quests to deck your house out in livery. While the starting accoutrements are common, such as birch trees and rugs, they offer a chance to spruce up a living space that starts out rather dull and dreary.
Little by little, as you add items you’ve acquired like trophies, beds, and paintings, you get a sense of your own individual style and preferences, and infusing a house with your own personality certainly makes you want to live in the home you’ve made yourself. For instance, if you live in Thorin’s Halls, but want elven features in your home, then you can buy paintings to represent your stylistic desires!
If you haven’t thought about buying a house in LotRO just yet, I encourage you to do so. The experience is worthwhile, even if it does cost you a pretty penny to spruce up your home.
That said, before I go, here are a couple of tips/observations I’ve made regarding LotRO housing:
Tip 1: If you have utilitarian leanings like myself, and want to pick a place for its general proximity to a city, the dwarven homestead is the place to be. It’s a much shorter walk to the main city than in Bree, though you’ll have to contend with housing that doesn’t look as stylish as the elven homestead.
Tip 2: If you’re looking to get free housing items for the communal home your characters will live in, do the housing quests on multiple characters and make sure they all have travelling rations. I’ve decked my starter home out in birch trees and each of the individual quest rewards from the starting housing decorations quest because of it, which makes my house a hodgepodge of various cultures, but ultimately makes my house more inviting, as it didn’t have any chairs or dressers previously.
Tip 3: Wait for the horse. My kinmates advised me to save my money first and wait till I earned enough to buy a horse and a house so that I could make up money faster and level up a little bit quicker by saving on travel time. If you’re the really patient type, you could save up your cash to buy a deluxe house after buying the horse.
Great article. I think the house photographed is the exact same one I chose (or same style anyway). I too chose Dwarven for it’s proximity to Thorin’s Hall (and having man/elf/hobbits means having a port so close to the Dwarven city makes getting there much much quicker!).
I have yet to upgrade to a deluxe house as I use my house chest less and less, and I tend to put my housing items in the kin house… but I will get it done eventually!
One bonus tip: Choose a house that is near the entrance/exit to the homesteads — so when you pop home, you don’t have a massive run to exit the area.
Second bonus tip: Use the suppliers in your kinship/personal-homesteads to get cheaper armour repairs.
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I actually got the picture from a Lotro Wiki, but there didn’t seem to be any attribution on it, hence no captions this time.
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I am also the proud owner of a little dwarven house. I went for 3 Frothing road which comes with its own island. How cool is that? Its not near the entrance but I can jump off my island and swim straight to the market place so its handy for banking and vendoring stuff.
I quite like porting my toons home for the night to sleep in their little house but getting back to your adventures the next day can be a pain. I would love if Turbine implemented some form of port back to where you came from after you leave your house like Morrowind’s “Mark and Recall”. I think it would make housing a lot more useful and it could have a long cooldown to prevent people abusing it.
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Fun fact: The Elven housing area is located right by the zone line between the Dwarf areas and The Shire. The wolf for the level 60 bounty quest is located 800 meters past the zone line. Let’s just say that I’ve been using my “return to guild hall” skill a lot more frequently since I figured that out.
I’d like to give LOTRO’s housing a try sometime, but I’m an infrequent player and the upkeep costs scare me. I realize that they want to do something to free up choice plots of land so that the players who do stick around don’t end up in ghost town neighborhoods, but I literally cannot afford to pay the punitive escrow fees (didn’t they get bumped up to 75% of purchase or something hideous like that?) when I wander away from the game for a month at a time. By contrast, EQ2 does not have instanced neighborhoods, and, as a result, can afford not to have a penalty for non-payment (you’re just locked out until you pay the CURRENT week’s rent, no back rent at all).
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Hi There.
Thanks for the info about the bounty quest enemy being near the border.
As for the information regarding house upkeeps, I found this tidbit before on the forums while doing research on housing. It’s about what happens if you let your subscription lapse.
As I understand it, if your house has its upkeep updated prior to your subscription stopping, you can keep the house. It’ll just be locked while you’re not playing. Feel free to check the info here for details.
http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?t=285970
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@GA I think the back rent ramps up slowly over time to a maximum of 75% of the purchase price. I resubbed after a six month absence and I had to pay around 450 Gold to get my small house out of hock (slightly less than 50%).
I really think the small house is the way to go. You get most of the benefits of owning a house for a much much lower cost (1G instead of 7G) plus some of the small houses are in really superb locations.
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@MBP: I hope you mean 450S and not 450G.
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