Clarification on Barad Guldur Gate Issues

Tony posted this on January 27th, 2010. It has No Comments »
Categorized as News, Patch.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2624

This morn­ing, LiuT­sieng posted a brief expla­na­tion on how the gaunt­let sys­tem for Barad Gul­dur is sup­posed to work. After the bug fix for the gate issue in this area, some things have been adjusted.

We don’t do a great job of com­mu­ni­cat­ing the way the gaunt­let works, so here’s what’s hap­pen­ing in that pic:

 — You have 40 min­utes from the time you kill the last two armored guards at the end of the gaunt­let to kill Durch­est with­out hav­ing to reclear the gaunt­let.
 — 39 min­utes after you’ve killed those guards, you’ll get a warn­ing mes­sage. Some­thing to the effect of, “You hear the sound of rein­force­ments in the halls, they are com­ing..“
 — A minute after that warn­ing mes­sage, you’ll receive a mes­sage stat­ing some­thing to effect of, “Rein­force­ments have arrived, this is your last chance.“
 — At this point you’ve had 40 min­utes of free attempts on Durch­est. Any cur­rent attempts will need to be fin­ished up, after which the gaunt­let will reset.

If you’ve been try­ing to pre­vent a respawn of the gaunt­let, you’ll see the sit­u­a­tion in that pic­ture. Sim­ply walk to the entrance (you don’t need to leave the instance, just walk to the door). You should see the front gate raise, an instance bill­board indi­cat­ing that you will have to reclear the gaunt­let, and then the gate should lower.

This is why most groups aren’t see­ing this. If you kill Durch­est before the gaunt­let timer is up you shouldn’t notice a thing. If you con­sis­tently attempt Durch­est with every­one dying and then reviv­ing at the entrance, you shouldn’t notice this. If for some rea­son you do though, walk to the entrance, let the gate raise, then lower, then reclear.

Hope­fully if you’ve been hav­ing some issues, this will clar­ify things a bit.

Upcoming Changes to the Dastardly “Hounding Fear”

Tony posted this on January 22nd, 2010. It has No Comments »
Categorized as News, Patch.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2607

Hound­ing Fear is one of those mob skills that has always been a cen­ter of debate. In the past I would say it was overused, but Tur­bine has made an effort to change that over var­i­ous updates. Today I came across this post on the forums from LOTROSys­tems with some clar­i­fi­ca­tion on how Hound­ing Fear cur­rently works and what is planned for the future:

Hound­ing Fear.

This has been the sub­ject of many threads, com­plaints, frus­tra­tions, and argu­ments. We’ve responded in the past to some of these threads try­ing to explain things a bit (feel free to hunt them down if you wish). We also made a sig­nif­i­cant adjust­ment to Hound­ing Fear with Moria: reduc­ing the chance of it land­ing on you when fight­ing mobs lower level than you. Cur­rently, you actu­ally have a 0% chance of get­ting hit by Hound­ing Fear when being attacked by mobs that are gray to you.

The rea­son we’re respond­ing to this (newest) thread is because the game has changed a bit: Skir­mishes, specif­i­cally sol­diers. We want sol­diers to be able to pro­tect play­ers the best they can, and we also want play­ers to be able to pro­tect their sol­diers the best they can. Hound­ing Fear ham­pers that a bit. If you’re able to heal your sol­dier and try­ing to run over to him but get slowed by Hound­ing Fear, you might not get in range in time to save him. Therefore…

The effect “Hound­ing Fear” is being removed from Skir­mishes AND from Landscape.

Now, you might be say­ing: “Pro­tect­ing your Sol­dier? That is your rea­son for remov­ing it when there’s so many bet­ter ones that have existed this whole time!?” What it comes to is that this was the final straw. We’ve debated back and forth for a long time now about the mer­its and flaws of Hound­ing Fear: what we were try­ing to achieve with it, how we were suc­cess­ful and unsuc­cess­ful with our goals, what the con­se­quences will be if we remove it.

We hope this change will be for the bet­ter in the short term and the long term. We feel this is the right choice to make (though, to be fair, we always make the choices we make think­ing they’re the right ones). Should it have been made sooner? Maybe. Will it back­fire hor­ri­bly because of some unfore­seen con­se­quence? Hope­fully not.

Thank you for all of your feed­back. We do pay atten­tion to your con­cerns and try and act upon them when we are able to (assum­ing we agree with you, of course ;) ).

So things appear to be chang­ing for the bet­ter for all you Skir­mishes out there.

Legacy Tier Upgrades to Be Fixed Soon

Tony posted this on January 19th, 2010. It has 1 Comment »
Categorized as News, Patch, Siege of Mirkwood.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2580

Graalx2 posted on the offi­cial forums today, con­firm­ing that legacy tiers will be fixed soon:

We have found the issue with all of the lega­cies costs not decreas­ing as the legacy tiers up. It will be fixed in the next major patch (not tomorrow’s). There was a prob­lem with round­ing off that caused the num­bers not to change as they should. This will cor­rect all legacy costs for all classes.

If you’re not famil­iar with this issue, Fer­di­nand the Great has posted a brief sum­mary on LOTRO Vault:

Unaware of what the issues were? A num­ber of lega­cies (at least eight of them con­firmed for War­dens!) did not reduce in cost at cer­tain upgrade lev­els. (In par­tic­u­lar, T4>T5 and T5>T6 were being mis­cal­cu­lated.) That means that, given a rate of some­thing like 500SM/hr (tak­ing into account dailies), you were look­ing at about four hours of wasted game­play upon pur­chase of a Scroll of Enti­tle­ment, because your legacy tier upgrade would net you zero points. Oops.

I’ve not dealt with that issue yet, but it’ll be some­thing to watch out for … sure sounds like a pain in the butt.

Volume 2 Book 9: Siege of Mirkwood, Patch 1 Preliminary Notes

Tony posted this on January 13th, 2010. It has No Comments »
Categorized as Patch.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2550

Vol­ume 2 Book 9: Siege of Mirk­wood, Patch 1 is up on Bull­roarer for test­ing. For some rea­son it feels as though there’s been a longer gap between the release and Patch 1 than usual, but maybe things are just drag­ging for me. You can read the full notes on the offi­cial forums: http://​forums​.lotro​.com/​s​h​o​w​t​h​r​e​a​d​.​p​h​p​?​t​=​3​1​2​145

As usual there are issues float­ing around that aren’t addressed by this patch, but we’ll have to hope they’re addressed in the future. I know there are sev­eral camps of peo­ple who are unhappy with some of the cur­rent legacy options. Man­ag­ing that well seems like a night­mare, I don’t envy the peo­ple work­ing on it.

Addi­tion­ally, there’s a change to shared stor­age that is worth explic­itly noting:

Quest items are no longer allowed in shared stor­age. Quest items that were stranded in Shared Stor­age are destroyed the first time you login a player on the account. Play­ers who have the related quest under­way will need to can­cel and re-acquire the quest to receive a new quest item.

I was under the impres­sion quest items couldn’t be placed in shared stor­age, but if you hap­pened to do this, be sure to restart your quests. It’s an annoy­ance, but hope­fully not a major one for most peo­ple. I am under the impres­sion that if you remove them before the patch you should be safe, so give that a shot!

Siege of Mirkwood Files on TDM

Tony posted this on December 1st, 2009. It has No Comments »
Categorized as News, Patch, Siege of Mirkwood.
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Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2444

Siege of Mirk­wood didn’t have a pre–patch down­load, unlike pre­vi­ous books and expan­sions. Even so, if you hap­pen to have the Tur­bine Down­load Man­ager, the files you need for the update will down­load now. If you want to get a head start, this method could be a good alternative.

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