MMeOw is currently down for the count, but please visit the LOTRO Combo Blog. It aggregates content from some of the best LOTRO-related blogs and podcasts on the net.

Mirkwood’s Legendary Item System Changes

Tony posted this on October 7th, 2009. It has 5 Comments »
Categorized as News, Patch, Siege of Mirkwood.
Tagged as , , , , .
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2250

MMeOw is currently down for the count, but please visit the LOTRO Combo Blog. It aggregates content from some of the best LOTRO-related blogs and podcasts on the net.

Get out the vote!

Hobbit and Redhead posted this on October 1st, 2009. It has No Comments »
Categorized as News, Siege of Mirkwood.

Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2235

Go vote on Siege of Mirk­wood!

(Cross-posted else­where.)

MMeOw is currently down for the count, but please visit the LOTRO Combo Blog. It aggregates content from some of the best LOTRO-related blogs and podcasts on the net.

Skirmishes, Storage and Mounts, Oh My!

Tony posted this on September 29th, 2009. It has No Comments »
Categorized as News, Siege of Mirkwood.
Tagged as , , , , .
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2202

Saluting on a Horse -- Yeah, that's right.

Salut­ing on a Horse — Yeah, that’s right.

Along with the date, Tur­bine has also posted up a few more devel­oper diaries con­cern­ing Siege of Mirk­wood. They’re really worth check­ing out.

Skir­mishes

Zom­bie Colum­bus has a two-page diary that cov­ers the new Skir­mish sys­tem. It will be fol­lowed by even more Skirmish-related diaries in the weeks to come. Be sure to read the whole arti­cle (it’s not too long and I found the sec­ond page to be espe­cially inter­est­ing), but here’s a bit on their vision for the system:

To cut right to the chase: Skir­mishes are short, acces­si­ble, ran­dom­ized, scal­able, story instances with incre­men­tal rewards. Why Skir­mishes became this can best be explained by dis­cussing what the designer’s goals for the sys­tem are. Every­thing we added to Skir­mishes was done with a high level “vision” in mind. By shar­ing this vision with you, I hope that you will see why we made the choices we did, and how we ended up where we are now. Our goals were to:

  • Cre­ate finely crafted instance con­tent that can be played by dif­fer­ent group sizes and levels.
  • Keep play-time short, allow­ing Skir­mishes to fit into other activ­ity cycles. Inter­nally we’ve called them– “Pop-corn” expe­ri­ences. If one is short and good, why not try another?
  • Add ran­dom­ized ele­ments into Skir­mishes to keep replays interesting.
  • Encour­age a rota­tional play of Skir­mishes, to keep them fresh and pre­vent them from over­shad­ow­ing exist­ing playstyles. Skir­mishes should com­ple­ment the game, not alter it!
  • Set up an incre­men­tal reward struc­ture, like the instance barter systems.
  • Allow play­ers to feel that any amount of play time was a step closer to a desired reward.
  • Give play­ers a feel­ing of par­tic­i­pat­ing in epic strug­gles, and of being lead­ers of small armies.

I like the idea of Skir­mishes. In some ways, it’s like hav­ing a Leg­endary NPC in addi­tion to a Leg­endary Weapon. I’m always big on ran­dom­iza­tion in MMORPGs and I hope that Tur­bine con­sid­ers using it in more addi­tions in the future.

Stor­age

By now you’ve prob­a­bly heard about the addi­tion of Shared Stor­age, but Tur­bine is offer­ing more details (and some images) of the sys­tem in action. I like the over­all con­ve­nience of it, espe­cially because the it hooks into the exist­ing Vault sys­tem. You can trans­fer items to and fro as you please. It can even han­dle bound items, although as you may expect, only the char­ac­ter who that item is bound to will be able to see it.

Shared Storage in Action

Shared Stor­age in Action

Mounts

This change is a big deal, in my opin­ion, as it really opens up a lot of future poten­tial for mount use. The Devel­oper Diary on these changes is the most inter­est­ing to me, espe­cially because it gets a bit heav­ier into how and why Tur­bine makes design and usabil­ity decisions.

For those inter­ested in the end-results, the new sys­tem most directly offers the following:

Read the rest of this entry »

MMeOw is currently down for the count, but please visit the LOTRO Combo Blog. It aggregates content from some of the best LOTRO-related blogs and podcasts on the net.

Siege of Mirkwood on December 1st with Pre-Order Offers

Tony posted this on September 29th, 2009. It has 1 Comment »
Categorized as News, Siege of Mirkwood.
Tagged as , , , , .
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2199

Siege of Mirk­wood has an offi­cial date: Decem­ber 1st, 2009. To com­ple­ment this, Tur­bine is offer­ing sev­eral pre-order options for players:

  • The LOTRO Life­time Mem­ber­ship is now avail­able for $199.
  • Any cur­rent or for­mer player who renews or upgrades their sub­scrip­tion to any multi-month plan by Octo­ber 31st gets the Siege of Mirk­wood dig­i­tal expan­sion for FREE!
  • All play­ers can pre-order the new LOTRO Adventurer’s Pack which con­tains 2 char­ac­ter slots and one shared stor­age slot that allows play­ers to share items with all of their char­ac­ters on the same server for $19.99 and get the Harbinger’s Cloak which pro­vides 8% speed boost and the Dusky Nim­ble­foot Goat mount for FREE!
  • Start­ing today, exist­ing Life­time Mem­bers who pre-order the LOTRO Adventurer’s Pack get the Siege of Mirk­wood dig­i­tal expan­sion plus two in-game items (Harbinger’s Cloak which pro­vides an 8% speed boost and a new mount) for FREE!

If I had more money I’d finally sign up for the Life­time Mem­ber­ship at this price. It’s just eas­ier to break up that fee than pay it all at once. Curses!

On the flip­side, I’ll appar­ently be get­ting Siege of Mirk­wood for free. Can’t complain!

I’m a bit con­fused by this Adventurer’s Pack, though. It does answer the call for more char­ac­ter slots (and the fee is rea­son­able, espe­cially when I con­sider how many deals Tur­bine seems to like to give), but I’m thrown off by the shared stor­age slot. I was under the impres­sion this was going to be part of the expan­sion itself. Does this mean that those with this pack and Siege of Mirk­wood will have two shared stor­age slots? Or does it mean you need to pur­chase the Adventurer’s Pack to access it at all?

In any event, I’m excited about the expansion!

Update: A Casual Stroll to Mor­dor has a great post clear­ing up all of the con­fu­sion, along with links to offi­cial comments.

MMeOw is currently down for the count, but please visit the LOTRO Combo Blog. It aggregates content from some of the best LOTRO-related blogs and podcasts on the net.

Lothlorien gets some love: new quests with expansion

Isy posted this on September 15th, 2009. It has 9 Comments »
Categorized as Siege of Mirkwood.
Tagged as , , , , , , .
Shorthand Link: http://mmeow.net/tw2159

lothlorien

Since PAX there has been rel­a­tively lit­tle new news regard­ing the upcom­ing ‘Siege of Mirk­wood’ expan­sion. How­ever, today I came across a lit­tle nugget of new infor­ma­tion while trawl­ing through the LOTRO​.com forums. The juice comes from the res­i­dent LotRO lore–mon­key Berephon and his MyLotRO blog — which can be found here.

The blog explains how in his down­time (from fix­ing typos and check­ing the lore used in the new Mirk­wood quests), he was given the oppor­tu­nity to do an Orion style update on a small cor­ner of Mid­dle Earth. Berephon goes on to explain his choice of Fanuid­hol — the orc-infested war-zone north of Lothlo­rien, where there are cur­rently just a few quests. His over­haul will include 14 new tasks which include sev­eral repeat­able quests to gain Lothlo­rien rep­u­ta­tion, IXP, cash and sil­ver branches. A com­ment in the dis­cus­sion, which fol­lows the blog entry indi­cates that highly-prized Lothlo­rien gold leaves may also be included as a quest reward, should the rewards guru per­mit it!

Berephon’s choice to add to the cur­rently lim­ited num­ber of Fanuidhol’s quests is well jus­ti­fied. Based upon my own trav­els in the Golden Wood, any quests that add vari­ety to the reputation-grinding quests in Lothlo­rien is most wel­come, and I look for­ward to see­ing the results.