Pumping Irony

Three months and one week after placing the order for all the parts for the new PC, it’s finally working!

Other than the Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit OS, it’s decidedly a last-gen (ie. DirectX10) system for now. The new DX11 cards were tempting but I’m simply not willing to spend that much just for a video card any more. On a side note, I find it interesting that when I was younger and living paycheck to paycheck I had no problem sacrificing and saving up for the brand-new hardware and now that I can afford it without batting an eyelash, I have a difficult time justifying it. My PC gaming is pretty much relegated to MMOG’s only now, and I think 2009 painted a grim picture for how I am feeling about the MMOG genre as a whole in its current state. At “bleeding edge tech” prices, a DX11 card just isn’t worth it for MMOG’s alone, to me.

This PC has been nothing but trouble from the moment it was assembled, so it was with great joy Monday afternoon when it finally booted up and Windows 7 was installed. After installing drivers and a few other applications, I naturally set out to get my MMO on. Age of Conan was first since it had less updating to do than LOTRO, which took all night to finish updating through two expansions and content patches.

So yesterday I’m enjoying the new PC, it’s noticeably faster overall and games were running faster, yet I’ll admit to being disappointed that I wasn’t seeing quite the speed increase in the two MMO’s. I could tell they were running smoother but I was only getting +10-ish frames per second more than the previous PC. That just didn’t sound right. Not to mention I have a DX11 OS and DX10 video card, yet the DX10 option was greyed-out in both games. Something was amiss. I know AoC is a resource hog but I was expecting to be able to crank up the graphic settings more than I was able to. Didn’t stop me from playing several hours and it was far more stable (from a playability, not technical, standpoint) than it had been but there was still a deep-felt sense of disappointment of “nearly $1,000 and this is all I have to show for it?”

So I made a few comments along those lines on Twitter yesterday and some of the gang went about trying to find out specifically how to enable my DX10 options. Unfortunately none of them worked, for a very special level of noobness on my part, but I want to specifically thank Openedge1, BlueKae and Avery78 for their help looking into the problem. Openedge was even digging through the LOTRO forums looking for solutions — and he utterly despises LOTRO and everything about it — so a special thanks for your efforts, Edge. We’d covered everything from multiple installs of the ATI Catalyst 10.2 drivers, multiple installs of the DirectX Web Setup, checking compatibility settings on the .exe files, and checking a few configuration files, all to no avail.

With great horror and shame, I finally discovered the problem. As I said, this was an entirely new realm of noobness and hell, it’s just embarrassing. Edge tried to get me to fess up and I said “no way!” Then thinking about it, not only does it give me an excuse to write something on my somewhat-neglected blog here but also it’s healthy to be able to laugh at yourself. So here’s the brief history of the past 3 months wrestling with this beast.

I placed the order for the parts on December 1 but it was probably the third week of December before I had a chance to assemble everything and run into the first hitch. It all started with the motherboard’s power LED lighting up but nothing else would turn on. No fans, nothing, and it certainly wasn’t going to consider booting. Turns out I’d had the cables to the power switch, etc. installed vertically like they were on the previous motherboard rather than horizontally. Then again, the manual for my previous motherboard had illustrations and the new one does not, so it took a couple weeks to discover that mistake. It’s mid-January at this point.

Now we’ve got full power to the system. Pressing the power button brought life to all sorts of fans and LED’s and… that was all. No signal to the monitor and from the lack of any sounds other than fans (ie. hard drives, etc.) the system didn’t seem to actually be doing anything resembling booting up. Argh! Is the video card faulty? The monstrous fan came on so it’s getting power so perhaps the GPU is bad? Or is it the motherboard that’s malfunctioning? Maybe it’s just the PCI-X slot? Unlike the other parts, I ordered the video card — an ATI Radeon 4890 HD (my first ATI ever) — back in July after reading Openedge gush about it. So now my freshly-opened video card was well beyond the 30 day return point and I was going to have to spend more cash having it replaced if it came to that.

Over the next couple weeks I did a little troubleshooting [make a note of this, it will be important soon] I learned that there was an extremely high probability that I was one of several customers who ordered this particular motherboard and CPU as a combo package from Newegg, only to discover that the BIOS had not been updated to actually support the CPU yet, preventing the system from booting at all. Hey, that sounds familiar, no? It’s mid-February now, and I spent nearly a week playing phone tag with people from Asus but finally having them send me a replacement BIOS chip (free but I had to pay shipping). The Fedex tracker says it’s going to arrive the first day of my next trip so I took the morning off work so the chip wouldn’t be sitting outside. I hung around the condo all morning but lunch time I was starving so I ran out for 20 minutes and left a note on the door for the Fedex guy. Anyone care to guess when he shows up? Yep! Exactly while I’m out. Oh, and unlike UPS, Fedex pretty much refuses to just leave your packages for you, even if you sign a note for them. Seriously, do they just expect everyone to stay holed up in their homes every second of the day awaiting their arrival with bated breath? I called the support number and in between ripping the girl a new one was informed that no, the driver could not simply come back (he’s only been gone a few minutes, grrrrr!) and I’ll need to sign the door sticker card he left in order for him to leave it. Great! Now I’ve taken unpaid time off work for no reason and the BIOS chip will be sitting outside anyway!

So, I get home Sunday night and sure enough, there was a Fedex package waiting. I dig into things Monday and learn I don’t have space to do the small screwdriver trick to remove the old BIOS chip. I’m going to need to buy an IC removal tool. Crap. I drove to three different stores and no one has one for sale. Crap. So I lugged the case to my car and drove to SmartPC and paid the owner $15 to replace the BIOS for me. Just to be certain it would work, he offered to power the system up to make sure I had a monitor signal and the motherboard would attempt to boot. Sounded good to me. So he plugs in the power cable to the video card then lugged it over to the monitor. I told him there were two power inputs, not just one. He stopped and double-checked and told me no, just the one. A little red flag went up in the back of my mind because I remembered full well that the 4890 had two PCI-E plugs, but hey, he’s the owner of a shop that does nothing but build computers; he should know his stuff right? Sure enough, the BIOS update was all it took so I happily paid the man, shrugged off his jokes about how messy my PSU was (seriously people, no matter how good the price may be, do not ever get a non-modular PSU) drove back home and excitedly installed Windows 7 which brings us back to the beginning of this article and trying to discover why DX10 options were disabled in my brand-new PC.

Remember a few paragraphs ago where I said I had attempted to troubleshoot why there was no signal to the monitor? Part of that troubleshooting involved replacing the new ATI 4890 with my old Nvidia 7950GT to see if a card I knew worked would have the same problem. Partly because I was still wondering if I was going to have to send my 4890 back for replacement and mostly out of disgust and dismay for the whole situation, I never put the 4890 back in! By the time the BIOS was replaced I had completely forgotten about it and thought it was good to go, 4890 and all. That explains the red flag for the guy saying my video card only had one power input. Naturally, having a DX9 card in the PC guarantees that all DX10 options will be disabled as well…

Like I said, that was a whole new level of noobishness!

All is well now. The 4890 is installed, and DX10 has become available. I haven’t gotten around to installing image editing and FTP software yet so I’ll have to wait until next week or so (rough schedule this month so “or so” is likely) to post screenshots.

I fired up LOTRO and… honestly couldn’t tell any difference. I thought there were supposed to be all kinds of shaders for even better-looking water but it looked the same as it has since launch. I finally noticed that the branches of all the trees in Lothlorien cast shadows on the ground and followed the light sources, which doesn’t happen in DX9. However, in short order every fan in my case was running on overdrive. So, for now, back to DX9 for LOTRO. It isn’t worth sitting next to a turbojet engine just for tree shadows and extra-hitchy movement through Middle Earth. Seriously, what is with that game’s engine? They really need to look at changing the tech for pre-caching textures, etc.

Then I logged into Age of Conan. Character select screen shows up and of course I have an even higher framerate while my Bear Shaman impatiently shifts from foot to foot waiting for me to log him into the world. So I oblige him. I think I bruised my jaw when it dropped onto the desk. This is my first time seeing what DX10 can really do live and in-person. Welcome to 2007 right? Whatever! Age of Conan was already a good-looking game in DX9 but had the type of art and textures that could look fairly ugly at times when some options were scaled down. DX10 is night and day, and Age of Conan’s graphics truly shine. Performance is noticeably better with the default DX10 settings and I’m sure with tweaking I can get even better framerate without detracting too much from the gorgeous visuals.

So a year after I started saying I’d build a new PC, 8 months after buying the video card, and 3 months after initially assembling the new PC… I have a new PC! :grin:

I’ve been bitching for a few months on Twitter about the extremely unstable state of my PC, but I haven’t been in the mood for any PC gaming at all, so I’ve just let it go. I’m slowly getting back in the mood to play a single MMOG — which will be LOTRO, naturally — and maybe a couple other normal games.

This all started awhile back when I first had the bright idea that maybe I’d upgrade my PC this fall, so I went ahead and bought an ATI 4890 card. Unable to resist temptation, I popped it into my existing system and all hell broke loose. RAM chips spontaneously flash-fried themselves and things in general just stopped working. I had to cut the power several times — while the PC was booted — just to get any control over the system. I eventually put the crusty ol’ 7950GT back in, which is still in today, but I can never trust the system to work correctly, even when it seems things are ok.

Random apps will crash; sometimes it’s a browser (or all browsers); sometimes apps simply won’t load; sometimes I’ll get a memory error or a .dll not found error; sometimes it decides during booting it’s discovered major errors on the hard drive so it runs CHKDSK. Despite saying quite plainly on the screen that the disk check can be canceled, this is a blatant lie, as it refuses to respond to any input whatsoever.

Yesterday I had an all-out battle when it rebooted itself for no apparent reason, then for over an hour decided that the 7950GT could only handle a maximum of 640×480, 4-bit color. It took several (yes, several) vanilla boots into Safe Mode and re-installing NVidia drivers before finally the thing booted back into native resolution, mere nanoseconds before my head would have physically exploded and my body would have alighted with hellfire as I summoned the minions of Satan himself as my black temper consumed the last vestiges of humanity — and, indeed, sanity — to utterly destroy the misbehaving electronics causing me such stress. Think I’m exaggerating, do you? Ha! You mortals…

Games can get interesting when the system otherwise appears to be “normal” for a change. I apparently lost (or failed to take) screenshots in Guild Wars where enemy 3D models were replaced with white 2D bitmaps. It was like fighting swarms of blind (they had no eyes, after all) Spongebob Squarepants. On the one hand, I could see those white squares from miles away so there was no hiding from my party’s wrath, but on the other hand it was quite immersion-breaking. Feel my QQ! Sorry, I just love poking fun at the Immersionites out there. :wink:

The one that truly scared the shit out of me was a few weeks ago I decided to check back into LOTRO to see if I was ready to start thinking about MMOG’s at all again. I logged in (it was one of those rare occasions that the unstable system didn’t crash the client), was happily chatting with a few friends and kin-mates then decided to hop on my horse and ride around to do a quest. The icon for my mount was missing. What the hell? My finger stretched up to click the ‘i’ key to bring up the inventory, where I would just click the mount icon itself, only to my horror the inventory was empty! I had nothing! Had my account been hacked? Amid my panic, a few neurons managed to fire and I realized that if my account had in fact been hacked, the password would have been changed and most likely the characters would have been deleted and totally naked. Arwellyn was still wearing her gear and not shaming the elves of Middle-earth by parading around in front of dwarves — dwarves! — in her unmentionables. A few reboots later to get apps (including the LOTRO client) to stop crashing, it was just a graphical glitch where no item icons would load.

I did manage to get two glitched LOTRO screenshots recently:

My client refused to load anyone’s mount graphics, but the mounts themselves worked fine. Everyone was just gliding bow-legged through the air. Amusing, but aggravating nonetheless.

Running around the Ettenmoors, none of the distance imposters in the entire zone worked, they just showed up as glitchy bitmaps. When I was in range of the model they were replacing, the imposter-to-model transition worked fine.

I’ve just about had it, though. Especially after fighting with it yesterday and my temper very nearly getting the best of me and unleashing a severe bout of violence upon the offending electronics, which as you know never accomplishes the desired effect. I was hoping to hold off until the holidays were over but I think I’m going to end up spending some money this week and ordering the remaining parts to build a new Windows 7 64-bit system…

Working! :sad: But aside from that, I am once again on break from LOTRO. I was fine and dandy when I returned in April with my focus on PvMP but of course I had to go check on my Lore-master. I did some of the Moria instances with my kinship and got one more Radiance piece. Then, against my better judgment I dusted off my Captain and took him to Angmar where I worked to get him the full heavy Fem armour set. Sure enough I felt the sizzle, which was quickly followed by the fizzle, of burnout again.

It’s not specifically that I’m burned out on LOTRO, however, I think I’m just burned out on DikuMMORPGs as a whole. I thankfully have that Lifetime membership to LOTRO which has always allowed me to guiltlessly come and go as I please. But I am finding it impossible to get interested — much less excited — about any upcoming DikuMMORPG at all.  Aion? Pfft! Please. World of Animecraft with a zone for flying but invisible walls everywhere else? Straight up DikuMMO with all the same old Diku features as every other DikuMMO the past decade? No thanks. To paraphrase Bartle, “I’ve already played Aion, it was called Every Other Frickin’ DikuMMO Ever.” BioWare is working on WoW: The Old Republic which at this point in time isn’t doing anything for me, though I won’t eliminate the possibility that BioWare may actually surprise me and put out a quality game that is fun and different, but honestly I’m just expecting the same old Diku stuff but with the best animated and synchronized Diku combat ever seen. The only MMOGs out there I have even a slight interest in are decidedly non-Diku. I think I can safely say I am Done with Diku. LOTRO will still be my main traditional (and therefore Diku-derived) MMORPG, and I will still tour some now and then that I already own like Age of Conan and Vanguard. I don’t have any faith that Mythic has the ability to suddenly turn Warhammer into a fun and compelling game to get me back there even for a brief visit, but stranger things have happened. But right now I just don’t see myself jumping on the bandwagon of any more Shiny New Sameness from here on out.

So I’m back to the 360 primarily. I still have Fallout 3 to work on. A friend was replaying Mass Effect so I popped that in and started a new campaign with my existing character, and got him to level 50! Plus my usual suspects of shooters, an RTS (Halo Wars) and an RTT (EndWar) to work on, I’m pretty happy.

I also picked up Too Human on the cheap. It received less than favorable reviews, and the demo wasn’t exactly spectacular but I have to say the full game has been extremely fun! I finished the campaign in a few days (it’s short, but I also played a lot) at level 29, then promptly restarted it. I’m pumped up to get level cap and work on the elite armor set and get the elite plasma rifle for my Commando. I will say that for me, the Commando class pretty much solves the iffy attempt at 360-degree control that causes so much confusion with the melee classes. The Commando pretty much sucks at melee and I only do it to knock an enemy in the air to juggle them with my rifle to crank up my combo meter. It’s a ranged ballistics class and is much, much easier to aim just fine and shoot things. Now I know what Pete meant the other day when he complained about Too Human though. It was designed from the start as a trilogy, and just when the story gets really cool, game over. Literally. A story cinema was playing and just as I said “oh, cool!” it all faded out and the credits rolled. Queue up a Darth Vader “nooooooooo!” yell and you get the picture. I’ve got a few AGE guys who’d like to co-op too, so I’m really looking forward to that.

On the PC, I’ve been playing Guild Wars again after close-ish to a year off from actually playing. The new Zaishen Bounty quests have been a blast and I’ve gotten over my fear of PUGs (well, somewhat) and just jump in with my Monk. Everyone runs them on Hard Mode which I have very little experience with, and it’s been a real eye-opener. I normally run Benjeth with the Healer’s Boon build, with a slight personal tweak, but Hard Mode has made me realize that I need to stop merely occasionally dipping my toes in the Protection line and just jump in and learn it. It seems that in Hard Mode — and PvP! — it’s more efficient and important to prevent the health bars from going down than it is to bring them back up. So there’s my project: Learn Protection and PvP. It seems every time I manage to make it for one of Van Hemlock’s Tuesday Noob Club sessions, it’s PvP week and, as I discovered yesterday, he’s come to expect me to sigh in disappointment and vanish once I learn it’s PvP week. No more! I’ll give it a shot again, although I reserve the right to use the Shock Warrior I made just for the occasion in addition to monking with Benjeth!

In the interest of PvE emergencies and learning PvP someday, I started working on getting Benjeth a shield and spear. His current spear is a normal blue with a +19% enchant bonus, so I’ll still need to get a perfect one, but I did get a unique (green item) shield for him: Keht’s Aegis!

I have some more items that I want to get for Benjeth, but he’ll need to start going into Domain of Anguish, Fissure of Woe and the Underworld for them, which are some of the game’s most popular elite areas. Heroes and Henchmen cannot enter elite areas so I’ll have to learn who’s who in my new alliance to get into some groups.

It looks like Turbine is finally stepping things up and developing tech simultaneously for DDO and LOTRO. For the past year or so, it’s been a situation of one team coming up with tech for their game then several months later it was added to the other. DX10 appeared in LOTRO, then awhile later in DDO. Some new rendering tech to reduce hitching appeared in DDO then eventually made its way to LOTRO (and still needs improvement! Badly!) LOTRO shipped with the ability for users to make their own UI skins, DDO added that much later. Just a few examples. But now it seems Turbine may be getting the engine builds in both games up to parity and developing new technology that will appear at the same time in both games – namely scalable instances.

Reading through the massive (I’ve heard it’s around 40 pages printed!) release notes for the upcoming Module 9, all quest instances (except solo and raids) will scale to the size of the group. When I first heard this mentioned on DDOcast, I initially thought they were eliminating the whole mechanic of selecting a difficulty level (Normal, Hard, Elite) in favor of scaling, but the release notes say otherwise; the group selects the difficulty then the scaling occurs on top of that when entering the instance.

Similarly, in Massively’s interview with Jeffrey Steefel for LOTRO’s 2-year Anniversary, Steefel mentioned that the Book 8 update scheduled for June will also have new scalable instances; the current working name for them is “skirmishes.”

I also noticed Steefel mentioned Book 8 will have “customizable soldiers that you can train and bring into these skirmishes,” which seems to have escaped most readers’ notice over the excitement of skirmishes and the post-Book 8 hints. Why do I have a sneaking suspicion they might be moving DDO’s Hireling tech over to LOTRO? I was a little skeptical of the need for AI companions in LOTRO but it sounds like (for now) they may be limited for use in the new scaling skirmish instances. Probably a good thing, the tech and the AI is still very much being worked on in DDO, and quite frankly LOTRO is having enough problems already with AI and pet pathing since Moria launched… :mad:

In other Turbine tech news, one of the big changes to DDO in Module 9 will be the new “soft targeting” system. Players can toggle this on and off, but when enabled will have a targeting system similar in some ways to Mass Effect. Just moving your cursor or the mouse reticule near a target will select it (though I think you can simultaneously keep another target hard-locked?). DDO is also getting a first-person camera. Previously the camera would only scroll right up behind your character’s shoulders, and for screen shots players would have to scroll all the way in then click the Hide skill to make the character duck below the camera. But that’s not all! DDO is also getting a new “shooter-style” control scheme, selectable in the options, which will remap a lot of the controls to make the game control and feel similar to how shooters do. I’ll hazard a guess that the control scheme will work in both first and the normal third person view.

Not only will the new camera, control and targeting scheme provide a whole new feel to DDO but I also can’t help but feel DDO is being used as a guinea pig to test various schemes for Turbine’s secret in-development console title. Despite all the rumors of DDO or LOTRO being ported to the 360, I just don’t see it. LOTRO is a traditional DikuMMO with all the hotbar and inventory aspects to the UI that would be extremely problematic on a console. Despite its emphasis on fast, visceral action, I find DDO to be even more cumbersome to deal with because it has so many abilities, “clickies” on most gear, switching items constantly… that just won’t cut it on a console. At level 8, my wizard in DDO already had as many hotbars onscreen as my druid in WoW did at level cap and raiding! I’ve only bothered to put a fraction of the stuff available to my wizard on the hotbars, otherwise it would be even more cluttered. LOTRO is Turbine’s cash cow right now, and they’re still working on a new UI sytem for their engine and games. As Steefel mentioned last year at, the core of their UI subsystem was written in 1997! Yet I’m supposed to believe they have a fully functional and brand-new UI system for consoles to handle their existing games? Sorry, not buyin’ it. Until proven otherwise, I’ll continue to believe that their console MMOG will be a whole new game, not a port of one of their PC MMORPGs.

Slight tangent, but I’ll just say that in the spirit of getting both DDO and LOTRO up to parity, the DDO team needs to get crackin’ on the UI. Out of all the UI’s I’ve ever had to work with in any MMOG, DDO is by far the fugliest. It’s functional, yes, but it’s obvious from all the work the team has been putting into DDO the past year (and Module 9 is proof of that) that they’re looking to reboot the game. It’s being given an all-new look and feel, starting with the new tutorial area added in Module 8 (Module 9 is adding full voiceovers to the entire Korthos experience, thereby fully realizing the Age of Conan-esque “the tutorial was a lie!” comparison. :grin: ) and the makeover to the Harbor. Module 9 is continuing this trend, with a makeover to the Marketplace. I know a lot of people who like to scale their UI intensely dislike LOTRO’s because it actually resizes rather than scales, which leads to a blurry and pixelated appearance. That’s one of the many things Turbine will fix in their UI 2.0 system but there has been no news whatsoever of when we might actually see that. In the interim, I’d at least like to see DDO’s UI get brought up to the same as LOTRO’s, so that when UI 2.0 does come out it can be fit into each game at once.

Speaking of rebooting the game, Jerry from DDOcast posted this morning that briefly, DDO.com was showing the game under the name Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unleashed. It’s been changed back now, but a quick search on the ESRB site does in fact show DDO under that name! (Interestingly, they also have the Forsaken Lands expansion that was instead released as one of the Module content updates.) Turbine has been hinting for quite awhile now that something “vast and mysterious” was coming to DDO. While I’d love to see them switch to the LOTRO engine tech for a huge seamless world that would probably bring in a lot of new players, doing that would be the equivalent to the NGE and I don’t think they’ll go there. What this probably means is now that Module 9 finally brings the game to D&D’s level cap of 20, they’re putting even more emphasis on new content and moving the focus away from the city of Stormreach into even more areas of Eberron. I’m hoping they make a compromise and take some of the existing zone tech from LOTRO, as well as Moria’s “dual height map” tech and give a nod to Age of Conan, adding population-limited public zones to adventure in.

I still don’t quite have a grip on the schedules of the various kinships and tribes on Arkenstone yet, but apparently Wednesday is Immortals night. The Immortals is the tribe I was invited to, and one of the two biggest and most well-known tribes on the server. I run with the other big tribe, Bloodthirsty, all the time too and between the two I’m learning a bit about PvP strategy and tactics, among other things. It’s also PvMP night for two kinships that I have friends in, so the Ettenmoors was quite busy for awhile this evening.

Tonight I logged in my orc defiler, Severakth and saw the Free Peoples (“freeps”) had captured Lugazag, the keep closest to Gramsfoot, which is the uncapturable “home base” for the Monster Players (“creeps”). I popped onto the Immortals Ventrilo and immediately got an invite to the Immortals raid. Bloodthirsty had their own raid (mixture of Bloodthirsty and creeps from several other tribes) fighting there as well, and for awhile we coordinated between the two tribes as to which would hold the entry hall and lower floor and which would handle the stairs and upper floor. We were pushed totally out of Lugazag once when someone in the other raid made a bad pull on the NPCs and the freeps took advantage of it, making a massive push downstairs and fragmenting our forces badly. We regrouped outside Lugazag and slowly pushed back in, holding the foyer and began pushing upstairs once more. This time we all made it upstairs only to find only a couple freeps. Suspecting they’d jumped out for either a flank maneuver or perhaps to attempt to take another keep (that’s what we would have done) while we were pre-occupied at Lugazag. Turns out the freeps were just hiding in the flag room, which is a separate part of the keep only available to the controlling faction. When we engaged the Captain-General NPC, the freeps rushed out of the flag room. Unbeknownst to them, we had no intention of actually taking the keep, we just wanted to feast on soft, juicy freep-flesh! We immediately dropped the NPCs and turned all our attention to the freeps, killing them all very quickly. Since we’d already aggroed the Captain-General, we went ahead and killed him, which puts the flag room door into a neutral state allowing us in to capture the keep. One of our spider weavers ran up to the flag as if to perform the capture while the rest of us stayed back. To our delight, the freeps made a heavy push into the flag room to prevent us from controlling Lugazag, and again we slaughtered them.

After a few minutes, the Captain-General respawned which resets the flag to an uncapturable state as well as making the flag room door unusable for us. We were trapped inside and unable to take the keep — which we didn’t want to do anyway or we would have already — but did the freeps know that? Whether they did or did not, they made continued pushes into the flag room where we hungrily awaited them! From the discussion over Ventrilo, none of the Immortals had ever heard of this particular tactic (which we admittedly discovered by accident) being used before, at least not on Arkenstone. Our raid alone had enough to split into two forces, one staying in the flag room to farm the freeps who continually entered, the other going downstairs to help hold the lower floor against respawning NPCs as well as to weaken and funnel the freeps up to us. Despite being on different floors and unable to heal anyone on the lower floor, each group was still considered in proximity to each other and so everyone still got the Infamy points for each freep kill regardless if they were upstairs or downstairs. We were pretty safe upstairs since the freeps kept coming in 2-5 at a time, otherwise we just had to watch every so often for when the flag room NPCs would respawn. Finally the freeps made a coordinated push but the downstairs group followed them up and once more we stood victorious! Fearing the freeps were catching on that we were unable to flip the keep on them (it would have been amusing to see all the NPCs switch to orcs and trolls with the freeps in a position where there was no escape) we planned a new attack. There’s a ledge on the flag room overlooking the entrance to the upper floor. The freeps had previously had hunters up there shooting at us. One of our warg stalkers snuck down and aggroed all the NPCs then kited them away while the rest of our raid jumped down en masse into the freeps! It seemed they were surprised by that maneuver; it took them a few seconds to start fighting back.

Wondering if the freeps would learn from their mistake, we took down the Captain-General again and re-entered the flag room to try the same tactic again. Sure enough, the freeps put themselves back into their previous situation of disorganization, entering the flag room in small fragmented groups that were dealt with very quickly and easily.

Gotta give the freeps a lot of credit though for actually putting up a good fight for a change though. All in all, Severakth earned over 1,500 Infamy tonight, putting him around 7,500 or so, which is roughly 40% towards Rank 6! I’m really looking forward to getting Rank 6 where Severakth will get his final heal, but at 7,500/18,000 it’s still going to be awhile before reaching Rank 6.

I haven’t been to the Ettenmoors for LOTRO’s PvMP since October of last year, I think. Mostly because I was busy working on my Lore-master prior to the release of Mines of Moria, then of course I went on a total MMO break in December until this month.

I had read a little bit of the state of PvMP post-Moria and the general consensus was that the Free Peoples (freeps) were once again extremely over-powered with buffs and Legendary Items while Monsters (creeps) were back to being free kills.

The recent Volume II, Book 7 update addressed several key issues with PvMP and gave the creeps some significant buffs. They’re still under-powered compared to freeps but many feel Book 7 has finally ushered in a new era of play. To quote Bicep, leader of The Immortals tribe on my server (who led several of the raids I was in this weekend; just have to mention what a great leader he is and he seems to be an all-around cool guy!):

The mechanics of PvMP are profoundly well balanced now. For the first time in two years there is parity and equity. Tactics, communication, and a bit of luck will be the determining factor between victory and defeat. For the first time in the history of the game players will have to learn how to play their class; they will have to find unprecedented ways to overcome powerful adversaries.

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I took Severakth, my Defiler, out to the ‘moors for a stupid amount of time this weekend, but I had the most fun I’ve ever had there! I had to go out and find the new outposts so I’d have them on my map, and made two runs into the Delving of Frór dungeon to get Spirit Stones. I have enough to get my first racial trait once I achieve Rank 5 now. Spending a little time checking out all the vendors in Gramsfoot makes it obvious that the Delving of Frór is not merely a change of pace activity; it is essential to advance your creep. In addition, Severakth completed all of the Tier 1 map deeds for each point except for the Grimwood Lumber Camp, so he’s got crude maps for the most-frequented bases, and is only a few quests from the Tier 2 Tirith Rhaw deed for the poor map. Reading the item tooltips for the maps, it seems the only difference is that each higher tier has less of a cooldown but I learned that each type also has its own spawn point, so it’s useful to keep every type of map.

Most importantly, the ‘moors were very busy this weekend! Plenty of fighting going on, and Severakth earned enough Infamy to reach Rank 4 (he started at Rank 2, so yeah, that was a lot of Infamy!). I’m sure I should have saved my Destiny Points but my “inner role-play” sensibilities demanded I spend some on the appearance trait with each rank. I love the look of Defilers and each rank just looks better and better! Here’s Severakth in Gramsfoot immediately after reaching Rank 4:

I did have enough Destiny Points to buy all the new active skills, and a few traits. I still need the final passive skill that will give Severakth more power but at 12,000 DP it’s the most expensive skill I’ve encountered. In addition to the extra percentage of power, that final passive skill transforms him into signature status and is therefore top priority now.

Despite the changes, the same old patterns are still prevalent in the ‘moors. Creeps whine that the freeps always turtle inside the elf camp (EC) south of Tol Ascarnen (TA). Freeps whine that the creeps turtle inside TA. It’s a circular effect: TA is the central keep. Freeps go to EC because creeps are at TA. Creeps go to TA because freeps are in EC. Around and around we go… Saturday night, the freeps mounted a late-night (3am or later!) raid on Lugazag and took that keep. We had all day long to recapture it and could have easily done so but we intentionally left it alone because that alone dramatically changed the entire dynamics of the battles. It was better to have more variety and more fun than recapturing Lugazag and ending up doing the EC/TA dance again.

Without going into all the issues that PvMP has always had such as balance and equality in rewards between factions, I will make one suggestion: Turbine needs to take a page from Mythic’s book and create some type of “open grouping” system. I don’t know if it would have a use for the normal PvE game or not, but for PvMP it would be incredibly helpful. Every creep logs into the ‘moors and immediately starts asking for invites. The invitations may or may not come at all. Sometimes it feels like pulling teeth to get an invitation. The ‘moors is in dire need of an open group system so people can come and go at their leisure without having to spam chat for an invitation. That means there won’t be a dedicated “leader” but if someone needs to be dismissed from the group or whatever, the FPS genre has gotten by perfectly fine for well over a decade with a voting system. For that matter, a voting system could be used to elect (or impeach hehe) leaders. That system was used in Battlefield 2142, for example…

Some of the creep classes don’t need to be in groups; specifically the Blackarrow and Reavers, both high dps classes that do not need to be in a group to earn good Infamy. As a Defiler, however, I have the lowest dps of all so I cannot contribute much to a fight. I am a dedicated healer, so I’m relying on being in that group and keeping you up to earn maximum Infamy. People were also claiming that Defilers earn less Infamy anyway regardless of solo or grouped because healing takes a lower precedence over dps in the Infamy calculations or something along those lines. I heard Blackarrows routinely saying they were getting 30-40 Infamy per kill, while I was averaging 7-17 per kill. At no point for any reason have I ever gotten more than 17 Infamy per kill yet. Now, consider that Rank 5 takes 9000 Infamy to achieve. That’s a lot of dead freeps!

All in all, I personally feel that Book 7 helped bring the balance between creeps and freeps a little closer but it still needs some love from Turbine. Creeps are still pretty much limited to the basic class abilities, while freeps have gotten even more buffs plus a huge boost in dps, etc. from Legendary Items. Creeps don’t get any gear at all and I’m not certain that would be the answer, although the concept of an evil counterpart to the Legendary Items does sound attractive…

Tangent: I was just griped at awhile ago for not healing someone who was not in my group. I may be “green” to PvMP and all but I’m a damn good PvE healer, and sorry but there’s just too much action with creeps, freeps and NPC’s running, jumping, stealthing, etc. for me to be able to keep track of it all. If you’re in my group, guess what? I can see your morale right there on my screen. If you’re not in my group then the only way you’re getting a heal is if no one in my group needs one and if I happen to see you and I bother to mouseover you to view your morale. Otherwise, too bad. Any advice, opinions or tips on this from any of you PvP healers out there?

I enjoy walking quite a bit and usually get a few miles per day when it’s nice but I decided to up the ante this week. I ended checking in at just over 22 miles from Monday to Friday! Not bad. I felt a blister coming since Tuesday and it made its appearance Thursday night. Nearing the end yesterday, my instinct told me I should stop because I was really starting to feel it but no, I pushed myself for another lap and by the time I got back home was practically limping. Taking the weekend off to let it heal but next week I’ll see if I can get 25 miles – 5 miles per day – and do so slightly quicker.

I checked in with my kinship in briefly, but for the most part I am waiting for Book 7 to go live on Tuesday before I make any effort to get back into LOTRO. I’m not positive but I thought I either read or heard in a podcast that due to the lore regarding the elves of Lorien, having player housing there is out of the question so I’ll probably be making the rounds in the Ered Luin neighborhoods to look for a suitably scenic Deluxe plot. I suspect I’ll have a difficult time with it – those Deluxe houses are always crammed up against other houses in rather non-scenic areas. My existing Standard house is in one of the most scenic spots in the neighborhood. I wish I was allowed buying a Kinship house; I could certainly use the storage space. Yes, I can afford one.

I spent most of what little gaming I did this week in DDO. After joining the guild Chainmail in November, I’ve barely spent any time in DDO whatsoever due to my overall MMO burnout/malaise. While walking this week I caught up on my podcasts, part of which was six or more episodes of DDOcast, which got me in the mood to get back in. So I’ve been getting to know the guild, letting them get to know me. I spent time in voice chat with a few asking questions about the wizard class, then we set out running some adventures. Now, Koriander is two ranks into level 8, roughly 60% to the third rank. Also got a few new items, my favorite two being an Aberrant Robe which has Wizardry II (+50 Spell Points) and +17 Spell Resistance, and Clever Goggles of Jump which gives a +2 to Intelligence as well as a clickie for the Jump spell that can be used 3 times per day. That might save me the need for carrying Jump potions for now.

Also I’ll mention that  the leader of the Chainmail guild, James “Lagin” Thomas, will be featured in DDOcast episode 108! The segment will be recorded tomorrow afternoon and I think the topic will be about old-school D&D gamers who have stuck with the game through the years and all its various incarnations. He’s been playing since the original white box D&D set and even still has the original set of the very first modules ever printed for the game. I may have misunderstood what he was saying about the formation of the guild but it sounded like he also had to jump through some hoops to even use the name Chainmail but ended up being approved by Wizards of the Coast. Something like that. Perhaps they’ll get into that discussion on the show.

Finally, I realized my Vanguard subscription was still active for some reason so I canceled that a few hours before the announcement that Live Gamer RMT would be coming to all US servers. I have some feelings on that, which I more or less stated over at Stargrace’s blog, as well as over IM with Karen/Jaye. I feel my points are spot-on but primarily for the modern PvE games. Others have counterpoints which apply more directly to Vanguard and its non-instanced, contested content nature and I absolutely concede to and agree with that part. I don’t know… I almost think Vanguard is too old-school (despite having more modern UI and mechanics) for Live Gamer. Or that adding “appearance tabs” ala EQ2 and LOTRO then selling optional fluff outfits with no stats like EQ2 is doing may have been a better fit for Vanguard. But that would facilitate actually programming in the appearance tabs, and I don’t see that happening. [Edit: I obviously missed in the patch notes that appearance tabs were in fact added two weeks ago!] I am unsure I can even name a specific reason why I secretly like the game and wish it success, but let’s be honest: the new content that was “promised” to arrive by Christmas still hasn’t arrived four months later. The reason I don’t play is because the population is nearly non-existent when I login. In a group-centric game, that clinches it, and I logout. I’m not interested in grinding mobs solo to level cap and missing everything in the game just to grind the one single raid currently in the game. No thanks.

After a two month break, I’m feeling ready to start delving back into LOTRO. I’d poked my head around last week and leveled Arwellyn to 57. I spent a good chunk of yesterday running around with my kinship, starting in Eregion doing one run each of the Library and School of Tham Mirdain, which are three-man instances near Echad Mirobel. I’d been to the instance entrances back when Mines of Moria launched but had never bothered actually getting a group for them.

After enjoying the sun and fresh air in Eregion, we ran back into the dark of Moria for the rest of the day. We completed several quests, though it seemed like for every one I turned in, ten more opened in its place. It was great having some kin-mates to run with because I intensely dislike soloing in the Mines. I’d actually started just duoing with another Lore-master, looking for four White Hand Ambassadors. We found them fine, but after two wipes, we ninja-invited the kinship leader when he logged in his Captain. That would have worked fine but one of the Ambassadors had other orcs and goblins around him, as well as Naga, an Elite Master troll who drops a Mithril Flake. An additional two wipes later, we finally managed to keep the mobs separate and avoid the patrols. With the Ambassadors down for the quest, there was no way we were passing up a Flake-dropper so we engaged Naga before someone else strolled by and saw him.

Next, we decided to hit The Grand Stair, which is one of the instances to start working on Radiance gear if you do Hard Mode. Apparently the "in" thing these days is to just do quick loot runs rather than actually clearing the instance. It was my first time in, but my usual bag of Lore-master tricks worked perfectly well, so I didn’t require any personalized briefings. I actually need to read up on this Hard Mode business, but from what I saw yesterday it’s anything but hard.

We walk in and the first encounter has a well-known… glitch… that players use. I pitched a hissy-fit about using a glitch, but the next two runs (we did three total) I watched them do it. You walk up to the gate and the NPC’s have a dialogue before lowering the gate so you can fight the mini-boss. The glitch is to let the boss walk through the gate to you, where he bugs out and won’t attack anyone so the group can kill him quickly. Even in the first fight where we ran into his room to fight him, it was an easy fight. The only thing the glitch accomplishes is that a healer isn’t required, so the Minstrel can enter Warspeech for extra dps or the Bug-zapper Rune-keeper can attune for full dps during that encounter. I don’t consider it an exploit because you still have to fight this mini-boss; it isn’t allowing you to bypass him, but still… this needs to be addressed in a patch.

If I recall, we only fought one other boss and skipped the others, to go straight to the final boss Igash. Unlike Guild Wars where Hard Mode is a setting you click, or DDO where you select the difficulty when entering the quest, Hard Mode in LOTRO is a state the group has to trigger, if I’m understanding the concept correctly. To get Hard Mode in The Grand Stair, the entire group had to run at once, tightly packed together, past Igash and up against a gateway blocking the exit of the instance. Another mob, The Devoted, will attack the group for a bit. To trigger Hard Mode, The Devoted must not be killed! Once he’s wailing on the group for a few seconds, two archers spawn and the tank grabs aggro on The Devoted and keeps him occupied at the gate while the rest of the group runs out into the main chamber to take down Igash. Most groups obviously won’t have multiple tanks so our tactic (which is probably very commonly used) was to have two hunters (or a hunter and a champion) ping-pong tank him. One hunter would slam Igash with dps to get his aggro then kite him to one end of the room. The other hunter then hits Igash for mega-dps and he runs back across to get that hunter. Rinse, repeat while the rest of the group whittles him down as he runs back and forth. It’s a bit of a long drawn-out fight, and Igash does have a few nasty tricks up his sleeve that might prompt the minstrel to use her "oh crap!" group heal, but overall Igash isn’t bad. Once he goes down, The Devoted and his two archers despawn and five chests spawn, whereas the normal bosses spawn three. The big chest contains the token for the Radiance boots if you’re in Hard Mode. Arwellyn got hers on that first run!

One thing I noticed quickly is that Grand Stair loot runs are extremely profitable! With a two month break, paying upkeep on Arwellyn’s house cost about 440 silver (I logged in from time to time to pay upkeep, plus doing the Yule festival events in December). Yesterday alone, Arwellyn was defeated 4-6 times and those repair bills aren’t cheap. Only a fraction of what the heavy armour-wearers pay, but still… All those repairs plus goat rentals all over the place, and her bags are nearly full so she wasn’t able to collect many drops to vendor. She started yesterday morning at 29 gold and change. Prior to the Grand Stairs runs she was down to the high end of 27 gold. Three quick Hard Mode loot runs later, collecting practically zero sellable items, she’s sitting on a little over 32 gold! I’m already scheming… a few of those will pay for a Deluxe house, a few more will pay for the final vault (bank) chest at level 60, and a few more after that will cover a goat mount once Arw reaches kindred reputation with the Iron Garrison Miners.

Accomplishments for yesterday: roughly 4 gold profit, enough XP that she’s 1.5 bubbles from level 58 (she started at less than a bubble into level 57), the Stone-Readers shoes (Radiance set!), a sword upgrade, Friend status with the Iron Garrison Miners, Acquaintance status with the Iron Garrison Guards, and Ally status with the Scholar’s Guild. Her main Legendary Staff of the Third Age is level 25/30 and her main Book is level 22/30. She’s been carrying around a few other Legendary Items so I decided to go ahead and equip them too. Two extra staves and one book, all 10/30 now and gone through their first re-forging. I’ll probably deconstruct them at level 11 and currently plan on maxing out the higher level items, hoping they’ll deconstruct into some really nice relics to use once I get Legendaries with higher level caps while I hope for an awesome Second Age staff (level cap of 60!) someday.

It’s that time of year again in Middle Earth, and to slow things down for Arwellyn I’m taking her out of Moria for awhile and only doing the daily festival quests in hopes of getting a few housing items. I say “in hopes of” because unlike other festivals where I simply save up tokens to barter for the exact items I want, the Yule vendors give gift-boxes with random gifts. I understand where that’s appropriate for the whole holiday gift thing, but it’s personally frustrating because there are only a few specific items I actually want. The cosmetic clothing I already have from previous festivals (no new ones, grrr) so I’m only interested in the season-specific housing items. And eventually the Yule horse but I need to save up some gold first to buy a normal horse to trade for it.

I did do the non-repeatable quest to get a Yule tree for Arwellyn’s yard though. That one is in the Shire. Notorious stick-in-the-mud Lobelia Sacksville-Baggins is the Yule planner due to an old Shire law that says whomever lives at Bag End gets to plan the Yule festivities. That wasn’t a problem when Bilbo was around but he’s gone now and Lobelia goes to great effort to put a damper on anything the locals might consider even remotely fun. Eventually we go see Michel Delving’s Mayor Whitfoot who informs us of the unfortunate law, though suggests we check out the book of Festival Law from the library of Great Smials. The mayor flips through the book and says a new planner can be appointed if a petition of at least ten citizens of Hobbiton are willing to sign, which is not a problem for the fun-loving people of Hobbiton! Lobelia wigs out over her foiled plans (it’s a shame they didn’t use a Scooby Doo “if it weren’t for you meddling kids!” pop culture reference, but then the Tolkien lore-nerds would be out in force screaming foul) and Gaffer Gamgee gives us a Yule tree decoration.

The downside to the tree? It’s not its own special Yule tree model with decorations and all that. It’s just the snow-covered fir tree model from Thorin’s Gate, the dwarven starter zone. Boo hiss. Oh well, more fluff to spruce up the yard and make things seasonal is still a plus for me even if it’s not totally what I’d prefer.

Pre-Moria I was going pretty hardcore with dungeons, raiding and reputation grinding. Now I can slow down again. Ten levels doesn’t take long; in fact Arwellyn was 54 within the first few days of Moria’s launch without even trying. Right now she’s 56 with just under 3 bubbles to go until 57, which won’t take much effort at all to obtain. Moria shipped with 6 Epic Books, and she’s already on Book 4, Chapter 5. The Book 7 update should be in either January or February, and that will be adding Lothlorien reputation, so I’ll be working on getting the Iron Garrison Guards and Miners reputations prior to that (currently focusing on Miners for the goat at kindred then Guards for the legendary trait) but I’m not going to be spending every waking moment playing LOTRO when I have a whole year to enjoy the expansion content, not to mention worrying over my couple of alts. I’m really wanting a deluxe house for the extra storage chest and extra hooks for decorations and furniture (which will also let me free some storage space) but I keep hearing rumors of Lothlorien housing so slowing down and biding my time until Book 7 also gives me time to see if that rumor has any truth to it. One “problem” with the current neighborhoods is there are so many standard houses, which are cheaper, but they have all the good locations. Look at the one I chose for Arwellyn, right by the river with her own little area for swimming and fishing and a great view. I almost got one right next to one of the waterfalls but I figured (correctly) that I would tire of the constant noise from that waterfall. The deluxe houses in Falathlorn are all in non-scenic areas with other (standard) houses crowded up against them. I do have a location picked out that I suppose fits the “lesser of the evils” as far as scenery and having my own space without feeling like I’m in a suburb, but I’m hoping there is Lothlorien neighborhoods with more deluxe houses to purchase in better, more scenic locations.

One thing I wish LOTRO did was decorate the main towns for each festival. Guild Wars completely revamps the hub cities for their holidays. I think EQ2 does as well. I’d love to see Bree and the other primary hubs decorated and celebrate the holidays, not just at the Bree Festival Grounds or the Party Tree in the Shire. It’s fine to go there for the activities but show some holiday spirit and decorate those towns! Maybe there are decorations and it’s so subtle I don’t even notice — LOTRO is all about subtleties, after all — but I don’t think that’s the case.

Turbine’s “My LOTRO” has entered public beta today, and marks their first entry into bringing LOTRO offline and into a more social setting where people can view their characters similar to World of Warcraft’s Armory.

Apparently I need to go in and edit my own profile as well? I’ll look tomorrow, I have a GRAW2 game to get to…

For now though, here are my primary characters:

Arwellyn (lore-master)

Myrra (minstrel)

Gared (captain)