We live in times of endless choices. I just noticed again very acutely when I went shopping for some new furniture. For example, I want to get a new wardrobe, because my current one had never been all that great since I got it: It was a second-hand one that had been stored in a garage for too long during humid weather, and never fit together 100%. But I was fresh out of university, and it still looked good and I got it for free, so I didn’t care too much about the state of equine’s molars. Now that I move again, though, I decided I’ll leave it behind and get a new one.

IKEA has a nice and highly modular wardrobe system called Pax. The opportunities! But now I had to decide: Do I want a longer clothes rail and fewer shelves, or the other way round? Oh look, I can split just the lower part of the rail area: full length for coats, half-length (with some drawers below) for shirts. And they have shoe storage too? And 4 kinds of drawers and about 27 combinations frames and doors? But which should I take?!

The bottom line is, I’m still without a wardrobe. (I haven’t yet made my peace with it, to not leave the obvious pun unsaid.) The last couple of months made me make lots of, sometimes quite far-reaching, decisions. I feel like I’m thoroughly exhausted on decision-making for the time being. I just want a nice wardrobe, but not spend days on designing it. On the other hand, now that I know that there’s so much choice, I can’t just take a predesigned one, because I know I have the possibility to improve on that. So I’m stuck in decision limbo.

Choice is not always good.

For the same reason, it took me almost 3 weeks to decide which Internet provider to take. I tried asking around at the workplace for experience with providers in this area, and as a result, I’m still waiting on “real” Internet and currently use a mobile connection for my Internet needs. Which works… ok, I guess. Better than I had feared, but it comes with limitations. Which means there’s less choice in what I can do. For example, I’d rather not stream videos, because of the monthly volume limit. For the same reasons, I don’t dare to update too many online games.

This has an unexpected beneficial side effect. When I first realized that I had leisure time again, I was a bit out of practice and couldn’t come up with something to do with all that free time. The worst part was that I had to decide which of the many games available I should play. I have a large Steam library, and about a dozen MMOs I could choose from. But having a somewhat strict monthly limit, I realized I couldn’t really afford to update lots of games, let alone download new ones. So I had a look at which games needed no updating, and picked one of those.

Minstrel back in action!

Which is just a very roundabout way of saying that I spent some time in LotRO again for the first time in… maybe a year or two? I dusted off my Minstrel, and got going.

I’m actually surprised how little data MMOs (or at least LotRO) exchange with their servers. It seems as if the other background traffic of a mail program, browsers, etc. uses more volume than the game does, to the point where I can easily stay below 200-300MB a night.

LotRO is nice for some other reasons. It is a very relaxed game. At least the way I play it, I spend a lot of time just traveling through the world (which is still one of the best in any MMO I’ve seen), with some laid-back tab-target fighting without any strict timing requirements (which is important, because I often have about 300ms lag). It’s great! It’s almost like a meditation exercise. Except that this meditation exercise got me upwards of 30 levels, from before Moria into early Rohan. Who can say that about their yoga exercises? All you get from those are slipped discs.

There is one more reason that LotRO works well over the mobile connection. At some point, I did have to update the game because a small content patch had come out. If you ever played the game, you know that their updater is one of the worst in the business, because it’s excruciatingly slow. I’ve now proven by demonstration what I always suspected, that your line speed indeed has little influence on the time it takes to update: it works almost as fast over a somewhat slow mobile connection as it worked over my 3MB/s+ DSL. So relatively speaking, it’s going faster! (Well, in Bizarro world, which I like to visit every now and then when I come up with weird comparisons, thanks for asking!)

So even though Sid Meier supposedly said that good games are a series of interesting decisions, sometimes a game can be good even if (or maybe because) its decisions are very low-key and, at face value uninteresting.

Maybe in another 10 levels, I’ll have recovered from my decision paralysis enough to order that wardrobe, after all.

With Rohan finally released, I felt the itch to try out LotRO again. Nevermind I hadn’t even preordered the Rohan expansion. My highest level character, Hiltibrant, the Hobbit warden, is still where I left him months ago, at the 21st Hall in Moria. Realistically speaking, I won’t even reach the newly released content this year.

Nevertheless, LotRO is one of the games I always come back to. And I was interested to see what else had changed in the UI, at lower levels, and so on. So I fired up the patcher and let it run. And run. And run.

And run.

After two hours or so in the background, I got somewhat suspicious. It was still stuck at “Checking game data”, and it didn’t seem to do much of anything, except grab a lot of CPU power without any noticeable progress whatsoever. A bit of searching around found lots of wildly implausible theories as to the reasons, one remotely probable solution, and no official comments by Turbine. Oh well.

I learned that the patcher had a tendency to get stuck on the main asset files, and that one solution was to figure out which one it was (thankfully denoted by an additional “.jrnl” file pointing to the culprit), and moving it out of the way to see whether it would help. It did. The patcher went through and greeted me with the login screen. I was happy. So happy that I went and deleted the removed file. (Because, hey! problem fixed! Big rookie mistake.)

Until I actually tried to start the game proper, when I found out that solution had been… well, less than optimal:

Oh well, that’s helpful.

Thankfully, that error had an official page on the Turbine support site.

Not so thankfully, it described the problem, but no solution. “One of your data files is missing.” No shit, Sherlock. I learned the hard way that the patcher doesn’t seem to recognize missing files, that there is no “recheck everything” option, and that I couldn’t find a way to redownload that missing file via the patcher. In short, I was hosed.

So this morning, before I went to work, I decided that there was a painful, but probably effective solution to the problem. I started redownloading the full installer. It crawls and doesn’t use my full line rate, but it should still be done by tonight.

Oh look, it already got the Rohan skin! (Plus some weird graphic glitches.)

The new design of the downloader makes me hope that I won’t have to patch for another 6 hours after installation to get it to a current state. We’ll see.

In the meantime, there’s other games that beckon.

One of the games that I always tend to go back to is Lord of the Ring Online. When it came out, it featured some of the most beautiful scenery even seen in an MMO. Even today, the style has a very enchanting charm. The textures might be more blurry than we’re used to, the mountains might have more hard edges, and all those things that improve over the year with more memory and computing power. But it is still a very convincingly-made world (The Shire is one of my favorite zones in any MMO ever), and like no other, it invites me to just travel around for the sake of traveling.

Plus, it’s Tolkien. Can’t argue against that.

The mechanics are a bit more of a mixed bag. Many people complain that the controls feels sluggish, and combat is slow. I never had problems with the sluggishness, but maybe that’s because of the class I played. I started in earnest, after dabbling around a bit, with a warden. Warden’s don’t have many skills that require cast times. In fact, they don’t have all that many skills to start with. Instead, they use three basic skills (“spear”, “shield”, and “fist”) in certain combinations, called gambits, and then release said gambits for special effects that work like special abilities do for other classes. It’s a pretty responsive system, for the most part, and it doesn’t require you to use too many keys at the same time.

It does require you, though, to remember what combination has what effect. I call it the “Tekken” effect. It’s not too bad though; you unlock new gambits slowly, one after the other, while leveling, so you have time to learn them. Also, there is a certain tendency that gambits that start with spear are DPS-focused, shields are defense-focused, and fist are threat-focused, which helps with memorizing. I was happily fighting my way up to the higher levels, and was in Moria at the time Turbine decided the class needed an overhaul.

Oh my. For starters, they strengthened the “stances” concept. Up to then, stances were just self-buffs to improve your DPS or tanking. These days, they also change the effects of your gambits. Also, they added a new stance that made all your spear attacks work as javelin attacks, to allow the warden to do some ranged damage. In effect, you end up with about 3 times as many abilities to memorize. So, as an example: “The Boot” (spear, shield) is an interrupt that also does some damage. It also has a stun component in “Recklessness” (melee DPS) stance, and roots the target in “Assailment” (ranged DPS) stance, in which the ability also changes name to the awkwardly clumsy “ranged boot”. Ranged boot? Oh, and in “Determination” (tanking) stance, it doesn’t add any form of crowd control, but instead adds a DoT. “Boar’s Rush” (spear, fist, spear, fist) also is a damage + CC ability, but in this case, melee DPS and tanking get the crowd control, while you get a DoT in ranged DPS stance. You still with me? If you need a handy reference chart, here you go:

You probably all had the feeling at some point in time: you return to a game, have a bewildered look at your ability bar, and realize that you have no idea how to play this class any more. And that even happens without sweeping changes while you were gone. When the changes went live, I logged in, bought my new abilities like the mentioned “ranged boot”, tried to figure out how to play, realized I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, and logged off. I decided I could always come back later to invest the couple of hours to get up to speed again. Only that never happened. I stopped playing because I felt the class had changed so much that it wasn’t the same any more. That doesn’t even mean that is actually the case: all those changes in one update just made me feel out of touch.

So, there you have it. Three games I don’t play, each for another reason. Incidentally, none of them are really about the core of the game. In one case, it’s the company’s business behavior (EQ2); in the other, parts of the fan base (GW2); and in the third, massive class changes made me lose track.

Which of those three will I play within the next year? I think LotRO has the best chances. I still love the game, and once I feel the itch to return, I’ll probably try and figure out how to play my warden again. It looks like the next expansion won’t bring any massive changes to wardens, so I could start anytime now without the fear that all will be obsolete again in two months.

And with that, I guess I can return to posts about games that I do play.

Last time around, we saw Hiltibrant exploring Goblin-town. Before and after that, I’ve been busy. I progressed through the epic quest line, tried to kill the king of Angmar, but failed miserably.

Aragorn wasn’t too devastated though, and I continued, until I hit the taxi books (Volume 1, Books 9 and 10), which can be summarized as follows: “Dear adventurer, after your great deeds here in Angmar, we decided only the most prestigious and important tasks should be handled by you personally. That’s why I’ll send you to Bree, the Lone-Lands, and Esteldín, to fetch some information. And when you get back, I’ll send you to Evendim, where you’ll have to transport despatches between Tinnudir and Annúminas roughly seventeen hundred times, with a short trip to Rivendell for good measure.” At that point, I made a rude gesture to all those smelly Rangers behind their backs and decided it was time to go to Moria.

But first things first. I had heard that you can’t ride horses or ponies in Moria. Luckily, I had invested some time into killing evil dwarves, which made the dwarves of Thorin’s Hall so happy that they graciously allowed me to buy one of their riding goats… for a hefty price, of course. Damn those greedy dwarves. To be honest, the goat looks a bit strange, especially when you have to look at its weirdly wobbling behind for hours. *ahem* But it’s functional, so I won’t complain.

As I said before, I love the world Turbine designed for LotRO. Or rather, the world was already there, but the way they made it looks for the game. So I decided to get used to the goat, and to not use any fast travel skills. Instead I rode all the way from Thorin’s Hall, through Ered Luin, the Shire, Bree-Land, the Lone Lands, the Trollshaws, and Eregion, to the gates of Moria. I made a lot of screenshots to show the beautiful landscape, even though the weather wasn’t the best with mostly overcast and some rain. Since there are a lot of pictures after this point, I’ll hide them behind the cut.
Continue reading Picture Post: Khazad-dûm, at last! →

I claim that I have a fairly good orientation and map-understanding in real life. With a map of an area at hand, I rarely got lost; without, I generally at least make it back the way I came. Not that this matters much any more in the days of GPS everywhere.

LotRO’s  maps are not very detailed, though. Nevertheless, with a bit of trial and error, I generally get from A to B in reasonably short time. In fact, traveling is one of the things I thoroughly enjoy in that game. I often take my pony and travel manually, instead of relying on stable masters.

I said “I generally get from A to B in reasonably short time”. Generally. It doesn’t work that well in the Trollshaws. I’ve traveled there quite a bit now (my Warden is 45… I should make an update post on that soon), but eastern Trollshaws is still terra incognita to me. I can make it from the ford to Rivendell without too many issues, maybe taking a wrong turn once or twice. On the other hand, I just can’t manage to descend the mountain on my way back. I’m not sure I’ve ever made it without issues. In fact, most of the time, I take a wrong turn somewhere, run into a dead-end, and can’t find my way back. I then run in circles until I inevitably plunge to my death.

I've gotten used to that message.

I don’t know what it is about that area, but I don’t think I’ve only fallen to my death once anywhere else. In Trollshaws? It’s probably a dozen by now. At least the respawn point is at ground level.

Not that I’m complaining. I could just take the fast travel and be done. I like the exploring though. And one day, I’ll make it down that mountain from Rivendell, all the way to the ford, without as much as a sprained ankle, and that day I will laugh at that stupid mountain, and shout, “I finally beat you! How does that feel like?”.

Ahem.

Of course, the time after that, I’ll fall to my death yet again, just for taunting the mountain. But it will have been worth it.