Massively Forgot what I was doing...

Every time Lord of the Rings Online patches, I kind of stop playing. I try and hedge it to the end of the month, so as to not use up my data limit.

But then...I've lost track of what that next thing I wanted to do was. Never mind the auction house mails that have expired in the mean time (I could just shrug at their loss - but then, that's kind of shrugging at the game in general).

Maybe I'll just bring up my lotro and enter the lottery they have - and if I win, hey, maybe I'll log in to see what I got!

LOTRO: What if there was a skirmish campaign?

So I patched up Lord of the Rings Online recently and did a few skirmishes. Still enjoyable.

BUT...it goes nowhere. You've accomplished nothing but a progression on your XP bar.

I think what would be cool is if it randomised up a campaign structure, where you do skirmishes in order to advance down the campaign, maybe with some big bonus at the end of the campaign. So it feels like your working at something that you can complete only via skirmishes. Kind of makes skirmishes their own little world, that way, instead of just one way you could get XP.

Lord of the rings lotteries

Just a neat side thing I found, where your lord of the rings characters can win some extra stuff.

How to get the lottery widget to show on the mylotro webpage here.

Lottery schedule here.

LOTRO 'unable to decrypt' possible solution

This pic is always going to be useful for something...

Edit: Just a second, working on this post...
I ran into this error when I went to continue patching LOTRO, saying it was unable to decrypt some of the files it downloaded.

After googling about a bit one solution one I found was where the guy went into the program files, into turbine, into the lord of the rings file then used the search function (ctrl-f) and searched for files that had been changed in the last few days where it happened.


After some experimentation (and game crashes! Yikes!) I think this is the one that was the problem. Once deleted the client downloads it again.

client_hirez_aux_1.datx

Use at thine own risk, if that didn't already occur to ye! Just putting out a possible solution because I had real trouble hunting down this answer, so just repeating it to make it easier for latter folks to find.

Lord of the rings online - skirmishes

What did you say? That I've got no neck!?!

I recently finished patching up lord of the rings online and tried out some of the skirmishes - they are good fun! A little bit headed toward doing quake live against bots (I said a little bit, not alot!), but with the grander accumulation model of a mmorpg.

I also notice you can exchange the tokens you get for doing batch jobs on resources, which is nifty.

Sadly they don't seem to have any turbine points trade on the auction house - I was hoping to earn gold/trade gold for turbine points/buy quest packs/additional character slots.

Four levels and a funeral

I've been playing alot of the warhammer endless trial recently, just in case it wasn't obvious :)

And because you will end up 'dying' quite a bit in it, it makes me wonder what on earth is the point of depicting death in mmorpgs?

Granted in lord of the rings online your not supposed to die but simply have your morale beaten and you retreat, but given the format is exactly the same as death in other mmorpgs, it doesn't feel any different. Like a short cut scene of the character clutching his side and shuffling away would show he's just really hurt and retreating.

It's only a flesh wound!

I mean, what is so much the thrill of 'ohh, yeah, killed ya...oh there you are, fifteen seconds latter?' that you need to preserve it?

It's kind of like one of those glaring graphic glitches that makes your characters head dissapear or all the trees turn into solid colour blocks. It kind of spoils things?

Here with death, your character like totally died...but he's alive...oh he died...oh he's alive. It feels more like a big presentation bug.

If he retreats though, clutching his side, there's continuity.

If you want some gore, you could even have the character lose fingers and toes or even a hand (quickly replaced with a hook or magical construct) and the 'killing' player gets notified, so he gets his gory jollies (well, what else would you call it?). From what I've heard this can happen in, of all places, puzzle pirates - you can lose an arm or leg and get a peg leg or hook. BUT also like puzzle pirates you would have items to regrow fingers or hands/feet/forarms. Usually with the magic or technology in most settings, this is fairly believable (far more believable than perfect ressurection any time you want it).

Lord of the rings online (LOTRO) almost broke out of it - and maybe it's unfair to say given that it still seems to be a death system in LOTRO because it looks like death in every other mmorpg. But it still leaves you being ravaged by monsters and then...popping up elsewhere. You wouldn't do such a harsh transition in a movie - you would explain with a short cut away what happened in between.

Death - you can't have it, mmorpgs (because of your own design choices)! So quit trying to pretend its happening and just smooth out the wounded retreat presentation.

It's like the want to be macho manly 'you can totally die in our game', except it's faux-macho, because even the most minor amount of critical thought disproves that idea. But maybe alot of people (men?) can't give up that bullshit?