LOTRO: XP for greys? But spread over time?

Yes, XP for killing aliens in Lord of the Rings online...wait, no!

I mean if you happen to be slaying grey monsters for whatever reason. What if you still got 'appreciation' points for it (ie, appreciation from the local peoples), which you can turn in. But you can only turn in so much at a time and there's a long cooldown between turn ins, so you could only gain XP at, say, 5% or 10% the speed you could if you were actually fighting level appropriate monsters?

So you can still gain some XP, but it's preferable to fight things that are your own level.

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.

Sci fi and shooting each other, toe to toe.

At Tobolds blog

As a final birthday present to Anarchy Online, I'd like to cite some previews of Star Wars: The Old Republic, in which the previewers complain about people standing toe to toe and shooting at each other with laser weapons, which doesn't feel all that realistic. Anarchy Online has this problem since a decade, and it's interesting to see how nobody has come up with a better implementation of Sci-Fi combat yet.

That's an interesting question, isn't it?

One idea is simply having personal shields! But that'd suit Anarchy Online more than star wars.

So, here's a bit of a radical idea - can we just have dynamic cover - you get into combat, your character goes and jumps behind a crate or tree stump. Was that crate or tree stump there a second ago? No, it sort of fades into existance!

I know star wars: the old replublic has some cover mechanisms, but they seem static and only in set places.

Another idea is to simply have alot of shots 'miss', but these still reduced your 'health'. In other words, health is used more to represent the lowering odds of all those shots missing you, rather than your capacity to take hits. Indeed, this would work very nicely for light sabers as well, since no one would be all dark night 'Tis but a flesh wound!' and fighting on after being hit. Instead they'd be dodging all over the place to avoid the saber until KAZROW, off comes the traditional star wars arm!

Well, LOTRO went and decided their 'health' bar was actually a morale bar. It's not like it's sacred to keep it a 'how much can you be hit by a battle axe and still smile' bar!

Lord of the Rings: Killed by a rune keeper!

There's one now! Run!

Maybe it was just the biggest area of effect I've ever seen. Who knew there was open PVP in lotro?

One of the first times I come across a rune keeper in action - near that quest where you rescue Robb Thornley? He's tied to a post with a bunch of orcs around?

I see a lightening special effect then KA WANG...my client starts to crash, offering me a big black square. And oh yes, can you log in fast enough...well, for a second you think you can as you see your character standing there...then a second loading screen and you realise it's dumping you at the closest retreat point! DAMMIT!

Luckily the character I was playing was kind of a TP gathering experiment - but still, I was aiming for the satisfaction of a level 20 no defeats.

On the other hand, latter I got defeated again but just by monsters this time, and I found they had added some self revive mechanism?? Wow, that's different? When was that added? When your character uses it, he actually says "Wrong bet!" before getting up again. No, really!

Okay, not really.

But I will say it lends alot more credence to the idea your character isn't getting killed, just getting the stuffing knocked out of him. There's a time limit on how long it is before you can use the revive option again. Nice addition. I wonder if guild wars 2 will keep the death jog while insisting they have no penalty for defeat (jeez, the more they try to avoid a penalty, the lamer the penalty gets - ie, plodding along in a death job), or give one free revive an hour?

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.