99 replies to this topic

[cossieuk]

SellingTheDrama, on 16 March 2012 - 14:12, said:

you need another option :

'no, but i am on the fence about getting it in the future.'

Done  

[Doro]

Darmokk, on 16 March 2012 - 19:39, said:

The $$$ you earn per hour seem very low there.

Is the point of that exercise that it is important not to reward Turbine with money for their behavior?

Yeah. I felt dirty enough buying the RoI expansion after what they were doing. Felt even worse when I found out how shoddy it was.

I'm against rewarding Turbine for half-assed work.

[Jackalope]

No, and I'm going to stay that way on principle. My ideals are not for sale.

[AgamemnonV1]

Doro, on 16 March 2012 - 18:03, said:

Well there is one way to get easy TP but it would cost a fair amount of in-game gold. What you do is make a new character, send them enough rep items (anything without level limits) to max them to kindred and then harvest the points. You get something like 35 TP for every kindred you make. So that's about 100 TP for at least 3 kindreds made. Do this 5 times and you've got your free 500TP and you could do this all in one day if you have the gold. Repeat every day for a month and you can get 15k TP.

I'm sure there's some problem with this but it seems like the easiest way.

That's only if you had enough rep items to do that each day, however, and I very, very, VERY much doubt anyone is able to find that many rep items, even if they were searching the AH. I could do the math later but even under the easiest factions to earn kindred for could probably take a few days worth of gathering rep items to hit kindred.

I'm going to sidetrack a little to explain the differences between gaining rep just using items and gaining rep by killing enemies that give rep and completing quests that award rep.

It's October 2007 and I'm playing a Hunter for once. I get him up to 34. I love Evendim. I want him to have the horse for the zone. But it was a whopping 5g--all he had was 4g. And because Annuminas was a LV50 zone, I couldn't turn in the higher-rep items. Which meant sashes were the only things he could turn in. I grinded sashes at Rantost for four days straight. I hit 37 in the process (and had my 5g). Four days of straight-up turning in sashes ONLY (remember, this was a time before they added additional rep-gain benefits through questing and killing rep-related mobs).

Of course the story is eschewed by today's standards. If you have a level cap dude you can just farm Annuminas for an hour or so and probably have enough badges to hit friend for someone with neutral standing. I'm just saying, it's not going to be easy as pie regardless.

Getting free TP, especially a lot of free TP, is not easy by design ON PURPOSE. The secret boar deed used to hand out 50TP on completion. When I found out about this, I took all my alts on a boar-killing spree across Eriador. The ones that were too low-level to kill that boar in Angmar? I just asked for high-level help.

Now THAT was easy free TP. You could essentially create a new character, group up with a highbie friend, have him take you to each Eriador zone with boars, have them killed, and you would be awarded 50TP. And because all of the pre-Moria zones don't have those pesky summoning level restrictions, your Cappy/Hunter can do it in a half hour.

Which Turbine wised up to and reduced the amount of TP the deed awarded you to 10TP instead. I'll never forget though that I earned myself 450TP in one day on my characters alone. Being able to almost earn what VIPs get each month was a very dangerous work-around for Turbine.

Point is, Turbine is aware of the work-arounds and they do their best to get rid of them. They're going to ensure that it's difficult to gain a ton of TP in a short amount of time. Someone could try a trial test of this concept (getting kindred with alts) and see how long it takes and weigh time spent vs. reward. My guess is it'll be steep.

[Doro]

AgamemnonV1, on 17 March 2012 - 10:27, said:

That's only if you had enough rep items to do that each day, however, and I very, very, VERY much doubt anyone is able to find that many rep items, even if they were searching the AH. I could do the math later but even under the easiest factions to earn kindred for could probably take a few days worth of gathering rep items to hit kindred.

I'm going to sidetrack a little to explain the differences between gaining rep just using items and gaining rep by killing enemies that give rep and completing quests that award rep.

It's October 2007 and I'm playing a Hunter for once. I get him up to 34. I love Evendim. I want him to have the horse for the zone. But it was a whopping 5g--all he had was 4g. And because Annuminas was a LV50 zone, I couldn't turn in the higher-rep items. Which meant sashes were the only things he could turn in. I grinded sashes at Rantost for four days straight. I hit 37 in the process (and had my 5g). Four days of straight-up turning in sashes ONLY (remember, this was a time before they added additional rep-gain benefits through questing and killing rep-related mobs).

Of course the story is eschewed by today's standards. If you have a level cap dude you can just farm Annuminas for an hour or so and probably have enough badges to hit friend for someone with neutral standing. I'm just saying, it's not going to be easy as pie regardless.

Getting free TP, especially a lot of free TP, is not easy by design ON PURPOSE. The secret boar deed used to hand out 50TP on completion. When I found out about this, I took all my alts on a boar-killing spree across Eriador. The ones that were too low-level to kill that boar in Angmar? I just asked for high-level help.

Now THAT was easy free TP. You could essentially create a new character, group up with a highbie friend, have him take you to each Eriador zone with boars, have them killed, and you would be awarded 50TP. And because all of the pre-Moria zones don't have those pesky summoning level restrictions, your Cappy/Hunter can do it in a half hour.

Which Turbine wised up to and reduced the amount of TP the deed awarded you to 10TP instead. I'll never forget though that I earned myself 450TP in one day on my characters alone. Being able to almost earn what VIPs get each month was a very dangerous work-around for Turbine.

Point is, Turbine is aware of the work-arounds and they do their best to get rid of them. They're going to ensure that it's difficult to gain a ton of TP in a short amount of time. Someone could try a trial test of this concept (getting kindred with alts) and see how long it takes and weigh time spent vs. reward. My guess is it'll be steep.

I did work out that you only need something like 120 rep items that give 700 rep to max kindred with a faction. I checked on AH on Snowbourn and found loads of people sell the 700 rep items, it's just I didn't have enough cash. I suppose there are some out there that do (one person is looking to buy a worn elder king symbol for 1200g).

[cossieuk]

AgamemnonV1, on 17 March 2012 - 10:27, said:

Of course the story is eschewed by today's standards. If you have a level cap dude you can just farm Annuminas for an hour or so and probably have enough badges to hit friend for someone with neutral standing. I'm just saying, it's not going to be easy as pie regardless.

For Evendim rep there is an even easier way if you have a high level character.  Just rerun the book quest where you have to steal the Palantir.  I did this a while back on my champ and did it 5 times in under an hour, the got locked out due to the max instances per hour, and got over 50 Band of Númenor and made a few gold from the trash I collected.  This was back when 65 was the level cap so it would be even quicker now to do the 5 runs.  Having AOE skills is good for the as you can just run in and round up the whole instance the kill them.

[Brrokk]

A couple of things...

1. Turbine are aware of the loopholes for getting free TP and will close them? I don't think so; see this guide to getting free TP here:
http://www.lotrolife...em-easily/1546/
OK, this isn't directly published by Turbine and I'm not sure what the connection is, but that site clearly has some close relationship. This information has been openly published on the web since 2010.
Turbine don't mind people getting free TPs if it's from playing LOTRO; that's why they award TPs for deeds.

2. I think the whole "lets punish Turbine by never buying TPs" thing is pointless. LOTRO is a great game and I'd happily pay regularly for it, even though I previously had a lifetime deal with Codemasters. I think it would be better if Turbine didn't pretend it was free and then muck about endlessly with pointless Store items and TPs, but if that's the way they've chosen to collect cash from me, I can live with it. After all, if it increases their overall income, the game I like will be better supported.

[Darmokk]

+1 on Brrokk's post

I see no indication that Turbine has a problem with people maxing out TP earning without paying money. It's not that those people would go spend cash if that hole was closed. So as long as they are nice to people in the game that seems fine.

I also don't subscribe to the idea of never spending any cash, afterall running the game costs money. I just have a personal catalog of items that I find OK to buy. And after Sapience has a fit of rabies on the forums I don't buy for a couple months, of course.

[Iorionael]

The example of how to farm TP I posted earlier was not something I actually do, it is how the 'true' f2p'ers do it now. There are people out there that have everything unlocked without spending a single penny on the game. Exploitation? perhaps, but then that is how turbine designed the model.

Anyway you do it, the grind for full unlock is possible but for the more rational members of society* perhaps a little unrealistic

*not sure if you were to grind that much that you would be a member of society any more!

[Dalthalion]

Brrokk, on 17 March 2012 - 12:12, said:

After all, if it increases their overall income, the game I like will be better supported.

I must respectfully disagree with this.  The bugginess and lack of quality storytelling has become progressively worse since Moria.  The added income (if it is indeed not an empty claim) is not producing widespread improvements to the overall game experience.  If anything, it is simply serving as a test sandbox for their profitability model.

[Doro]

Dalthalion, on 17 March 2012 - 19:53, said:

I must respectfully disagree with this.  The bugginess and lack of quality storytelling has become progressively worse since Moria.  The added income (if it is indeed not an empty claim) is not producing widespread improvements to the overall game experience.  If anything, it is simply serving as a test sandbox for their profitability model.

Exactly. It's extremely naive to think that Turbine's constant stream of cash from the Store is actually going back into making the game better. It's clear they just want to make the most profit with minimal returns to the development team, hence why quality has bombed and price has shot up (£20 for a horse, £10 for a barter wallet, etc).

[Darmokk]

It is extremely naive to assume that the store brings in a lot more cash than the old model did.

The only confirmation we have ever seen (and even then only Turbine's word) is that in the quarter after f2p went life there was a burst of cash coming in. But nobody outside Turbine knows whether that was a permanent increase, or whether masses of people just bought their personal equivalent of a lifetime subscription and never spent a single dollar more, or anything in between.  The fact that this news has not been repeated for any other quarter after the first one might indicate that things didn't go all that well.

I had hoped that at least the people on this forum are a little smarter.

[Jackalope]

Brrokk, on 17 March 2012 - 12:12, said:

A couple of things...

1. Turbine are aware of the loopholes for getting free TP and will close them? I don't think so; see this guide to getting free TP here:
http://www.lotrolife...em-easily/1546/
OK, this isn't directly published by Turbine and I'm not sure what the connection is, but that site clearly has some close relationship. This information has been openly published on the web since 2010.
Turbine don't mind people getting free TPs if it's from playing LOTRO; that's why they award TPs for deeds.

2. I think the whole "lets punish Turbine by never buying TPs" thing is pointless. LOTRO is a great game and I'd happily pay regularly for it, even though I previously had a lifetime deal with Codemasters. I think it would be better if Turbine didn't pretend it was free and then muck about endlessly with pointless Store items and TPs, but if that's the way they've chosen to collect cash from me, I can live with it. After all, if it increases their overall income, the game I like will be better supported.

The original game is no longer supported though. Had to say it. If it was, then all game items would be available to VIPs without them using the store. Most of the new stuff must be bought, one way or the other, and they ARE slowly removing all ways of avoiding using it. The relic scroll, reducing TP awards for easy deeds, reducing DP collection, the barter BS, and it's just going to keep happening. Whatever game you and I used to play prior to F2P is dead and gone the way of the dodo. Simply artificially increasing grind via the LI system was a kick in the teeth to people who pay monthly.

Turbine supports the store now, the game is secondary. That is the truth of it.

And it was obvious to me that the f2p model wouldn't last, it can't sustain itself. Once you bought what you want, you are done spending money. Oh sure, you may occasionally buy something new they add to the store, but whoever thinks people are lining up in droves and dropping cash constantly are optimistically blinded by their own desire to have the game continue. F2P normally is what happens when a game is in decline, and while I'd like to believe the game had enough subs to keep it going, obviously that wasn't enough, or it would still be like that today. So what we have now is a 'pay to hang on to what you had', and 'pay more for the rest', or 'pay to claw back what they took away'. And as surely as the sky is blue and the sun rises in the East, they are going to continue to adjust the game to make it harder to avoid using the store, even if you DO pay a sub fee. It's easy to see that, that is exactly what they've been doing since the switch. Why else do they go to so much trouble to prevent people from mentioning that on their official forum, or go to great lengths to attack the people who post anything negative, especially when it's factual? Because that would keep new fish from biting the shiny hook on the end of their line of BS. That's why.

[Knowfere]

Jackalope, on 17 March 2012 - 21:20, said:

The original game is no longer supported though. Had to say it. If it was, then all game items would be available to VIPs without them using the store. Most of the new stuff must be bought, one way or the other, and they ARE slowly removing all ways of avoiding using it. The relic scroll, reducing TP awards for easy deeds, reducing DP collection, the barter BS, and it's just going to keep happening. Whatever game you and I used to play prior to F2P is dead and gone the way of the dodo. Simply artificially increasing grind via the LI system was a kick in the teeth to people who pay monthly.

Turbine supports the store now, the game is secondary. That is the truth of it.

And it was obvious to me that the f2p model wouldn't last, it can't sustain itself. Once you bought what you want, you are done spending money. Oh sure, you may occasionally buy something new they add to the store, but whoever thinks people are lining up in droves and dropping cash constantly are optimistically blinded by their own desire to have the game continue. F2P normally is what happens when a game is in decline, and while I'd like to believe the game had enough subs to keep it going, obviously that wasn't enough, or it would still be like that today. So what we have now is a 'pay to hang on to what you had', and 'pay more for the rest', or 'pay to claw back what they took away'. And as surely as the sky is blue and the sun rises in the East, they are going to continue to adjust the game to make it harder to avoid using the store, even if you DO pay a sub fee. It's easy to see that, that is exactly what they've been doing since the switch. Why else do they go to so much trouble to prevent people from mentioning that on their official forum, or go to great lengths to attack the people who post anything negative, especially when it's factual? Because that would keep new fish from biting the shiny hook on the end of their line of BS. That's why.

I fully agree with this assessment. I did finally break down and log back in. I'll at least take my highest character thru the new epic and content. And make my judgements on negative and positive things. It's mostly still negative after playing for 3 days. Severe rubber banding and skill lag to the point my warden couldn't even get a gambit of because always the 2nd skill would not fire before the 3rd in the lineup. So I'm back to Rift until she can do something resembling combat. And if there really was good money going back into the game, you'd think after 4+ years they'd be able to NOT have this problem after EVERY. single. update. ever. And yeah, they will continue to create problems in the game to force players to 'fix' it using the store.

[Brrokk]

I'm sorry that some aren't enjoying the new content, but I'd like to put a contrary view so that casual readers of this forum won't be put off. Here's my review...

Rubber banding - I haven't seen it. I do get lag problems in places like Helegrod and boss fights in Tower of Orthanc, and I believe I've narrowed it down to my PC not handling atmospheric effects (fire, steam, mist) very well. In open landscape I've had no problems for some time, in the new or in old areas.

Story - excellent. I've only got as far as Stangard so far, but there's a real sense of being in the footsteps of the Fellowship. Hints of where they have been, wondering where Gollum is, Gandalf returning and trying to follow, others like Galadriel and Landroval showing concern. Also, the disputes from Edoras spilling over, first into the northern rohirrim camp and then into Stangard and remaining as a threat even though partly resolved. I admit that to pick up all the hints you need to have read the books; maybe that's made it too understated for some. (I'm being vague here so as not to give spoilers).

Scenery - rock textures, river water, flower-filled meadows. Pretty good. Better once away from the huge mallorn trees on the edge of Lothlorien. Turn up the graphics settings as far as possible!

Architecture - the Mead Hall in Stangard! I must organise my kin to have a drinking session in there! the design is carried on less magnificently in the houses and places like the tavern too. The celtic look which I though was a bit out-of-place in Dunland is excellent for Rohan. Colours, woodcarving and banners, all lovely.

Reputation faction - I'm a bit miffed at starting again with a new riders faction when I fought at the Fords of Isen and the raid on Isengard. I can see that the riders might not have got news of me from those places though. It advances fairly fast and I reckon I'll be well in with them soon.

[Hawkmoon]

Brrokk, on 18 March 2012 - 15:56, said:

I'm sorry that some aren't enjoying the new content, but I'd like to put a contrary view so that casual readers of this forum won't be put off. Here's my review...

Rubber banding - I haven't seen it. I do get lag problems in places like Helegrod and boss fights in Tower of Orthanc, and I believe I've narrowed it down to my PC not handling atmospheric effects (fire, steam, mist) very well. In open landscape I've had no problems for some time, in the new or in old areas.

Story - excellent. I've only got as far as Stangard so far, but there's a real sense of being in the footsteps of the Fellowship. Hints of where they have been, wondering where Gollum is, Gandalf returning and trying to follow, others like Galadriel and Landroval showing concern. Also, the disputes from Edoras spilling over, first into the northern rohirrim camp and then into Stangard and remaining as a threat even though partly resolved. I admit that to pick up all the hints you need to have read the books; maybe that's made it too understated for some. (I'm being vague here so as not to give spoilers).

Scenery - rock textures, river water, flower-filled meadows. Pretty good. Better once away from the huge mallorn trees on the edge of Lothlorien. Turn up the graphics settings as far as possible!

Architecture - the Mead Hall in Stangard! I must organise my kin to have a drinking session in there! the design is carried on less magnificently in the houses and places like the tavern too. The celtic look which I though was a bit out-of-place in Dunland is excellent for Rohan. Colours, woodcarving and banners, all lovely.

Reputation faction - I'm a bit miffed at starting again with a new riders faction when I fought at the Fords of Isen and the raid on Isengard. I can see that the riders might not have got news of me from those places though. It advances fairly fast and I reckon I'll be well in with them soon.

Just curious...
What to you think of the quests in ROI and The Great River?  Not the Book quests, but the normal everyday quests?

[Brrokk]

Yes... the general region quests without attached stories aren't so interesting. It depends, as a fierce dwarven warrior I'm always happy to slay a dozen orcs. In fact, I'll do it even if I'm not asked. I think I've seen enough of boars, though. And goats seem, well, similar to boars...

[Hawkmoon]

Brrokk, on 18 March 2012 - 17:51, said:

Yes... the general region quests without attached stories aren't so interesting. It depends, as a fierce dwarven warrior I'm always happy to slay a dozen orcs. In fact, I'll do it even if I'm not asked. I think I've seen enough of boars, though. And goats seem, well, similar to boars...

"aren't so interesting"  LOL.. I thought they were badly designed.  Seriously.  You have a tribal leader who suffers from Dementia early onset Alzheimers.  He forgot where he put 3 items he needed to perform a ceremony.  And it seems the only one capable of finding them is the new person in town.  Or how about, would you go scare this guy fishing for me?  And so on and so on.  The lack of quality quests is amazing.  To me anyways.

[Trinsec]

Hawkmoon, on 18 March 2012 - 21:00, said:

"aren't so interesting"  LOL.. I thought they were badly designed.  Seriously.  You have a tribal leader who suffers from Dementia early onset Alzheimers.  He forgot where he put 3 items he needed to perform a ceremony.  And it seems the only one capable of finding them is the new person in town.  Or how about, would you go scare this guy fishing for me?  And so on and so on.  The lack of quality quests is amazing.  To me anyways.

That's nothing new, though. I was already amazed at the kind of quests in SoA itself. Fetch this, do that.. It was almost as bad as WoW. I'd say the quality has been pretty consistent so far!

[AgamemnonV1]

Trinsec, on 19 March 2012 - 12:53, said:

That's nothing new, though. I was already amazed at the kind of quests in SoA itself. Fetch this, do that.. It was almost as bad as WoW. I'd say the quality has been pretty consistent so far!

At least we haven't been asked to gather boar guts or deer turds in awhile. Although "clean up slop" in Isengard sure did bring back memories.