Sunday 24 April 2011

The Grindaversary

As most who've been reading the LotRO community forums and blogs know, the current Anniversary Event, also known as The Grindaversary, has been quite unanimously declared a complete fiasco. The token costs for the few new cosmetic items and the garish festival horse are way too high and they're only available, one at a time, from two minigames, one of which can only be completed twice a day. The other option, the Thorin's Hall bar fight, is fun but gets tedious very quickly — mostly because of the long waiting times between rounds.

And the icing on the cake is, of course, that after the whine escalated Turbine went and added a third option to the token grind, and it's only available on the US servers since our EU provider still doesn't have the system in place that would allow lotteries on our servers.


Damn carebears, whining about pvp.

So I went and did a few rounds of Beer Brawl to get the horse and a couple maps for the new Cartographile deed. And by a few rounds I mean around 80 rounds. I managed to get myself quite addicted to the minigame, and the waiting wasn't so bad after I dug up an ebook to read between rounds. What really really pissed me off (and still does) were some lame table campers — but at least they were easy targets to knock out of the fighting area, ha-HA! After the umpteenth fight I had absolutely no qualms about knocking people away from the beer jug and grabbing it for myself. Give no mercy and expect none!

Luckily I also had several friends helping with the maps so we each ground one or two and then shared them between us so everyone got all the maps counted for the deed.



After Lothi got her horse as well we went to take some screenies together but it was too dark and they didn't turn out quite well. Suffice to say the horse looks very silly and hastily made.



I also got a /salute from somewhere during the Beer Brawl and it finally completed the /swordsalute deed for me. Yay!

3 comments:

  1. I'd rather that anniversaries were a cause for celebration instead of complaint. I don't see much to celebrate with adding even more tedious grind... instead, they should've implemented some more fun way of getting the cosmetics and steed, as a sort of a "thank you" to the players for another wonderful year of gameplay.
    But eh, I tend to try to avoid the grindy bits in LotRO anyway... I've never had the attention span for such things anyway.

    I'd love to get the steed for my collection, but I don't think I'd be able to stomach hour after hour of beer brawl. :P

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree, it would have been fun if there was even just one other activity but as it is now the "festival" is just a sorry unfinished excuse-for-a-grind. The previous years we got some really nice goodies for the Anniversary; at least scrolls that reduced the Bard and Stable-master costs.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The sad part is that most of us grind the stuff anyway. We simply want to haz all the horses.
    Why do we do this to ourselves :P

    ReplyDelete