Classic!

The irony.

Also, at this point, anyone NOT wishing to hear about my misadventures in FFXIV should turn their links to http://roll100.blogspot.com/search/label/lotro or whichever label they like to read about the most.

Remind me why I even bother

So I thought "why not?" and bid on a 2nd age symbol, won it, made a sword for my hunter. In before "3rd agers are just as good" - I wanted to get rid of my ugly 3rd age club so I could fix the relics, and hunters actually have some pretty good legacies on melee weapons nowadays, plus on a 2nd ager I could even max out all of them. I got 2 starting legacies, and on reforges I only got some crappy melee legacies nobody in their right mind would use - at least not before all the more important ones are maxed. So please remind me again why the Legendary Item system is so legendary and useful and rewarding?

I find it completely inexcusable that a 2nd ager, which are so damn hard to get in the first place, can get less than four (not to mention just two!) starting legacies - I would have been happy with just 3 pool A legacies and replaced the rest with stat scrolls, but obviously I can't have nice things EVER (I'd show the awesomeridiculously bad LM staff I made a couple months ago but I just closed the game and don't feel like logging back in again).

*grumble*

I'm guessing the only people who like the LI system are those luckwhores who get nice things on the first try - I know for certain this was my last attempt in a long, long, long time.

>> QQing over virtual items

OMG HORDES OF WOW KIDDIES

-- IN MY GAME NOOOOOO.



^ that seems to be currently the hot potato in the LotRO community, and even more so in the RP threads. As we learned last week, The Lord of the Rings Online is going free to play later this year. This "f2p" is very far from the more common, free Asian mmos, since it's pretty much just an unlimited trial with severe limitations (such as only one character per server, money capped at 2G, less storage space), which can be removed with microtransactions in the ingame store. What most of the early ragers on the forums missed was that subscribers and Lifetimers would see no change in their game, in fact they are getting free points each month to spend in the store. Personally, as a Lifer, I'm pretty happy with what we've seen of the new model so far. There's even going to be additional character slots in the store, so I could roll at least two more toons! Because 9 is so not enough.

Back to the topic - of course, the new f2p will mean that EVERY SCREAMING KID ON THE INTERNET IS COMING TO ROOOOOOIN MAI AR PEE SERVERS. Some of the folks on the forums are wondering if their precious Laurelin should be turned into a VIP-only (VIP meaning subscriber/Lifer), with a multi-part questionnaire posed to each new player thinking of rolling a new scrub there. I have a feeling that in reality that would not stop those who plan to join Laurelin just to grief role-players, but it would most likely deter those who are still undecided about RP or who like RP servers for the community. I hate it when role-players get all territorial.

(it's a funny thing how each f2p discussion brings up "wow kiddies" - aren't they already busy playing their p2p game? kiddies logging in while wow is in maintenance, you say? well, that's maybe an hour or two away from my life, and in that time I can easily avoid them, if I ever even happened to run into any!)

What personally makes me RRRAAAAAAAAGE is that there will be NO CONTENT UPDATES until the game goes f2p, meaning there will be a ~10month gap between any meaningful new stuff. Meaning it's going to be a very, very quiet summer in Lotroland, unlike last year, when we got a nice new set of instances to entertain us until SoM. I'm assuming there will be a summer festival in a month or so, but that's not comparable to proper new level-cap instances (no, I won't forgive Turbine, not even when there's a wicker chair and a hammock among the new summer festival prizes). I had been sort of hoping there would be a new update soon-ish, which would give me some incentive to play again (I don't count role-playing as playing the game - it's 3D chatting :D), but it seems like we'll have to wait until autumn now. Tsk tsk.

What I fear the most now is that the quiet period will make me lose touch with many new acquaintances I've made, both ingame, on the forums and even real life - I'll just have to come up with something to combine all three.

Awesome security.

Ravious of Kill 10 Rats sums up the recent NCSoft fuck-up pretty nicely.

I wouldn't even post about this, but reading the linked threads I just remember I did once log into my Aion account and saw someone else's name there.

EDIT. I had to log my GW account to see if my stuff is still there, and luckily enough it was. Also one of my characters had just been awarded the most awesome minipet:

Well, damn

I installed Win7 last weekend, completely replacing my old Vista. I backuped all my important program files, documents and pr0n, and in a couple hours I had a nice fresh Win7 running with all my tabs in Firefox, Vent server configs and whatnot intact.

Except I'd lost a month's worth of Aion screenshots, because they were apparently located in the program installation folder and not my Documents folder like every other mmo does. As I wrote earlier, play.com had charged and shipped me a copy of Aion although I had cancelled my preorder, and because I never got any kind of reply from their customer service I decided that what the heck, I'll try this.

So I played it for a month, taking a ton of screenies for a multi-part report about the game, community and stuff. But now all the screenies are gone and I'm not technically savvy enough to dig up anything from a formated hard drive, so I'll just give a summary:

The graphics are bad. Characters look cool, but the average player can only create characters that look like horrendous clowns or crackwhores. Environments are bland, empty and lack any kind of close detail if you wander just a bit further away. Give it dynamic lighting, like in the video a couple posts down, and it'll start looking good.
I don't mind if people like the Twilight books but I do get annoyed when they say it's "good literature" - same with Aion, who markets itself as "the most graphically advanced mmo" which some people even seem to believe when it looks only a few steps better than some Korean free-to-play games. This is mostly why I collected such a vast amount of screens to illustrate my point, but as they're gone now I'll be happy to challenge anyone to prove me wrong.

Around level 20 you are basically forced to group to advance in the game. My server was full of spanitards, who LFF'd in English but only spoke Spanish in groups, even though me and some others said we don't understand. Some PUGs I left intentionally when I realised we couldn't get anything done when four people are chatting to themselves in a foreign language, only to end up in another moonlanguage-speaking PUG after answering another LFF that was clearly written in English. Besides the community seems a bit too young and weeaboo for my tastes, although I did run into the fabled Aion RP community a couple times and would have loved to look into it more.

At level 25 you're able to enter the Abyss, which is the main pvp area in Aion and spanning levels 25 to 50, meaning there's always some highlevel asshat camping the spot where newbies land the first time to do pve quests. I really really don't see the point in clumping half the players, and with such a large level difference, in one area and expect them to play nice. Then again, the whole pacing of Aion is very strange to me, since first you need to endure 25 levels of very dull pve to get to a pvp area, where you have to do pve again to gain levels while being farmed for pvp points by highlevels.


Saraste, Spiritmaster level 25, of Gorgos server, taken from the Aion database. I liked that you could log into the site to check your auctions and mail, or look up a recent ganker's level and gear :D.

My class of choice, the cc-and-pets class Spiritmaster, is also apparently very broken at the moment. While it has some very powerful pvp crowd-control abilities, some of it's basic functions are just so laughable that it was actually the first thing that made me decide not to continue playing (since now way I'd be willing to endure the first 20 levels again on another toon). Firstly, it's a pet class whose pets don't fly in a game where pvp revolves around flying. Secondly, all Spiritmaster damage is damage-over-time, but mobs can only have a limited amount of buffs/debuffs on them (7-9, can't remember correctly), so once you've fired off your damage spells the opponent could just rebuff themselves with their own abilities to completely remove the SM dots. Thirdly, SM pets and related abilities don't scale with gear, so if I'd ever hit the level cap I could still walk around naked while everyone else could make their characters even more powerful with epix gear.

I did have occasional fun times in the game too, especially at level 20 when I eventually found a good, English-speaking pick-up-group for the mandatory group quests. The monster design is funny and combat is fairly engaging. It's just that so many things in Aion are complete opposites of what I'd consider a good mmo, and while I can aknowledge that not everything should suit my personal and often quirky tastes, I just never had enough fun in the game to continue subscribing.

Being skinny does not make you pretty

.. or even happy. It really doesn't.

This is a bit of a personal rant, but I just can't help it. People admiring bone-thin looks just makes me so angry. Also frustrated. Once again I managed to stumble upon some pro-ana discussion forums while casually browsing the internetz, and it still makes me feel sick to the bone.

Joy of being a gamer in Euroland

...is that publishers will rip you off as much as they can. After over two weeks of "we'll have the info next week", that is, waiting for the European pricing of the upcoming LotRO mini-expansion, Codies dropped the bomb an hour ago. Not only are they NOT bringing us the sweet life-time and multi-month subscription deals that Turbine offers their customers on the other side of the pond, they've managed to make an even more confusing list of Special Packs, Triple Packs, Adventurer's Packs and whatnot.

Also, according to their calculations, 20 pounds equals 28 euros (xe.com says it's just a bit more than 21).


Graph made by Berryl of TSM.

In my wildest doom&gloom imaginations I had thought they'd take the original 20$ price on the new expansion and somehow convert it to 30€ for us poor oldworlders... so in a sense I wasn't too far off in my speculations. They did indeed manage to get us pay twice as much as we would have in the US (or I at least, in my current subscription situation).

I'm kind of suspecting that the reason (or maybe one of them, other than good old Greed) Codemasters aren't bringing us the multi-month or life-time-based pre-order offers is that, somehow, their accounts tech doesn't allow it. I mean, Turbine are eagerly promoting their social network and how it ties with the new expansion, but us here in Euroland can't have it because CM don't have the tech for it. I really really wouldn't be surprised if their accounts system doesn't allow them to make special deals for certain types of subscriptions.

I always love having to pay more so I can have less stuff <3.

Also, I made a new tag for this level of BEING VERY MUCH PISSED OFF.