Things That Are Great About LOTRO

I keep doing nasty stuff about LOTRO and its not really fair.

'Cause I like the game, y'know?

I mean, I know I like the game, there's all these little things I notice that I go "oh man this is great," but then I forget all about it.

And its just hard for me to say nice things about stuff, 'cause I got a million billion ways to say something sucks but I only know two words to use when something is good, and that's "kickass" and "awesome."

And those two words aren't even all that great heh.

First off, I know I blabbered about how great it woulda been to have the music from the movies, but the music in the game is actually pretty awesome.

Especially the music in the Trollshaws, there's parts of that that makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck, its really kinda scary-good.

And there's lots of different music all over the place, every place has its own stuff that's pretty good, can't really think of anything in there that is totally annoying like that crappy unga-bunga drum orc junk was from WoW (although that Night Elf Woods Music they had in there was really awesome too).

But you won't get to hear that until yer like level 30 or something so its sorta going to waste if you get bored and frustrated before you get far enough to make the run to Rivendell heh.

Second, I crab about the lore but actually the world-building guys and the dudes who do all the quests really couldn't be any better than they are.

And the Evendim expansion (thassa new "land" fulla stuff to do that was added for free, sorta Classic Asheron's Call Style) was totally top-notch and deep-lore awesome too.

Only thing that really ruins Evendim is the way all the monsters are so damn close together that you either need to fight for like six hours to get anywhere ('cause all the roads are clogged with monsters too) or you gotta hobble around from place to place all crippled while pretending all the snares and diseases and the twenty monsters chasing after you and biting away at yer ass ain't happening (which is what everybody does heh).

Its funny how a little thing like "monster density" can really ruin something that's otherwise terrific.

Oh, having to swim around in the lake a lot really bites 'cause it takes forever to get anywhere, I mean, you can hardly tell that you are moving when yer in the middle of an ocean for like ten minutes of swimming, that's another thing that ain't so good, I file those type of things under "player pathing" but almost nobody understands that kinda "player pathing" stuff except for some old EQ-type dudes (and the guys who made some of the areas for WoW, you know a guy gets "player pathing" when a game has lots of cool "hunting areas" that work sorta like a mini-strategy game with their own specific clockwork mechanisms and stuff that you can figure out the trick to and get "good at" insteada just tons of "yards" full of random "monster spawns" every so many feet).

What stinks is that LOTRO has such awesome terrain and so much detail and love and energy and intelligence put into it and then somebody just randomly sprinkled all this stupid yard trash monster crap on top that clutters up the place and goes around making all this stupid "gobble-gobble-gobble" endless loop sound effect racket garbage that ruins the mood of the music and shit heh.

Okay, okay, I'm starting to go negative again.

Man, I just can't seem to help it ahaha.

Last time I played I was reading the books while I was playing and like, every single sentence from the books was in the game, I shit you not, the place Frodo and Sam meet the Elves in the Shire, the Big Hill in the Middle of Old Forest, the guy that Samwise argues with at the Green Dragon, I mean, every damn little thing is in there.

And the stuff they made up (like where you help 'em reforge Aragorn's sword) is really all deep and awesome (if you bother to read the stuff) and you can tell whoever is doing it totally reveres the lore and junk too.

Plus the quests are all inventive as hell and stuff too, with tons of moving parts and puppetry.

Only bad thing is the ones you gotta skip or get frustrated with 'cause you need a group to do 'em (in another one of these Brad McQuaid Style "monster fighting football team" games) and that can kinda ruin some otherwise awesome shit.

See how there's like this superficial level of sucky game mechanics layered on an otherwise super deep and totally awesome game?

I dunno why they just didn't make everything important soloable up 'till max level, y'know, like WoW does it, where they got some hardcore elite stuff for the treasure-whores sprinkled around but not the awesome junk that's supposed to be delivering the plot that you gotta run through at a million miles an hour with some pickup group of hardcore players 'cause they're the only ones that can do it and they don't even CARE about the plot heh.

Its the same thing that was messed up with DDO man, and that just drives me nuts, they had such awesome and cleverly designed dungeon/quest thingies in that game but it just got brutalized by the nature of the only people that would put up with those kinda game mechanics long enough (I can do it either way, y'know).

Oh, another thing that really bugs me is the way they only give you five character slots, y'know, I thought we were done with that stupid junk already, I mean, do you wanna make a cult or do you wanna get and retain some customers, you gotta make up yer mind there, "character slots" are how many lives your game has for a lot of people heh.

Plus they got all these game mechanics (like group-only level-dependent content and lower level crafting) that totally don't work if everybody on the server has their five 50th level guys and there ain't no newbs running around, its just totally self-defeating and especially newb-defeating, y'know, I just don't get it.

Mebbe my friend takes too long to get the game and now I don't have no room left to make a guy to hang out with him, yeh?

I mean, I'm guilty of this, I have a really hard time pricing the stuff I wanna sell for real newbs, I feel like I'm getting ripped off, y'know, I don't wanna have to go out and gather ore and shit, I'm gonna make you pay hard if I gotta do that heh.

And all they'd need to do is give people more slots.

You can't even try every class in the game on one server (where all your friends and hard-earned twinking money are) without deleting characters like we got trained to do in SWG, that is just ghetto-bad game design ahaha.

Oops, here I go again, crabbing insteada talking about how great stuff is.

Okay, hmm, let's see, uh, man, Hunters are a really great class, they're the kings of dps and killing stuff quickly in a game where you get powerful for killing stuff, they can teleport instantly pretty much everywhere you'd ever wanna teleport to in a game that otherwise makes you slog through millions of miles of annoying terrain, and even when they do feel like hoofing it, they're the class with the speed buff so they can always run super fast, and if they pick the harvesting tradeskill, which goes great with being able to run faster than everybody else and teleport back and forth to town, they can make their own armor for free and make mad phat money on the side selling extra boiled hides (which you get from killing stuff faster than everybody else) and all the ore and wood you bothered to collect that you don't actually need for anything.

I always thought crafting should be kinda like a quest to build your own junk pioneer style like it was in UO but this is one of those "hardcore auction house" crafting games and not one of those kinda things heh.

They got houses and stuff but it aint all awesome like EQ2 was with that junk, people really oughta pay more attention to that part of EQ2, that's really the only thing that was super strong in that game that holds it all together imho, the fighting monsters was crap and all clunky and stuff and the classes were boring as hell, but the crafting system and the way you could make your house into a shop and stuff was genius (oh the graphics were good, though, but that sorta goes hand-in-hand with everything).

Gawd, how long have I been blabbering, I hope this ain't super huge already.

That monster fighting football team junk is getting really old, I wish people would steal some more bits from UO, where it was "more the merrier" and you could bring Newbs with on the Big Dragon Hunt and let them take their own shwacks at the thing with their Newbie Swords, but I know that "skill increase from use" thing is kinda sucky in its own way unless you do it better than they did it in UO where everybody just ended up macroing their characters aganst polar bears trapped in their houses by a pile of boxes and stuff, that was shit as far as the "fun is in the journey" crapola ahaha.

Where's my These Are the Days of High Adventure, baby?

Hmm hmm hmm lessee.

Okay that's about it, I guess.

I did manage to say a couple good stuffs in there, I uh, think.

Hey man I dunno what's wrong with me I really do like the game I just can't help myself.

Don't even make me get into the way they try to "manipulate" the "populations" of players who woulda wanted to be an Elf by Making Elves Suck Worse Than Humans so that the player will decide to pick to be something they don't really wanna be (its not just limited to that, though, they do the same things with classes) just like Raph Did It, I CANNOT BELIEVE that nobody but me thinks that "Jedi Should Be Rare Shit" isn't TOTALLY FUCKED man ahaha.

Are you trying to entertain people for money or are you working for some crazy ass Higher Purpose where you think that all your players wanna have you try to manipulate 'em like that for their own benefit or something?

DO YOU THINK YOU ARE A GOD OF A TINY LITTLE UNIVERSE LIKE THAT ROCKETSHIP DUDE THAT WENT NUTS IN THAT OLD TWILIGHT ZONE EPISODE WITH THE LITTLE ALIENS?

Sheesh give that shit UP already, man, you guys must REALLY be some SERIOUS NERDS with MASSIVE issues from high school to be doing control freak junk like that, y'know, I mean, yer worse than the dudes that became COPS fer the love of mike man ahaha.

Okay, okay, whew, gotta quit going down all these negative paths, gotta get back to the good stuff, right, deep breaths, ahhhh.

My uncle was a cop and he was a totally cool guy I don't got anything against good cops (especially the awesome Family Guy cops we got in Chicago) but the good cops know exactly who I'm talking about let's face it heh.

Ugh now I'm picking on the police holy shit this is a train wreck of Epic Proportions my shit is on fire and sliding sideways off the rails into a poisonous swamp full of snakes and exploding helicopters ahaha.

Ah well, I tried, y'know, I really did.

Hey at least I din't crab about how purple fruke almost all the frickin' clothes and armor in the game are this time.

Er, sorta.

I'm telling you man, this whole "trying to say nice things" shit sucks some serious ass ahaha.