I've been spending the past week re-acclimating myself to the old school MMO design of LOTRO.*
The concept of item wear during normal use --which typically only happens when you're killed in an MMO-- is still part of LOTRO. I'd made it to roughly about L24 or L25 before my Champion died the first time**, but I had to periodically stop and visit a vendor to repair my worn items.
The old style quest hub concept, which I detailed a few posts ago, was very much in evidence in the Lone Lands and the North Downs. You'd think you were finished with a quest hub, but once you turned everything in another set of 6-10 quests would suddenly pop into being.
I can't say I mind the old quest system so much, but it sure would have been nice if Tolkien had dreamed up a bit more variety in the enemies department. I'm getting tired of killing orcs, bears, wargs, boars, birds, and spiders wherever I go.***
This is the reason why bears are now on the Middle-earth endangered species list.
The thing that still surprises me, after all this time, is how faithful LOTRO is to the source material. Even the items that they made up for the MMO, such as the refuge of Esteldin, fit in so well that unless you're a Tolkien geek you'd never notice they were made up.
True story: I was goofing around in the North Downs, if you want to call goofing around slaughtering trolls en masse, when someone asked in World Chat just how much of LOTRO is made up****. The asker thought that Archet, Combe, and Staddle were made up (they weren't) and that Esteldin wasn't made up (it was). When someone mentioned that The Forsaken Inn, for example, was referenced in the novels but never fleshed out, the asker exclaimed that he thought that was another made up location.
***
Naturally, in MMO space you can't afford to have distances as far apart as they really were in Tolkien's Middle-earth.
For example, the distance from The Forsaken Inn to Weathertop was a couple of days of foot travel on a good road, and the distance from Buckleberry to Bree was much a good day's travel by pony, too.
Compressing Middle-earth does have one huge positive, however: that people can remain engaged with the MMO without extraordinary effort.
I know there are people out there who like to explore, and they would love the vastness of Middle-earth as Tolkien envisioned*****, but to be completely honest a real trip from Bree to, say, Weathertop would be 95% boredom coupled with 5% adventure. (Or sheer terror. Your choice.) Eriador in particular is so empty in stretches that it is simply impractical to expect it to hold a player's attention without gobs and gobs of additional "kill ten rats" type of quests. And really, there are far too many of those quests in LOTRO as it is, as that was the quest design structure of the time.
So while it does kind of irk me that some aspects of the game, such as political contact between The Shire and Ered Luin not exactly following the pattern of Hobbits not named Took or Brandybuck, I'm willing to ignore it in favor of playability. Besides, a lot of the political and racial tensions in Tolkien's works do find their way into LOTRO itself. The end of the Elven low level zones in Ered Luin, for example, is predicated upon the traditional misunderstandings between Elves and Dwarves, and the open refusal of the chief constable in Bree to work with the Rangers ends up hampering his ability to handle the brigand and orc incursions into Bree-land.
***
But there's one item that is definitely NOT in Tolkien's works that I'm glad that Turbine has taken: Tolkien's viewpoint toward women.
Yes, JRR Tolkien was a product of his times, and yes, he patterned the stories surrounding Middle-earth after the Anglo-Saxon and Norse mythic tales he so loved, but both The Hobbit and LotR are a primarily a sausage fest with the few women in the story reduced to a secondary or tertiary role.
As a guy, I never really noticed the lack of women in the novels. Even comparing it with other stories from the early 1920s up through the 1970s, such as Brooks' The Sword of Shannara, Howard's Conan stories, or Moorcock's Elric and other stories surrounding the Eternal Champion, the women in the novels are primarily there to be a) a love interest, b) a plot device to explain/move the story along, or c) for sexy fun times' type of window dressing.
The Peter Jackson adaptations of both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, however, did make an attempt to address the lack of women in the stories by enhancing Arwen's role (by giving her the additional duties fulfilled by another minor character, Glorfindel), providing more screen time for Eowyn to be badass on the battlefield, and emphasizing Galadriel more. And, yes, creating the role of Tauriel for Thranduil's realm.
Still, LOTRO goes a step further by integrating women into all facets of life in Middle-earth. Women are guards, warriors, craftspeople, farmers, nobles, etc. And more than that, they are also important NPCs in each region.
Who is the hero whose quick actions saved Trestlebridge from attack by orcs? Aggy Digweed.
Who is the hero who stormed the Red Maid's territory in the Lone Lands to stop the nightmares of Hana the Young? Her sister, Elsa the Bold.
But the best part? Some of the enemy NPCs and bosses are women, too.
Not my video, but Andraste's ability to hang out
in the Barrow Downs alone merits my respect.
***
Perhaps because of the old school feel of LOTRO, I've got a fondness for the game. I can go back in time and relive the design that was current when I started playing WoW, without having to worry about any story continuity issues that Cataclysm inflicted on Azeroth.
But more than that, I can enjoy the Middle-earth that I used to read****** come to life in an MMO, without it looking too hokey or snarky concerning the events in LOTR. Bree itself fascinates me in a way that I never expected, since it was just a metaphorical bump on the road in the novels, but seeing it truly come to life like this gives you a much greater appreciation of Tolkien's vision.
Besides, they've got a good band that plays on Friday afternoons on the Gladden server.
*The mini-reds have informed me that I've been playing LOTRO waaaay too much. Go figure.
**As is usually the case, I tried taking on more and more enemies at once until it finally caught up with me.
***And the Dead. You'd think I dropped in on The Walking Dead: The MMO from all the wights I've been killing.
****Yes, I know how silly it is to be arguing such a thing in a fictional world. At the same time, staying true to the source material is always important for immersion.
*****The late Karen Wynn Fonstad's work, The Atlas of Middle-earth Revised Edition (Amazon and B&N), is well worth the price for people who love maps and created fictional worlds. While she references Christopher Tolkien's History of Middle-earth series, she doesn't allow it to overwhelm the original material from the primary sources (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales).
******And play in, courtesy of Iron Crown Enterprise's Middle-earth Role Playing (MERP). It was a competitor to D&D back in the 80s and 90s, and I loved the skill based system. Their sourcebooks had a default setting of the mid-Third Age, about 1500 years before the events in LOTR, so there was still a Dunedain kingdom in the North and a Dwarf kingdom in Moria. And those sourcebooks were fantastically written and detailed. Even though I haven't played the game since the early 90s, I still have all of my sourcebooks; they're that good.
I was goofing off on Dromund Kaas last night, figuring I'd go do a daily or two, when I got in line to take out a 2+ toon in the Temple.
Another toon in front of me asked me and the player behind me to join up as a group, and I figured why not. It saves on waiting around for additional spawns, and you can burn down the boss more quickly.
But. (You know this was coming, right?)
Once the boss dropped, another toon who'd just run into the room ninja-ed it first.
Ahead of about 5 people/groups.
"Did he just do that?"
"What a dick!"
"Fucker!"
"Come back here, asshole!"
I shook my head. I bit back my "Well, that's someone embracing the Sith Code for you" rejoinder, because I shouldn't have been surprised at all.
***
I've not seen much ninja-ing of stuff since the height of Cataclysm, but it does still exist.
There was the one time I was on my Trooper and I joined an ops group to take down the World Boss on Tatooine. We were waiting for the last couple of stragglers to join us at the location when a lone Imperial ran up and summoned the World Boss, blocking us from taking credit for it.*
Then there was the 1/2 hour I'd spent grinding my way through mobs in the Field of the Dead on Age of Conan, sneaking around and attempting to reach a boss at the far end of a long flight of steps, when a high level toon rode up and dispatched the boss just as I was fighting off the last mob or two.
And I'd really rather not talk about the times I'd been ganked or ninja-ed while leveling Q back in the day, particularly in the Arathi Highlands. At 3 AM server time.**
***
What drives someone to take someone else's hard work and capitalize on it for their personal gain?
It's not like MMOs have a lock on this sort of bad behavior. If you work at a company of any real size, you know of at least a few people who attempt to sabotage or (at least) take credit for other people's work on a regular basis. And some corporations seem to actively encourage this sort of behavior, too, given how they handle annual performance reviews.***
Is it the nature of the MMO reward system that encourages Machiavellian behavior, or is it the other way around?
I suspect that a lot of this is absorbed by people while growing up, believing that this is how they ought to act to get ahead in life. From my own experience, I had a grandmother who used to say things like "If you've got someone who looks like they might run you over to get ahead, go and get them first! Get them before they get you!" And this in spite of the fact that she always considered herself a proper God-fearing woman.
However, a certain percentage of people get their amusement out of the pain of others. These are the people who give YouTube comments a bad name, or those who dox people they don't like (or espouse views they don't like). When confronted, you often get a defensive "hey, lighten up!" or a "it's just goofing around", or even the occasional "hey, they deserve it for [insert whatever pissed them off here]!"
Whatever the reason, there's a subset of MMO players that enjoy ninja-ing, and while they tend to gravitate toward certain games, no MMO has a monopoly on this behavior. This leads me to think that the Machiavellian tendencies were always there in people, but the online and anonymous nature of MMOs encourage ninjaing. The reward system doesn't shape behavior to the extent that some could argue, because by and large ninja behavior is the outlier, If the reward system were causing the behavior, I'd expect it to be condoned in blogger press as an acceptable method of playing the game. (It isn't.)
***
After the 2+ boss was ninjaed, our group switched world instances and found one empty of any sort of line. We dispatched the boss quickly, and that was that.
Well, kinda.
One of the group members dropped, but the other player and I teamed up to finish the other Dromund Kaas Heroics in short order. We chatted throughout the short adventure, and ended up friending each other. In a bizarre sort of way, were it not for that ninja, I'd have not made another acquaintance in SWTOR.
I'd just rather not have a ninja as the catalyst for that.
*He died almost instantly, but it was such a dick move that he should be grateful that his PvP flag wasn't set to "on."
**Which you'd THINK would be the safest time of day to be out in a PvP world. But nooo.....
***The worst types are those that grade on a strict bell curve, with only the highest rated people getting the raises. That means getting that highest rating, whether by backstabbing or working 90 hours a week (and I've seen both in action), makes it open season on everybody who is a good employee. Other people deliberately move to bad teams so that they can be the top banana of a bad group without having to put much effort into it. And still others will lie and cheat and steal in order to get ahead.
I've been making time this week to do some low level questing in LOTRO with the mini-Reds. Considering that I only leveled up to around L16 or so the last time I played before ceding the game to them, I figured it wouldn't take too long to go past that.
I'd forgotten that the initial leveling process for LOTRO is a bit like the pre-Cataclysm WoW system as you tend to get shuttled around quite a bit in the low level zones. For example, if you start as an Elf (as I did), one of the quests takes you up to Duillond to try to convince the brother of a quest giver to forsake Middle-earth and take a ship to the West.* That brother then sends you out to find the remains of a sword used by a Dunedain compatriot long ago, and then once secured you're sent all the way back to the initial quest giver. That quest giver then sends you up farther north to yet another hub. The back and forth in the middle, while important to the quest line, is a bit tedious to a brand new toon who has to hoof it back and forth.**
That's me, a glorified messenger boy. (No, I haven't created any female toons yet.)
By the time Cataclysm was released and SWTOR dropped, the leveling experience had been tweaked to minimize back and forth movement throughout a zone: you collect your quests, do them, and then once you turn them in you're sent to the next quest hub. The back and forth of the previous example would have been eliminated, either by a form of phasing that would cause the two brothers to be together at Duillond (Wildstar or post-Cata WoW), or a Story Zone instance (SWTOR).
The quirks of questing aside, LOTRO still holds up well. World Chat was lively yet thankfully free from the sewer level of filth and trolling found in WoW's Trade Chat. My oldest was a bit annoyed at people feeding a few trolls, but to be honest those trolls were pretty mellow compared to those I've seen on most other MMOs.
Another part of the game that let you know you were in LOTRO was the competition for resources in the low level zones. While there are still instances of people ninja looting, I found people being respectful of others when they were fighting the baddies next to a quest object they were looking for. I suspect that the (relatively) quick respawn times helped alleviate that issue***, but still that speaks to the average LOTRO player that they weren't acting like jerks simply because they could.
***
These low level experiences, grouping up with the mini-Reds who were excited to share their favorite MMO with me, have been fantastic. Unlike the times when we play SWTOR, you can tell that while they like that game, they really love this one.
I can't say there have been memorable "can you believe we did THAT?" moments, but just having them there, doing their thing, or tagging along and healing while I putzed along, was great.
I wonder if this is what it is like for family who use MMOs to keep in touch across the country; these are the same tools that people use for guilds, but when family is involved the feeling is quite different. Even though they're upstairs and I'm downstairs.
*One nice part of LOTRO is that they remain consistent with the world of LoTR itself. While a reader of The Silmarillion would almost expect them to say "The Undying Lands", the quest giver here says "The West" instead, which is how the Undying Lands were presented in LoTR.
**Yes, LOTRO has Stable Masters who operate like a taxi or a flightpath, but you still have to reach places in LOTRO on foot to unlock those Stable Master points, particularly on the within-zone Stable Master locations. Unless you knew they were there as I did, a new player could just as easily have missed them and ran all the way across Ered Luin to complete this questline.
***Thankfully, they weren't as quick as found in Age of Conan, where a player would never be able to clear an immediate area of enemies before they started respawning. You have no idea how annoying that is, knowing that you'll never be able to clear things out enough to take on a boss without having to worry about a bunch of regular enemies jumping you from behind. And in Age of Conan, two mobs can take out one toon at level without blinking.
I spent part of last night watching a documentary by the PBS show Frontline. If you've never watched a Frontline documentary, they're very much worth the time.* This particular time, however, the Frontline documentary was on daily fantasy sports. Called The Fantasy Sports Gamble, it talks about the explosion of daily fantasy sports into the popular consciousness, whether daily fantasy sports such as Draft Kings and Fanduel are gambling or "games of skill", and how "normal" online gambling subverts US law to cater to US players.
While I'm not exactly planning on playing any of those games**, I did note one almost throwaway comment toward the end of the episode. One of the people promoting a lesser known daily fantasy sports site was emphasizing the growth aspect of some of the "lesser" sports in the US, such as cricket and eSports.
That got me to wondering just how we truly know that eSports are legit.
My quick conclusion is we don't.
Unlike, say, other sports or "sporting activities", such as football (both varieties), basketball, auto racing, and even extreme sports, there's a physical gamespace that people have to compete in. While the space could be tampered with, that tampering affects all competitors equally. But with eSports, the gamespace is virtual, and controlled by a central system. That central system becomes more of a black box, where you have to assume everything is equal for both sides***.
But what if it isn't?
And, more importantly, how can you tell if it isn't?
You have to assume that the code compilation for eSport games didn't include any tweaks to the code designed to adversely favor a specific build at a specific time, but with growing amounts of money involved, you can bet that organized crime is trying to find a way to game the system in their favor.
I'm not talking about players being paid to throw matches, as can be found in this article from Den of Geek, but the employees at the company from being paid by organized crime to make very small code tweaks that will favor one style of play over another. Between two evenly matched teams, just a small tweak of a cooldown or a very slight manipulation of a crit size would be enough to influence the game. Or, to put it another way, if there was a code tweak in a Mario Kart Tourney that someone playing Rosalina would have a larger than normal chance of getting a lightning bolt or a Bullet Bill. It may not ensure victory, but it would certainly tilt the game in favor of someone who plays Rosalina.
And what organized crime would want is not exactly a sure thing, as that would cause speculation, but a decent chance at a sure thing.
***
If you follow auto racing, some leagues enforce more standards than others. Formula One racing is at the "let 'em play" end of the spectrum, while NASCAR is at the "rules lawyer" end. But that "rules lawyer" end of the spectrum means that NASCAR spends a lot of time measuring and testing the cars and other equipment of their participants to ensure there's no funny business going on.
The reason why I bring this up is obvious: without extensive testing, that black box is more mysterious than ever.
It's not as if gamblers will not stop sniffing around what they feel is a sure thing. The sheer chutzpah of some gambling sites to sponsor soccer teams (such as Stoke City having Bet365 as their primary sponsor the past few years) shows that other places around the world have a different view towards gambling than the US'. But still, as eSports will become more popular and more money flows in their direction, there will be more attempts to manipulate the system for profit.
It goes with the territory, I suppose, just as long as eSports doesn't have their own version of the 1919 Black Sox scandal.
"Yeah, I'm gonna play some 2x2s tonight. Wanna come?" From the movie Eight Men Out. From moviefone.com
*You can watch Frontline shows online for free, and they're definitely worth it. One of the best ones from last year, League of Denial, talks about the concussion epidemic in the NFL, and inspired the Will Smith film Concussion.
**Full disclosure: I have played Fantasy Football in "leagues" when I was in college and upwards of 10 years ago, but I've not played in years. I no longer even fill out a bracket for the Men's and Women's NCAA Basketball Tournament, because I tend to be lousy at picking who will win.
***Not counting individual build and toon differences; there's a reason why Blizz and other PvP-centric companies are constantly tweaking class and racial abilities to prevent the "new hotness" from cleaning up on the Arena or Battleground for too long.
According to this gameinformer post, Activision's weaker results in the previous quarter have resulted in some layoffs and reorganizaton.
My previous speculations that Activision Blizzard is going to focus more on mobile and eSports games seems to be coming true, but at the cost of Skylanders and Guitar Hero.
Whether or not Skylanders is superior to the competition, Disney has heavy hitters and name brands in its' Disney Infinity line*, and LEGO has both name brands** and... well... LEGO it it's LEGO Dimenions line. This is one of those times where Activision is going to take a hit.
This makes me wonder whether Skylanders might have done better if it had a tie-in with other Activision Blizzard properties, such as characters from WoW or Diablo. Of course, those characters alone would push Skylanders away from its current family friendly space, but it might have also brought in more profits.
Will this impact Blizzard's end of things? That is uncertain, but given the downturn of Activision Blizzard's profits, there will be likely greater outside push for improving next quarter's --and next year's-- numbers. Overwatch and WoW are going to be in the crosshairs as investors will demand to see improvements to A-B's bottom line, and if they don't get it, I'd expect for Activision Blizzard to start hearing calls for more reorganization and spinning off properties that are work intensive yet not as profitable as they could be. With a lack of subscriber numbers to go by --Activision Blizzard no longer publishes those, remember-- that might include WoW.
Not that Legion didn't have enough pressure on its release.
*Disney has pulled out the stops for Disney Infinity, with Star Wars, Marvel, Disney classic movies, and others.
**Not counting LEGO specific lines (like NinjaGo), there's DC Universe, Ghostbusters, Jurassic World, Doctor Who, Lord of the Rings, Back to the Future, and The Simpsons. At least; I'm sure I missed a few non-LEGO properties here and there.
