And I still don't know why. No one at LotRO is returning my emails.

While my internet connection is still prohibitive to playing, I can't help but feel dissappointed in the lack of communication. Their community support won me over originally. Now I am begining to rethink this.

Another issue is this is the time that Lifetimers can be building credit and rewards for playing, to be used when the game makes the free-to-play transition. Every month that passes without me being able to log in means I lose points. This lack of communication is costing me.

My imagination is running through all my interactions with LotRO on what I may have done to be banned. I come up empty, unless my account has been pirated, which makes this lack of communication even more disturbing.

My girlfriend gave me the news, along with details of what benefits us lifetimers get, if we log in regularly. Well, we're on vacation and the hotel has highspeed internet, so I go to log in and see what's going on in Middle Earth.

My user name or password is no longer valid. So I go to my account page and reset it.

Only to find out that I have been banned until the year twenty, thirty-seven.

Huh.

In three to five business days I may get a reason...

If you've spent anytime on a MMO forum, you've come across the the solo-vs-group debate. Soloers want a fun game they can play without the hassles of grouping all the time. Groupers say; "Play a RPG and quit dumbing down the game." I see both sides , but I am watching a trend, in both MMOs and how we play them.

Let me back up a bit.

Read more »

Please excuse me for being dense. Wasnt this nerf primarily for PvP?

Why did they nerf the PvE play?

Makes no sense.

If you are making a change for PvP, then leave the PvE alone.

Kudos to gleowine for good advice. TYVM

Well if nerf wasn't for PvP, I dont like it, dont want it, and dont care about all the addictive rhetoric in support of it.

I think all nerfing is bad. Why decide now after the game is out for over a year that the class is too powerful. They either dont have money and personnel to fix things or this decision is not related to overpowered classes.

BTW, I think nerfing of any class is wrong.

What happened to making games that were fun and interesting? It isnt fun to have an economy that is broke. I am not the kind of character or person who has the time to figure out the little cheats that a grognard uses to make buckets of cash. I never hear about these things until it is too late for me to partake. I am mostly a casual gamer.

I was up in forochel with my 57 hunter in kauppa-khota helping out my daughters 42 minstrel doing the quest driving the beasts out. The quest involves killing a level 45 elite, the red-fang behemoth, with 8k and two of his normal level 43 warg friends. My daughter could not keep me alive on full heal and food. I had eaten 24 agility and some superior rack of lamb with mint sauce food.

My character soloed this encounter pre-update at level 45 or 46. I have mostly blue equipment. fine westernesse protectors armor and other better moria items. I have 420 agility, 2700 armor, a level 55 legendary bow, and 55 legendary knife.

Please don't answer this post with I soloed the behemoth with my level one wimp or any such nonsense unless it relates to before and after nerf patch.

Nerfing classes is an excuse for not adding content.

"game balance nerfing" leads to reducing other classes later on because when you change one class you have to change another. It becomes a round robin feeding frenzy of nerfs until no class has any power and dies at the drop of a hat. "game balancing" wastes developers times on "non content items." "game balance" nerfing is lazy development. Which class will you balance next? the warden?

There is no way that a level 45 8K elite should kill a 57 legendary character. This is bull.

The amount of time I spent carefully going to all the zones and doing the deeds to build up my skills and stats has, in my humble opinion (IMHO), been mostly wasted. My favorite character is now a bust and cannot even solo the lowliest elite. It is sad.

My favorite game is now reduced to the nerfing tactics I have seen in many other MMOs (massively multi-player online games). LOTRO is going to go the way of everquest, ultima online, dark age of camelot, asheron's call, star wars online, and many others. The party is over. It was nice while it lasted.

All the addicted player rhetoric, such as "the hunter class was too powerful," is predictable. This type of rhetoric has been seen in all the games nerfed to extinction. Today the hunter is too powerful, tomorrow it will be the warden.

Let us say you are right -- the hunter was too powerful. This point is to my mind irrelevant. It completely ignores the greed and envy component of nerfing. Greed and envy dictate that my favorite character should be the most powerful.

So what if the hunter was too powerful. Stop wasting time on game balance and start fixing things that really need fixing, such as broken quests and the need for new content. Do you really want to go down the road where everyone starts demanding that you nerf the classes they think are too powerful. I have seen this happen in other MMOs and it is not pretty.

Good Point one: You should never nerf character classes or races. Taking something away from someone pisses them off. (If you scroll up this point was made above) If you want to make classes more powerful this is fine, because it makes players happier.

Good Point two: The suggestion by another person above was to never nerf but make the environment tougher. This was, IMHO, a good suggestion. It is harder to get upset about something getting tougher, but the result is essentially the same, game players feel they have something taken away and get upset.

Let's take these two excellent "good points" and finish off with the best alternative: add content that is more difficult and leave everything in the original game alone. Add new areas and new quests and new monsters that take into account the power of certain characters. This is the best alternative. This alternative takes developer imagination, money, skill, and development time that leads, in the end, to greater player satisfaction and a better game.

Message to Turbine
1. Put the hunter back the way it was and work on adding content.
2. Stop wasting your time balancing and start writing good quests and good scenerios.
3. Spend some of that valuable time developing the family features of the game. My entire family plays with two son-in-laws, three daughters, hubby, wife, one son, and some other relatives and friends. Your family tree does not even support more than two children much less husband and wife and in-laws. Families need an identity separate from kinships. Families need their own alt-O tab. Families need their own family house. Families need a better family tree. If Turbine really supports family play and wants more females and families playing their game, they need to improve the family features.

Shame on you turbine for wasting time on bogus game balancing bull stuff.

The legendary weapons are unsatisfatory and unfulfilling.

You should be able to pick whatever skills you want that are available to that weapon at each upgrade or identification. I know it doesnt make sense. But why should it make sense if the current system is frustrating.

Do the legendary weapons in a way that doesnt make game players constantly trade in weapons until they randomly get what they want. Weapon attributes or skills are randomly assigned. When you identify or upgrade a weapon you get to choose between two randomly assigned skills. Why not let players choose from all of the available skills, and abandon all this time wasting random skill stuff?

What do you think?

I have not blogged in an eternity!

Sorry Algiovetti! And greetings to Cronus!

Currently my now 51st Champion is exploring Eregion, which is the first new zone as part of the Mines of Moria expansion. Some quick comments on the Mines of Moria:

Even though there is a big map for it, Lothlorien is not completed. By doing several chapters of the new book, epic quests, there are parts that can be entered. We found this out the hard way after fighting our way across several zones of Moria. The parts of it we could see were pretty though.

Moria, by the way, is fantastic! Huge halls, perilous drops and some well placed camps make it a fun area to explore. There are a series of instanced quests one must complete to enter. They act as an introduction to the History of Moria and to Legendary Gear.

Legendary Gear, in many ways, was kind of a let down for me. The legendary gear earns experience and it modifiable with different relics and gems and runes. But one needs to get new ones every few levels. So in some ways they are worse than crafted gear. Many have to be leveled several times before they are better than the old, level-fifty stuff. Most of the modifications to them are worthless, at least for my play style. And don't get me started on some of the graphics. I can't wait to get rid of my champion's current greatsword. On the positive side, equipping legendary gear means one experiences more dings, since she is leveling many things at once. And we are given an extra slot to equip class items, such as the legendary rune, in my champion's case.

I cannot wait to log back in to explore some more.

Lots and lots of complaining on the official forums about this year's Yule Festival. Last year, we got one quest to get a snow covered tree. This year, that quest is there, but there's 8 additional 'fetch' quests, for which you earn tokens.

5 tokens will let you get a gift box. There's a different gift box per race (man, elf, dwarf, hobbit), and there's some race specific things (like snowglobes and wallpapers). There are several festival specific things - snowglobes, wallpapers, a candle, a feasting table - several clothing articles (nothing new) and two 'booby prizes' - a tater and a piece of coal. What you get when you open your box is all luck of the draw (other than getting the race specific things at that race's rep (ie, elf snowglobe from the elf vendor). To run all 8 quests takes about 45 minutes, and there's no level restrictions, so if you had time on your hands, you could earn 56 tokens a day.

That's why the community is up in arms - some people don't think that spending all that time and only netting coal is a very nice Yule gift. They think that Turbine should have provided an interface where you could pick the gift you wanted, like they did with the Summer Festival. In my opinion, I don't think they should look a gift horse in the mouth. This is not end of the world stuff. If you don't have a crafter that can use coal or a tater, then sell it. At least then you get cash out of the deal.

Maybe I don't have the right perspective, because I've been lucky. I've run the festival quests on just 2 characters, once a day each since the festival started, and I've gotten 3 taters and 2 pieces of coal, most of the housing items, and plenty of clothing that I'll eventually auction off or give away. So, I've had a lucky streak and they haven't - I'm not sure that means the entire system is broken. My main thought is - it's the holiday season, but people will complain about anything.