Gibbets and crows: Rise of Isengard and the state of LotRO

October 23, 2011

If you are unawares, you’ll probably want to know that my feelings on LotRO haven’t really been that nice. At least, that is to say that I’m less and less impressed with the things Turbine attempts to do in trying to continue developing for LotRO, an MMO that has drastically changed in one short year prior to its four years running. Once again we find ourselves waiting for what seems like eons (six months since Book 3—or, if you’re a true defender, I suppose you’d say five months because of the Rift coming back in June) for scraps from the master’s table. At the very least Turbine is still operating under their previous year’s update schedule, which essentially means they are only able to release one Book update before then spending the next seven months working on an “expansion.” Was it worth it? Has F2P actually turned the game around to pave the way for Turbine’s way of success?

The short answer: no.

The long answer: If by ‘success’ you mean ‘greed’, then yes.

It’s difficult to decide where I should start at their faults, as there are just so many, but I suppose I’ll stick with the ‘expansion’ before moving on to higher forms of argument. Firstly you will notice how I continuously call Rise of Isengard an ‘expansion.’ I denote it with such contempt because it’s not an expansion. As I’ve made the case before, Turbine set the bar for what an expansion is with Mines of Moria. Which is to say an update that introduces multiple zones, new levels, a new game mechanic feature (Legendary Items, in this case), and a new Volume (six Books from the start). Mirkwood was a good example of how that standard deteriorated (at least it brought the Skirmish system). Isengard is Turbine’s latest and greatest example of, “do less expect more.”

Rise of Isengard brings us ten more arbitrary levels and a new raid. That’s it for meta content. No new feature, no gigantic change, no new classes. This is our reward for being so patient—having to trash our LIs once more, trudging it through ten levels before we start working on the LI grind once again. Yay, so much fun. But before I digress onto another issue, I’ll just get to the meat and potatoes of the Book 4 paid patch (which is what I’m calling Rise of Isengard from now on).

We’re still in Volume 3 after two years, wetting our palette on the starter menu of Book 4. Granted it is quite a large book, but that’s not surprising considering the new zone, Dunland, is quite large as well. We are still following the Grey Company to meet up with Aragorn and eventually ride off to war, but before we get to Rohan Turbine has made it apparent that the reason why Grey Company didn’t meet up with Aragorn months before is because they were wasting so much time helping their lord’s enemies.

If you remember Book 3, the Rangers were doing pretty much the same to some degree, although it’s understood that the Dunlendings in Enedwaith are actually outcasts that openly opposed Saruman’s hand over Dunland. Plus helping the Men of Enedwaith would eventually help in the long run because they eventually planned on raiding Dunland in the hopes of taking back their lands. The Rangers get two bargains out of it—for one, they ensure civil war is happening back on the homefront to trouble the Dunlendings, and secondly they are taught the “safe ways” through Dunland to get to Aragorn.

Book 4 apparently throws all of that out the window. Halbarad, in his infinite wisdom, apparently waltzes into every single Dunlending camp in Dunland asking where they pledge their allegiance and whether or not they would like some help starting a rebellion against Saruman. This takes somewhat for a number of villages (and one prominent town). I just cannot shake the feeling, however, that we are still helping the enemy because regardless of whether or not the Dunlendings fight for Saruman or not, we’re still arming and training the rabble that hates Rohan’s guts and wants to still burn and pillage their countryside.

Soon enough this plan escalates to full retard when you’re helping out one particular village and they turn traitor. This is after arming them, training them, gathering them necessary supplies to survive and commit to the war effort, and also saving various townsfolk from various ailments (whether they are physical or psychological). Yep, the village repays you by taking you and the Rangers prisoner. Gee, thanks.

What follows is probably the best “jumping the Sharkey” moment of Book 4 (and not all those times Saruman shows up in an instance and you’re powerless to try and strike him down where he stands). I did say you are taken prisoner, and that’s exactly what happens. You’re transported into an instance of Isengard as a prisoner. Your captives, however, have failed to strip you of your gear, so you still have all of your armor and weapons. Time to do some slicing and dicing, right?

Nope. Instead you do the bidding of Uruk-hai taskmasters—this ranges from helping them supply their war effort so they can more easily kill helpless women and children to cleaning up the slop off the kitchen floor (which Turbine makes you do a total of four times over). Not once are you ever presented with the opportunity to at least say, “No.” You can run to the unguarded gates of the front door and you can’t leave. Eventually the number of tasks you complete promotes you to “captain slave,” or the precious pet of the Uruk-hai that enjoys serving the White Hand. Turbine crucifies you to a train in this railroad plot.

Of course you eventually escape with some prisoners and sabotage a siege engine, but the damage remains—you’ve helped the enemy greatly. It apparently takes the event of the capturing and killing of numerous Rangers for Halbarad to go, “Gee, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to help our enemies.” No shit, Sherlock. I’m so glad you’re playing the part of Captain Obvious here. Does that mean we can pack up our things and just get our asses to Rohan?

Nope again. Now we start working for Theodred, Theoden’s son, who has led a foray of Rohirrim into Dunland to investigate what’s going on. Because apparently after passing Isengard’s ashen fields and seeing wargs and Uruk-hai, they also managed to miss a huge Dunlending camp that’s armed to the TEETH. “Where are my eyes?” Theodred beckons to Halbarad at one point. “I don’t know, maybe we should help the Dunlendings so they can help us search for them,” Halbarad answers back.

At least Theodred mans up and does what Halbarad should’ve done, which is attack the village that betrayed you, but he then has you “investigate” the “Dunlending problem” with scout camps that are behind his position. Gee, thanks Theodred. Why don’t you go on ahead to all the villages I’ve already been to where I’ve already liberated the people and had to drive back the townsfolk from offering me their daughters while I go do the job your party is supposed to be doing?

This is essentially Book 4. Halbarad gets a bunch of Rangers killed because he thinks he can make the Dunlendings have a change of heart, while Theodred is still wondering how the Dunlendings are so well-armed when they bear GIGANTIC FLAGS with the standard of Saruman on them. Apparently it is Turbine’s intention to somehow write why exactly Theodred managed to get himself killed at the Fords of Isen if he already knew before his death what was happening in Dunland and Isengard, and that explanation apparently is: he was an idiot. Strangely enough, that’s also Turbine’s plan for the Rangers as well.

There were a number of different paths Turbine could’ve chosen for the plotline for this Book. The forces of good had too few numbers and all they could do was perform hit-and-run tactics. Or maybe Theodred’s scouting party found out they had too much on their plate and instead of retreating back into Rohan, they were cut off and they needed the Ranger’s help to make a hole so they could attempt to cross into Rohan (or vice versa—at least something heroically tragic). But no. Turbine’s answer was instead to have intelligent, seasoned heroes to act like total noobs and frolic in a minefield with complete disregard for the safety of their company.

Now that we have the story out of the way, we can now talk about what changes Isengard brought us. For starters, Turbine once again ignored the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” rule of thumb and went ahead and fiddled around with the stat mechanics again. All resistances have been lumped under one batch of “resistances,” attributes have been uncapped (although truthfully you start hitting diminishing returns at about 1500), heavy armor classes have greater survivability, while medium and light armor classes have lower survivability, the Finesse attribute was added (essentially a stat that dictates how often you crit against an enemy and how often an enemy’s crits are resisted), and mobs past Normal hit harder. What does it all mean?

As a Hunter I’ll give you a feeling of what my life has been like for two weeks—I’ve died more times in these past two weeks than I have in the past two years. And that’s saying something, honestly. Armor sustainability was reduced for medium armor classes, which means Hunters have lower survivability. Which is a bit of a joke, as we already have lower survivability. The only way we survived is by killing the mob before it could get into melee range to really befuddle a class whose greatest skills are 95% on inductions. We now couple this with the Finesse rating, which all mobs have. It’s a good thing Turbine went through the hard work of updating all current armor in the game to add that stat, right? Oh, right, nope. So there I was, at LV65, with no Finesse whatsoever and having enemies clobber me with crits for 40% of the fight. Now we add on how every enemy in Dunland has the ability to stun you (and they do—every mob I have fought has stunned me in a fight, which is why the nickname for this update has been Stunland), which renders you unable to perform any actions and also drops your B/P/E to zero for the duration. And let’s not forget the fact that after LV68 our shiny LV65 LIs are worthless in the damage-dealing department.

Put this altogether and you have a recipe for a development team that obviously did not test out whether numerous changes all at once was such a good idea or not. It’s at a point where I cannot take on enemies that are two levels above me—they hit like dump trucks, clobbering me for at least -200 damage each hit (-350 on a crit). I’ve got 7,100 morale. After one fight with a mob, I’m down at 45% health. If they stun me, 30%. If there’s a second mob, I have to run—I cannot survive that fight unless I blow all of my top CDs. At which point I would have to wait at least five minutes to fight more than two mobs again. And forget Sigs or Elites. These mobs hit me for -400 each hit (-580 on a crit). I’m dead in ten seconds. Which essentially means if you out-level your quest progression (and you will, as I did at 72 with only 25,000XP to go to 73), you’re screwed unless you get one of Turbine’s Favorite Children to help you (Guardian and Champion). I even tried the skirmish route—my first pull in the skirmish ended with me dying.

Of course before I out-right gave up there I thought maybe I might try and upgrade my soldier instead (after all, I was sitting on 4,000 skirmish points). I tried to level him past Rank 25 but was barred from doing so—I was informed that I had to “…purchase the Skirmish Trait Max Rank item in the LOTRO Store.” Wait, what, huh? I’m a VIP. Since when were VIPs required to purchase that? So I submitted such an inquiry to support and was informed that it was no longer a VIP feature.

It was at this point that I walked away from the game.

Turbine has always had a reputation for not informing their players when it came to spending money, but this is just a new low. I decided to do some more researching as well. Apparently I don’t actually “own” the RoI expansion pack. What I bought on the store was actually just the quests to Dunland. 3,250 points for quests. That’s $50. I paid just as much as the folks who pre-ordered and got less. And I’m not just talking about “no pre-order items.” Sure, this “Skirmish Trait Max Rank” is only 195 points on the store, but the new Draigoch raid (there’s a Welshman somewhere masturbating furiously) is also 3,250 points. Essentially Turbine wants people who didn’t feed them their pre-orders to pay at least $100 for Rise of Isengard on the store.

Yeah, I think I’m more than justified here. What exactly is the point to subscribing if they’re just giving everyone the same treatment? Turbine made no effort whatsoever to make this public information. In fact, it had to be demanded on the forums for months before Isengard before at least some of this information was revealed (and still quite vaguely). At the very least they should rename VIP to “Sucker” or “He-Who-Gets-Swindled.” The next update will be getting the same treatment as well. They’ll be releasing new group instances and that’ll go up on the store for 3,250 points as well. Never mind it was supposed to be released day one. And Book 5? Well, considering they’re nickel-and-dimming folks for the small stuff, would it be such a stretch if they just go ahead and charge EVERYONE for that update as well? Cue the defenders that will say 500 points monthly actually amounts to something when it actually doesn’t.

I’m here to tell you that the “reported success” of F2P is just higher-up humdrum hooey. Success should equate a higher quality of standard—one we were used to before the game started getting stagnant in 2009. Instead we are still only getting two updates a year. Updates that we will have to pay for each time they come out now. That’s Turbine’s actual success—realizing that they can get away with nickel-and-dimming old customers that provided a roof over their head in the first place. Our reward for loyalty isn’t to be provided with the standards we were used to, but to be taxed heavily and as often as possible. And our protests fall on deaf ears—yell loud enough and they’ll just whisk you away and dismiss you as a nuisance. Feudalism isn’t dead at all—it still exists at Turbine. Thankfully we have the right to up and leave whenever we want, which is exactly what this dirty peasant is doing. Enjoy it while it lasts, Turbine. All kingdoms eventually fall.