Loading... Not About Watchmen

[Ethec]

Loading... covers this week in MMO news and makes a little of our own, pulling from our insightful dev chat with EVE Online's Arend Stührmann last night. We'll talk about the WAR 10-day free trial, a special Pirates of the Burning Sea skirmish test, and the latest Lotro Book 7 dev diary, and have a special link to celebrate the release day of Watchmen!

We also have links to Loading... Live 7 dev chat with Champions Online's Bill Roper, two special previews of Secondhand Lands and Lothlorien in Lord of the Rings Online, an all-new Gub & Begud comic, episode 2 of the hilarious City of Heroes Captain Dynamic videos, and a WoW mage 61-80 soloing guide. All this plus an epic forum thread in Loading... Not About Watchmen!

[Lizante]

Just a note to say that a player "rolling" a new avatar (any player - new player or veteran) could always skip the "tutorial" in LoTRO and simply start the actual game as a level 1 in their race's starting town right away (been that way at least since retail release in April 2007). And getting to level 5 takes about 30 minutes.

Never needed "fixing" in Book 7, IMO. Which all allows me to cut to the chase here.

What's really annoying about Book 7 is that Turbine is once again demonstrating their well known propensity to "fix" what isn't broken. And this time it's much more serious than "fixing" the female elf jump, or adding animations and sound so as to "fix" the summoning of a player mount so we could hear three whistles from everyone in range. This time, Turbine goes far beyond annoying and has taken "dumbing down" the game to new and shocking levels so players can level even faster and making quests much less challenging than before.

Turbine's excuse for this is "it's what players want." But the reality of life is veteran LotRO players do NOT want this. Turbine wants this -- in the hopes of drawing more casual players to LotRO who don't want to read LotRO's rich lore or work for rewards and progress like they are able to do without thinking very hard in some other games, such as WoW.

We're seeing it even now -- lots of level 60's running around with Moria gear, messed up and often very low equipped traits asking inane questions in /advice about ridiculously basic stuff they would have nailed long ago had they played the game as intended rather than powerleveling or being powerleveled to 60.

Oh ya, Turbine, it sure will help to make leveling easier -- thanks so much.

[megaflux]

it took me like 8 characters in lotro to figure out HOW to skip the tutorial! once you pass that point of no return and set it in motion you may as well just ride it out. hopefully now there is a player friendly "skip this shit" button.

i will never forget last year when i was playing lotro seeing a level 50 ask "where does one get wood?" it was kind of a turning point for me, i was even on a low pop server and apparently people were buying accounts in a game i hit cap in under 10 days /played on (no guides/cheating/partying). made me sad. the whole experience felt futile after that.

[kitsunegirl]

I love Turbine. They have the Roheryn forums. And they ignore them.

When they were "fixing" the mounting "problem" back before Moria, we had two or three threads up telling them dont put this in the game! Its going to annoy alot of people. They did it anyway. And about a week later, they had removed the function so that only the player could hear the whistle.

That type of deafness to players has happened more than once.