WTB Massively Singleplayer Online Game

A friend just pointed me to someone complaining in LOTRO world chat. Okay, so far nothing new. But several people joined in, in a lament of which the irony just hurts.

"Why do we need to do raids and instances for the featured gear box?"

Good question. Why force players to leave the safety of solo play and expose them to something stressful like carrying out strategies, playing skillfully and exercise social interaction? Wouldn't it be awesome if one could just do something relaxing, such as enjoying the beautiful landscape and picking flowers, to get best in slot gear?

Oh, wait...

General chat, where facts are opinions

My minstrel, Ravenwe, was just forging some ancient silver when my eyes got bored of following the crafting bar progress and incidentally wandered off to the general chat box.

The walk to Minas Tirith. A curious meeting with role-players

I was speed levelling my hunter, Ravereth. Not something I normally do, but I had promised to bring a level 65 to a nostalgia raid and I didn't have one. Now there was just one week left and still over ten levels to go. The epic quest urged me to talk to Elrond, but I had never been to Rivendell and couldn't take a swift horse there. The captain in Rivendell that I found with the /who command didn't respond to my polite request to summon me. Relunctantly I ported to Ost Guruth and mounted my own horse to make the trip manually. This would take much of my precious time.

It wasn't long before I passed a company of four players walking the road eastward. I blinked. They weren't running (the default movement for moving in MMOs), but actually walking. In other words, they were consciously moving about as slowly as possible, on a road with nothing to see. Curiosity got the better of me.

The quiver dispute

MMOs hide the true identity of players behind in-game avatars, and are usually heralded for this, it being harder to form prejudices and all. At the same time, though, this lack of information forms a great source of miscommunication.

"I want horse"

This is a story about what happens when you make the mistake to ride on your fancy steed through Bree. Don't. I mean, seriously, just don't.

How to make it to my KOS-list in 5 quick and easy steps

I was playing with my friend Marinka the other day and I thought it'd be fun to show her how PvP works. We queued for the baby lowbie bracket (level 10-29), so we would be up against other inexperienced players. Conrad joined as well. We went over our snipers' skills and I explained focus targeting. We barely had any skills at this low level but who cares, we were having fun.

On 'slow raiding' and disassembling two walkers

Some raid groups require their members to read up on tactics before turning up. This is an alien concept to me. My raid group on Imp side has the opposite attitude: we don't want to look up tactics, but rather want to figure them out by ourselves.

I'm so popular, everyone wants to play with me... right?

 

You know how it's customary for MMO players to come up with abbreviations for long titles? Expansions and raids often have long names yet are popular subjects of discussion, so nicknames come in handy. Well, guess with which one they came up for the new Ravagers raid...