I spent a couple hours talking with Andang, Pineleaf, Merric and Bandoras about the Riders of Rohan Expansion and the state of the game. It was great fun and if you missed the live feed, you can watch or listen to the Youtube Video below, and you can find the show notes here.
You are quick
Although I am happy that you all were so happy with this expansion, the absence of any conflict or criticism made it a bit dull. It’s hard to have a stimulating conversation with people who agree with you. Due to certain key decisions many if not most players logon their max level characters just to do their dailies – including the daily gold box Bugund drop (takes only moments usually thanks to open tapping) – and then work on their alts. Had they followed the model of Limlight with Hytbolt – making the dailies impossible without a group – then they would have addressed the fundamental flaw in Riders of Rohan: not a particle of community generating content. The utter abandonment of the idea that online games are meant to generate communities is best symbolized by the rebuilding of Hytbolt: a task you can only accomplish alone and an achievement only you can see.
I see your point and I think we kind of adressed this with what they are going to do with the instances coming later this year
Yes, you did indeed. And the Bugund boxes are silver….don’t know where I got gold in my head
It’s been difficult for me to adjust to LOTRO’s far more passive sense of what multiplayer means. It’s not just the old school things of how you fight but it’s about how you look or how you behave in non combat settings. I’m an ancient game dev who believed that motive friction and conflict were the prime engines of community, not the price of a dye pack for a digital horse. But LOTRO seems to work okay. Still would have to rank RoH a B based on the sheer number of critical and fatal bugs on release and failure to properly perform regression testing. Their head of QA was trained by a former QA guy for NASA….you know, where bugs could mean dead people. Their consequences are a bit less severe for online games but bugs remain the chief killer of MMOs.
I have yet to listen, but are you experiencing lag when mounted on your Warsteed? Its not as bad as launch for me, but im still having issues..