Fellowship of the Creeps Episodes 1-7

Welcome to the first few episodes of Fellowship of the Creeps.  Sadly episodes 1-7 have been lost to the internet but the bonus video from episode 7 is below.  The following article was originally on CSTM detailing the battle of one of the most impressive fights in LOTRO.  Moving forward with this series it should just include show notes but this huge battle is an exception to the typical design of these show notes.

Last night on Fellowship of the Creeps our group was fortunate enough to be on during one of the biggest engagements ever in the Moors and definitely the biggest fight since Rohan’s Release.  Starting around 6pm Server time the fight began with one Creep raid vs one Freep raid.  This quickly changed when Ivan came on and started making a group the raids doubled to two Creep raids vs two Freep raids.  There were also several individuals running around as independents.  In total Ivan and I estimate the numbers to be around 60+ vs 60+.

What was really weird was that from 9pm to around 11pm Server Time we had one unbroken engagement which is really weird because usually in the Moors you will have a 20min engagement and then one side will gain the upper hand and the fight will move to a different spot.  This fight was so long likely because the spawn points between the two sides was only around 3min and with the ebb and flow the closer you get to one side the faster re-enforcements can make it.  This caused the fight to constantly move back and forth between the spawn points but it never stopped and neither side had to retreat to a keep for protection.  It was really interesting because this crazy, chaotic experience was Pineleaf’s first time to be in a raid battle.  Since this was such a large scale battle it was very hard to control the battle and so Pineleaf now thinks that raids are pure chaos when in reality raids are usually very organized and controlled…I guess we will have to help him get the right opinion moving forward.

In the video it is hard to see how big this battle really was so I will try to explain why it seems smaller than it really was on the server.  For one thing my computer only displays around half of the entire Freep army because of how deep their line goes.  Also for the majority of the video there are also several Creeps behind me that you can’t see.  This is because the actual fight had people meeting in the middle like normal but the lines also went really deep into each side, making it hard to show the scale.  This also doesn’t even account for respawners and invisible solo characters.

This fight continued on this scale well on into the night after 1pm Server Time.  The fight could have gone on a lot longer than that but I was fast asleep well before then and Ivan got off the server around that time so the fighting could have gone on for much longer.  With this kind of fighting it seems players are once again getting excited about PvMP and hopefully this trend will continue.

With the changes in Rohan it really seems like the Ettenmoors is “fixed”.  Now fighting is much more dynamic, balanced, and most importantly it takes place all around the map now.  No longer are there choke points where fighting would always take place.  Now the fights move all around the map and so you never know where you might run into the enemy.  It also seems that both sides are finally very close to being balanced and so the game feels much more fun.  Finally the buffs given for taking different locations on the map make each base be meaningful to have under your control where as before it was not very important to have a base and definitely not to defend a base.  Luckily this seems to all be great in Rohan and has made PvMP a very fun game.

Also when your side is losing you get to take control of a ranger/troll depending on what side your on.  This can allow the underpowered side to be balanced but the player as the troll doesn’t get infamy for their work and actually has to pay commendations to use the feature.  As someone who has played a troll they are great for tanking things but they really need backup to go against a large number of players.  The troll seems to be more powerful than a normal character but not too powerful to be game-breaking.

Fellowship of the Creeps is a pre-recorded show but you can join us in game during the recording at 5pm Eastern (server time) on Landroval server.  We create an open group each week that anyone on Landroval can join.  Thanks for watching and see you again next week!