Tag: 21.2

Mordor 21.2.1.b?

 

It has been a busy few days in SSG and here on our website. The instance update has taken care of this. First, we reacted to Cordovans first announcement to the mistake that has happened. Then, with a great community effort, we announced the different solution that SSG has come up with. And ultimately, we announced the update they released today.

Sadly, this update comes with a different set of kinks in the build. The one that was quickly noticed is that the instance and loot box armour (but not the jewellery) has also been reduced in stats, not only the Ash barter armour we had traded for.

Cordovan

Today’s hotfix incorrectly reduced the power of Level 330 Incomparable items acquired through the new Instances and Gorgoroth Steel-bound Lootboxes. We are working on a fast correction to this issue, and expect to release a hotfix this weekend. Players with incorrectly-reduced items will see those items automatically returned to their proper power level after the hotfix.

But another one has also happened. As I feared, given the experience with down and upscaling in LOTRO, the downscaling didn’t really go well. It has been actually great news to see that we didn’t lose too much light, but it wasn’t that great to see that now level 330 armour is lower in stats than our lower level items.

 

 

Bad news for players who bartered for new gold rings is that there has been some change there too. The rings with the barter price of 3300 are now also available through an upgrade of the old gold rings for 800 Ash of Gorgoroth. The upgrade is only available for the 326 gold rings, not the rings from the loot boxes, which may have been of a higher level.

Now, all of this keeps me wondering what kind of Inception-like story is behind this. A hotfix in a hotfix in a hotfix. What do you call a hotfix in a hotfix? Does it get hotter or colder? A lukewarm fix? I really have no clue. And while I do support SSG when it comes to people actually figuring out the mechanics of the game, I am not sure if they really did adjust the damage dealt by bosses properly. As per other player’s testimony, the Dungeons of Naerband last boss hits too hard. I won’t speak more to this since I didn’t yet have the time or a chance to test it. I did test Court of Seregost t2c and the last fight there reset on our group several times. Not a failed instance because of too many bats got away or something, just a random reset. If someone has a clue why this is happening, please let us know.

In any case, the solution they did come up with the gear was a good middle ground, I’d say, but another bug and inadequate scaling aren’t doing SSG any favours.

I hope you’re not all fed up with this topic, but I feel now that we have started covering it, we also need to follow and cover it until resolved.

A different day, a different solution

 

To remind you, if a reminder is even needed, I have had an article about how SSG wanted to address the issue they have created by not putting the correct Ash value on the elf-enchanter. Some people were happy to see the discounted gear, thinking it’s the correct price because there were so many ways to get more pieces of gear. The teal barter items had a +14 Light of Earendil stat, while the crafted purple items had a +16 and it was only natural to think that is the reason it was cheaper and because of the eventual gear from the instances.

The first idea was to strip the people from their newly received gear and have them left without any gear, which cause a massive uproar on the forums. I have been following the community for a while and it has been a long time since I have seen the people there so in sync with who has made a mistake and what needed to be done. I haven’t seen a greater display of a community effort that great and I applaud them for that. As much as some people do not like the tone of some of my articles, I’d like to think that it played at least one small part of it.

The current solution that SSG has come to is that they would offer two solutions. Either turn in the gear and receive the ash that you spent and shadowed essences, the number to be determined by the number of slots of the armour piece you turn in. Or keep the gear, but it will be downscaled to the old level 330. I hope this means that the stats stay the same, but we lose the extra +4 LoE. This would be tolerable and what I would prefer because I’d hate to see SSG try to downscale or upscale anything since it doesn’t really work that good in LOTRO. Downscaled BB’s and upscaled PvMP is a proof of that.

Cordovan

When Update 21 Patch 2 was released to the live worlds on October 10th, the cost for Incomparable items from the High-Enchanter Barter Vendor was incorrectly set when compared to the rest of the gear on offer. Once we recognized the issue, we temporarily disabled the vendor. We are working on a hotfix to correct this issue.

 

For players who already purchased Item Level 330 Incomparable gear, we have several options available. When the hotfix is released, already-purchased level 330 Incomparable items will be able to be disenchanted with the Flame of Ancalamir to return the full Ash of Gorgoroth cost, plus a number of Shadowed Essence Boxes equal to the number of Essence Slots on the gear. Already-purchased Item Level 330 Incomparable Gear will also have its stats adjusted to be approximately equivalent to the level 330 rare gear available through the High-Enchanter, and the Essence Slots will remain. This allows players to utilize the gear if they choose. Following the hotfix, Incomparable gear will have its correct vendor cost.

 

Cordovan

The essences will be retained in the gear, unless you disenchant it, in which case you’ll want to use an Essence Reclamation Scroll prior to disenchanting it.

Since they want to downscale the gear, but keep the essences in it, I hope this works. Because we couldn’t slot the new essences in old gear and this might create some issues if another oversight would happen.

Another issue this creates is that people have paid Ash for an upgrade and now are getting downgraded. In a sense. If done correctly we may actually end up with higher level gear and more stats than we had, since some gear we had before was lower than 330, but higher than 326, but we would get less light too. And to get the Ash back one would need to turn in the item. Would this warrant for players to ask for a certain amount of Ash now too? I’m not sure. What do you think?

Of course, this being the mistake of SSG many think that they are not supposed to be downgraded and still expect to keep the gear as it is now. This is what I would prefer too, because it makes no sense to me to have the instances roll out and now go and do Ash farms. Drops aren’t good enough to spend too much time in t1 instances preparing for t2c, hoping for crafted items that may or may not crit. I guess what could be considered positive from all of this is that we may get the Ash of Gorgoroth to be account bound. Eventually.

Cordovan

Additionally, we are looking into making the Ash of Gorgoroth account-bound, although that’s not specifically a part of this announcement (but is pretty big news).

Once again, I can’t praise the community enough for what they have achieved. With the community being against this solution it was a smart move of SSG to not push the first solution they offered and now we can only wait and see how they implement their new plan and when. Hopefully soon, since with the ash vendor being blocked people can’t get the Flame of Ancalmir and follow the quest chain if they are only now entering Mordor.

So, you’d like to play a game that punishes you for supporting it?

Today, as some players expected even before the announcement, the update 21.2 of the current Mordor expansion was released. And you could have guessed that too, something was broken. But what was it?

Simply put, SSG is broken.

If you were one of the early log-ins to the game when the update went live, then you would have seen the new items you could get from the ash vendor and their cosmetics in the game. The updates we weren’t able to test on alpha server (no way I’m calling Bullroarer beta) and give any sort of feedback on those. As predicted in our brief  look through the notes the lootboxes don’t give only 330 item level gear, but also higher. I have not yet seen anything higher than 335, but I guess we can give it time. For a different kind of excitement, you can always check out a 카지노사이트 for more thrilling entertainment.

But what they did (well, announced) next dwarfed the issue with lootbox gear levels.

The items on the ash vendor were priced at 140 ash for teal armour and 110 for teal jewellery. 3300 for new gold rings. For the increase they offered, many would say that was a fair price. The issue SSG had with this is that they didn’t actually intend the prices to be in that range (for the teal items, of course) so they have disabled the ash vendor for a while. In that period they have announced that the items should have been priced four times higher and that the players who have already bought these items will be stripped from their items and given back the ash they spent to get them. But nothing is said about the items that we have destroyed in the process. Ashed the old gear, some even with essences in them because new ones were better, etc. Not to mention the crafting of new essences that we have in these new items. Also going to waste.

Cordovan

The High-Enchanter barter vendors have the wrong barter prices for the new incomparable items. The items have too low of an Ash of Gorgoroth cost. We are temporarily disabling the High-Enchanter barter vendor while we work on a hotfix.

 

Cordovan

When the hotfix goes out, the Incomparable items from the High-Enchanter barter vendor will be four times the cost they were today, prior to us disabling the vendor. Characters who have already acquired one of these items will see the item stripped of its benefits when the hotfix goes live, but will be able to turn in the item and receive the amount of Ash they used to make the item.

But this isn’t the first thing they messed up with the items in this update. Namely, the incoming healing essences were reduced to half their value before the update, some even more. Oddly enough (or as expected from SSG) our essences didn’t get unslotted when we logged in, we didn’t get reclamation scrolls or any currency that we would be able to buy them with. It was left to us to barter or buy the essence reclamation scrolls for a mistake SSG has made and it took them a hotfix, a patch and two updates to fix it. Change few numbers. Really? Guess clicking fire grims in the Summer festival in October was more important. Also, the filters we have been looking forward to, don’t really work on certain quests and we’re unable to filter out Hobnanigans. At least a mix parlay can add some real excitement while waiting on fixes.

So, not only does SSG think that not giving any compensation for the things they have broke is not an issue, they also think that because they have made a mistake even though players keep on asking for longer beta testing, more feedback, more bug fixing and polishing, we should now somehow be held responsible for logging into the game too early and bartering the gear in a non-exploitative manner, at the vendor with no tricks. So, what are the players supposed to do? We have release notes, we didn’t have something worthy of a dev diary in ages and nothing to tell us if this was intended or not. Do we need a written permission from Aragorn in some form of a decree that we are now free to barter the new items available to everyone?!

Of course, none of these announcements come with anything even resembling an apology.  Does SSG think people will continue playing naked and re-grind stuff back from 0 to 150 to 200 Light of Earendil. It won’t be easy to give that gear back either. I know that I didn’t have all the “regular” gear. Some were good drops from the rare chests or lootboxes levels 327 and higher. People have spent gold, some have bought Lotro Points for keys or solvents, ran quests, ran instances, had some drops maybe… I doubt SSG will be refunding money. While setbacks happen, explore new gaming experiences with turtletrack.org and keep the excitement going.

Of course, with the new mess they made, they also didn’t fix the old mess in the instances we have been reporting and they can still bug. Quality Assurance, testing and feedback? Yeah, not really. We should be getting paid for doing the QA they certainly don’t do and can’t do in the end because very few understand the game at all. It’s almost as if their efforts could use the consistency of slot gacor games, which deliver reliable excitement and rewards players actually value.

It is hard to imagine that someone could even succeed in alienating this many players by trying to do it, let alone by just having a usual business day in SSG. I guess it goes something like: “We messed up and people are not happy? Oh, I guess it’s Tuesday.”

I guess it’s a good time now to recall certain pieces I wrote here about Mordor release and SSG’s business skills and some similar issues – The story behind the disappointment and The sound of silence.

So, you’d like to play a game that punishes you for supporting it? Welcome to LOTRO.

 

 

Mordor 21.2: A brief look through the notes

 

Welcome to the open beta. (In case you didn’t notice that Bullroarer is an alpha test server). Let’s see what is going on in the Update 21.2.

 

Twenty new repeatable daily quests are now available! Find these new quests by speaking with the Expedition Organizers in each of the Allegiance halls (Vórthi, Tancram, Glórellas, or Aster Hayward.)

Oh, well, I guess repetition of the current daily quests wasn’t enough, so we needed also daily requests. Without a deed on BR, we will see if something changed there.

A new Main Menu item has been created to allow players to filter out sounds, quests, and items, either for the current player, or for your entire account! If you’ve got something you never want to see, hear or get again, you can access the Filter panel by pressing Alt+R (by default). To remove any filter, drag the item, quest, or sound off of the filtered list.

 Loot: To add an item to your loot filter, drag it from your inventory to the filtered list, or press the button in pending loot. Anything added to the Loot filtered list will not be awarded to you again. For Master Looter, the Master Looter will see an assignment dialog for items meeting the quality rating of the fellowship rule, even if the item is filtered. For Need/Greed/Pass, only players who do not have an item filtered will see the dialog option for items meeting the quality rating of the fellowship rule. For filtered items, players will not see the Need/Greed/Pass dialog, and the response will automatically default to Pass when the timeout for the response expires.
Quests: Filter a quest by clicking the filter or account filter button at the bottom left of the bestowal dialog or quest log. Quests you have filtered will no longer attempt to auto-bestow, no longer appear as quest rings on the Mini-Map radar, and no longer appear as a quest ring on NPC or mob heads. Quests that cannot be abandoned cannot be filtered.
Sounds: To filter a sound, go to a place or situation in-game where the sound is heard, click the Record button to see a list of all sounds currently playing, then drag the sound to the character or account filtered list. Sounds you have filtered will no longer plays as audio in your game client.

Finally a useful feature in this game. We wrote more about filters here. Looking forward to checking if they removed the item number cap in the list and if we can see all the audio files now.

Experience the new “Frightful Tales to Curl the Hair On Your Toes” at the Harvestmath Festival this year.

Can’t wait to try out the filters.

Talath Urui – Shackles have been excavated from the rubble, and can now be reached for the quest “Breaking the Chains”.
Talath Urui – The hiding spot should now be more obvious in the quest instance “Borangos the Horror”.
Gorgoroth Resource Dungeons – Allegiance bonus quests no longer go away after completing an Allegiance. If you have already completed one or more Allegiances, the bonus quests will return for you.
Gorgoroth Resource Dungeons – Barad-dur: Lore of the Past no longer has an Ancient Tome hidden in rubble. Barad-dur: Gathering Relics no longer has a relic hiding in a wall.
Gorgoroth Resource Dungeons – Durthang: Gathering Relics Durthang is no longer missing a Relic.
Gorgoroth Resource Instances: The following deeds are now available: Resources of Gorgoroth, Gathering of Resources, Gathering of Resources (Intermediate), Gathering of Resources (Advanced).
The Tales of Gorgoroth Deed is now visible in your Deed Log as soon when at least one objective has been completed.
Some actors in the Udun region now have the correct species or race listed.
Some minor typos in the Elf Allegiance storyline have been corrected.
Players who currently have the Court of Lothlorien Allegiance quest underway will now find Glorfindel in Rivendell if an older quest that requires him is not yet completed. If the character is not in the middle of an uncompleted older quest, then Glorfindel will continue to phase out of the area.

Only took a hotfix, a patch and 2 updates.

There is a new Allegiance Weekly in the rotation for completing the 3 person and 6 person instances.

Oh, great. So a bugged “cluster” of instances will now be a requirement for a weekly quest that probably not every class will be suited for. Great job, SSG.

There is a new Lost Lore for the three and six person instances.

They didn’t have the 5000 allegiance point relic in the BR build, we will see how that goes in the beta today.

Wildermore Endgame – All quests are now available as choices all the time.
The Battle of Ost Celebrant – Follower Doran will bestow all of the quests immediately when you enter Ost Celebrant
Evendim – Farmer’s Bane – The wolf is now always available to advance the quest.
Summer Festival – It is now easier to target and attack the Heat Wave mobs for the quest “Defeat the Heat”.
Baggins Birthday – All of the story quests will now be continuously available during the event.

Very important for the instance update. Class balance isn’t really an issue. *Takes the blue pill* (No, not that one.)

There is a new tier of crafting available. New recipes are available from the Quartermaster – Gorgoroth Crafting Vendor. These recipes require a special ingredient only found in the Instances. This item may be freely traded.

Didn’t spend much time on crafting in BR, but I think that ‘tier’ is a bit confusing, as it’s still Doomfold. But I’ll bet you anything that instance only items also drop from lootboxes.

When running the Pelennor Instances: Blood of the Black Serpent, The Quays of the Harlond, and The Silent Street, at level 115, you can now receive equipment that scales up to Item Level 315.

Still don’t know if there’s a 315 hilt and what it would give. LoE?

Crafting – Doomfold Healing, Milkthistle, Conhuith, and Lhinestad Draughts now remove negative effects up to a maximum strength of level 120.
Crafting – Captain Crest and Warden Carving recipes may be executed with Universal Ingredient Packs.
Crafting – Food produced from Doomfold Cooking now has a stack size up to 100.
Crafting – Woodworkers are now able to craft Strong Boards of Doomfold Wood, Weaponsmiths are now able to craft Quality Doomfold Ingots, and Tailors are now able to craft Well-treated Doomfold Leather.
Crafting – Doomfold Jewellery recipes now only require 1 Refined Black Adamant instead of three.
The Doomfold tier Woodworker recipe Superior Bow of the Doomfold no longer creates hammers, and the Superior Hammer of the Doomfold no longer creates bows.
The Empowered Shadow Essence Box is now unbound so that it can be traded or sold.

Still no essences for scholar or cook and no scaling up of Doomfold crafted class items.

Allegiances – Daily repeatable, weekly repeatable, and Resource Instances in Mordor now give a new type of Allegiance Point item. The value of allegiance points from these sources results in the same point grant, but the new AP items can be used to barter for a new tier of Allegiance Gear.
Allegiance point granting items now stack to 100.

And they kept the relic that you use for Allegiance level up to use for bartering and basically given up on Tokens of Service at the same barterer. So much for the feedback.

Allegiance Cloaks no longer have an armour class requirement to use, and can be used by any class.

Still didn’t get an explanation to what is a heavy cloak. Made of chain mail?

Gorgoroth Steel-bound Loot Boxes now provide item level 330 gear commensurate with the new instance spaces.

Most likely not true and is meant that the new lowest level is 330, since we already had items up to 333 that we know of, just the minimum level was 326. We will probably get a message that this is either a bug or the items can be obtained somewhere else. But then again…

Gorgoroth Steel-bound Loot Boxes now offer an assortment of new Mordor-themed pets, and a set of cosmetic weapons.

Interesting… Wonder if they used the beacon feedback to add Viznak in. The barterer had pets in shape of different crawlers, snakes and salamanders. Hopefully these are somewhat different.

To see the complete list of the changes, you can visit the forums.

 

Mordor 21.2 Beta 3: Shields and other news

 

If you thought that we are getting shields for Metalsmiths, then you will be disappointed. There will be shields we can get by playing the new instances. The purple version of the shields we will be able to barter for a Silver Signet of the Armsmaster and the teal version for a Gold Signet of the Armsmaster. But I do have some remarks about the shields. They aren’t really made that different for different builds. And the same goes for light cloaks too. With the cloaks they seem to have gone in the same direction as with the teal item drops from Talath Urui and Agarnaith, having exactly the same stats.

For Warden shield it’s easy to find what is wrong with it. I would like block rating removed from the dps Warden shield and swapped for finesse. Maybe add Light of Earendil on the shields too, since off-hand weapons have it.

For Minstrel shield, it’s not only one change that I would make. For the dps shield, I’d remove block and add finesse. For the healing shield, I’d also remove block completely and swapp it for critical rating. The cloaks we would get from the Alliance barterer are exactly the same and have a stat less because they now have two essence slots instead of one. Might not need to change anything, since critical rating is good for either role and you’d probably get more mastery by slotting it, than what you would get if they made 2 different cloaks, one with critical rating and one with mastery, for example.

I haven’t made screen shots of all the off-hands, but for now the Will ones appear to be missing.

There have been some other changes in the Beta 3 build, but not too significant when it comes to gameplay. Bosses still bug, there is still too much trash between boss one and two in Dungeons of Naerband, and there is still this constant line of sight issue that prevents us from doing certain skills, either healing, removing effects from our fellowship, etc. So, it’s Beta 3 and the biggest difference we could feel in the instances was that the items that are supposed to drop are now in the boxes. But, hey, we have Baggins birthdays, Farmers fare and Summer festival fixed. Well, whoopty-do. [sarkasm]Thank you very much. It was very important to work on those, while the “cluster” is still not done.[/sarkasm] Why in Eru’s name are we testing this IN THE BETA BUILD IN OCTOBER?!! At least make it one of the silent changes, it’s not like you don’t know how to do those, SSG.

A good quality of life addition was the removing of the quest to advance your crafting. Just recently I had put one of my characters to craft and thought I’d be back in time to stop and go do the quest. Well, I forgot about it and all the mats were gone and I was only proficient. This is a long overdue change that should have happened with all the crafting facilities becoming superior ones.

I am still advocating against the relics that are used for advancing allegiance being used as new barter items. For an old barterer that has his own currency, this should not have been changed this fast and Tokens of Service, which are now a reward from some other quests too, should have stayed relevant.

Other than that, there’s not really much to talk about. There have been some changes to the icons. Now the filter icons don’t look like funnels, but like a symbol of a person, solo and a group. And the symbols for the quests, items and sounds are also changed now. A new Rune for your Legendary item has been introduced as a drop from instances. I would much rather have a crafted relic I could swap, so hopefully, they’ll do something in that department. Also, similar to wisps in North Ithilien, fragments are now introduced as an additional option of obtaining the keys, but these will be bound to you. These will be the rewards from the new daily requests.