A sad fact; I have not logged into the Lotro in almost 5 days.<\/p>\n
I say sad, because when I came back to the game I was so excited I was playing multiple characters at various times. Logging in several times a day, everyday.\u00c2 I knew when I started that it, even if I sometimes played with a group I would be soloing most of the time.\u00c2 And for six weeks things were fun.\u00c2 Then something happened.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
I stopped being able to advance in any fashion in a reasonable time frame. Every activity including deeds, tradeskills, faction gains, and leveling all began to take several multi-hour play sessions.\u00c2 \u00c2 I don’t mind leveling slowly, as long as there are other advances I can be making and in the mid 30’s I was not able to make such advances.<\/p>\n
I fully expect that I am playing the game “wrong”.\u00c2 I am not optimizing my questing, gathering, or auction house use, and I certainly was not taking part in full (or close to full) fellowship activities.\u00c2 Alas that is how I usually approach games on my first leveling up and I try to be much more optimized on second playings once I understand more about how the game plays.<\/p>\n
So I don’t fully blame turbine, or myself\u00c2 its a combination of how I play and how the game is designed that made it easy for me to log in.<\/p>\n
Another sad fact; I have logged into wow everyday for the past two weeks.<\/p>\n
This is sad, because my log-ins feel more like chores than fun and I am only doing it for achievements; which are really meaningless.\u00c2 Yet this is a case where Blizzard wins and Turbine loses, because since I was logging in everyday it was easy to let my subscription go one more month.\u00c2 That was not the case with my lotro account.<\/p>\n
Also this week was City of Heroes aniversery week, and with it a free reactivation of my account for a week.\u00c2 I think one week was enough for me to realize that: The amount of\u00c2 fun making heroes and testing out power combinations does not outway the dullness of how their repetive content is presented and executed.\u00c2 At least when soloing.<\/p>\n
Interacting with the ‘contacts’ in the game (mission givers) feels more like interacting with a terminal (ala Anarchy online, or SWG) and not interacting with an NPC.\u00c2 It may be that most of the ‘story’ content is only presented as text in the UI and not actually shown or discovered by the player.\u00c2 Other games continue to push forward with ways to integrate ‘story’ into the game (WoW and lotro stand out) while I have seen zero progress in CoH.<\/p>\n
So as for my MMO playing I will for now continue to ‘play’ WoW, while looking forward to Champions Online in July.\u00c2 That should give me extra time to enjoy some single player games, which I suspect I will need with games like Red Faction, Damnation, Sims3, Alpha Protocol, and Prototype all set release in the next two months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A sad fact; I have not logged into the Lotro in almost 5 days. I say sad, because when I came back to the game I was so excited I was playing multiple characters at various times. Logging in several times a day, everyday.\u00c2 I knew when I started that it, even if I sometimes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[46,105,113,107],"class_list":["post-435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","tag-burnout","tag-lotro","tag-mmo","tag-wow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}