Tag: LotRO

Nomadic Once Again

I have a lifetime account to Lord of the Rings Online – and I played not too long ago, with Arkenor and a few other Combat Wombats. Problem is I’m a nomadic gamer, and I tend to move on before too long. Sometimes sooner than not. I wasn’t always a gamer who bounced from game to game, but as my allotted time has changed, and my gaming desires have changed, so have the games themselves. Taking a look at LotRO in specific it’s pretty easy to see what the problem in my case is.

My highest character ever was level 44. I was playing last year, but only reached level 20-22 or so. I had a house, but it expired (you have to keep paying upkeep on those). None of that is the problem though. The problem, is that the current cap to the game is 130. That’s a huge daunting number, especially when you’re only level 20. It felt like I could never catch up, could never make sense of the mechanics that were utilized in the game. Chat was basically an entire other language that I couldn’t make sense of, and my bags were overflowing with items that I had no idea how to use or what they were for.

Returning to a game that you haven’t played in a while is an incredibly daunting task. There are few games that I go back to where it actually sticks, and I am sad to say that no matter how many times I try to get back into LotRO – I just never quite succeed.

Time to continue wandering.

Home Sweet (Hobbit) Home

I finally managed to download and patch all of LotRO, created new characters over on the Landroval server (currently I have a level 15 hunter, a 10 guardian, a 7 lore-master, and a warden) and joined up with a handful of Combat Wombat and friends from twitter. At level 15 you get the ability to purchase a house, and since I had a bunch of gold stored up on my level 44 minstrel on another account I decided to send it over and allow my hunter the ability to purchase a nice fancy home.

The location isn’t the greatest, I had to place trees in my yard to give it a bit more of a natural feel, but it’s close to the stables which makes me pretty happy, and it’s also close to the Kinship house, which has a bunch of crafting tables!

Housing has changed since last I played. Not in the method (it still uses pre-placed hooks that you drop furniture onto) but in the number of hooks, and their placements. My home used to have only a few hooks for furniture, and it looks more natural now, you can place things close to one another. It’s not the free moving housing that I love from EQ2, but it will do.

I’ve picked up some crafting on everyone, and I can’t wait to get started on that. I sent over a bunch of supplies from alts and everyone should be pretty situated now. We’ll see how long this lasts!

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Downloading, and MORE Downloading

As my frequent readers know, I moved to a remote location for my husband’s work earlier this year, and our internet (while available) is not that great. I’m unable to stream at all, uploads are almost non existent, and I can’t download any faster than 300-500 kb/s (yes, that’s KB, not MB). It makes you realize how privileged we are to have good internet, because it’s simply not a thing everywhere.

I decided I wanted to download EQ1, which took an entire night overnight. Then friends started playing LotRO and I wanted to join them. Now, I actually have this installed on my PC already, but it needed to be patched and as luck would have it, my patch ran into a patch that was being done on the game, and it corrupted my files. The only solution was for me to do a 26g download to repair. So I’ve been doing that for a few days.

I also wanted to download FFXIV, I had it in the past and I’m not sure why I removed it from my PC. It might have been when my SSD failed, I can’t quite remember. Anyway, that one took around 3-4 days to download, then I upgraded to Shadowbringers and it was another night of downloading content.

WoW has a small 100-500 mb update every few days which takes me a few hours to grab.

Steam games each have small frequent updates on their platforms.

Epic games.

GoG games.

You can see where this is going. Now, the issue is not downloading itself – but the fact that the rest of the house cannot access the internet if anyone is downloading. We don’t have cable, so that means the children can’t watch netflix, my husband can’t patch his shows, we can barely access email when things are being used. I’ve restricted myself to patching at night, but even that isn’t ideal since my husband works shift work and I don’t want to deny him the internet while he’s awake waiting on calls.

Our situation won’t improve any time soon, but I hope to finish off all of these downloads shortly and then maybe I won’t notice our issue quite so much. So far ping rate in-game has been totally manageable even around the 150-200 mark, but I wouldn’t want to see it get any worse.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

Saving Chickens

Dora needed some help rounding up her chickens today, so of course I did. She gave me a cloak in return that looked like it had been used to wash the floors, and was no where near as nice as the cloak I was already wearing. Why her chickens were out wandering with wolves, I have no idea, but hopefully she keeps them closer to home in the future.

Diving into LotRO

It has been years since I played the Lord of the Rings Online, and even though my other half and I used to play it together for some reason it is one of the very few games that we actually did not return to year after year (unlike EverQuest, or WoW, or EverQuest2). When they announced a legendary server would be opening (much like the progression servers we know at Daybreak) I perked up a little. It didn’t take much hype before I was fully on board and planning out the characters I would play.

My husband also decided to play, and though we faced a queue any time we tried to log in we both managed to make new characters – yay! He’s playing a Warden, and I opted to try out a lore-master this time around (the one with the pets). I also have a hunter for ease. Last time we played he stuck to a guardian and I bounced between my rune-keeper and my minstrel. We finished the tutorial starter and headed off to Combe to pick up some crafting vocations. This time around I decided to go Tinkerer, and he went Explorer. It should compliment one another well, and if not no big deal we’re not exactly min-maxers anyway.

It’s really nice to be playing again, even if we’re frantically trying to fit those minutes of gameplay in between everything (ie: life). Since we met in a video game (EverQuest 2, for those curious) it seems only fitting.

The server has had a lengthly queue every evening, but during the day it’s not too bad. There are all sorts of returning players checking it out, though a fair portion of my twitter friends are reluctant to start on the new legendary server and have opted to remain on the regular servers – nothing wrong with that! I hope this brings the game some money and more business is never a bad thing.

We’ll see how long I end up sticking with it. I’m hoping to be able to play a few times a week, even if I don’t get much done. I believe expansions release every 4 months, so there’s plenty of time to catch up to “end game” though I have never actually been end game in LotRO before. There is a first for everything.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!