DocHoliday posted this on April 29th, 2013.
Categorized as beta, Bullroarer, crafting, End Game, Equipment, gear, Helm's Deep, lord of the rings online, lotro, screenshots, Update 11, Warden.
Shorthand Link:
Full link: http://docholidaymmo.com/2013/04/29/lotro-update-11-goodies/
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon - LOTRO, Secret World, & Rift with an End-Game View
Of course this is all subject to change, but there are some pretty cool aspects to Update 11 that I wanted to share with folks. I also will have a couple of suggestions for folks towards the end. Don’t get me wrong, Update 11 isn’t perfect and it won’t keep end-game folks busy until the Helm’s Deep expansion, but this update is better then what I was expecting. And I haven’t even done any of the Epic line, which always have good stories tied to them.
Visually, the area is quite stunning and unlike the other winter zones in the game – which is quite nice. Turbine always impresses me with how they’re able to keep creating different and unique zones. Adding to the beauty of the area, Turbine has stepped it up with their armor designs in this update. The end-game sets with Rohan were honestly pretty disappointing as the Hytbold sets were incredibly un-inspired. As some examples, check out some of the gear below:
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DocHoliday posted this on April 26th, 2013.
Categorized as beta, End Game, lord of the rings online, lotro, Player's Council, Raids and End-game, turbine.
Shorthand Link:
Full link: http://docholidaymmo.com/2013/04/26/lotros-player-council-announcement/
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon - LOTRO, Secret World, & Rift with an End-Game View
It was delayed a couple of times, but I have to admit I’m pretty please overall with the folks chosen for the council. I certainly don’t know everyone (I do know and respect both Silverlode representatives) but in all the places I’ve read (including the unofficial forums) there are very few criticisms of the folks chosen. Granted, it could be that people can’t make the connection between the character names and the forum names, but I still think the lack of push-back from the community is a good first step.
For those wanting to get more involved with the council, there are a couple of ways. My only suggestion would be to be understanding of the fact that the council members are bound by an NDA and as such may not be able to tell you anything, however some have already come out in various ways and made themselves available. They probably are also getting a few other requests coming into them, so it would probably be best to be patient and not take their lack of a response personally.
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DocHoliday posted this on April 25th, 2013.
Categorized as beta, Bullroarer, End Game, expansion, forums, Free to Play, gear, Helm's Deep, isengard, lord of the rings online, lotro, Raids and End-game, Riders of Rohan, Rise Of Isengard, rohan, screenshots, Skirmishes, Update 11.
Shorthand Link:
Full link: http://docholidaymmo.com/2013/04/25/turbine-with-an-interesting-news-day/
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon - LOTRO, Secret World, & Rift with an End-Game View
I’ve been waiting a little bit to absorb and digest the releases yesterday as there are certain things that just don’t make sense to me. We saw 3 main pieces of news that I wanted to go a little deeper into.
After a delay hit last week, Update 11 finally makes its way over to Bullroarer for public testing. I will admit that I’ve only popped on the server for a little bit, so this isn’t any sort of thorough review of the update. For the most part, we knew much of what is in this update but I wanted to touch on a couple of things. I was a bit underwhelmed by the changes to mounted combat, as Rowan made it out to be a pretty significant change to the mechanics as well as giving the mount trees more options. At first glance, it really just seemed like the removed many of the basic traits and rolled them into the base mount. While I appreciate the change, I was hoping for more of an evolution. But, I will reserve full judgment until I play with it more and see the new content in case they added something spiffy there. I am (as always) happy to see new zones and am VERY curious to see where the story continues, and visually it appears that the new zone doesn’t disappoint. I did check out the new Hobbit Presents, and I really don’t have any personal issues with it – but at least now we should be able to get confirmation regarding non-VIPs and gold boxes. On my first roll I did win 50 Mithril Tokens, so I used those up for research purposes. The main thing that jumped out to me is that the gear in there maxes out at level 80, but there are Teal and Orange drops. Below are some shots of what’s possible to get, notice the orange item is not that far off from my Hytbold gear. In addition to this use of coins, there are new ways to spend them, which is all well and good but I’m just not entirely sure the rationale behind the change. We shall see how much of this build stays the way it currently exists and how many BR builds we get before live, but for the most part I’m liking the Update for what it is.
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DocHoliday posted this on April 18th, 2013.
Categorized as beta, Bullroarer, Equipment, Free to Play, lord of the rings online, lotro, store, turbine, Update 11.
Shorthand Link:
Full link: http://docholidaymmo.com/2013/04/18/all-sorts-of-lotro-news-today/
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon - LOTRO, Secret World, & Rift with an End-Game View
It has been a busy day, but many of the expected announcements either haven’t come or have not come in the way expected.
First up, the Player’s Council announcement initially scheduled for the 19th (tomorrow) has been delayed to give more time to the review process. This doesn’t really phase me too much, but certainly with the rest of today’s items I could have fun speculating (and have on twitter).
The first big item of the day was the announcement of the Hobbit Presents, which I’m not even going to talk about since the FAQ raises more questions then it answers and even basic things are ambiguous at best. Why can’t Turbine put out actual information that makes sense instead of a rushed out announcement followed by a stream of Dev posts on the forums either contradicting the FAQ or just confusing things? As an example, it still isn’t clear if non-VIPs can obtain items from the Gold boxes, to me that’s a pretty cut and dry question that they’ve tried to answer in 3 separate places with each one providing a slightly different answer. Personally I don’t really care either way about this system, but for me there are better uses of development resources.
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DocHoliday posted this on March 25th, 2013.
Categorized as fm2013, Football Manager, football manager 2013, lord of the rings online, lotro, secret world, the secret war, The Secret World, TSW.
Shorthand Link:
Full link: http://docholidaymmo.com/2013/03/25/whats-keeping-me-busy/
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon - LOTRO, Secret World, & Rift with an End-Game View
I haven’t been writing all that much, and that’s mainly due to not playing much of anything lately. But things are coming around and I’m getting settled at my new job and getting into a better routine with our newborn, so I should be getting back into more of a schedule. But it shouldn’t be a surprise what main games are occupying my time and plans for the future.
I’ve been in and out of LOTRO lately, but more trying to keep things somewhat organized and not doing a whole lot out purely due to time constraints, that are loosening up. I’ve toyed with the idea of dusting off my Captain but I think there’s still more then enough work to do on my Warden to keep me busy. She’s not in that bad of a position, but I need to go grab a few virtues to adjust to the whole Agility switch. I also think I’m going to start playing in the new instances to see what all I can do in there to challenge myself – I’ve heard rumors of Warden’s soloing the new 6-man, so that’s something I’m going to toy with.
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DocHoliday posted this on March 25th, 2013.
Categorized as fm2013, Football Manager, football manager 2013, lord of the rings online, lotro, secret world, the secret war, The Secret World, TSW.
Shorthand Link:
Full link: http://docholidaymmo.com/2013/03/25/whats-keeping-me-busy/
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon - LOTRO, Secret World, & Rift with an End-Game View
I haven’t been writing all that much, and that’s mainly due to not playing much of anything lately. But things are coming around and I’m getting settled at my new job and getting into a better routine with our newborn, so I should be getting back into more of a schedule. But it shouldn’t be a surprise what main games are occupying my time and plans for the future.
I’ve been in and out of LOTRO lately, but more trying to keep things somewhat organized and not doing a whole lot out purely due to time constraints, that are loosening up. I’ve toyed with the idea of dusting off my Captain but I think there’s still more then enough work to do on my Warden to keep me busy. She’s not in that bad of a position, but I need to go grab a few virtues to adjust to the whole Agility switch. I also think I’m going to start playing in the new instances to see what all I can do in there to challenge myself – I’ve heard rumors of Warden’s soloing the new 6-man, so that’s something I’m going to toy with.
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DocHoliday posted this on March 22nd, 2013.
Categorized as beta, Community, lord of the rings online, lotro, turbine.
Shorthand Link:
Full link: http://docholidaymmo.com/2013/03/22/my-hopes-for-the-new-turbine-player-council/
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon - LOTRO, Secret World, & Rift with an End-Game View
I must admit that I’m on the fence about this whole player council thing Turbine is rolling out. A part of me thinks this is a good idea for Turbine to have a more structured way to get feedback and guidance from the community. However, I also think there’s the distinct possibility that this will just be another avenue for Turbine to ignore.
On the positive side, there’s quite a bit of detail to the makeup and roles of the council. Also the timing seems good as they’ll be able to interact with the team pre-alpha which should be early enough to actually make changes. It also seems like the council will more or less be the funnel for the community to really focus attention to the areas Turbine needs to pay attention to. The size of the council (30 to 50 members) should certainly be good enough to get a good cross section of the community and also not overly task any single member.
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DocHoliday posted this on March 6th, 2013.
Categorized as End Game, Equipment, ettenmoors, gear, instances, legendary items, lord of the rings online, lotro, moors, ost dunhoth, Patch Notes, pvp, Raid, Warden.
Shorthand Link:
Full link: http://docholidaymmo.com/2013/03/06/lotro-official-update-10-release-notes/
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon - LOTRO, Secret World, & Rift with an End-Game View
<Update>
Shockingly enough, there’s a known issues list already posted. Pretty significant especially when there’s so much in there regarding loot not hooked up, which was one of the main selling points for this update. Seems like a minor issue – and I don’t understand why Turbine springs a release with no warning when there are this many “little” things un-resolved. Granted, it probably will take them time to wrap everything up but it seems like another pass of polish would’ve done quite a bit of good and not let the community down at all.
<End Update>
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DocHoliday posted this on February 11th, 2013.
Categorized as crafting, End Game, Equipment, gear, group, instances, lord of the rings online, lotro, Raids and End-game, Riders of Rohan, rohan.
Shorthand Link:
Full link: http://docholidaymmo.com/2013/02/11/lotro-update-9-1-1-patch-notes/
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon
DocHoliday's MMO Saloon - LOTRO, Secret World, & Rift with an End-Game View
I didn’t even realize there was going to be a patch today but there was and 2 things from this really jumped out at me.
First, I was surprised that they’re doing server side performance enhancements ahead of Wednesday’s extended downtime. I’m all for them doing things, it just seems strange timing to me. But hopefully it will help as I know since Rohan many (including myself) have been having issues.
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