Those of you familiar with LotRO might be familiar with the pie-runner deed. It’s a low-level set of Hobbit quests in the Shire, in which you run spoiled pies back to the Hobbit who baked them (on a deadline naturally), avoiding Hungry Hobbits along the way. Once you’ve completed all of the quests, and thus the deed, you get a new title you can add after your name: “Pie-Runner”.

Today we were out and about and we happened to see a catering truck from a ribs restaurant. On the back bumper it had a notation painted: “Rib-Runner”.

The jokes started flying:

“Hey, he got his Rib-Runner title.”

“He must have completed his Rib-Running Deed.”

“I wonder how many deliveries that takes, and how hard it is to avoid Hungry Humans?”

I hope they get a delivery person who plays LotRO.

Yes, I finally saw the “Bourne Ultimatum.” And I loved it. There’s something about the Bourne movies that you just don’t get in other action films. I think it’s the fact that while the characters exist at the extremes of what human beings are capable of, they’re not supermen and superwomen. No wire work, no CGI amping up the fight scenes—just human brutality overlaid with either that signature heart-pounding piece of music or even no music at all. Don’t get me wrong; there’s a warm spot in my heart for Matrix-y bullet-time and the wire work of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” But sometimes, particularly for the spy genre, it’s really heart-stopping to see something that can feel so real. I remember my reaction when the first Bourne movie was announced. It can be summed up as, “Matt Damon, action hero?! No WAY.” And yet he works perfectly as the series’ protagonist. I never would have expected it, and yet now I can’t imagine anyone else in the role.

We also saw “The Invasion,” with Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman. It felt like they left a few scenes on the cutting room floor; the pace and story were a bit jumpy in a few places. Other than that, however, I definitely enjoyed it.

If you’re in a bookish mood, I highly recommend checking out the R.I.P. II challenge. I think I’m a little too buried in books right now to go after it myself, but it looks like a great one!

Edit: Just had to add my favorite patch note from the new LotRO patch:

People were really bummed in Rivendell, sometimes. Now they shouldn’t be so depressing, even the Bowyer who was always going on with ‘Oh, woe is me!’ and ‘It’s terrible, just terrible!’ — brought to you by the ‘Rivendell Is A Happy Place!(tm)’ tourism bureau.

And, my second-favorite:

No more deja vu! You should now only see Athal once. You should now only see Athal once. (ed. note. MadeOfLions, that was too easy! You should be ashamed. You should be ashamed. -Patience)

I love that Turbine adds some amusement to keep the patch notes from being impossibly dry and boring.

I haven’t posted about LotRO for a while, so it’s time for another round-up of thoughts on that game. On the one hand, I don’t tend to play the game for hours on end the way I used to with Warcraft. On the other hand, I think that’s mostly because I have other things to do these days. I’m almost always working on things that are in some way related to the website and my reviewing.

I find LotRO to be a more relaxed experience than Warcraft. There are more frequent towns and stablemasters, so it’s easier to just play for a little while and have some fun without needing to invest a huge amount of effort at once. Every time I think of playing Warcraft again I think of how much effort it would take just to get to the area of my next quest and try to finish it that I end up not bothering; now that I’m happy to be spending the majority of my time on other things, I’d much rather play a more relaxed game where I can easily log in, wrap up a few quests, and log off again.

It isn’t that the quests are somehow fundamentally easier, but that there are more of them. If you want to advance in Warcraft—particularly if you tend to solo—you need to do pretty much all of the quests, and that means often traveling well out of your way to get the next stage accomplished before you can move on. With LotRO, I find I can always find a deed to work on or a quest to accomplish that suits my level and won’t take a serious investment of time and effort, if that’s what I’m looking for. There’s a ton of fellowship quests available if you want a greater challenge, but LotRO makes it much easier than Warcraft to subsist on other quests should you so desire simply because there are so many. Occasionally you need to do some traveling, sure, but you don’t have nearly the preponderance of “FedEx” quests as Warcraft, and most of them are meant to introduce you to a new area and can be batched.

This isn’t the only reason I prefer LotRO to Warcraft right now (the crafting system is another reason, but I’ll talk more about that once I’ve explored the further reaches of it some more), but it’s definitely a big one.

I do have to say that I was wrong when I initially said that the game seemed less immersive, and the characters more androgynous and obviously computer-generated. I think it was just that I was used to WoW’s cartoonish style. Now that I’ve gotten used to LotRO’s style I actually quite like it, and find the more “realistic” swaths of grass and such to be more immersive than Warcraft’s style.

This is my ALT

Wired has a great little post about how Voice Chat Can Really Kill the Mood on WoW.

There are a lot of folks who swear by Ventrilo, and of course raiding guilds won’t let you in without it. I’ve steadfastly refused to use it, for exactly one of the reasons put forth by the guy writing the article–I’m a woman. When I’m typing in text I find it fairly easy to use language that’s ambiguous in terms of its sexuality; people almost always assume I’m a guy. I like that because I don’t get hit on and I don’t get folks condescending to me just because I’m female. I’m also naturally introverted, and as he pointed out, shy folks tend not to say much on voice chat–which leaves everyone listening to the locker room banter of the raucous teens in most guilds. That’s just never appealed to me; I can’t imagine why.

One of the downsides to the included voice chat in LotRO, I’ve found, is that folks are less tolerant of your not using it even in the simplest of quest fellowships. I’ll have folks making pointed comments about how I really should use it not because we actually need it for anything we’re doing, but because someone in the fellowship doesn’t feel like typing. I’ve taken to telling them my mic is broken. I definitely enjoy the game more when I can’t tell that the bearded dwarf is a 10-year-old, and he can’t tell that my hobbit guardian is a woman old enough to be his mother. Unless I’m getting to be friends with someone on-line I honestly don’t want them to know my gender and age, and if I had a 10-year-old kid playing one of these games I wouldn’t want him chatting away with midde-aged strangers.

I’m glad voice chat is available; I always loved listening in on the snarky jokes when my husband went raiding (he’d leave the output set to speaker so I could listen in). I just think it would be nice if folks would respect the wishes of those who don’t want to broadcast their voice–and their identity–to everyone else. Obviously that isn’t always an option when raiding, but in lesser circumstances it shouldn’t be an issue.

Speaking of raiding, as Foton notes over at AFK Gamer Blizz has started nerfing some of the attunements. It seems they’ve finally realized they’re alienating all but the most hardcore of raiding guilds with much of their complex end-game content and making it hard for even those guilds to bring newer members up to speed. Unfortunately I’ve found I’ve already gotten kind of fed up with the end-game content over there. I want to continue playing, but every time I think about logging in I consider what I could do when I log in and how many times I’ve done it before… and I log in to LotRO instead. Of course, as Van Hemlock notes, there are bunches of other games out there to try too, and his reminder got me to download D&D online last night just for kicks. So far it’s fun but I doubt I’ll want to pay the subscription fee for it. It has the feel of a standard single-player boxed game in which you just happen to run into other people, whereas WoW and LotRO feel as though they’ve taken advantage of the massively multiplayer environment to become another beast entirely. Still, that’s a rather unfair judgment for me to make at such an early stage, so I’ll keep playing it for the rest of the trial period.

Today’s review: Just as a note, today’s book review is The King Arthur Flour Company Whole Grain Baking Book.

“Welcome to my IGNORE list”

I feel so productive this week. I’ve posted the review of Michalko’s Thinkpak. Upcoming: reviews of the King Arthur Flour Multigrain Baking Cookbook and Tony Ballantyne’s “Recursion.” I’m also halfway through an ARC of “Grammar & Style at Your Fingertips,” from Alpha Books’ upcoming new series.

In unrelated news, if you’re a LotRO fan, check out Foton’s new character (mildly maybe-NSFW). He seems to have decided to explore Hobbits & hunters in a rather unusual way. I never thought of Hobbits that way before, but hey. Keep an open mind, right? …Right?

Erm, uh, I’ll be going now…

I started reading the patch notes for LotRO’s Shores of Evendim update and my head is swimming. I think I’ve been reading for about 20 minutes or so, only to get to the bottom of the page and discover that there are two more whole sections to the patch notes. A ton of these changes are great things that folks have been asking for–updates or bug fixes–and I can’t wait to see how they work out in practice.

Well there’s one thing I’m seriously impressed with: the quantity of changes and fixes, and the brief period of time we had to wait for them, is a vast improvement over what I’m used to seeing with Warcraft. This pace of change makes Warcraft’s look positively glacial. I hope they keep it up–particularly the trend of adding in whole new content areas complete with full quest complements. I’m off to read the other two-thirds of the patch notes now…

Edited to add: I absolutely love LotRO’s patch notes. They’re the most entertaining patch notes I’ve ever had to read:

Assikko, the Earth-kin tribal leader was being very crafty and selfish when he thanked you for recovering the book he requests in the Techniques of the Masters quest. He refused to return the book but ushered you on to Gondranc anyways. He has been reprimanded and will return the book as needed to advance the quest.

Oh, and of course I can’t leave out:

After an unprecedented 3 months in a prolonged abdominal crunch posture, Nathan Hodges of Amon Raith has finally assumed an upright, locked position. As a result of his amazing accomplishment he has been awarded a North Downs Abs of Steel commemorative plaque.

It seems that the further Patience got in posting the update, the punchier she got. I approve.

Edit #2: Patience is already collecting known issues with the new patch. Whooo! Thanks to Foton for the link, although I disagree with his contention that the patch notes contain no character development!

We finally completed the escort quest, after several additional complications, such as the extermination company having input the wrong zip code and ended up in Baltimore instead of Annapolis. They sprayed for the ants (I swear it looks like our entire lawn is composed of ant colonies) and dusted our four carpenter bee nests. Things seem to be much better now.

Now our road is getting ripped up again. Mind you, I’m not really complaining, since the patch job they did last week mostly turned the street from a full-bore roller coaster ride to a kiddie roller coaster ride, which was only a minor improvement. This time it looks like they’re doing the whole thing. (You think I’m kidding with that roller coaster comment? There’s a spot across the street where we’d slow down to about five miles an hour and the car would still rock back and forth like it was on hydraulics.)

In entirely different news, Shores of Evendim is coming out for LotRO today! Whooo! They’re being smart by putting out regular free content updates. They’re also being smart by making the preview server available during the downtime with a special event to keep folks entertained. I’m looking forward to playing around after the servers come back up tonight.

So, we haven’t put in redirects from the old site yet (we’ll do that after we’ve brought over the last pieces, i.e. the reviews and the link directory), but since this blog is up and running I figured I might as well start posting here. I’ve found some interesting new sites of late, which you’ll find in the blogroll–such as Van Hemlock’s erudite gaming blog, Glod’n'Epix’s academic approach to gaming, and of course some additional comics like xkcd, Three Panel Soul, and Cyanide and Happiness. I have various things I want to post about in coming weeks, and a review that’s finished and waiting for the reviews blog to move over (with another one coming up soon), so come back soon! In the meantime, if you see any rough edges do let me know–we haven’t quite finished up yet and might have missed something.

Apparently my sub-quest to locate an exterminator has presented a new challenge in which the true quest has shown itself to be getting the exterminator to the house. My least favorite type of quest, presumably: an escort quest.

You see, a road crew ripped up our street this morning.
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I stumbled groggily out of bed, threw on some sort of clothing, and wended my way to the kitchen to get breakfast started while my husband took his shower. The cats curled around my ankles meowing for breakfast, and as I bent over to pet them I saw it:

The ants had taken over.
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I haven’t hit the limits of the open beta for the Lord of the Rings Online game, but I have had a chance to play around a bit more, so it’s time for a few more thoughts on the game. Again, there will be a handful of comparisons with Warcraft just because that’s my other game of choice so it’s what I have to compare it to.

Technorati Tags: Lord of the Rings, LotRO, mmorpg, Warcraft, World of Warcraft

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