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.

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