Suboptimist

Letter’s from Middle-earth.

It turns out that unlike, say, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online is a bitch and a half to theorycraft. An entire cottage industrycottage industry, where people research and cite eachother’s research, has formed to figure out on our own what Turbine, Inc won’t tell us: the numbers behind the gameplay/damage/healing mechanics. I haven’t finished reading through all of it, but it’s easy to glean that at least at this point in the game’s existence, damage is tied to player-character “initial stats,” i.e. agility, might, etc., as opposed to gear-based stats like +damage and +crit. Where the game system really shines, however, is in the stat buffs the party gains from skill chains. I’ll shut up about that now. Even I’m not sure what I just said.

I guess the gist of what I’m trying to say is that I like Lord of the Rings Online. It’s an interesting take on the MMO genre. Mechanically, it’s nothing new, but the quest-driven gameplay and the incentives given throughout the game for players to stop and smell the frakking roses rather than race to the level cap is a nice change. I’m playing two characters: a hobbit minstrel and a man hunter.

Last night I managed to get a pick-up-group together to explore the Hobbit lowbie zone, the Shire. The Shire is a pretty neat zone. The zone layout is right out of Tolkien’s descriptions. There a bunch of little villages throughout that in typical Turbine fashion have nothing to do game content. A bunch of stuff is there to encourage exploration. Pictures below.

In other, non MMO-related news, I have been hired to work at the Center for American Indian Languages on the Shoshoni documentation/maintenance project. It’s only a few hours a week, but I will probably supplement it with the work at my dad’s firm.