The world of Middle-earth is perhaps the richest gaming environment for a role player currently available. This is the world whose stories created a genre, the wellspring of all fantasy realms to come. With Lord of the Rings Online, players were entering a world they knew long before the game was even conceived, and it offered something beyond the usual hack and slash MMO experience; it gave players a chance to inhabit their beloved Middle-earth.
Such an opportunity was especially enticing to role players. Here was a chance to see themselves, their avatars, as they could only have imagined before: living among the elves, dwarves and hobbits of a world they knew as well as their own. The only ingredient that spoiled the pie was that they couldn't look the part. Early on, all a player could dress in was armor, and it's hard to imagine yourself as an adventure-shunning hobbit while dressed in full battle gear. Players longed for a means to make themselves look as they should while tilling the soil or cooking up a hearty breakfast.
So came cosmetic clothing. Now a player could truly immerse themselves into Middle-earth society. Someone playing music at an inn (a wonderful system, and one personally dear to me) could no longer need to look like walking artillery; they could now look relaxed and comfortable as one would expect from a performer at a social gathering.
But then a thread of irony was woven into much if not most of the cosmetic gear: in order to attain the most suitable items for a role player, you had to engage in activities that were least amenable to a role player: grinding for reputation and skirmishes.
The risk/reward component of an MMO is a long held tradition. The more to risk, the greater rewards you can earn. And it's not wrong. Rewards should be earned. But life doesn't move in a straight line. There should be multiple paths to achieving some rewards, and others do enough to add to the overall experience of life in Middle-earth that they should simply exist, and be available to anyone. Should one really need to incessantly skirmish at L65 to be able to wield a rolling pin?
While it's true that skirmish rewards, at least, are now bind on equip, allowing other players access to them even if they don't earn them themselves, they're unlikely to be chosen as a reward by hard core players who are most easily able to earn them, unless of course it's to put them for auction at prices that are prohibitive to anyone except other hard core gamers or players who illicitly buy gold, the latter being a practice that none of us encourage or even tolerate. Are there not enough rewards for the serious gamers, rewards that enhance game play and status? Does having a wash-day dress do anything other than thumb noses as the players who can't have it? Does a rolling pin mean more to a raider that a first age weapon? What about to a role player?
I understand the purpose of the skirmish system. For the developers it's gold: it's a system in which a small effort in development can keep players busy repeatedly grinding out rewards in a controlled fashion. Such a grind has been a tradition in MMOs, though they've usually been unsanctioned or outright exploits, practices that put undue tension on the game economy. Skirmishes are a means to allow players to do what they've always done, and do so in a way that is sanctioned and doesn't unbalance the game. But it has become a hammer, and everything else its nail. There ought be more tools in the box, and tools accessible to broader spectrum of the player base.
LotRO is losing the distinctiveness that made it special. It's been consistently focusing on intense, hard core gaming, leaving the role players, people whose gaming style can make this Middle-earth a living and thriving world, left like children looking in the dept store window at Christmas, staring longingly at toy which are denied to them. Having so many ambiance-enhancing cosmetics be practically unobtainable doesn't inspire role players to strive to achieve them. It insults them. It tells them that they are unimportant. And it makes this Middle-earth a world corrupted by greed and shadow, instead of a world that can make a hobbit's heart sing.
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