Clarysta Gives Feedback

I hate to turn up out of the blue, uninvited

But I couldn’t stay away, I couldn’t fight it

I had hoped you’d see my face and that you’d be reminded

That for me, it isn’t over  yet

Next week will be my fourth anniversary in LotRO. I plan to post a light-hearted discussion of what I like and why I still play.

But today is not that day.

Today I'm going to provide some feedback to Turbine in the form of a blog post. It may or may not reach their ears and it may or may not have an impact. Either way I'll feel better, and that's what's important, right?

If I could give Sapience any advice it would be this: get another job. Sounds harsh, right? But eventually his words will come back to haunt him. Patience was lucky; she got out before her statements were washed away in Turbine's spin cycle. I am glad that Sapience posted this, but this is communication that should come from the people responsible for the actions, not those that get stuck with the response.

For those of you that missed it in the thread, here's my little comment:

Lot of words in this thread already so I'll keep this short:

1) I don't care what goes into the store. I'm in the camp of "Don't Care What Other People Do." I am finding this trickle of items, cleverly and constantly pushing the boundaries to be very annoying. Put whatever you want in the store, see if it sells. Get it over with. Just promise me you'll still call me in the morning.

2) This thing that Sapience posted can't be applied to pvp. The whole "advantage vs convenience" thing goes right out the window for pvp, where ANY benefit is an advantage. Oh, I'll also point out that he even referred to "unbalanced game" as something fun - whether that was sarcasm or not, it's a slap in the face to pvp players that face imbalances as a chronic condition.

Ok, I'm done. Back to this awesome OC/Rez fight.

By the way, it was a terrible OC/Rez fight and I was falling asleep at the keyboard. Good thing I'd done a lot of questing yesterday or I probably wouldn't have gotten any infamy at all. Hurray for pve in pvp.

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But today's announcement prompted this post. Another expansion, another level cap increase and two yes TWO substantial changes to combat.

According to the Massively article, 

Players will learn special skills for mounted combat and spend their spare time up-armoring their My Little War-Ponies. 

Well, I guess we've learned that it's possible for Turbine to not know what they are saying in interviews, but even accounting for the playful tone of the article's author, it's pretty clear that the Pony Grind is coming soon to a game near you.

I have ZERO confidence in Turbine's ability to implement the combat changes necessary for mounted combat. And here’s why:

• Great Water Bug of Moria - The issue with the z-axis that caused mobs to bug out if you'd been anywhere near water.
• The combat changes that rendered guards impotent and gave minstrels jelly arms when Moria released
• The book 8 release that killed the champs so bad my partner deleted his
• The (insert release here) changes that left wardens wondering why they'd ever been created
• And even now, the mitigation changes that made creeps melt before the enemy, and the big, "Look we fixed it! Oops, did I say we fixed it? Sorry!" issues that STILL continue 4 months after RoI released

Nothing compares, no worries or cares

Regrets and mistakes, they’re memories made

Who would have known how bittersweet this would taste

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Specific feedback for Turbine:

·         Fix Bullroarer. Bullroarer is a preview server, but it needs to be a beta test environment.

o   Remove auto-ranking on Bullroarer. Many of the issues with creep mitigations could have been seen if Bullroarer's pvp wasn't just an epeen sausage fest. If there is a need to test at rank 15, it seems that could be handled differently. I'd like to see creeps get at most a 2 rank boost above their current rank. Of course that would mean migrating creeps to Bullroarer first.

o   Provide instructions for beta and require feedback. 

o   Act on Bullroarer feedback. A lot of bugs were caught on Bullroarer and reported and yet RoI released on schedule anyway.

·         Revamp LIs. There's only 3 things I think this needs:

o   Provide for scaling of existing LIs with level cap increase. NO ONE wants to repeat the grind.

o   Remove the tiers of the legacies to allow for true choice. Right now captains "need" 4 major legacies. That means at least a 400% increase in grinding items to level 30 to find an item with that structure.

o   Add legendary items to the front half of the game. Similar to skirmish soldiers, this allows the leveling process to begin much earlier and reduce the feel of the grind.

·         Put pvmp back on the table. Or remove it entirely. Either will work. Neither is no longer acceptable.

o   Put a development cycle in place that INCLUDES monster players. Either include the pvmp developer in the planned freep changes early, or publish a schedule that lets monster players know exactly when their toons will be buffed in response to the freep changes.

o   If we can spend TP in the Moors, we should be able to earn them there. I'd like to see more deeds, and deeds with TP attached for monster players. And no, killing 24570183470187 hobbits, when there are only 3 that play on my server, is not an acceptable deed.

See you next week with a happier post.