The Blind One

He’s a big, bad, monster deep within Dar Narbugud. It’s a tricky, Thrang-style fight. We’ve been at it a few weeks (I think would have been a bit faster with a fixed group, but our kin practices ‘rotations’ so we often have people new to the fight with us). We can now easily get through 1st and 2nd stage and yesterday got him to 38k on one attempt and then 28k on the next (from 500k). We’re making progress. And soon, it’ll be second nature to handle the transitions.

But for now, he’s my biggest frustration in LotRO. Captains, in our kin, are a rare breed at max level and radiance-d out. We get to go to most raids, which is quite a bit deal as every other class has to rotate between 3-4 players (we have more guardians but one is sitting out the rotation). I’m not a huge fan of rotation on such a wide-scale, but it’s meant to be fair to those who want to raid. Strictly, we’re very close to being able to run two raid groups, just not every week, and we’d be missing the Captains. So it’s a Catch 22 situation.

My personal views of rotations aside, what the situation does mean is that I get to see the fight every week, with both new and old people. I get to judge when I feel it’s gone better, when we’ve taken a step backwards, and I also get tired of the content faster, I imagine. For me this is attempt who-knows on the Blind One (we’re going again tonight after such close shaves), most people know how many times they’ve been. It’s blurring for me. And even if we do it tomorrow, there’s no guarantee we’ll do it next week. I worry I’m burning out a little. I still concentrate on being the best I can be when the fight starts, but I’m not enjoying it like I once was.

Would be nice to finish Dar Narbugud before Mirkwood comes out. I think and hope we will. The boss after The Blind One is supposed to be a lot easier, and is the last boss. I’d kind of like the armour set, as the Captain bonus is actually a decent one for once. Funnily, I’m not usually an ‘achiever’ in raids, I tend to go for the social aspect. Maybe skirmishes will fill that hole soon… though who doesn’t want to go to Dol Guldur and kick Nazgul butt!?

/ramble off.

Does everyone hate DKP?

Since when did DKP become a polarising factor? I quite like it, and I’ve seen a few different versions. Each DKP system  can be tweaked for a specific raiding group/guild, it’s up to you how you award points and how to spend them. But it seems people either love it, or despise the very concept.

Dragon Kill Points. Something we’ve all become aware of since the old Everquest days. Who knew they’d become so fixed in the MMO world?

In the days of massive raid numbers in Dark Age of Camelot we had a pretty simple system going. Turn up for a Sidi raid, get 10 points. Spend points each week bartering for items that dropped at the guildhouse of the guild running said raids. Either save up points for armour or weapons (at say 40 or 50 points per piece), or spend 10 points on the cheaper loot, such as respec stones. Perhaps from this I started with a good opinion of DKP.

What makes it less fair?

1. Bind on Acquire loot that requires not just your presence, but the presence of the character you want to have the item in the raid on the night/day it drops.

2. Non-fixed groups in the days when raid size is mandated by the game. So if you’re not lucky enough to be picked for the raid, but you signed up for it, is that rewarded or not, and at what level?

There’s probably a thousand other little nuances of unfairness… being docked points for turning up a little late through no fault of your own, or for mucking about during the raid. As I said at the start, each DKP system can be tweaked to be that little bit different, depending on game and group.

If I was doing a LotRO Moria one, I’d probably award points for helping people get radiance gear, but that already gives benefit to those who can play more often and have the time, or those with especially useful classes. All things you don’t and shouldn’t think about when picking a character class you love and want to spend time with.

Our kin in LotRO doesn’t use DKP. It uses something called the Suicide Kings method. I hate the name. It was, of course, devised for World of Warcraft and is supposed to suit casual raiding where loot isn’t the primary concern. We have separate SK lists for barter coins and set gear loot. But anything that isn’t covered, such as jewellery ends up being rolled for because everyone knows that if you choose not to ‘suicide’ over it, it goes to a roll. It’s not the most satisfactory system, and I have a few problems with it. But it’s hard to think up a DKP system for our kin that would work.

Why? Because we’re a supposedly casual kin (and in many ways we are casual), but we also have a core of raiders, such as myself, who have both the time and the desire to hit raids hard. Currently our pool of raiding-geared characters means we have quite a rotation system set up, and we need a specific member of the kin to decide who goes and on what night. It’s not ideal, but it lets the widest pool of people participate in the raid. Of course, it also means some of the more focussed raiders have to sit out, and don’t really get to choose what nights they sit out on.

And, at some stage, we’ll have enough geared up people to run the raid twice, but who wants to go on the discovery (ie. full of wipes) raid, when you can go with the established group. It’s a problem that isn’t going away. In trying to please everyone on both sides of the casual/more hardcore divide, we’re left with a compromise raid. It’s working, but it’s definitely more of a slog.

Lootwise, I generally don’t care too much about loot. But it always makes me sit back and wonder what the truly fair way to do it is. It isn’t fair to be told you can’t go even if you have the time and commitment to. But then it also isn’t fair that I ended up with a class that gets to go every time I want, more or less, purely because Captains are seen as raid-desirable and very few people in our kin have managed to get one to 60 and geared them up. While recognising it’s not fair, I also like it, from my perspective. I don’t get time to forget the fights, I see it work with different sets of people, and of course, I keep my place on the SK list. 

I can sometimes show my hardcore colours. I’d like a loot system that rewarded punctuality, helping others, sitting out if you have to, participating, coming with a full set of potions, tokens, and having traited appropriately. Less so the first kills, because it’s no longer in anyone’s power to decide if they get to go on the night we kill something. Multiple wipes would be nice to reward, as they cost a fair bit in LotRO – I’d rather reward those than the first kills, I think. But, I’d also like the full Captain set, and that ain’t going to happen anytime soon. Shame, it has a nice bonus – which not all the sets do. 

I wish I had the time and energy to work up a DKP system I felt would work for our kin. But truthfully, many people don’t see any problem with SK. They raid when they can, and get gear in some kind of rotation made fairer by the intervention of the raid leader.  And while that’s the case, there’s no real push to change things.

It’s a bit of a ramble. But I mainly wanted to spew my thoughts out to see if anyone out there had any kind of solution to a raid looting system for a casual-ish raid with rotating members, I don’t really think there’s one out there. But it’s been a while since we went and looked, and I want to be fully prepared to suggest something better for the Mirkwood raids on Dol Guldur, if possible.

ps,. this post is made more awkward by the fact I know some of my kinmates read this blog. Don’t take any offence anyone, and don’t read into this anything other than what it is, a consideration of how much I dislike SK for our current loot distribution system. With the new, revamped NtC blog, I’m spending very little time considering other people’s opinions and this is just me, on the moment I write the ramble! Liable to change my mind in 5 minutes, but unprepared to change what I write to save any hurt feelings.

Convenience/Inconvenience

Ravious over at Kill Ten Rats brought the following quotation to my attention a few weeks ago:

The only place where I find a very broad approach useful is in convenience of play. What is a player’s overall tolerance for inconvenience and delay of any sort? In that one regard I do tend to think in terms of casual and hardcore I suppose. A hardcore player will put up with less refined UI, buggier content, long travel times, and other things that basically delay or degrade the play experience. A casual player will quit after fairly little irritation of that sort.

It’s taken from a Turbine dev, Vastin and neatly brings a new way of looking at the whole casual/hardcore split into play.

It may have taken me a while to comment on it, but it’s been in my mind since I first read it. It’s also made me look at the way I play. How much inconvenience will I put up with?

Well, recently we’ve been discussing grinding in teamspeak a lot (and when I say ‘we’ I shortly hope to introduce you to the characters in my ‘stable gaming group’ and we’re hoping to bring a few group discussions to the blogosphere. It seems I’m a bit of a grinder, I don’t mind fairly repetitive mindless tasks, even if I don’t particularly need the rewards. I think it’s mostly because if I like a game, I want to be in the universe as often as possible, even if I don’t have anything truly ‘productive’ to do. The lack of raiding in my LotRO life is often a sudden, hard shock to me, but I like to be in the LotRO world, so I find myself enjoying grinding more than some of my counterparts.

Of course, it depends WHAT I’m grinding. If I can web browse a bit while doing it, I enjoy it more… back to inconvenience as an indicator of my comfort levels with the hardcore grind.

And back to that raiding, I guess I could do it, if I got involved, looked for another guild, went with an umbrella raid… but all those things are a little inconvenient right now, so I instead choose to play a more casual game of zero raiding, until I can deal with the inconvenience of finding a raid group once again.

I like the terminology, I thank Vastin for putting it out there.

The Angel Translator

Ok, one of the things I very very rarely touch upon (leaving it to others to do a great job of it) is what it means to be a female MMO Gamer. And one who isn’t very ‘casual’ about completing quests, instances, raids etc. I’m not sure I’d call myself hardcore, but on the hardcore-casual scale I’m a lot nearer the hardcore players in outlook, if not always in time. I’m lucky, my husband can’t play MMOs due to their addictive nature, and he exercises amazing restraint every time I offer him the chance to come play an MMO with me. Seriously, he can play 24h straight if he’s really into a game, so we’ve found it much easier to have him play stand-alone games to scratch that itch. How does that make me lucky? Well, I have someone who understands my socialising and gaming. Who will happily rustle up dinner if I have a raid, and not moan at me for it taking up my time and energy. I also don’t have dependents, like many female gamers of my age – well, except two cats who make their views on gaming while it’s mealtime very loudly understood.

Every so often though something crops up that reminds me that I am not the norm. And that being female does make some kind of difference.

This week, it’s been brought to my attention because of some guild drama, that I’m not going to go into the details about. Suffice it to say that I usually play in a very tight-knight group with 4 friends that I met while playing LotRO, and sometimes that becomes an issue. I really won’t go into any further details, we all know that semi-fixed groups can cause tension in guilds, and every so often it flares up. So, what does that have to do with being female? Nothing – so far.

What happens when things flare up? Well, there’s usually some to-ing and fro-ing on guild forums, some chatting in-game and then things are smoothed over. It seems that the guild perceives members of our ‘group’ quite differently. We have two female players, myself and another. We are very rarely villified as often as the male players, especially the two that are seen as the more hardcore of the ‘group’. And I’m beginning to find that quite frustrating. I want to be heard. In my own words. I don’t want every sentiment passed through the ‘Angel Translator’ (as I termed it yesterday in a moment of exasperation). I don’t want to be misunderstood, but sometimes I’m flummoxed by how someone can read what I know was a fairly stroppy post by myself (I recognise my own emotional outbursts!) and still not think of me as childish and a bit uppity. Or worse.

If I was feeling more cynical I’d make nastier posts and comments just to judge the full effect of this. But truthfully, I like my kin in LotRO. I really really do, or I wouldn’t have stayed around so long. I just wish I could bang a few heads together sometimes and get everyone to sit in the same room and just get to know one another.

But mostly, I want the freedom of my words being taken as they were meant and not softened because people have had good experiences playing with me (that sounds SO wrong, but you know what I mean, so I’m not re-writing it), or of not wanting to go all-out because I’m a girl. Girl, heh.. I’m way too old for that.