STRAT: Grand Stair, Igash encounter.

The Grand Stair instance is one of the easier instances in the Radiance-chain of instances. Igash is the final boss and can be challenging if your fellowship is not experienced in dealing with Igash. As always you need to be prepared for sudden massive loss of morale fellowship-wide as well as the seemingly insta-death blows. Here's how you deal with Igash.

Assuming your fellowship is taking advantage of the current and now long-standing bug where you can root the 3 adds Igash summons thus eliminating them from the picture as they anti-exploit for the durationg of the battle that you will conduct behind his throne this is the strat I use.

Igash drops an AE down ignigting the ground in fire in front of him. This fire does massive damage and your fellowship needs to ensure it's out of the fire within 1 second else the mini is going to have a bad night. Igash doesn't ping-pong around very much if you have a guardian on him. He does a decent DD that you need to be aware of so don't let the guard get below half health. Also, do not let squishies get backed into a corner or against the gate when Igash is facing them. Always have everyone facing his back with only the guard to his front. This eliminates the entire fellowship from getting his by the fire AE. He can wipe an entire fellowship if his fire AE hits and he does group of attacks after that. If you stay out of the fire and keep the tank over half health your job is as complex as just that.

If you are not using the bug and will have to manage the adds then your job as mini becomes more difficult. Ensure you are using Song of Soothing the moment you catch agro. Coordinate with everyone who has any CC skill so that your fear skill is used appropriately. Keep the archers off you anyway you can. Other than the addition of CC the same strat applies with or without the adds. The fire is the killer. If your fellowship can't stay out of the fire because they are fail then make sure you use your hopeful heart when needed and don't walk into the fight with triumphant spirit on cooldown.

Keep out of the fire and you survive the encounter. Suck at that simple task and you will have to make use of all of your "oh shit" buttons to keep the people alive.

Micro-transaction scare is over.

The micro-payment scare that hit the forums was a short lived scare. Life in the LOTRO world has returned to normal. Turbine announced that the position was for future projects and will have no direct impact on LOTRO.

Obviously this is a good thing.
Game on.

Micro-transaction Management - Continued

I will continue to research the purpose behind Turbine's madness on the micropayment / micro-transaction management position.

I'm going to assume, for now, that this position will not impact LOTRO and only games Turbine has in the works. Perhaps, Turbine is developing a free-to-play MMORPG with micropayment as the source of revenue for the game. A bit quick to jump out and assume it's in relatione to games already out there.

It would be interesting to see if anyone in the gaming community would respond with legal action if their one-time life-time subscription fee ended up being undermined by Turbine with a micropayment plan. I can easily see an argument against such a thing as the provider would ensure the game is not worth playing without a considerable amount of money thrown into the micropayment system by the customer making their initial agreement questionable.

Micro-transaction Management

I've been fuming over this for the past few days. Micro-transaction has been the route some MMO's have taken to increase their revenue. Now, it appears Turbine is flirting with the idea.

Turbine's Job Posting

If you are unsure of what micro-transaction is all about in the MMO world here's a piece from the Wiki site on Micropayment

In MMORPGs

Micropayments are used in some massively multiplayer online role-playing games^[3] These are typically free to play games with no monthly fee, which offer players the possibility of purchasing in-game currency redeemable for items. These items are often more powerful than those that can be obtained by "free" players, or offer an advantage or feature otherwise unavailable. An example would be a set of armor more effective than that obtained from generic in-game vendors or enemies, or a potion that allows a character to earn more experience points per quest completed or enemy slain, thereby progressing faster than usual. (MMORPGs).

Numerous MMORPGs use this system to some extent, though the details of what can be obtained and at what price will vary depending on the game. Some of these games are: SECOND LIFE, Starport: Galactic Empires, Cabal Online, Rappelz, Sword of the New World, Flyff, Silkroad Online, Atlantica Online, Maplestory and Daimonin.

What does this mean to us LOTRO gamers? We're going to end up paying for that uber sword of we're-stupid-consumers if we want to continue having a good time in LOTRO. You want the next horse that's going to be .5x faster than the one you have now? Twenty dollars please. Do you want an xp boost? $5 dollars please. Would you like to get a stack of uber crit pots? $1 please per stack. Think this kind of game-play won't add up? You should see the games both MMORPG and other types of games and how much money they are pulling in.

This is the new frontier for gaming. Soon, you'll see Call of Duty 7 asking if you want to aquire the RPG of Nubness for $9.99 or X Microsoft Points. When Fable 3 hits you'll be contemplating if spending $14.99 in MS points is worth 15k in in-game gold or a new fuzzy hat that talks.

This has me very upset. Turbine has been so high on my list of kick ass MMORPG developers but ever since Book 13's release they have fumbled the ball a few times and their overall performance has fallen off a good deal. Moria's look and feel was outstanding however they KILLED crafting and now I think we can see why. You want the best gear? Crafting isn't going to get it done for you. Or, perhaps, you'll have to BUY the sepcial components in the future to make any sort of in-game money through crafting which is NO DIFFERENT than those who pay the far-east for gold accept now it will be going to Turbine and you'll still have to bust your ass to make SuperDuper Master whatever.

The gaming industry didn't rise up against companies who announced they were going to create databases for gamer demographics based on Ip addresses to sell to advertizers. The gaming comunity stood by and did nothing when their ISP's decided to allow thirdparty companies to snif all HTTP traffic from your system to generate demographic data to be used for advertizing. And now I see clearly that the gaming world will not rise up against this one either. Micropayments will hurt. You shall see.

Turbine, turn this down. Please.

Hef is back from vacation. Time to blog!

Mines of Moria is here and sadly server issues are rampid. At least with the poor folks on Brandywine. Book 1 introduces you to some crazy greatness that I won't share for a few days; I don't want to spoil anything for anyone this early.

I'll have plenty of screenshots inbound as I get them. Two words though: session play
A taste ...

Mines of Moria's impact on Freeps in PvMP

The Mines of Moria release will have a serious impact on all freeps in the Moors. The impact is a simple one; the creeps get an instant level increase to 60! This means the Moors will be either empty or incredibly unbalanced until the freeps level their characters and get bored with the newness of MoM and find their way back into the Moors for nightly fun.

Mines of Moria release date update!

EB games has changed their ship date for Mines of Moria as well as Amazon.com and other major retailers. The new date is November 18, 2008. Turbine has yet to officially confirm this date.