Skip to main content

Throg's Lotro Journal 20 April 2007

Would be dwarf champion Throg is taking a well earned rest after adventuring his way to within spitting distance of level 9. Most of his progress came through questing in the Vale of Thrain. Throg went there initially on the advice of Tindr to warn the citizens of Noglon about possible water shortages but once there he found work clearing the vale of wild cats, bears and goblins. It was in the Vale that our sturdy dwarf first tasted the bitter sweet tang of defeat. Spurred on by overconfidence he made the mistake of tackling three Goblins at once. Poor Throg got a right pounding and was forced to run for his life. That defeat has cost him the chance of gaining an "undefeated" title but to be honest I think it is for the best. Far from being cowed by the experience he has learned from it and has become at once more sensible and yet more courageous. Having been defeated once and living to tell the tale he is no longer afraid to take a risk when the potential reward justifies it. I am pleased to say that Throg proved his mettle after honing his skills a bit. He went back to the same goblin encampment and slew the three miscreants. At three against one it was a tough battle but with the aid of a morale boosting essence Throg's axe and sword won the day.

The vale turned out to be an excellent place for Throg to to try out his recently learned explorer skills and he returned to Thorin's Hall with a bag full of copper, alder wood and tin. Throg has the option of processing these materials to produce higher grade ingots and wood but a quick survey of the auction house indicates that prices for trade goods are still extremely erratic and it is far from clear as to whether not further processing will earn him a profit. With a dwarf's nose for gold Throg has decided to bank his raw materials until prices stabilise.

For my part I am still learning about the game. I figured out that that the quest log uses a colour scheme to indicate difficulty but I still amn't sure of the sequence. I think the order is grey, green, light blue, dark blue, white and yellow in terms of increasing difficulty. Unfortunately I didn't figure this out until after I had done all the white quests on my list thinking they were the easier ones to do first. Now I have a bunch of blues to complete and I hope I still get decent XP for them. I really need to read the manual - I downloaded a pdf version from here.

I have got my first "group" quest to clear out the goblin "Villains in the Vale". These group quests are apparently great fun so I will try pugging it tomorrow.

In other news Turbine have just announced a free expansion for June. Given that the game hasn't even been released yet this is very encouraging, particularly since they say that this will be the "first of many free updates". The expansion will be called "Shores of Evendim" with key features:
  • Discover the lands of Evendim
  • Explore over 60 new Quests
  • Raid in the Battle for Helegrod
  • Fight against 9 new monsters
  • Upgraded music system adds new instruments and lets you share your music with others
  • Equip collectible Armor Sets
I am delighted to see that Turbine are taking a leaf from Guild Wars in providing "Vanity" rewards such as hard to get titles and collectible armour sets. Rewards like this give hard core players something to aim for without creating barriers to progression for casual players in the way that the tiered armour sets of World of Warcraft do. I have previously discussed this issue at more length under the heading of "Artificially Creating Value".

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My First Gaming Mouse: Logitech G300

I bought a gaming mouse yesterday a Logitech G300, here my initial thoughts. What is a gaming mouse?  There are a wide variety of devices available classified as gaming mice but a few features  seem common: 1. Wired rather than wireless: Although some high end models are wireless wired connections are just better and faster than wireless so most gaming mice stick with wired. As a bonus wired mice don't need batteries so the mouse is lighter.  2. High response rate: 1 to 2ms response rate so the mouse immediately responds to input.  2. High DPI. Gaming mice invariable boast high DPI numbers from 2,000 DPI upwards. This makes the device very responsive to the smallest movements.   3. Adjustable DPI . High DPI improves responsiveness but reduces precision so gaming mice generally allow you to adjust the DPI down for precise work such as pulling off headshots in sniper mode. Generally the mouse allows dpi to be changed on the fly by pressing a button.  4. Extr

Portal 2 two screen coop on one PC.

I mentioned before that I intended to try Portal 2 in "unofficial split screen co-op mode. Well split screen on a small computer monitor is a recipe for a headache especially when the game defies gravity as much as portal. However a minor bit of extra fiddling allowed us to drive two seperate screens from one PC. The Steam forums describes a complicated method of doing this that I couldn't get working so this simpler method which worked for me might be of use to someone. 1. First I followed the instructions in this post to get split screen multi-player working: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904 A minor issue not mentioned is that you need to enable the console from the keyboard/mouse options menu I am using keyboard and one wired Xbox360 controller as suggested. Getting the controller to switch to channel 2 was tricky at first but as Chameleon8 mentions plugging it out and in again during loading works. The trick for me was to do the plug / p

Android Tip 3: Sharing a Folder between multiple users of an Android device

Android has allowed multiple user logins for quite a while now. This is can be very useful for tablets which are shared by family members. Normally Android erects strict Chinese walls between users preventing them from using each others apps and viewing each others files. This is a useful security feature and ensures your kids don't mess up your work spreadsheets when screwing around on the tablet and should also prevent them from buying €1,000 worth of Clash of Candy coins on your account. Sometimes however you really do want to share stuff with other users and this can prove surprisingly difficult. For example on a recent holiday I realised that I wanted to share a folder full of travel documents with my wife. Here are some ways to achieve this. 1. If you have guaranteed internet access  then you can create a shared folder on either Dropbox or Google drive. Either of these has the great advantage of being able to access the files on any device and the great disadvantage of bein