Today my husband and I joined a guild mate in an instance called Carn Dum. This used to be the place to go, before they raised the level cap. We joined a few hours after they started and stayed for two or three bosses over the course of two hours. Earlier in the week, we joined a kinship group of level 60’s who were going through the rift for the heck of it. Like Carn-Dum, it was once the thing to do… but now the glorious rift-armor is out-dated. A week before that, I went through Helegrod in a 24-person loremaster raid. Yes, it was a raid of pure loremasters just for the heck of it.
It’s mind boggling to think of how much content Lotro has which is now out-dated and pointless. I’m looking forward to them raising the level cap so that I can play something other than the same-old instances… but I also know that such an action will immediately make all the rare rewards I’m working towards a full 10 levels below the quest-rewards of the new content.
Why couldn’t the instances and their rewards level with me? I’d love to see the Rift and Carn-Dum balanced for level 60s. And it’d be nice if the rewards from the rift could be traded in for something more appropriate for level 60s. It doesn’t have to be the best armor in the game… go ahead and let the new content have that. But god, I get tired of the same old instances and I hate to think that new stuff will always out-date old stuff.
FFXI is actually the reverse. Since it is the only game that can’t increase the level cap anymore (it did originally from 50 to 75 in steps, and we have some outdated content) most of the endgame content is still valid. People still do Sky for a Byakko’s Haidate because even though its probably 4+ years old, its still the best leg piece for meelee classes. The best ring in the game is still from the chains of promathia expansion, as are the best neckpieces.
What that leads to though is people stuck doing the same old, and stagnating because SE refuses to add meaningful upgrades. Your instances would level with you, but each expansion would offer nothing really better than them. The latest expansion, wings of the goddess, so far offers WORSE armor than even common AH drops for a lot of classes.
The old stuff still “levels” with us, since we can’t level anymore. (A subjob system has a huge downside, it has to have a main level stay at a specific point so that each job can have abilities that cant be subbed.) But it’s not so hot because we are still in hostage to the rewards of the past-they can’t add anything better or more powerful without. That’s probably what would happen to you too, they’d always have to balance new additions to your upscaled legacy content rewards.
@Dblade… I hear yea… I’m not saying the old Rift armor should be the best in the game. I recognize the new stuff has to be better than what came before or else there’s no reason to do anything new.
But I wish the new stuff was marginally better, not so drastically better that there’s absolutely no point to ever visit old locations.
For example, in the Hard-Mode instances in Moria, there are coins that drop for the “lesser armor”. It’s good stuff, but it doesn’t have radiance on it, so you can’t use it to fight the Watcher. That’s the feeling I’d like to have when going through the rift or helegrod. I want to say, “Oh, this has a lot of acid defense, I’ll save this for the turtle raid” or “Neat, I can wear this until I get my radiance piece”. I don’t want to say, “Wow, so this is what people used drool over pre-expansion? Too bad I’m going to sell it to the vendor for 5 silver now”
One way of making those older instances harder would be reducing the group size for the quests. The easiest would be coming out with Helegrod and other Raid content which can only be completed in a 6-man group instead. It might require a little more finessing than that, but it’s a starting point.
Also, they could add in some rare drops to the loot tables. Not weapons or armour, but Cosmetics and Decorations. Heck, put a mount in there and there are bound to be people who would go for it :p
I think some of the content should be updated. There are way more ways to get good gear for a 50ish character than are needed right now. However, I don’t think the entire old endgame should be updated. Just as you can get yourself exceptional gear for a late 30s’ character by running Fornost, I think it’s cool that there are some options to get exceptional gear for a level 50ish character.
The problem is that the structure of the old raids is such that no sane 50 is going to spend enough time to get a full set of armor before heading on to MoM. Fornost is designed as a mid level raid (i.e., a raid zone you might spend a weekend or two on while leveling). Because of that you can get every piece of gear on offer there in one or two runs. The Rift and Helgorod are currently still using “end game raid” designs. You’d have to run them dozens of times to get a full set of gear. Now that they are merely leveling raids, they should be structured as such.
Hell, you could argue the same about a lot of content in EQ and WoW for that matter. Does anyone actually gear all the way up in PoK or Molten Core these days? It’s an obvious problem that game designers tend to completely ignore for whatever reason.
I played LOTRO for about a month. Gave up because I was starting to really enjoy EVE at the same time. Starting two MMOs exactly at the same time isn’t a good idea.
LOTRO has a very interesting business model. Add new content at an amazing rate so that the players don’t get bored. I guess the down fall of such a business model is that the old content is simply forgotten and never updated.
To pull this off successfully the new content has to be better, otherwise why add new content.
And why does progression have to be through better gear, more hitpoints, higher levels etc?
One could add more versatile skills and add other/additional equipment options. Content could be made for the same levels as before, perhaps slightly harder to accomodate added versality etc.
They’re already underway updating the old content to form a smoother and more consistent path along the game to the cap and into the future. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Carn Dum and the like significantly updated to be a better piece of the puzzle on the way to the cap.
One thing I have seen, meta-wise, is maybe to change the rewards to a barter system with consumables. So 50’s and etc. can play with people and get gear and a fun time, and 60’s can get some consumables not found anywhere else. The ‘rog chain was a good start until they nerfed it.
I’d be perfectly fine if the leveled the rift up to lvl 59 or whatever and made it good but not the best. I think they should actually do this with every level cap increase. This is a simple solution and a good one. Nobody will run it unless it’s part of end-game and its a shame for it to go to waste.
Whatever you do with old content, don’t take it away from the levels it was intended for. Revise it in a way that allows high levels to go back sure, but if my level 35 Guardian has some big instance taken away just because I am behind the curve, I’ll be pissed. You need to leave the original option in the game, and add additional ways to play it. Don’t make it so I can’t play it at the original intended level.
“don’t take it away from the levels it was intended for”
The rift always was an endgame raid. You got maybe one quest to go to the meeting camp solo and that was it. For the most part, the quests and rewards within the rift do not come from one, or even two runs through. They come from weeks of farming the instance. Again, it is an endgame raid, and as such should be adjusted to the current endgame.
The danger of keeping old content relevent is exactly what Khai Mann mentioned, the new content has to be better. It can be better as in more fun, or better as in better rewards (preferably both). You just don’t want the weekly raids going into the Rift for their gear 3 years down the road. Let them go in for a challenge and a good time, with some possibility of reward, but that’s it.
I do agree that the leveling instances (GB, GA, Fornost, etc.) should be left alone at their current levels
Not sure of someone pointed at this yet, but this was in a Warcry Turbine dev chat:
WarCry: Marqlar: Do you have any plans about “scaling” old content so lvl 60s (or the new lvl capped chars) have a valid reason to go back there? Personally I find it a bit sad that a lot of the great instances/raids like the rift or the annuminas instances go unnoticed by new players. Those are in fact great instances, And I would love an incentive as a lvl capped character to go back there and do those again…
Amlug: Marqlar. We have talked about this internally with much debate. It is a very compelling and interesting idea to entertain. There are a lot of things to work out to make it work properly and not feel like a recycle of old content with nothing new to put in. This won’t be happening in the forseeable future, but it is something we have not ruled out completely either.
This is from the same chat, unrelated but good news for the solo players out there:
WarCry: Meeko: Any chance that some of the epic instances in volumn 1 will be eased as not so many people are around to group with who are interested in doing them… or a way to hire npc’s to help complete them in future?
Orion: Funny you should ask this. Book 8 will see the first change along these lines. Chapter 11, Orthongroth is already set this way. Moving forward – post Book 8 – we are taking a different approach. My recent work has been focusing on providing both solo and group version of the Epic instances to allow players to choose the way that they want to complete the overall epic story.
There is something that i have been wondering for a while now. Why is there no option to /stopleveling in MMO’s? I first saw the need as I was creating my second character in World of Warcraft (3-4 years ago). I wanted this character to be competitive in the low level battlegrounds (read: twink). However, more often than naught i found myself wishing i could just stop leveling so i could run the various instances just a few more times to get the best possible gear. But that was not possible. 3 bars from 30, or 40 and you start to get very scared of doing ANYTHING in the world around you lest you accidentally gain a bit of xp and move up to the next bracket.
I’m not sure it is the best solution, but ever since then i’ve thought it would be interesting if the same could be done for the various stages of “end-game” in WoW and/or LOTRO. When MoM was released I had three characters at level 50. While some people tried to level up all of their toons to the new cap at once, I just stuck with one. There is simply no need to have multiple characters at the level cap. Many intense raiding kins even frown upon bringing along alts.
Why not let me keep my two other level 50’s stay at level 50? Cap their xp so that i can do the annuminas dailies, delve into the rift weekly, and have an actual challenge in helegrod.
Hey there,
first of all, I’d want to tell you how glad I am that I’ve found you! In the office we have an evil proxy, which we can’t remove and it wont let us visit blog sites or forums anymore, so if the production is over, the season of pure boredom is kicking in :)
Think I’ve seen most of your names on globallff on Laurelin, so I’ve read a few posts to see, who you are and where you come from, becoz to be very honest, lotro isn’t even close to it’s old social scene nowadays. Way too many kids got MoM from Santa’s little helpers last year and even more picked an EN-RP server to start their chars on, which I really can’t understand.
What I wanted to say with all of the above is that I really like the site (I LOVE the name!!) and like the way you discover the world of lotro, which game captures the philosophy of Tolkien the best way I could ever imagine (Shadows of Angmar first of all).
But – and it’s now really “on” to this topic – don’t you think that levelling all the Rift and Helegrod instances will just take away the fun factor from lower level players and turn the game into a grind fest? If I was rolling my first char now, I would feel offended, that I’m “not allowed” to do instances until I grind myself to 60.. Like I was worthless before then..
I think the game becomes what people create from it, I did CD with a 48-50 group as my warden was only 49 and that was one of my best runs in two years in the game!
Spread the love,
IT