Are you really sure that you want to betray us?

EQ2 has a feature that allows characters to betray their chosen faction. As part of this process, the player is thrown out of their home city and is given the opportunity to grind their way to friendly status with the opposing side. As one of the last aspects of the good/evil alignment system that actually matters, this process can force the player to change sub-classes (for example, there are no good Shadow Knights and no evil Paladins). This also requires blanking the player's entire spellbook, since most of your spells will be replaced.



I don't know that it's necessarily a good thing that players have gotten into the habit of declining to read the quest text. Even so, the way that the betrayal system was previously structured made it a bit too easy to accidentally start down the road accidentally. In Neriak in particular, the betrayal questline started right next to the newbie player housing and is not entirely easy to distinguish from an ordinary quest that the player is actually supposed to complete. Though you're supposed to be doing the quest because you want to switch from evil to good, the quest NPC's actually present their discontent with the status quo as dissatisfaction that the city is straying from its evil roots. In particular, newbies who do not know the lore have little way to realize that they're backing the wrong faction.

To fix this problem, SOE implemented a large number of confirmation boxes that pop up during the process in ways that ordinary quest text does not, including one quest that requires the player to type the character's name for confirmation.



One minor absurdity with the new system is that the helper NPC's are relatively oblivious to the fact that someone has walked up to them to discuss how they can more effectively betray and depart their homeland. This is handled as best as the story permits - the clueless Ambassador doesn't realize that he's pointing the character towards the one truly dissident person in the entire city in an attempt to bring them back to the path.

The other quirk is that SOE never took the time to implement questlines for earning the trust of the two newest starting areas, Gorowyn and this patch's addition, New Halas. The officially endorsed workaround is to join one of the other two cities of the correct faction first, and then ask the NPC's for a more routine intra-faction change of citizenship once you're done. This would be fine, except that there are a number of players, myself included, who took the introduction of the new starting areas as a great occasion to bring an evil-aligned race over to the good side.

The result is that, after a relatively brief process of grinding up some faction with the good city of Kelethin, and swearing my allegiance to the same, I then went back to the same NPC I had just been talking to and asked him to ship me off to New Halas. I guess that guy has been getting that a lot this month, because it didn't seem to surprise him in the slightest.

Triumph of the Cash Cat

I'm not sure that I'd ever be inclined to spend $25 on a mount, even if, like EQ2's "cash cat", it offers an in-game advantage. As a player of four MMO's and counting, I'd much rather spend the money on more time with a second game than on an optional transaction in a single game. If I'm able to win the mount in a contest at Stargrace's place, however, all bets are off. As a result, I am now the owner of a very blue/purple giant glowing cat mount in EQ2.



As promised, the mount offers a 65% speed boost to level 1 characters. It also offers small amounts of skill bonuses to EITHER your casting or your melee skills (you have to pick one or the other, I opted for melee). Finally, the mount item is flagged heirloom, which means that it can be passed to other characters on both the same account and same server via the shared bank.

I didn't think of testing the heirloom feature before getting kicked out of Neriak (as promised in my contest entry), temporarily cutting off my access to the shared account bank. Though SOE appears to be hoping that some people will buy more than one to get the alternate colors and stats, I don't think it would be too difficult to pass the one mount off to multiple alts as they need it.

All that said, I'll concede that this mount isn't really all that game-changing. My alts that do not have inherent runspeed buffs can now travel at 75% speed (the mount plus the Shadows mount speed AA), which is almost as fast as Lyriana's Dirge buffs, only the mount suspends indoors. It's a huge step up from not having a mount, but I don't think the jump from, say, a relatively accessible 40% mount would be as impressive.

If nothing else, the big blue kitty has given me the inspiration for a character story/background, which I'll be working on and posting here in the near future, so that's a pretty big win in any case.

Balancing Guild Rewards

DDO's guild airship/housing has gone live on the game's test server, and players have dug up the list of rewards. All of this is obviously very subject to change (at the moment, the most efficient way to level your guild is to farm kobolds for reknown items in level 1 quests, which was not the design intent), but we're seeing enough to get some idea of what the trends are going to look like.

Guild rewards are a challenging design area. On the one hand, players are supposed to want the perks that come with being in higher level guilds (otherwise, they wouldn't really be rewards). On the other hand, guild features are supposed to enhance the guild experience and encourage players to form social ties. If the perks to guild membership are too substantial, the developers risk creating an incentive to leave your guild for the largest, least personal guild you can find, so long as they have the requisite perks.

What's on your airship?
That said, the perks in the DDO version don't look that game-altering. There are the requisite bankers, storage boxes, auctioneers, and teleports, but I've never actually felt that I was really missing these perks in the game as it stands today.

There are "crafting" stations, used to combine raid drops into raid gear, but it seems like players with access to the ingredients should be able to reach the crafting stations as well - from what I've heard, the limiting factor is raiding enough to get the materials, not actually going to do the crafting.

Finally, there are a variety of miscellaneous buffs, the most significant of which is an exp bonus that goes as high as 5%. These aren't trivial, and may be more important for players who are working on the tougher true resurrection exp curve, but nothing I'd panic over missing out on.

I'm still a bit concerned that the system as is heavily favors large guilds, which appear to have more rapid access to the most powerful rewards. Even so, if you look by comparison to EQ2, where guild rewards include teleportation to multiple locations in every zone in the game and the complete elimination of the need to harvest as a prerequisite for crafting, DDO's rewards don't feel overly game-defining.

Choices for guilds
On the plus side, low-key rewards also mean that DDO guild leaders dodge a bullet in terms of deciding what to put in their guild's limited amenity and crew slots on their airship.

If there's one thing that concerns me about WoW's upcoming Cataclysm, it's the guild talent point system. EQ2's rewards are massively significant, but there aren't that many of them, so even a small guild can quickly obtain the most game-affecting ones. If WoW's housing-less take on this type of system features more choices, and some of the choices force guilds to choose between, say, raiding and leveling alts, that could have some very unfortunate effects on guilds. Who makes that kind of choices? The officers? The whole membership? The members who contribute most to guild leveling/exp? These are tough questions that could make guild features more divisive than beneficial.

Examining F2P LOTRO

So Lord of the Rings Online is apparently going free to play. Given how satisfied Turbine has been with DDO's shift to that payment model, it was probably only a matter of time before they found a way to make it work for LOTRO. Key information available so far include a chart of F2P vs subscription benefits and a compliation of forum question and answers. What have we learned so far?

Trying to close the free leveling loopholes
Unlike the heavily-instanced DDO, LOTRO has a seamless non-zoned open world (like WoW). I'd thought that this would be the largest obstacle to taking the game Free To Play - for example, how would you even get to Angmar if you didn't already own the North Downs?

To address this problem, Turbine is going with an odd compromise. Players will be able to travel through the entire Shadows of Angmar world, regardless of subscription status. Instead, all of the QUESTS in a given zone will be bundled together into "quest packs". All players will get the three newbie zones (good for levels 1-15 or so), but will need to pay to get the quests from level 16-50. (It is not yet clear whether this includes the deeds in any given region, such as explorer and kill deeds.)

There are several quirks to this model. First, it sounds like there will NOT be a level cap on free players - if you want to grind mobs for exp, you'll be able to. To counter this, only VIP's (subscribers) will be allowed to get rested exp. In my experience, it's relatively hard to run out of rested exp in LOTRO, so that's basically a 50% nerf to combat exp. Skirmishes would be another loophole, so Turbine will be limiting free players to four of the game's pre-Mirkwood skirmishes.

The last issue is the previously paid expansions. There's no helping this one if you're Turbine - players have already paid expansion fees for no purpose other than access to the content and expansion owners will therefore be granted permanent F2P access to the relevant content. The odd result is that players who own Moria and Mirkwood (including the Mirkwood storyline skirmishes) can level as free players from level 50 to 65 without paying anything. Turbine is trying to discourage this too by requiring players to pay to unlock all of their trait slots - irritating to be sure - but it certainly could be worse.

Note that this MAY mean that buying a super cheap clearance Moria expansion box if you can find one will be a more cost-effective means of getting access to that content than buying it through the LOTRO store, we can't be sure yet.

Some head-scratching moves
There are a few things that don't make sense to me at the moment. A few:

- Monster play is being described as subscriber-only. Are they worried that free accounts would be used to spy on the opposing faction? I can't see any other reason why this change makes sense, as player versus player only works if you've got players in the zone.

- As Doc Holiday notes, the announcement confirms that the game will not get ANY new content until the F2P rollout "this fall". At that point, the game will be getting what sounds like a Mirkwood-sized miniexpansion, but it will be for levels 62-65 with no increase in the level cap. First, this means that I will have limited reason to purchase this content, especially if the epic book portion of the zone is free to play. Second, I'm not even convinced that the game NEEDS more content in this level range. I hit level 65 very early in Mirkwood, albeit with the benefit of rested exp (which a Premium player won't have). I'd be willing to grind out some extra skirmishes and daily quests if it meant not having to pay for a new miniexpansion just to finish out a level or so.

- Mind-bogglingly, Turbine points will NOT be universally usable in both DDO and LOTRO. If you play both games, you will have to maintain separate balances. Then again, I'm already stuck with two Turbine accounts because they don't have any method to add a free DDO account to an existing LOTRO account, so I would only be in for a headache trying to get that fixed if they did allow a common balance (as SOE does with its Station Cash).

- There's also a gold cap, and it's very low for free players (2 gold) and somewhat low (5G) for premium non-subscribers (anyone who has ever paid real money for something, such as the current boxes). At current prices, neither player type can purchase the larger of the game's housing and free players cannot pay for their level 35 mounts.

- Finally, I don't see any reason why I'd pay for a LOTRO subscription at any point between now and the F2P rollout. There won't be any new content for the next 3-6 months. There will be ways to earn LOTRO Turbine Points in-game, but there will be no retroactive credit for doing things now that will be worth Turbine Points in the future. This means that, if you're thinking of subscribing for a few months to "rent" the content you'll need to get some alts from level 15-50 before "downgrading" to F2P using the expansions you currently own, you may be better off waiting for the F2P rollout to do so.

(Turbine is offering a stipend of sorts for current subscribers, to be paid in Turbine Points when F2P arrives, but the maximum rate for non-lifetime subscribers will work out to fewer points than the cost of the subscription, assuming DDO-like exchange rates. Unless you're planning to actually play in the interim, you're better off buying the points directly when the time comes instead of paying for a subscription to get some points thrown in later. Lifetime subscribers, who seem to be making out reasonably well in this whole deal, need to read the fine print and log in at least once a month between now and the rollout to get all their points.)

Bottom Line
Personally, I'm reasonably okay with the way DDO's store works, so I'm cautiously optimistic for this roll-out. I'd much rather pay for what I use and not get locked into a monthly fee, especially now that I've branched out into four MMO's and counting.

That said, this change also means that it is relatively unlikely that I will ever take a LOTRO alt beyond the newbie zones. I'm not going to want to pay to unlock all of the mid-level content that I've already done on my main, as that would stick a huge price tag on leveling alts that I'm not that interested in from 15-50. For most other aspects of the game - housing, cosmetic outfits, storage, etc - Turbine has done a reasonable job of ensuring that the entry level content is free so that they can sell upgrades in the store. I guess that the fee has to come somewhere, but it does seem to discourage alts.

Also, like the DDO store, it sounds like the LOTRO store will be heavily stocked with one-time purchases. That may or may not be a long-term problem, since LOTRO already has so many lifetime and discounted subscribers anyway, but it's something worth watching in the future.