As part of our Labor Day holiday weekend, we went down to the Smithsonian yesterday to check out the Art of Video Games exhibit. It's a fun walk down memory lane - amusing to see stuff I owned copies of 20 years ago behind glass at a museum. If the trip to Washington in the next few weeks is not in the cards for you, take a look at the tour schedule to see if it will be anywhere near you.
Anyway, the trip into town put me behind on the schedule for covering all of my MMO's within a week, so today we cover two games.
LOTRO
The six week delay for the Rohan expansion to avoid the crush of Guild Wars 2 and Pandaria's release dates is a minor reprieve for me. I did hit the current level cap and complete the epic story, but there is a large amount of reasonably high quality quest content that I have yet to see. I'm torn on this, because I hate to skip good content, but I'm not sure if I will get to all of it even with the extension. Moreover, there are deeds for traits and Turbine Points at stake. If I left the Dunland area and Great River areas now, they will be the first where I have failed to finish the local quest deeds.
Realistically, I'm expecting to run out of time here. Perhaps I'll just hold onto the in-progress quests and then go back to one-shot through them at level 85. On the plus side, at least they're producing content that I want to complete.
STO
I'm technically at the level cap in this game despite having done almost none of the leveling content, thanks to a focus on the duty officer system. The developer responsible for implementing this mechanic has since left the studio. In his absence, very little new content is being added to the system for its own sake - for the most part, new duty officers entering the game are added through lottery items in the cash shop, and are being used to introduce more abilities that affect the regular portions of the game (which I almost never play).
Cryptic has always stated that part of the point of the system was to add a minigame that was consistent with microtransactions in the post-subscription era. That said, I'm definitely feeling like I've mostly "beaten" this aspect of the game. Meanwhile, as combat abilities continue to be added, I can see the officers rewarded through the duty officer system becoming increasingly less optional for people who wanted no part in it. As they say, all good things come to an end, I suppose.