Book 10 - City of the Kings, early patch notes

[Tarami]

A week old news, but may be interesting for those not actively seeking it up. No raids, but three new instances. Massive tweaking to crafting, I'm guessing a little over 100 new recipes. A new sub-zone and some other stuff. Atleast I am a bit excited. 

http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?t=81487 - General stuff
http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?t=81500 - Crafting mostly

[pants]

Reputation System?  Oh FFS, not another rep grind - I just escaped those leaving Wow :P

[Venkman]

Yea, another ripoff, but at least another good sideline activity for players. Having said that, I couldn't care less about rep farming. The only time I ever completed a rep grind was the one WoW Arathi Basin, and I only did that because they were quick matches and Alliance generally won :)

More proof I'm not a completest. Heck, I ditched WoW haflway through 69 ;)

[Tarami]

Reputation grinds are generally bullshit, but it depends entirely on how they're done. If they let me get some intermediate, worthwhile bling I might consider doing a bit of it now and then, I'm pretty happy. The soul-crushing experience of so many of WoW's rep grinds is that you have to get to the ultimate rep level to get anything that isn't utter bullshit compared to the gear you got while you ground.

[Phred]

Early reports seem to indicate some nasty nerfs hiding in the various revamps to trades and classes next patch. Metalworking is gonna be an even worse grind for metal as they are reducing the exp rewarded from component production. Jewellers are getting a boot to the head in the form of gem polishing experience greatly reduced, and some early reports from the test server says the hunter do-over has some major nerfs in it as well. How they can nerf the mounts one patch and introduce new less nerfed mounts you pay even more for the next is beyond me either. I guess with the constraints of the lore on a lot of their class design and stuff they have to use other areas to express their creativity, but mounts are seriously broken atm and introducing partially fixed ones with a more expensive cost seems moronic to me.

[Tarami]

Phred, the mounts are dogturd, and not even a polished such, just classic, steamy turd. The entire community agrees that -something- has to be done, but from there the views differ, to put it lightly. Personally, I'd like to see;

• Keep the health for the mounts. It's a pretty decent idea not to have a binary system as it seems far less random;
• Remove the "dismount when crit"-shit. (Shit removal from turd, don't know if that leaves us with any mounts.) Enough with fucken archers dismounting me. Leave the crit damage untouched of course, so a critted hit slices off more from the mount health;
• Remove every other fucking binary dismount-mechanism. Aggro from stealthed mobs, stuns, you name it. Just make it something that damages the little blue bar.
• Let the mount health regenerate. It makes no sense that a hit now should make me more liable to fall off ten minutes later.

But as you mentioned, since they're adding "improved" mounts, I can't see it happening. I am guessing, as I haven't read anything contradicting it, that the new&improved only lies in more health for the mount, which makes it an utterly pointless upgrade - you never dismount from being worn down, you get kicked off because of some random, binary bullshit-factor. I know, it's carbon-copied from WoW and WoW got 9 million subscribers and all that, but it was a horrible idea even back in WoW. It just was rare enough not to send you into a fit of frustrations.

[Phred]

Phred, the mounts are dogturd, and not even a polished such, just classic, steamy turd. The entire community agrees that -something- has to be done, but from there the views differ, to put it lightly. Personally, I'd like to see;

• Keep the health for the mounts. It's a pretty decent idea not to have a binary system as it seems far less random;
• Remove the "dismount when crit"-shit. (Shit removal from turd, don't know if that leaves us with any mounts.) Enough with fucken archers dismounting me. Leave the crit damage untouched of course, so a critted hit slices off more from the mount health;
• Remove every other fucking binary dismount-mechanism. Aggro from stealthed mobs, stuns, you name it. Just make it something that damages the little blue bar.
• Let the mount health regenerate. It makes no sense that a hit now should make me more liable to fall off ten minutes later.

But as you mentioned, since they're adding "improved" mounts, I can't see it happening. I am guessing, as I haven't read anything contradicting it, that the new&improved only lies in more health for the mount, which makes it an utterly pointless upgrade - you never dismount from being worn down, you get kicked off because of some random, binary bullshit-factor. I know, it's carbon-copied from WoW and WoW got 9 million subscribers and all that, but it was a horrible idea even back in WoW. It just was rare enough not to send you into a fit of frustrations.

Ya, I've gone back to WoW and I get dismounted from my horse maybe once or twice a day, as compared to the every 5 min it happens in LoTR. A carbon copy of WoW would be a vast improvement on LoTR's mounts, where you can actually talk to npc's while mounted, shop at vendors and talk to quest givers and have your tracking work and not have to recast all your self buffs every time you get dismounted. Not to mention the odd use of that annoying dialog box. Why does exit game dump me straight to the desktop but I have to hit a dialog box to get off my fucking horse?

Horses didn't drive me back to WoW but they certainly did nothing to keep me either. Actually I guess that's not true. Horses did drive me back to WoW, along with the schizophrenic developers attitude in general. How hours of elite trash mobs outside dungeons got into a supposedly casual focused game is beyond me. Same with the clearing of the actual instances. A lot of ppl shrug off the lack of polish in the ui as well, even claiming it "better than WoW" but as something that's in your face constantly, I wasn't able to ignore it  so easily.

[Tarami]

Stuff.

I didn't really mean that the mounts in LotRO do work as well as WoW's (that's open to interpretion) even with the nuisances removed, I just meant that they share the same binary knocked-off crap. I disliked it in WoW and I dislike it here, mostly because getting arbitrarily knocked off at the slightly wrong moment will make cheese out of you, and for no good reason. ("But I could ride through there last time!")

As goes for the UI and whatnot, it's okay. The confirmation when dismounting is, uhm, puzzling, but I don't really notice it anymore. WoW's super modular and powerful UI gave me more headache than real benefits, especially when add-ons started conflicting and I wanted -both-. My UI in WoW was buttugly but fairly close to what LotRO offers, but I guess it had a few additional features. I would say that LotRO's UI is more obscure than bad, as it got alot of nice features implemented if you just know where to look. I don't particulary miss the addon-fiesta that was required just to kill a few raid bosses, and I think that's what most people mean when they say that LotRO got a "better" (which is technically an outright lie, as it doesn't) - they do mean simpler. The real differences between vanilla WoW and LotRO are minute, it's really about a few details (like how dialogs are handled).

Customizibility isn't always a good thing, for people who just want something simple, the lack of option can be bliss. In software development, there's a proverb that goes "File -> Preferences Doesn't Make a Good UI." 

[Phred]

As goes for the UI and whatnot, it's okay. The confirmation when dismounting is, uhm, puzzling, but I don't really notice it anymore. WoW's super modular and powerful UI gave me more headache than real benefits, especially when add-ons started conflicting and I wanted -both-. My UI in WoW was buttugly but fairly close to what LotRO offers, but I guess it had a few additional features. I would say that LotRO's UI is more obscure than bad, as it got alot of nice features implemented if you just know where to look. I don't particulary miss the addon-fiesta that was required just to kill a few raid bosses, and I think that's what most people mean when they say that LotRO got a "better" (which is technically an outright lie, as it doesn't) - they do mean simpler. The real differences between vanilla WoW and LotRO are minute, it's really about a few details (like how dialogs are handled).

Customizibility isn't always a good thing, for people who just want something simple, the lack of option can be bliss. In software development, there's a proverb that goes "File -> Preferences Doesn't Make a Good UI." 

Ya it;s not so much the customizability I missed as the polish. The universally hated loot window being covered up by rez windows, grabbing focus, in general just focus at all. It seemed like they pumped out a "working" ui in beta and never went back to it. An example of the kind of thing that drives me nuts was the inability of the ui to layer various elements appropriately or consistently. Quest text overwriting, bags, etc etc.

I don't program lua for wow addons but the little bit I've poked around in them tells me layers are very stictly enforced in WoW ui code.

[Tarami]

Fair enough, the way dialogs seize focus is occasionally horribly annoying, and likewise the way Enter defaults to "Yes" in nearly all dialogs. Oh, and you can move the loot windows. I did and it relieves alot of the problematic layering of windows. Fairly sure the UI is something that will get better incrementally, as they're very aware that it got some rather annoying problems.

I do love Lua, though, and writing things for WoW is alot of fun as you get results so fast. Unfortunately 2.0 (BC) nerfed the UI capabilities badly with the implementation of tainted execution, in order to control the increasing exploiting of the UI. A shame as some -very- practical addons met the grave with that change. (Seriously, Decursive didn't hurt raiding half as bad as the manual decursing is hurting my wrist.)

[Phred]

Fair enough, the way dialogs seize focus is occasionally horribly annoying, and likewise the way Enter defaults to "Yes" in nearly all dialogs. Oh, and you can move the loot windows. I did and it relieves alot of the problematic layering of windows. Fairly sure the UI is something that will get better incrementally, as they're very aware that it got some rather annoying problems.

I do love Lua, though, and writing things for WoW is alot of fun as you get results so fast. Unfortunately 2.0 (BC) nerfed the UI capabilities badly with the implementation of tainted execution, in order to control the increasing exploiting of the UI. A shame as some -very- practical addons met the grave with that change. (Seriously, Decursive didn't hurt raiding half as bad as the manual decursing is hurting my wrist.)

Ya the least they could have done was give healers instant group cure spells to make up for it.

Yes you can move the loot window but there's not a lot of free space to move it too, at least on the 1024x768 I played at. I moved it but it was frustratingly annoying having the loot window pop up under the quest log text which is the only clear spot I could find to move it to.