MMO Soloers get some love from Turbine

As an oft-time solo MMO gamer, I’m used to being spat upon by the herd-mentality masses. “Go play a single player game!” they scream at me. “Your [sic] an idiot for paying a monthly fee to play a game by yourself!” Or even, “Hey solo player… YOUR MOM!”

OK OK I’m being a bit over-dramatic but seriously, there’s a big component of the community who seems to think there’s something “wrong” with preferring to play an MMO solo. And some day I’ll do a big long whinging post about why I do it, but that day is not today!

No, today I just want to direct you to this guide to Solo Leveling in LOTRO. Why is it worth noting? Because it comes from Turbine themselves. So apparently they acknowledge and appreciate that some of us prefer the solitude of a quiet walk through The Shire to a booze-laden Tavern League Quest Marathon.

Actually, the article doesn’t feel all that solo-oriented and if you’ve never played LOTRO it’s a decent “Getting Started” article for anyone to read. If you’ve played a grouped character and want to start a solo alt, the article isn’t going to teach you very much. Hopefully future installations will be a bit more meaty with regard to the soloist.

Bloggers: Check your RSS feeds

This is a public service announcement from me, your faithful reader, to all you bloggers out there.

RSS feeds rock for those of us who read a lot of blogs. It gives us a 1-stop location to see what new posts are out there in the blogosphere. I urge you to subscribe to the RSS feed of your own blog and take a look at it now and then, and think about it from a reader’s perspective.

There are basically 3 choices as to what you’re going to put into your feed: the entire post, a title and summary, or just a title. Let’s look at these options.

Putting the entire contents of a post into your feed is perfect for your readers, but of course it means no one needs to actually come to your website (unless they want to comment), which can be a problem if your site is ad-supported or you just want to analyze traffic patterns at your site.

Putting a summary of your post in your feed gives readers an idea of what the post is about so they can decide if they want to ‘click through’ and read the rest of the post. If you do this, you should probably write a custom summary, not just let your blogging software grab the first paragraph or something. If you don’t feel like writing a summary at least keep in mind that for some segment of your readers, that first graph is going to determine whether they read on or not. Using a summary forces readers to come to your site to read the entire post, which gets ad revenue and good analytics for your website.

The last option is title only. This is a bad idea, unless you write incredibly intriguing titles (I’ve yet to see an example of this). When a reader is deciding which posts to read and which to skip, it becomes really easy to skip just a title with no more information about what the post is about. Presumably your #1 goal is to get people to read your posts (if your #1 goal is go make money, you’re in the wrong business!) and by only giving readers a title, you’re working against your own best interests. You have to entice readers to read you!

This may all seem really obvious, but I have a few blogs that I follow that only offer a title and I have to confess that even though I’m interested in reading this bloggers, I often find myself skipping them because I’m not sure what the post is about. It’s so much easier to hit “Read Next” and bop on down to the next blog in my reader’s list.

For your sake and mine, at least give us a summary!

War Wishy Washy

I haven’t gone back to check, but I think in my Warhammer posts I alternate liking the game and griping about the game. Maybe it’s because I have fun in one session and it raises my expectations for the next one and then I get disappointed, so have low expectations for the following session and get a pleasant surprise? 🙂

Today’s gripe is once again back on the lack of polish and slow leveling speed. My Witchhunter was level 18 doing quests that required killing mobs level 21-23, and had rested experience. I completed 3 kill ten rats quests, a fed ex quest and a couple of Kill Collector turn-ins and earned maybe 1/6th of a level over the course of the session. That’d be fine for 3 easy quests, but if felt pretty paltry considering they were tough quests for my level (I died a lot…level 23 mobs are dicey) and the fact that I had to clear a lot of trash mobs of level 20-21 to get to the 23s I needed.

I mean, it wasn’t horrible, but I would go back to turn in one of these quests totally psyched to see the EXP bar zoom up and then it’d just nudge over a smidge. 🙁 A tad disappointing. And all the rewards are too high for me to use! LOL.

Worse though was more evidence of the lack of polish. I was fighting big cats that could stun me. What would happen would be my hotbars would suddenly go dark. Then I’d get a text message saying something about being stunned. Then finally my character would switch to a prone stance. These were distinct sequential events. And note how I didn’t say “my character would fall down” because he didn’t. One frame standing, next frame prone.

Plus the old ‘stuck in the shooting animation’ bug when I use my Trial By Pain (I think its called) skill to kill something. This is the Witchhunter skill where he rapid-fires his pistol at point blank range. If the target dies, the Witchhunter keeps firing and firing until you do something that’ll make it stop. I finally figured out jumping would do this. That one’s just aesthetic though and it impacts you *after* a fight, not during it. The stun thing, where seeing your character get knocked down is important feedback, is a bigger deal.

Quote of the day, heard on the regional channel where a warband was doing OpenRvR: “Get ready, I can feel the lag of their approach!”

I can’t wait to try Warhammer next Fall after Mythic has had plenty of time to polish and flesh out some thin spots. There’s a gem of a game hidden in there somewhere!