The LOTRO Distraction

Hi All,

While EvE Online remains my favorite game (yes I own several of the T-shirts –  much to my partners rolling of eyeballs), I will admit to having put in quite a bit of time into Lord Of the Rings Online over the last couple of years. And in recent times, time enough sufficient to have hit the end game areas.

I’ve already outlined that I consider the single biggest advantage that LOTRO has over EvE is putdownability i.e, the ability to drop everything at a moments notice without significant penalty. Even being killed is a relatively minor inconvenience.

Now, while I wouldn’t change EvE in that regard, it does have an impact on the decision making process on what I play. Am I going to undock in a several hundred million+ ship and go do what I want to do? Hmmm…. will I be interrupted mid-mission, dead-space, or CTA? If the answer is yes, I’ll turn to LOTRO more often than not.

But (like anything), it’s more complicated than that. LOTRO’s end game is surprisingly addictive, with the daily quests that repay you in tokens and experience – not just for your character, but also for your steed and your legendary weapons and items.

You can use those tokens to rebuild a ruined town, which also has the secondary affect of opening up MORE daily quests as well as sets of rather sexy armors (three sets for each character class). In effect, it draws you in and encourages you to log on once per day.

By comparison EvE Online has… erm…. not too much equivalent to that. We have missions to be sure, planetary interaction as well, but apart from gaining iskies, LPs and standings, what else do we achieve?

Sure, once your standings start going north, you get access to better research agents and higher level missions… but apart from assisting a corporation put up a Player Owned Station, and getting access to a couple of admittedly sexy ship BPCs at certain points, what else is there? What keeps us logging in, day after day, week after week?

Sure you could argue that there is PvP at the heart of it all. But honestly I think this is an area where I think CCP could put more effort in. If you want to retain subscribers and grow the player base there needs to be something special, something a little more valued, an intangible that is more than just more of the same, albeit harder or more complicated…

Don’t believe me…?

Then answer me this question: what happens when you hit 10 standing with a faction…

FS

H

 

P.S I should have written “Hmmm…. will I be interrupted mid-mission, dead-space, or CTA by real life? If the answer is yes, I’ll turn to LOTRO more often than not.”