LOTRO: April’s Producer’s Letter

Lord of the Rings Online can be an incredibly beautiful game and it always seems to suck me in when my subscription runs out.  We resub (and bought two new expansions) and once again LOTRO goes and does something foolish and I regret the “investment” we made not to be nickel and dimed to death.  Look, $200 a year isn’t going to kill us but it is more a sign of faith in the future.  This year however, LOTRO has finally managed to kill my interest in the game completely.

They just released the Producer’s Letter for April and in it, they once again break yet another promise to the player base.  There will be no update to housing this year despite it’s repeated promises that the update was coming.  However, there will be a new class which I am sure will be heavily monetized and poorly implemented.

The competition is too good for a seven year old game to be fooling around with crap like a new class and broken promises to an already frustrated and fleeing population.  Realms are empty, trying to play on a new realm means losing real world money tied to the old realm, housing is a joke, the game play can be incredibly boring, and gorgeous screenshots aren’t enough to keep players logging in.  If you want to retain a player base, don’t nickel and dime them (ESPECIALLY players that subscribe to your game), don’t break promises, don’t have secret player councils, and don’t have you corporate heads buried so far in the sand you don’t even realize you have serious competition.

My twitter feed alone shows long time players leaving LOTRO for games like Landmark and Elder Scrolls Online.  The team at LOTRO seems oblivious to the fact that players are finding new games to play and sink real world money into, I’m being kind.  I actually believe that the LOTRO team is intentionally burying it’s head in the sand and break promises and ignoring the flight of customers so that they feel “justified” in closing the game down in the next six to eighteen months.  I know that we won’t be buying any more expansions and that we definitely will not be paying for two yearly subscriptions this year.

Rant over, opinion spoken and now I’m off to write for my ESO character blog and get in some ESO playtime before exploring the awesome changes to Wildstar in the upcoming beta weekend.

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Is WOW the old and dying dinosaur on the block?

World of Warcraft announced its technical Alpha for the Warlords of Draenor late last week, hours before The Elder Scrolls Online officially launched. Anyways, Hubby and I got around to talking about WOW yesterday afternoon. Neither of us is even remotely interested in WOW for different reasons. But what we were discussing was whether or not WOW was even relevant to gaming any more. We are both of the opinion that the answer is no and below is why we’ve come to that conclusion.

First, WOW is flat out an old game that is being left behind by the competition. It isn’t fully voice acted, the quests are simple and repetitive, and game play mechanics are bloated and aged. Combat is basically pressing the same combination of buttons over and over again. There is no active dodging for instance. You can just stand there and whack on a creature while doing your nails and watching a movie. The game doesn’t actively require player engagement to avoid death.

 

Second, WOW doesn’t seem to understand that the gaming audience is no longer just young men. It is now a much broader audience of both sexes of all ages. BlizzCon 2013 was the nail in the coffin for me, comments like “It’s a boy’s trip” from Chris Metzen was the straw that broke the camel’s back. If I’m going to play a subscription game, then it isn’t going to a company that devalues women and refuses to include women in their games as anything more than objects of sexual fantasy.

Third, the competition is just so much better in every way. TESO has strong women characters everywhere, active dodging mechanics, and it requires players to think and manage how they play. Wildstar is just flat out funny, once again active dodging mechanics, and unique systems like Path. Landmark, while we haven’t played it nor have any interest in doing so, has a strong legion of fans that enjoy building and creating in the Everquest environment. And those are just three games off the top of my head that are better.

Fourth, WOW just takes too damn long between updates or expansions. Subscribers and fans play the same content over and over and over again for months on end. The endless gear grind progression style is boring. Why stay on the treadmill of the same content when the competition has a large variety of end game content and not just raids. Adventure zones, two-person content, and group content immediately spring to mind. Why would you run the same raid content week after week for months on end with no new content on the horizon when the competition releases content patches ranging from every two weeks to once a month.

WOW has its die-hard fans that want nothing more than to see the competition fail. I get that, I get that I won’t be changing any of their minds. No one single game will be the proverbial “WOW killer” but the competition taken together will kill WOW. Well, the competition and the “boy’s club” that is the team of WOW management. I don’t begrudge those players their fun and enjoyment. The hubby and I won’t be going back ever again.

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