A Weeked of LotRO
In anticipation of Thursday's release of Book 11, the new content patch for LotRO, I figured I should make some effort to get some cash together. I won't be able to afford a house immediately, but I'd like to have more than a couple of coppers when they become available.
So I logged on on Saturday evening, and spent a bit of time charging around the near edge of the Lone Lands doing kill-ten-rats style quests, and then going through my vault (already jammed, since I'm a packrat in any game) to see what I actually needed to keep, and what could go to the vendor or the auction house.
There's some auction house behaviour there that I don't understand - or rather, I understand it, I just can't see why people are so dim about it. When you go to post an auction, the system provides you with a base price. For an apprentice-level recipe, for instance, that's 1 silver and 67 coppers. This is the same price as you would get if you sold it to a vendor, which is fair enough; if they have to list a default, that one will do. But what gets me is that people then use that as the base price, only setting the buyout any higher. There's a listing fee there, depending on how long you want to list the item for. For 24 hours on one of these recipes, the cost is 33 coppers. So when people use the default price, they cost themselves 33 coppers against the price they could sell to a vendor for, and may not even succeed in selling it.
Now, it can be argued that since there are low-level items on there, such as Aged Scraps of Text that sell for 10 silvers a pop, this just indicates that there's no demand for the lowbie recipes. But I still cannot see why anyone would use the AH to sell at a loss.
Anyway, I cleared out my bags, listed some more likely-to-sell items on the AH, and logged off. I was rather astounded on Sunday morning to find that most of my auctions had sold, and I'd gone from a paltry 20 silver in hand to 180. So I went about getting some more stuff to sell; more of the Lone Lands quests, and then going through some of the epic quest line with help from Nina, whose Captain, Aedinn, is as usual a level or two ahead of me.
Got into Book 1, ploughed through at a good rate up to Chapter 10, and then had to look for a pick-up group. From my experiences in WoW, I dread PuGs. But I asked around on the (well-populated, literate) LFF channel, and had another two people within minutes. And they were great. Good, competent players, no silliness, and we shot through Chapter 10 easily, and went on to do Chapter 11.
And this is where the game really kicked into high gear for me. The experience of diving down through that chapter, with all its atmosphere, superb graphics, nicely-balanced fights, and the really rather excellent surprise ending, all made me remember why I love this genre of games. Forget the economics and all the stuff I spend my time thinking about; it's the experience of being there with other people, going through events, that makes these games.
There's a lot more content there than I need; I have quests going gray before I finish them, and I'm doing almost nothing but questing. Even the crafting has taken a back seat for a while now, which is unusual for me, but at least in the short term, I'm aiming for that house, and questing is the fastest way I have to make the money for it.
Posted by Drew Shiel at October 22, 2007 12:01 PM
