Book 11

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Book 11

Postby Felaion » Mon Oct 15, 2007 1:01 pm

While I've been offline, it suddenly came to my attention that Book 11 is due soon!

Which is a total bummer... as I promised myself to stay offline, and have un-installed LOTRO. However, my subscription hasn't run out, and the game is still installed on my bro's computer. It can't hurt my studies to check out Book 11 for just one day now can it? (So I'll hopefully be on that day). [Besides, I just got an A in my Philosophy Essay... that surely deserves some sort of reward!]

Okay, and here's what I've picked up about it sor far. As of yet, the release date is a close kept secret, but we have been told to expect it in the 20's, or early days of November. (The date on the street is the 22nd.)

And here's what should be coming! Check out proper lists on the forums, but there should at least be...
-New zones (Mostly extends in the Misty Mountains)
-More content added to Monster Play.
-Loremaster and Minstrel undergo changes... how long will it be before they realise that Burgs are important too!
-New creatures... notably Golum and a Balrog?! (Hmm...)
-And of cource... what we've all been waiting for...
PLAYER HOUSING!
(Fingers crossed it won't be a disaster)

Now... on to player housing and what I can tell you about it. I recently discoverted that last Thursday, there was an event where players could beta-run the housing update on the preview server (Roheryn) (men and elf only though)! From what I've been told, it was stupidly popular... There were only a limited number of 'Neighbourhoods' and practically everything sold out within an hour or so!

Image
...elf broker getting swarmed...

More of that later though... on to how it all works.
Information gained from a site... yes I'm boring, but I can't be bothered to type it all out, and don't have the time.
Housing Purchase
You can buy houses in one of two ways: visit a housing broker (there is one outside the housing portal in each of the four homesteads - see my sneak peek for locations) or go into any of the neighborhoods and look around, just as you would if you were house hunting. Of course if you are competing with 100 other buyers like I was yesterday, you would just grab the first available one from the broker. Or if you know the layout and have your eye on a specific address, you can go to the broker and see which neighborhood has that address for sale. Now if you’re the type who wants to see what you’re buying, you can walk (or run or ride) around a neighborhood and look. Houses that are for sale have a (guess what!) “For Sale” sign on the front lawn and you can go in and look around before you buy it - I suppose by clicking on the For Sale sign. It’s a great option for someone who’s buying for the first time and to whom location is important. I’m easy to please, I think the feature is perfect as it is.

Neighborhoods
Neighborhoods, as we all know, are instanced. There’s a portal near each of the races’ major towns leading into the housing area. When you zone into the portal, you get a dialogue box asking which neighborhood you want to visit and a list comes up from which you can pick one. The neighborhood layout is the same for each homestead. In other words, if you go into the Falathlorn Homestead, no matter which neighborhood you choose you will see the same buildings laid out in exactly the same spots as all other elf neighborhoods. That makes it boring and I wish there was a little more variety in the layout. On aesthetics, I don’t think it’s possible to design an ugly elven neighborhood and the one they have is just gorgeous.

Each neighborhood has 16 standard homes, 10 deluxe homes, and 4 kinship houses. Considering how fast the deluxe homes went during the first few minutes of the open house, unless they adjust the prices upward, they probably need to think about adding more deluxe homes in the market.

Prices

Now, I’m pretty sure the prices we saw on Roheryn are not what they will be when the feature goes live. I noticed that the price varied according to location, too. But on the average, here’s what they were:

Standard House: ~1 gold (upkeep ~50 silver/week)
Deluxe House: ~7 gold (upkeep ~75 silver/week)
Kinship House: ~17 gold (upkeep ~110 silver/week)

You can also unlock up to 3 chests for additional storage in each house. In Roheryn it cost 100 silver to unlock the first one and 500 silver to unlock the next, but based on their survey questionnaire, that will definitely go up in the live version.

Since the minimum level to buy a house is 15, I think 1 gold for a standard one-bedroom house makes sense. While I don’t think I had 1 gold at level 15, it’s certainly possible to get it and is consistent with Turbine’s view that housing should be accessible to the most casual player. And because I’ve always had problems hanging on to my ingame gold (ie. I spend it faster than I earn it), I can’t offer an opinion on the rest of the pricing scheme.

Decorating

In each neighborhood, there is a Housing Furnisher who sells the basics. Here you can get tables, chairs, rugs, etc to furnish your home. Each type of furniture has a classification, ie. large furniture, large wall, small wall, wall paint, and so on. To decorate your house, you need to enter a “decorate” mode in which you will see slots, like so...

Image

As you can imagine, each slot is also labeled accordingly (large furniture, large wall, etc) so you are limited to placing specific types of furniture in very specific spots. There isn’t even a way to rotate the items and I don’t know how much thought was put into which slot went where because I couldn’t figure out how to place a dining table with chairs around it anywhere in my house! Unless they improve the location of static placements, or give us a lot more choices for each slot, I just don’t know how I can make it look like a real house and not a collection of mismatched furniture haphazardly thrown into a room. I’d really like to see the picture of the room that was in the devs’ mind when they designed this! And I bet every house will end up looking exactly like the other once we manage to figure out which piece goes where. I am just so disappointed with the decorating options and I do hope that there will be some changes in this aspect before it goes live.

All things considered, I am happy that the player housing feature is at last in the game. Now to go kill some orcs and get some badly needed cash for that piece of Middle Earth real estate…


And that is that! Now to just count my cash and the days remaining...

Oh, these links are very good. Interactive maps of the Elf and Human Homesteads.
...click on a house to see a screeny of it!
Man: http://female-gamer.com/Bree.html
Elf: http://female-gamer.com/Falathlorn.html

From what I've seen... this might work. There are LOTS of houses in each Neibourhood, and would permit the Thorn to all live in the same 'Hamlet' (if they wished) but also have others around. There is also a 'Community Center' in each zone, and it all does look and feel very... village-like.

Felaion.
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Re: Book 11

Postby Archibold » Thu Oct 18, 2007 10:52 am

It looks great.

Makes me want renew my sub ....

must...resist ..the ..temptation .....
"Reality is the part that refuses to go away when I stop believing in it." -- Phillip K. Dick
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Re: Book 11

Postby Felaion » Sat Oct 20, 2007 1:29 pm

Release Date Announced: 25th October!
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Re: Book 11

Postby Sayvara » Mon Oct 22, 2007 7:29 pm

More goodies!
http://www.lotro-europe.com/newspage.php?id=1520

Customizable Chat: User-defined chat channels (up to 4 slots) are now available!

Crafters rejoice! The crafting section in the Auction House now includes recipe scrolls which are sorted by vocation.

New feature - chat logging! (YES! I've been asking for this since DDO! )

/S
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Re: Book 11

Postby Sayvara » Mon Oct 22, 2007 7:33 pm

And a little something for sister Adjanah, I know her player was kind of grumpy about this one:

Audio
Our NPCs have recently attended a group therapy retreat, and you will generally find the voice-over used by our Vendors, Stable-masters, etc., to be a bit less gloomy/angry/scared.

/S
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Re: Book 11

Postby Saerid » Tue Oct 23, 2007 4:07 pm

Sayvara wrote:And a little something for sister Adjanah, I know her player was kind of grumpy about this one:

Audio
Our NPCs have recently attended a group therapy retreat, and you will generally find the voice-over used by our Vendors, Stable-masters, etc., to be a bit less gloomy/angry/scared.

/S


I was extremely glad to see that one aswell! :D
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