No Longer of the Rings Online

Before I get to LotRO's current worthlessness, it may be worth reminiscing on past failures.

It was only two or three months after release. I spent quite a lot of time sitting in front of the Agamaur entrance at level 32, failing instance run after instance run... or more often quitting them in disgust. The first instance cluster at level 24 had gone well enough. Everyone tried and failed and learned and triumphed, playing the instance on-level. But by the time I hit the Lone-Lands, the powergamers had hit max level, which means absolutely every group just wanted to get powerleveled through Garth Agarwen instead of actually... PLAYING THE MOTHERFUCKING GAME!!! It was literally impossible to get a real group. Even if it started with on-level characters, at the first death some retarded cunt would say "hang on I'll get my buddy to run us through it" and that was the end of gameplay. When I went from level 32-40 all by having to quit groups who'd rather cheat than play, I cancelled my subscription.

 

So, with player idiocy, it began.

 

 

1. Turbine

 

At launch LotRO was just one of many, many WoW-clone MMOs on the market, slavishly copying it in most respects. But it did a better job on the stand-and-shoot early MMO mechanics fleshed out by a healthy suite of resource management and status effects and crowd control, plus the game's signature "conjunctions" or "fellowship maneuvers" requiring groups to coordinate for big nukes or heals. Aesthetically it distinguished itself by going in the other direction from the cartoony/weeaboo trend of World of Warcraft or Guild Wars, with better-proportioned character models and staying as true to Middle-Earth lore as it could while still providing lots of uglies to beat over the head. Laudably, it avoided treading on the source material, making clear you are not the center of the story but working in the shadows of the fellowship, removing side threats and carrying messages, etc. The starter zones felt LotR-ish (which has probably done more to save this game over the years by hooking new players than any more recent content) and even early expansions like Forochel or Eregion preserved the dignity of the classic.

 

I wasn't playing when the Moria expansion hit, and everything I heard about it made me continue avoiding the game. The "legendary" item system was a blatant gear-farming timesink atop the existing timesink (weapons with their own inventories; recursive grinding) and when I did finally see the place, I wasn't particularly impressed. The environments were more cut-and-pasted, the monsters more kid-friendly D&D-ish (bigger flaming orcs with spikes on their shoulders) and while Lorien and Dol Guldur walked back some of that idiocy, they also continued a trend started shortly after release of long, tedious cinematics and cutscenes. Nonetheless the Moria instances remain, to this day, some of the game's most interesting, with unique spawning and phase transition mechanics rewarding group coordination.

 

Enedwaith, at least, returned to a more coherent Middle-Earth feel, but it also cemented a long-running trend afterwards of minor zones interposing long faction reputation timesinks between more content-heavy expansions.

 

2. Warner

 

I've said it before but in many respects getting bought up by a megacorp helped the game. The added production values show, and not just in glitz. Rohan and Gondor are both expansive and thoroughly planned out with few or no corners cut, and the writing improved, not greatly but noticeably. Characters' speech patterns and concerns feel far more authentic to their Anglo-saxon roots, and the heroics (with some glaring exceptions like Thrymm) balance most adequately between fable and modern fiction... which, let's remember, was Tolkien's big achievement in the first place.

 

Sadly, Warner Bros. obviously had no other interest in the game but as cross-promotion for those disgusting Hobbit movie maladaptations, and the era (2010-2016) shows a rapid pace of cranking out zone after zone, largely indistinguishable from each other, just to keep the IP in the public's eye. Gameplay dumbed down rapidly during this period.

 

Sadder still, much of the extra funding sank into cinematics and half-baked attempts to diversify game modes, watering down its necessary focus on team dungeoneering dynamics, which deteriorated constantly, dropping fellowship maneuvers, resource management and anything the least bit challenging to make it more "accessible" to mass-market retards. All the new features then proceeded to fail monumentally.

- Mounted combat was never supported by a game engine and netcode which had been optimized for stationary, counter-heavy back-and-forth gameplay. Warsteeds' rubberbanding made them nigh-impossible to control, not to mention it required keeping both mouse buttons constantly pressed.

- Epic battles were supposed to make it easier for players across levels to team up, but in practice it just amounted to long, cutscene-laden minigames having nothing to do with the rest of the game.

- Roving threats, big landscape bosses, were a last-ditch attempt to rebuild the appeal of open-world adventuring. They did help for a bit, but as a lone feature thrown into an otherwise endless solo grind and endgame instance gear grind, rapidly lost relevance.

 

However, this is also a period when news of the game trickled out (thanks presumably to WB's advertising) to many who don't normally play games but were attracted to the Tolkien license, and you'd find, say, some random cardiologist hopelessly blundering through the fields of Fornost, or a writer and lawyer teaming up against wights in Angmar. Though it lost many of the smart players from release, LotRO (very briefly) regained a few even as it lost any better gameplay by which to retain them. When that ended I wrote this and quit for the fourth or fifth time.

3. Standing Stone

 

After Warner lost interest (though I'm not sure if the game's still licensing its Tolkien content through them in some weird deal) some old developers got more creative leeway. Starting with Mordor the effect was ambiguous, with obvious stalling, slower development pace, etc. and a half-assed attempt at yet another new mechanic duplicating the existing hope/dread feature pointlessly. Also, by the late 2010s the game had simply lost the interest of better minds altogether. Where I had been able to find on-level or challenge run groups at least occasionally before, the remaining playerbase did nothing but grind the Dol Guldur arena to powerlevel and play the one latest instance. And has done nothing since.

 

However,

1) They've undertaken the painstaking task of undoing many of the moronic decisions from the past. They've redone skill trees to restore most skills' utility. The legendary item grind was streamlined a bit, more status/conjunction functionality has gradually returned, classes have been refunded some of their lost individual roles beyond "guardian, minstrel, and everybody else is DPS"

2) At first the new content refocusing on the admirable task of fleshing out Middle-Earth did a damn good job of sticking to the Tolkien feel. The Dale-Lands, Iron Hills, the two northern Anduin zones, were for the most part lovely, immersive places to visit. 

But you weren't allowed to stay there. Notice I said "at first" which leads us to:

 

 

4. ??? who the hell is even in charge over there now?

 

Though some half-decent efforts at worldbuilding persist, like new alternate low-level zones in Cardolan or The Angle, these are poisoned by lacking the same cash shop currency rewards as the older zones, and therefore (unless amusement park dollars are removed) have not made a real impact in player experience. But the real break seems to have come during the pandemic, when I can only assume there must have been a major shift in writing staff, entirely for the worse.

 

From 2020, from The War of Three Peaks onward, the vast majority of storytelling, characters, worldbulding, has shown not just incompetence in creating a Tolkienish feel (stop. repeating. "uh-oh!") but active vandalism toward Middle-Earth. The Gundabad expansion was especially terrible (and having gone into some depth here I won't repeat myself) but though the social activist garbage is slightly more muted now, it's no less pervasive. The leveling thread has moved into Umbar and Harad, given the snowflake idiots writing quest dialogue plenty of chances to posture on grounds of skin colour and not just sex.

 

I wavered quite a bit before buying last year's Legacy of Morgoth expansion after a year's absence, knowing pretty much what to expect.

- At the tipping point between expansions, Elladan, Elrohir, Legolas and Gimli are all officiously shooed out and replacement heroine Sigileth (returned from presumed death to show up her brother) makes sure to note she doesn't know some man's name.

- Then you've got a young naive white guy getting lectured by a dark-skinned sage on how Gondorians are a bunch of imperialists who dunno nuthin' 'bout nothin'.

- Of course you immediately run into a matriarchal warlike society.

- "I am fine. These *MEN* were no match for me." quoth one female NPC (emphasis added... but not much)

- Another antivillainess is of course victimized, cast out by her beorning kin.

- No male leaders unless they're villains; all good factions led by blandly idealized "strong women"

- As you're chasing two new villains escaped from prison, both male, you're repeatedly reminded the game's sole remaining villainess is only acting out of revenge for her dead husband. (see rules 3, 14)

- It wasn't enough putting in black elves, of course they're special-er than regular elves, turning into trees by way of fading.

- There's an entire romance quest chain between an ingenuous young male bookworm and a woman talking down to him, particularly funny when he's forced to apologize for the presumption of saving a woman, then having to risk his neck anyway, segueing into pages-long rants about the damsel escaping male aggression, longer than far more important quests, and how independent she is, yes she's very independent, now shut up and listen to her babbling, she neeeeeds it!

- On and on like that. It's hard to miss quests resolving to some "man bad; woman good" face-off:

- Then of course, though the last dungeon brings back some of the heroes, it also features the highly... creative... enemy type of giant orcs led by evil elves from the first age. Because of course. Build up the orcs as impressive, shit on elves. Because that's apparently the brave new frontier of social justice.

 

With the MMO genre collapsed, LotRO stood a good chance to cleaning up the scraps, getting yet another second chance after the endless second chances it's gotten since 2007. But at the same time it tried gambling on that by offering all pre-Gundabad content for free, it also poisoned the well with the idiotic writing and mission design. And sure, I could complain about quite a few other matters:

- every class has a DPS role now

- fights move away from dazes toward interrupts, call 'em quick-time events, meaning away from players needing to be aware of their greater surroundings and exert the minimal self-control not to break a daze and toward button mashing, idiotic twitch-gaming

- last year crafting was paramount, now it's been forgotten and all your loot upgrades are dungeon drops

- infinite teleport skills

- infinite cash from trash loot

- content is being proofread less thoroughly, see an ability placeholder-named "a ranged double attack" or elves from North Carolina

- bugs are cropping up more often - NPC turns hostile in tower mission, NPCs do not spawn in the mission following that, etc.

- heavier emphasis on the "delving" system of solo dungeons, whose difficulty is nothing but idiotic gear-checking, getting nuked from nowhere and having enemies spawn right on top of you, giving them infinite speed to make them impossible to kite, making them aggro regardless of normal aggro radius, all to remove the possibility for crowd control or tactics

- then there's the timesink of making the new bribe loot for faction rep usable as stacks, but wasting any overflow due to progress being locked by trivial turn-in quests

But remember what I said above. During every phase of LotRO's development, no matter how smart or stupid the fights, how time-wasting or exploitative its monetization, its Tolkien license has lent it a tremendous amount of undeserved goodwill. I did try to warn them: parasites die if they kill their host. Shit on Tolkien at your own risk. And a Middle-Earth reinterpreted by Valerie Solanas' understudy does exactly that.

I hadn't known how petty the feminazi vandalism had gotten, but apparently at some point they actually went back and invested time in rewriting a quest in the Glittering Caves so that Gimli now gets K.O.d by a miniboss, only to have a random little girl effortlessly beat the same miniboss.

Yeah.

Fuck this retarded trash.

 

Without the literary tie-in, you were never going to get by as a pure multiplayer game. You never had enough worthwhile individuals for it among the rabble. Simpleminded MMO grinding draws simpleminded subhuman trash, and from the very start it was impossible to get them to do anything other than race for cake, a routine which will captivate none but the most degenerate. Middle-Earth was your selling point, and the latest expansions have less and less tying in to the peoples, events, themes of Tolkien's writing, instead being repurposed so some narcissistic snowflake wastes of oxygen can push to the forefront their original fanfic characters in a social justice warrior wonderland full of knockoff drow and noble warrior orcs.

 

Though they're still plugging away at improving team tactics, level design, skill balance, the few good points are too readily washed out by the stupidity of their attached content. Too little, too late. The game recently upgraded to 64-bit servers, which also functions as an unofficial server consolidation. Combined with the latest instance runs, this briefly made raids possible again. I immediately cautioned the fanboys the excitement wouldn't last, and though it lasted a month instead of the two weeks I'd predicted, group recruitment is already more slapdash with the LFF channel going blank for fifteen or thirty minutes at a time. Whatever windfall LotRO could've reaped as other MMOs contract to oblivion, it's already pissed away by deliberately destroying its core appeal in the name of vapid posturing.

 

Maybe I'll keep logging in now and then to continue wandering about older zones. But I sure as hell don't intend to give these clowns any more money. LotRO's gotten more undeserved second chances than anything else in the industry, and it's long past time to let it die.

A Elbereth Gilthawny'all

Quite a few game companies, when looking for a bit of aural atmosphere over the years, have fallen back on just sticking a microphone in their workplace's break-room. Properly edited, the indistinct rustling, clattering and mumbling of a busy cafeteria or lounge can indeed supply a charming everyday-anytown backdrop. Improperly, you end up with too-distinctive noise jogging the listener's attention, like a gaggle of women with southern U.S. accents.

Worse yet when lines can clearly be distinguished, like "how're y'all doin'?" sounding more and more like a Blanche DuBois audition.

Worse and worse when another voice clearly states: "I'm from North Carolina"

But worst of all when the game in question is supposed to be The Lord of the Rings Online!

Friend Zone Lined

"Your princess is in another castle"

- an old gimmick even in 1985

 

I had an odd conversation last year in LotRO. Some guildmates referenced the current expansion's plot and it was revealed I hadn't played the main quest all the way through yet. When asked why not, I pointed out the reputation bar for that zone was locked at a weirdly low level, wasting any rep gains from questing until the limit would inevitably be raised in future patches. Fanboys were incensed that I would dare accuse the noble and mighty d'evs of such frittering micromanagement. Obviously they knew better than me how high to set the bar and if the bar had been set at "friend" level that's where it would stay. I doubled down with a "what are you, an idiot?" pointing out that obviously the whole point was to waste your current effort and make you grind all over again next year.

So here we are next year. Note the empty progress bar.

Discerning middle earthlings may also note my character is nowhere near Umbar now. I've logged in a few times the past week to bum around the Wildwood, a zone whose reputation I haven't even raised to "friend" level yet because it was released a few years back as a blatant timesink, two factions with ten "kill ten(s) rats" quests each to be repeated infinitely. Hell, I still haven't ground out Minas Tirith timesink rep from over a decade ago and probably never will.

Designers: do you not ever notice how many of your attempts to game gamers and keep their interest while offering nothing of interest are having the opposite effect? Gotta say I'm not feeling any burning need to finish last year's quests even now that I'd get my reward for them. You poisoned the well. Here's a facet of the gamer mindset you apparently never noticed in your decades' worth of experience in the business. You can give me an impossible task and maybe I'll give up or maybe I'll bash my head against the wall trying to finish it no matter how unfair... so long as it's unfair on its face. But if I spot you trying to play me I WILL SHIT IN YOUR MOUTH!

Naive Little Pieces

"They'll never know where she got her weapon"

Kidneythieves - Arsenal

 

Hold it!

Stop everything, we need to address this very pressing issue.

Whenever cartoons, video games or whatever want to pepper their natural landscapes with something colorful that isn't flowers, they often default to the familiar white-speckled red mushroom. Case you didn't know, it's poisonous! Well, not horrifically poisonous... some even try to get stoned off it. Also, almost everyone already knows about it... but! But being colorful it attracts the attention of small children, whose low body mass increases the likelihood of a toxic dose. And here our entertainment products are promoting this vile peril!

I hereby decree that everything must be done to combat the menace of toadstools! All products featuring them must be yanked off the proverbial shelves and replaced with products promoting nice, safe tofu, which despite clearly being the superior foodstuff has been unfairly mocked and marginalized for generations. Obviously that toad-humper Mario's first on the chopping block.

What?

What're you looking at me like that for? Why are you not dropping everything to join my cause? Clearly my only course of action is to start an anti-muscarinic activist group and begin forming hashtag mobs to hound every author, every graphic artist, every movie and game studio until they conform to my demands for combatting shroom doom! Soon, I trust, a multibillion-dollar publicity campaign shall spring up, and any shroom sympathizers will be blacklisted as we righteous ones morally cleanse all media and all society beyond. All of society shall be defined by anti-toadstool, pro-tofu affirmative action.

 

Sound ridiculous?

Now consider this is an actual, verifiable, physical danger (children are in danger! won't somebody please think of the children?) not some nebulous "institutionalized prejudice" demonstrated by the fact I'm not king of the world yet.

 

On a completely unrelated note, The Lord of the Rings Online added Umbar in the last months. While less virulently stupid on average than the Gundabad zone's quests, whichever "writer" was responsible for the previous pile of garbage is obviously still on the payroll. Or at least one of them. Though, amusingly, her (safe to assume "her") influence is only discernible in unfiltered, unedited form in half a dozen quests on one isolated island in the earliest corner of Umbar. The good orcs are back:

 

And they still sound or act nothing like Tolkien's orcs but that's okay because we're standing up for marginalized minoritorcs and that's good because fantasy racism is bad, mmkaaay? Meanwhile the entire new main plot centers on a warrior princess countess baroness whateveress sailing off to save her kid while her husband repeatedly sings her praises. That at least could still be salvaged, but time will tell.

 

And of course the newest Dune adaptation needs to crank up Chani's appearances waaayyyy before she ever appears in the story. Is there anyone who didn't predict that utterly groundbreaking minority viewpoint?

And yes of course the latest Dominic Deegan chapter is some ridiculous conflation of fantasy dwarves with Taliban misogyny. What else could there be to talk about?

Or you could look at Baldur's Gate 3 whose companion roster permits nothing but sexy young bisexuals. At least its homognomos and trans-dimensional ringmaster don't take up the whole plot... but you do realize that shit ain't mandatory, right?

Not everything needs to be about the toad tofu.

Do none of you find it odd that in the name of diversity, every single one of you flaunts the exact same badge of moral superiority? Shemales and shefemales and the almighty glory of yaoi, all lightly dusted with melanin for a more exotic flavor? We used to express other themes in fiction! Strategic resource dependence, nuclear disarmament, EXPLORATION, the weighing of one's legacy against the public good, entitlement and modesty, the worth of a life, living a life of worth, fear both personal and societal and the overcoming of same, artistic expression, the environment, honor, compromise, industry and the working class, the yoke of material possessions, home and belonging, freedom vs. authority, safety vs. adventure, superstition vs. reason, future vs. present, crime vs. oppression, snobs vs. slobs, tradition vs. adaptation, intellectual isolation, integrity and the isolation that comes with it in turn, driving passions beyond sexual pair-bonding like revenge or greed or fanaticism (though I can see why the snowflakes of all people would want to dodge discussing that last one) or fuck it, anything, anything, ANYTHING other than yet another garish little wail and moan about the evil oppressive patriarchy and female empowerment!

 

When every. single. mother.fuckin. book/movie/comic/game/painting/song/tweet or particularly melodious fart must in every instance pay homage to your desire for more power, you already hold all the power. And what are you doing with it? What is our society's net cultural output channeled towards under your absolutist control? Endlessly complaining that you don't have enough power!

Of course the real mafioso grave-digging sadistic twist of this gigantic moral cleansing campaign lies in who's actually doing the work. 'Cause for the most part it ain't the trannies. It's heterosexuals promoting homosexuality, men glorifying women and white guilt to the thousandth generation, all of them brainwashed, bullied and blackmailed with the threat of blacklisting into producing racist, sexist propaganda against themselves.

 

There is no surprise as to the provenance of her weapon. He made it, loaded it and handed it to her.

Cutting through the Treacle: AlzRAMmer's Disease

"So tell me, who are you dissing or maybe I'm missing

The reason that you're smiling or wilding

[...]

This time, this time I'm losing my mind"

 

Beastie Boys - So What'Cha Want

 

 

(working title: I Am My Own Grandpa, Redux)

 

Sometime in recent months, League of Legends began saving your role selection while queuing up for a match. Apparently after fourteen years of unjustifiably dominating the AoS market, they finally sussed out that players in class-based games tend to play their favorite classes repeatedly. You don't say. (ProTip: they also like leveling up, scoring kills and getting loot.) But, in Riot's defense, they're far from the only game designers forcing customers to repeatedly click-through pointless pre-flight checklists.

I've also been playing the squad management dungeon-crawler Iratus recently.

 

"Choose a battle squad" hmmm, let's see, well, tough choice, jinkies gang, I'm stumped! Maybe I should go with Squad 1, the same one I've been playing so far and the ONLY squad I will ever choose because in the absence of multi-squad fights you only ever shuffle units in and out of your ONE active squad. Your reserves should mostly be healing/training. Somehow, being forced to confirm the obvious for hundreds of fights in a row has never once altered my choice!

The same routine proved doubly unjustifiable among Wartile's many nuisances:

 

- for often making it literally impossible to alter your group composition (three recruitable party members and exactly three spots on the boat, etc.) yet still demanding you drag-drop the idiotic little digitized plastic toys onto the little diorama boat every. single. goddamn. time!

 

But I'm not bitter, dear game developers. I understand that in the five or fifty gigabytes of memory space your piece of shit of a product's taking up on my hard drive, complete with glossy high-resolution flashing buttons for your Twitter feed, Discord channel, forums, store pages, blooper reels, YouTube ads, holiday-themed costumes, DLC spam, director's commentary and podcast of your mother-in-law's appendectomy, there just weren't enough bits left over to dedicate to a few hundred lines of plain text preserving my own preferences in a .ini file or whatever they're calling it these days. I simply cannot express my gratitude at your open disdain for my choices. Especially when you're asking my money for the privilege of choosing.

Like all so-called "MMO"s Lord of the Rings Online gradually degraded to an outlet store for imaginary funny hats over the years, and having played on and off since its launch I've accumulated quite a few such hats. And spaulders. And boots made for walking. And capes for the crusadin'. And more cowbell. And a loaf of bread for some reason. Well, collect however many you want, but you still only get 8 outfit slots maximum to play dress-up. Any more might stress our servers and cause lag or something, and we need that server space to store three different versions of every consumable item reiterated every five character levels and ten different names and stats for every reused item visual and aaahh, by the way, please keep buying more character slots to feed your alt-itis everyone and please never look up the term "force multiplier" if you hear the fiberoptics creakin'.

I mean, The Secret World was even worse, as there the limited number of outfit slots applied not just to cosmetics but the the various gear you constantly needed to un/re-slot when swapping classes and damage types for different dungeons. The same applies to the aforementioned League of Legends' "rune" loadouts.

What are you selling?

 

Games, as media, bank on interactivity. Everything from new map settings to character and town names to group and gear loadouts to cosmetics express your customers' interests, personality and strategy. I don't care if you're motivated by microtransactions or interface timesinks to drag out those gameplay-hour totals or you're trying to build addictive anticipation of reward stimuli. This bullshit's been old for ages now. I'm not inclined to believe that the same program which records my last million mouse clicks suddenly hits a patch of senility when trying to remember my name, or whether I clicked "1" or "2" in the squad selection window last fight. I even less appreciate being nickel-and-dimed for the honor of permutating the content I already paid you for.

If you have enough memory to animate your company logo, you have enough memory to save my preferences.

Beardier than Thou

"Such men as he be never at heart's ease

Whiles they behold a greater than themselves

And therefore are they very dangerous"

 

Caesar describing Cassius, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Act1Scene2

 

 

"Memento mori. You are parasites, and a parasite which kills its host is a doomed parasite."

Thus I admonished The Lord of the Rings Online eight years ago, that in light of its rapidly diminishing gameplay value and overwhelming reliance on its Tolkien license, shitting on Tolkien's corpse was a bad, bad idea. Stay tuned, we'll come back to that by the end.

For a while, LotRO benefited from Standing Stone Games' split into a separate studio. The new adventures centering on Northern Mirkwood, the Iron Hills and Misty Mountains more closely approached the "Middle Earth Online" the game should originally have been instead of "Rehash the LotR Plot Online" it was turned into in its middle years. The "legendary" item system (a whole gear farm in each weapon) was retooled into something less aggravating last year, along with a few other quality of life changes and more attention to detail like interweaving quests instead of polishing off one location at a time forever. There are even some new monster models, after a long drought. But, after over a decade of catering only to the stupidest possible clientele, it was too little too late.

 

Standing Stone got desperate enough last month to give free access to all but the last major expansion, Gundabad, which no company does except in extremis. So I've sunk some cost into Gundabad, jumped back in and have been struggling to catch up on the past couple years' content. Initially, several others from the guild I'd joined two years ago also popped their heads up, until it almost seemed we'd get enough for an instance run. Two weeks later they were gone again. Partly, this can hardly be helped, as LotRO features a tremendous amount of repetitive "kill ten rats" content to wade through before reaching the even more repetitive end-game of farming a single instance for gear upgrades - a problem compounded by timesinks like nearly instantaneous respawns forcing you to kill everything twice in each location. Running the game on what would appear to be the same servers from fifteen years ago doesn't help, as more than a dozen players in any location immediately weigh the network lag down into rubberband land. And, of course, it's hard selling slightly blocky mid-2000s 3D graphics on a more modern market of downright fuckable photorealism, no matter how inspired your visual artists may be. Before I get to my complaints, let me admit LotRo's old knack for achingly scenic landscapes remains solid.

The Wells of Langflood: beauty, branches, bears and boggarts

Even some of the Gundabad zones seemingly created (just as Moria) with a mind toward low decorative workload (noone questions cave walls textured uniformly mottled gray) make inspired use of repeating motifs.

The (rather Spartan) cradle of Durin

And, as always, it's somehow even worse to see good work amidst bad, because the storytelling filling the precipices and caverns of Gundabad has taken a sharp nosedive. This was somewhat a problem after Mordor, with professional writers having apparently split the other way from old Turbine. For a while the team broke even, resigning themselves to mediocre drama, unambitious yet also unintrusive, but whichever writers joined preceding the release of Gundabad last year have dragged the new zones so deep into the realm of SJW lunacy as to overshadow any recovery LotRO has made in the past few years.

One sure sign is trying to gratuitously redeem villains and recast them as oppressed minorities. Suddenly we need to focus on good dwarves from the canonically evil Dourhand clan (some of the first enemies you fought back in 2007) because you see it was only their leaders that led them astray. The Nuremberg defense apparently remains perfectly valid in Nogrod. Even orcs, fucking ORCS, are gradually going the way of Warcraft noble savage orcs, deliberately flouting Tolkien's established narrative of them as thoroughly corrupted body, mind and soul by Morgoth (a.k.a. the devil himself) back in the first age. But the most obvious change is relocating Middle-Earth, like every single other product of our propaganda-choked society, to Femtasia, that FEMale chauvINIST utopia where women are always more clever, wiser, morally upright, skillful, braver, stronger, faster and flat-out more bionic than those lowly disgusting males in every possible way.

 

As a side-note, as much of this involves dwarf-women, and one of my old posts on bearded ladies saw a slight increase in hits last year, I may have shared in the guilt of justifying (inadvertently and only by omission of proper context) the notion of sending original recipe Ardan she-dwarves out on adventures. If so, I do regret it, and I'll plan a post at some point in the future about the topic of evolution in fantasy.

Though, as all modern media, LotRO suffered from occasional bouts of virtue signaling (refugee themed plots, a female master of Lake-Town, etc.) they integrated these half-decently into the existing literature. Its current problems appear to have started with Amma.

Back when Erebor was first opened up, one of the quests casually introduced you to the first female dwarf NPC, and Mother Amma was in fact a good character in keeping with Tolkien's own guidelines on the topic. She was protected and hidden away deep within one of her people's most secure fortresses. Which didn't stop her from being portrayed as a respectable matriarch and noted expert in the fine craftsmanship which so obsesses the Naugrim. Cool. I'm down with that.

But of course it's never enough. Not for the fanatics anyway.

The War of Three Peaks and Gundabad proper saw Amma and a host of new females transported to the front lines, increasingly monopolizing the action. Remember Tolkien laid out the central problem quite clearly: dwarves not only breed almost as slowly as elves but only have a 1/3 female population. Much like loonies from Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, this naturally mandates a rabid, unquestionable protectionism as core cultural value, or dwarven demographics would've dwindled to nothing back in the First Age no matter how many Durins they bring back from the dead.

LotRO keeps dwarf females looking masculine (and bearded (you can tell them by their voices)) but while lower cuteness would indicate a higher female involvement in masculine risk-taking, female scarcity would easily over-ride these dames' hirsute valor.

But of course, that's logic, and who needs logic when you've got feminism?

 

For one of the more absurd examples, meet the dwarf lesbians:

One sends you with a gift to her "wife" - an absurd notion both for the reasons above and for this being an infamously traditionalist society. In preindustrial times everyone was a quiverfull by default, with infanticide quietly making up the difference in lean years. While various cultures formalized some form or another of what each other might consider sexual deviance, social justice warriors consisently miss the little detail that true sexual freedom is a virtue and privilege of post-industrial, medically savvy modernity. In a royalist, medieval, 2/3 male dorfopolis you might conceivably (pun intended) see male-male homosexual acts tacitly normalized to ease tensions, but lesbianism would by definition be extramarital, and a childless lesbian marriage would almost certainly be an actively enforced taboo. Dwarf lesbians on the front lines of battle doubly so; two dead wombs for the price of one. Might as well salt yourselves and hop in a pot for the orcs' genocidal ease. But of course, for the SJW who shoehorned this in, a couple of unmarried dwarf lads expressing a fondness for each other in the trenches (iffy but at least arguable) wouldn't go nearly far enough. Had to make a show of strength by vandalizing the source material as much as possible.

Naturally, running a mission with one of the lasses, you find her as idealized as you'd expect, dashing ahead of you to solo everything, explicitly stating she doesn't like fighting and just wants to feel useful and expressing sorrow at having to kill poor innocent bats who've just been trained for evil. Your presence in that mission serves no purpose but to absorb her sanctimony.

 

But the sapphidwarfies are just barely scratching the surface. Back when taking stock of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire's endlessly reiterated anti-male chauvinism, I noted their main gimmick of juxtaposing good women with bad men in order to drive home (consciously or subliminally) female superiority with every zone, every encounter and every dialogue. Here, three or four years later, we see avid students of that technique at work.

 

There's Hersegg, the young, sparsely-bearded librarian also inexplicably accepted as an experienced explorer and combatant. At least she at one point admits "I was too eager" but a lot more lines have her stuck babysitting an older male scholar Spall, presented as dead weight for being a nerd in a warzone.

There's the dwarf who pissed off his wife by appearing too protective of her. And instead of talking to him about it (you remember communication, that skill supposedly higher in females?) she puts him in the dog-house (gossiping about the problem with Mother Amma instead) until he redeems himself with a present of a show of fireworks.

 

Unjustifiably angry wife = prezzies! Yay equality!

 

Then you've got Elta, who sends you bounty-hunting after beasts with the twist that "I simply name my targets after folks I don't like" and yes of course all three inspirations are male, with the pretexts that they were "lazy to the bone" or "hovered over my shoulder" or had "a very cold personality" - hey, we introduced a female character whose only purpose is killing her male acquaintances in effigy. Cute, right? Adorable. Just like all those times Aragorn's long-lost brother Man-a-born sent you to kill disgusting pigs, slugs and worms named Galadriel, Arwen and Eowyn. Fucking adorable, right?

 

The next one took a slightly longer introduction. First we need to meet a male artisan who's introduced as too greedy and putting on airs for working up his ambition to recover his people's treasured gems and get his name in the history books, and writing convoluted contracts to lock others into servitude. His current servant, one Eskil Bloodthumb, is introduced as a worthless fuck-up -

- and after serving his purpose in feeling dejected and ashamed, instead of learning and growing into his role is immediately replaced with his hypercompetent sister Fastrith, who then starts a romance with one of the Moria dwarves from ten years ago. When debating whether to advance into a dangerous area, he staunchly defends her honor, proclaiming her great ability... and she retorts she might as well come along... otherwise her hapless new beardybeau will dumbly stumble into danger. Answering praise with mockery. Lovely. Definitely not an abusive relationship in the making. And completely different from the guy insulting his wife by (mistakenly) appearing motivated by protectiveness.

Oh, but the brother's not completely forgotten. Fastrith repeatedly quips "Good thing my brother Eskil is not here!" as a catchphrase during a fight. (see below)

Then you've got the two dwarf rogues, Ausma and Muta, who can't seem to go two steps without either being given a heavily scripted mission with more dialogue than half a dozen other characters put together or some other NPC randomly chanting "she is quite clever" or proving themselves superior to males. Note, it's a common trait of Mary Sue characters that the rest of the established cast must suddenly be twisted into helpless idiots or villains to justify Mary Sue's specialness. To the point here, the war hero Nain the Slakeless has to suddenly and inexplicably Rambo into a cave full of orcs by himself, to justify a rescue mission by one of the females, and he ends up shaved as a penalty for his male stupidity. Which stupidity somehow wasn't narratively necessary before females stepped into the picture. For bonus points:

 

Olivorc Twist, everyone. Or maybe Jean Valjorc?

This same mission chain ends with Nain forced to apologize to his orcish informant for mistrusting him and some orcs set up in a cozy little deluxe apartment in a dwarf skyscraper, as a deprived minority getting their due. In a delightfully Freudian slip, we see a glimpse of the dirty little secret behind women's criticism of men. The same quest chain at once tears down and symbolically castrates a respectable male while propping up and idealizing a murderous, ethically incapable replacement, redeeming the most brutal, sadistic, primitive brutes in reach.

No matter how hard you try, you will never be good enough, because what they want isn't "good" but reliably murderous and stupid and easy to manipulate into suicidal aggression. Girls want orc boys.

But if you think they stopped at dwarves, you've got another thing coming. And more things after that. One of Ausma's missions leads you to the game's first female orc NPC:

 

Loknashra... who is of course far better than the males around her (sexist male orc immediately cowers in fear of her) and badmouths her chief with impunity (the menfolk are doing everything wrong, y'see; and she's only stepping in 'for my people' and not for aggression, to prop up her inevitable moral superiority) earning the explicit admiration of the female dwarf for bonus interspecies sisterhood points.

But wait, there's more!

The hill-folk of Angmar make their return, in the conspicuous form of a plucky and inventive young female:

- whose quest chain leads you to confront and kill her evil father. Because of course.

 

But wait... there's more!

What, you thought they'd stop at humanoids?

 

You run across a warg asking you to rescue her pups from evil sorcerors sticking crystals in them for whatever reason. Of course, the same crystal treatment that drives her "mate" rabidly aggressive turns her into a lucid, noble paragon of virtue. How could it be otherwise?!?

I wasn't deliberately recording these from the start and I haven't even finished the damn expansion but I'm willing to bet it'll be more of the same. I'm stopping examples here for the sake of this already over-lengthy post remaining borderline readable, and for exhaustion at trying to track anti-male proselytism on its own moldy turf. See, that's one thing about fanatics: they never have anything new to say. Just as a Christian will answer everything with either "Jesus" or "Satan" a feminist's interpretation of every scenario is preordained by their holinesses MacKinnon, Steinem and Dworkin:

"Oh, honourable font of gyno-knowledge, might I borrow a moment of your time?"

"Yes, you filthy pig?"

"Half-dog, actually, but never mind. I was wondering what you think of elves."

"Female elves are better than male elves!"

"Oh! Follow-up question, any opinion on dwarves?"

"Female dwarves are better than male dwarves!"

"What a coincidence. Have you given any thought to librarians?"

"Female librarians are better than male librarians!"

"Interesting. While we're on the topic, what about apprentices?"

"Female apprentices are better than male apprentices!"

"How insightful. And what about hill-folk?"

"Female hill-folk are better than male hill-folk!"

"Curiouser and curiouser. What about orcs then?"

"Female orcs are better than male orcs!"

"Fascinating! Ah, but this might stump you: how do you see wargs?"

"Female wargs are better than male wargs!"

"Wasn't expecting that! Dare one inquire as to your opinion of dragons?"

"Female dragons are KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen! KillAllMen!!! KillAllMen!!!!!1"

 

But to fully understand their motivation here, you have to remember fundamentalism includes not only monomania but active hostility against outside creativity, especially if it is admired, if it steals admiration away from the hagiography of the one true faith. Sidetrack a bit, for reference, to the iconoclasm of official religions, like christians' destruction of pagan art or conversely muslims' destruction or whitewashing of churches. Recent examples include the Islamic State's attempts to erase all history before themselves. Twenty years before that, younger viewers might not remember the international outrage at the Afghanis' destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in 2001. Even I did not remember, until a recent refresher, that the (tragicomically incompetent, involving... shooting at the statues... with guns) demolition was undertaken for sheer spite, because foreigners has offered to help restore them.

 

This same mindset dominates social justice warriors' revisionist agenda. The harm inflicted against Middle-Earth with every XenArwen and Tauriel and Hollywood-pretty dwarves is not just a bug. It's a feature. Returning to LotRO and its newer writers' competence pay attention to the scintillating banter during one scripted encounter:

Fastrith says, ''If we were to find the stolen stones that made up the mosaic...''
Bróin says, ''...we could restore it!''
Bori says, ''That sounds hard.''
Bori says, ''You are more likely to find the lost Zabad'ibîn, I think.''
Fastrith says, ''Perhaps we will find both! Bróin will help me!''
Bróin says, ''I will!''
Imák says, ''Hmm... do you hear that?''
Imák says, ''There could be more. Do not relax your guard!''
Hobgoblin Prey-catcher says, ''They're in here!''
Imák says, ''There will be more of them. Let's return to the others and prepare!''
Bori says, ''What happened? I heard shouting!''
Imák says, ''Hobgoblins.''
Fastrith says, ''Hobgoblins! How exciting!''
Bróin says, ''How many are there?''
Imák says, ''Does it matter?''
Bróin says, ''Spoken like a Longbeard, Imák!''
Imák says, ''Hmmph.''
Bori says, ''Here they come!''
Bróin says, ''I will fight, if I must!''
Fastrith says, ''Good thing my brother Eskil is not here!''
Hobgoblin Prey-catcher says, ''Take this!''
Fastrith says, ''Good thing my brother Eskil is not here!''
Bróin says, ''Fastrith, are you all right?''

Does any of that sound like Middle-Earth to you? I think the "that sounds hard" coming out of the mouth of a canonically perseverent race is what truly gets me.

*Sigh*

No, Broin, Fastrith is very much not all right. She's a product of hijackers far more interested in giving all new characters B-movie gypsy fortuneteller accents than trying to adapt their dialogue to Tolkien's general style. Other scenes echo even more generic children's cartoon one-liners like "you won't get away with this" or "you underestimate us" or "you've bitten off more than you can chew" and even the dreaded "drat" until you start to realize the fanaticism is a smokescreen. This petty, infantile abuse is as much born of incompetence as it is of brainwashing. Directly mirroring the devaluation of the elves themselves in recent decades, those attempting to adapt good authors must feel a desperate need to vandalize. Faced with superior intellect, creativity, talent, they hunger only to deface, defame, destroy, for how well the other's ability reflects their own inability back at them... and feminism makes as good a pretext as any. A pretext and shield from warranted criticism, because as I noted with regard to both Deadfire and Wasteland 3, "Fanaticism is, among other things, a refuge for the incompetent. [...] unskilled hacks shielding themselves from criticism behind the unbending bulwark of constantly repeated politically correct mantras. My crap promotes people of the correct skin color or sex, so if you call my crap crap then you're a sexist, racist, child-molesting nazi pig."

 

It's not as if LotRO had not demonstrated, in its long years Online, that it is possible to insert new characters, including female ones, into the narrative while respecting Tolkien's original style and framework and even building upon it. Anyone remember Ellen Fremedon?

Aside from the geek cred inherent in her very name, bitter Ellen, in her far shorter appearance than Muta or Amma or Ausma, demonstrated both female leadership and interpersonal conflict stemming directly from the situation in which she and her social rival, Eowyn, find themselves. Conflict against another woman. That happens. Not that you'd know it from feminist iconography pitting the valiant sisterhood always vanquishing those disgusting hairy beasts guilty of all the world's ills - like "lazy to the bone" or "hovered over my shoulder" or had "a very cold personality". Ellen's criticism is both warranted (absent her secret wraith-slaying fate, Eowyn would do far more good as royal representative organizing an eventual exile than as another fresh recruit on the field) and slightly overstated for envy at her rival's higher standing, and your aid leads her to eventually relent enough to cooperate with the warrior princess - a perfectly natural social conflict resolved just as naturally, without the need to degrade either side. In fact, much of the Rohan expansion (though far from brilliantly written (e.g. Thrymm, oy vey)) dealt with the women left behind while the men went to war, the ladies of each fief coordinating defenses, stockpiling for the coming hardships, leading townsfolk to safety, one pining for her husband or father, another cursing him for leaving her, another struggling to fill his shoes or just keeping her mind on more pressing matters, another filling them quite adroitly, or yet another growing into her role independently, quest by quest.

 

I have to wonder, as Standing Stone watch the rejuvenating potential of their gambled freebie content trickle away to nothing, log-in by daily log-in, are they even asking themselves if, among other mistakes, they should've hired better writers? You know, instead of paying some brainwashed imbeciles to spit insults in your customers' faces? More so, to cut the literary branch out from under you with the pretext of the noble cause of spitting insults in your customers' faces? How much salary did you waste on those desperate to use an adaptation in an effort to destroy the original work, when all that's kept you afloat for a decade has been your Tolkien license?

Coincidentally enough, they seem to have posted a Lead Content Designer job about five days ago, just as I got angry enough to start taking notes for this post. Maybe I should apply? Whaddayasay, Fallen Stoners, are ya desperate enough?

'Cause I think you might find yourselves beyond desperation by this point.

Despite my inconsistent commas, action verbing and typos, I do think I've already done better in a page of fan fiction from ten years ago than your current employees in their official contributions. And I didn't need to deliberately shit on Tolkien's corpse to get my amateurish point across.

 

If that's your professional standard, then what the fuck am I <no longer> paying you for?

The Dwarves No More Shall Suffer Wrong

"Now we call over the mountains cold

Come back unto the caverns old!"

 

Thanks to Clamavi de Profundis for the excellent compilation / rendition

 

 

To my shame, by trying Gwent recently (long story short, don't bother, it's a bad joke like all CCGs) I fell prey to cross-promotion and reinstalled Witcher 2 after having used it as an uninstalled negative example no less than three times over the past couple of years... and ended up enjoying some of it. Chapter 2 was at least less interrupted (though it's mostly grinding through harpy swarms) but as I close in on the transition to the last chapter the endless cutscenes and over-scripting have reasserted themselves, not to mention perfunctory crafting, bugs, crashes, minigame timesinks, useless maps, misdirecting markers, obtuse quest design prompting trial and error reloads for more timesinks, etc. So, feeling like I at least got my three bucks' worth, I likely won't bother finishing. Despite some obvious talent behind it, it's still a deliberately bad game. Definitely staying filed under the "Bozo" tag. However, I must confess a guilty love for Vergen.

 

As a mixed dwarf / human town, it gets its chthonic aesthetic across without simply being transposed into some giant cave, instead carved into the mountainside and connected by an infernal (yet navigable once you learn a couple of landmarks) tangle of ramps, stairs, short tunnels, ledges and bridges. Aesthetically, everything about it just... works, from the rough, massive, sparsely decorated facades, to the weatherbeaten patina and geometric interiors. It all just screams dwarf - especially the dwarves!

Aside from crassly humorous and randier than other depictions, their dialogue (and surprisingly apt voice acting) nails that trenchant utilitarianism we've grown to expect from fantasy's designated working class heroes.

It reminds me of a specific town in LotRO.

The game has presented several examples of megalithic dwarven construction (Thorin's Hall, Moria, The Hall Under the Mountain) as well as tiny/isolated/abandoned outposts, but Jarnfast is a mining colony. While technically it does possess a music track, logging directly into an "indoor" space prevents it from loading (maybe intentional, maybe just a good bug) leaving you with sparse, distinct ambient sounds: a clatter of machinery, silence, a hiss or shriek of escaping steam, silence, and most beautifully a slow but insistent clang of hammer on anvil... answered a couple of seconds later by a more certain, repeated, concatenated hammer echo from elsewhere. Work, speaking to work.

 

The ambience may or may not be reused from elsewhere. Can't remember. But here? Ringing off the claustrophobic walls, half-carved, along the mine rails, under the overhanging natural rock?

Just beautiful.

While Tolkien's dwarves usually get defined by belligerence, greed or technological prowess, I'd say nobody bothers altering the winning formula much due more to their steadfastness.

My latest Dwarf Fortress broke into a narrow, tangled cave system, and I decided I'd like to move at least part of my goat herd down here in case of aboveground attacks. Enclosing the pasture is slow going, the year being only 37 and forgotten beasts not nearly forgotten enough, but workers are ever so gradually building floor and wall tiles to cover access from the north or east. I'll have them close off the southwest entrance as well, favoring the southeast tunnel's length to line with traps while still maintaining spidersilk gathering access. The entire process complete with polishing and trapmaking is taking years, just a side project to establishing my main living, working, and most importantly graveyard quarters.

But that's okay.

They'll keep working and fending off acid-spitting giant slugs until it's done.

With their bare hands if need be.

In another playthrough a giantess attacked a group of unarmed (with one exception) civilians. They lucked out in the first round and knocked her unconscious, and proceeded to kill her. Gradually. Very, very gradually. Dwarves. Killing a giant. With their bare hands. How gradually, you ask? That shit eventually went on for nineteen pages of text.

Damn, I love elves, I'm still in the Noldorin camp... but can you imagine my hero Elrond sitting there pimp-slapping a giant to death for a solid week just because... well, it gets the job done, don't it?

'Putcher backs inta it boys, ah think shae's startin' ta breiwse!'

In fact, is there any fantasy race that would fit that scenario better than dwarves?

 

Fantasy tends toward grandiloquence by its very nature, and dwarves fill an easily neglected niche for dogged perseverance. Neither graceful, eternal guardians of creation nor plucky upstarts promised dominon of same, literally carving out their own space in the world, Aule's misconceived yet grudgingly accepted progeny bow to no-one. (Mostly because they're busy craning their necks instead.) They're the ones fantasy authors (or game designers) can turn to for hollowing out a mountain scrape by scrape, century by century, fighting on even if fate itself will deny you ultimate glory, even if you're stuck as the middle children of creation.

 

"And dark things silent crept beneath"

Given it's impossible to join any team game where you won't be griefed by spineless, degenerate, troglodytic vermin refusing to fight, spamming surrender votes, quitting at the first sign of difficulty, maybe that steadfast refusal to quit while you're in any position, brutal honesty even if it doesn't make you look good, a willingness to keep plugging away at an act of construction or destruction for sheer pigheadedness, should be brought to the forefront of our escapist fantasies. Though the proud, noble mindset of the elf is clearly superior, at this very moment we desperately need that of the dwarf.

Speak for yourself or they'll speak for you

"Our only hope is the minds of kids"

Billy Talent - Red Flag

Ready to quote the same song three days in a row?

Last year, my Corsair Demographic series of posts tried to get at the sort of audience who would inhabit a true persistent virtual world game, a true MMO, which ended with the depressing realization that we will never have such a game, because we lack the chivalrous corsairs to fill it. That whole series started, however, with citing Lord of the Rings Online's decrepit, brain-dead remaining audience as negative example, who ignore 95% of the game they bought in order to log in every day for perfunctory chat participation and maybe running the one single currently popular instance.

The year before that I compared the more mature audience of The Secret World with the much more kid-friendly Warframe, concluding with the depressing realization that the idiot brats were more alive, interested, engaged in their activity and: "I have a request for my generation: Please don't get old."

Last night I got to see the intersection of those posts.

 

I reinstalled LotRO last week (I'm not expecting it to have improved, but can't stay away from Middle-Earth, damnit) and a couple of days ago joined a guild, fully knowing that I'll be kicked out (and banned from the game again) in another few weeks for pointing out gamer stupidity. Last night I was privy to a lengthy conversation between several gamers supposedly in their forties and fifties.

They complained about LotRO's decline, about the death of fellowship maneuvers and the unsatisfying end-game timesink. They rightly pointed out that the rest of the playerbase unjustly restricts instance groups to only half the classes, and that some classes like the burglar or loremaster desperately need their old functionality back. They argued about the merits of PvP. They reminisced, for hours (I had time for my one-hour teleport to cool down) about other old MMOs, about the classes they played and the battles they fought in DAoC and the combat sytem in AoC, about the likelihood of Camelot Unchained becoming vaporware for over-reaching, about a myriad old WoW-clones and other MMOs, about D&DOnline, Final Fantasy and games I've never even heard of, minutely dissecting the pros and cons of their group content, including how they motivate players to run said content.

It was one of the most comprehensive discussions on MMOs I've ever seen crop up spontaneously. Even I was impressed.

There was, in fact, just one, exactly one pertinent topic which never arose, the whole time they sat in their rocking-chairs griping about how they don't make 'em like they used to.

None of them ever bothered suggesting they actually get a group together and DO SOMETHING!

The Corsair Demographic, Part 0: Not Thou, Luxurious Slave!

"Ours the wild life in tumult still to range
From toil to rest, and joy in every change.
Oh, who can tell? not thou, luxurious slave!
Whose soul would sicken o'er the heaving wave;
Not thou, vain lord of wantonness and ease!
Whom slumber soothes not—pleasure cannot please—"

Lord Byron - The Corsair



The Lord of the Rings Online is dead. Granted, this will come as news only to the troglodytic woses who still inhabit it and not to the noble Eldar who undertook their journey away from it in ages past. Well into its second decade now, LotRO has languished in MMOs' eventual and perpetual state of undeath for the last decade or so. The Rise of Isengard expansion revitalized it briefly in 2011 by some appropriately complex fights, but every patch after that slid farther downhill into meaningless reputation / gear farming via ever more oversimplified simplicity and ever lengthier timesinks. The litany of features removed or trivialized into irrelevance in order to make the game more "accessible" (to retards) makes one wonder what if anything at all could remain.

The answer of course is that despite having long since shed any value as a team RPG, LotRO's been largely kept afloat by its Tolkien license, profitable enough an intellectual property in its own right to justify the development team in striking out on its own after WB had had enough of milking the game as cross-promotional material for those vomitous Hobbit maladaptations.
I had hoped and cautiously predicted that the split would motivate the developers to better groom their now sole cash cow.
I also predicted that it would not matter, given that LotRO's long years of catering solely to cretins had hollowed it of the core of intelligent players who could actually have appreciated any improvements.
I was correct -- unfortunately on both counts.

The new instances feature more AoE attacks to make positioning matter, more adds which make crowd control at least marginally useful, shifting terrain, status effects dangerous enough to keep players from simply healing through everything. The writing, though terrible at times and wildly uneven, does a better job of not raping Tolkien's corpse than it used to. None of it matters; good or bad, you won't find any players above the intellect of a rodent with whom to give this ersatz multiplayer game an honest try. In the past seven or eight years the chat box of the four or five guilds I've tried has either been completely empty or followed a painfully predictable pattern.

"hi"
"welcome"
"hi"
"i like cookies"
"hi"
"welcome to the kin!"
"hi"
"hi"
"i like cookies"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"hi"
"i like pie"
"hi"
"welcome"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"i like cookies"
"hi"
"what's the best weapon?"
"hi"
"welcome"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"hey, has anyone seen PlayerName lately?"
"hi"
"welcome"
"hi"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"welcome"
"hey, has anyone seen OtherPlayerName lately?"
"welcome"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"evening everyone"
"hi"
"i like pie"
"hey, has anyone seen all those other players lately?"
"i like cookies"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"
"hi"

Other MMOs have established the same behavior pattern since the early 2000s: pablum and somnolence peppered with the occasional impulsive pro-social backstabbing. Not a single organized run or other purposeful action in sight. Once MMO gameplay was redefined as simplistic "kill ten rats" endless repetition, it turned out that marketing an entire genre to nothing but brain-dead filth gets you a customer base of exactly that. LotRO just makes a sadder example than most because its subject matter had, for the first few years, attracted a more intelligent nucleus of the right customers in addition to the usual subhuman chaff, attracted people who were in it for more than just the simplistic, repetitive nightly endorphin rush of giant flashing victory signs. Like EVE or City of Heroes, it was once a place where conversations about blue-shifting, bone tensile strength or the intersection of classic mythology and modern pop culture would simply spring up, casually, spontaneously.

And now?
The sole remaining activity of online game "communities" these days seems to be inviting each other and greeting each other, congratulating each other on existing and informing each other of what they had for lunch... and occasionally, awkwardly, visibly avoiding the question of why those other few, more interesting people have lost interest. You would never guess, looking at guild chat for several days on end, that there exists an actual game to be played somewhere beyond that chat box. Were it not for that bare glimmer of activity, you'd never guess the existence of players at all. They log in, chase their cake and log out again, pathetic addicts incapable of doing anything but mindlessly repeating the minimal actions they're prodded into by loot rewards. LotRO has scores of instances instantly available, but if you see more than three or four of them being played on a given week it's a miracle. The grim irony being that online games were originally where we went to escape human degeneracy; in a purposeful interplay of classes, gear and various maps we could find the antithesis of sitting in a cubicle stamping forms and replying to form-e-mails while listening to our coworker tell us about her cat and what she had for lunch and what her cat had for lunch.

For now, I'm just wondering: what would it take to rebuild the persistent virtual world mentality among a new crop of gamers? After all, it's 2020. Fifteen years have passed since graphic MMOs were strangled in their cradle by World of Warcraft, and a new generation is now growing into their high school and university mind-expanding period. They may wish to rebel against the previous generation's choice in "entertainment" - but where might they come by an alternate mindset?

I've talked at length here about the sort of world an MMO should be, but less about the necessary mentality of those who would inhabit it. To seek the antithesis of mindlessly repetitive instant gratification, bringing back the nineties just won't be enough. We have to go farther back, much farther, beyond the internet, beyond dungeons, dragons and Tolkien, to the era which defined our concept of escapist fantasies marketed to polite urbane audiences: to Romanticism. So, in order to wrap my head around what kind of audience would want to be plot devices instead of heroes I'm going to build the next three or four posts on this topic around lines from Byron's immortal Corsair... or mostly from the scene-setting first canto, and not from the bulk of Conrad's largely tedious personalized palpitations.