Respectfully, I have to disagree with some of what you said… I don’t mind end game being a challenge, or even difficult.
Because the end game has always been in instances and raids. I don’t mind raids being challenging. I dont mind 3/6mans being challenging. Cause they are content you can typically choose to do or not, you need a group to do them, and they have the tier system that lets you select how difficult you actually want it.
Thats a good, healthy system to introducing challenge to the system.
And that meshed very well with the otherwise relaxed/chill nature of lotro. Because before mordor, Turbine/SSG/Whatever they are now, did a fairly admirable job at balancing and spacing out the challenging aspects amongst the fun and relaxing stuff to keep playability and fun high, while keeping a sense of satisfaction by overcoming the challenging bits.
Landscape wasnt a cake walk, unless you were ridiculously overeveled, but it wasn’t a torture session either. Any class could get through their landscape quests with an acceptable amount of challenge.
But then Mordor came in, and you couldn’t solo landscape unless you were one of the chosen classes, with Hunter being the king of them, because their DPS was insane, and they were range, so they could power down anything without taking damage. A poorly equipped hunter was solo survivable, when a very well equipped not-hunter could barely survive, if survive at all.
Mordor landscape wasn’t fun, it wasn’t a challenge. it was just naked brutality for brutality sake. They listened to a vocal minority that hadn’t played the game for long, comparatively, and wanted to turn lotro into a souls-like difficulty game, at the expense of all the people who had made lotro their evening stable for a decade+. and they lost players because of it. It really changed lotro from a fun way to spend an evening, to a way to ruin your evening because you just want to do these handful of landscape quests without having to deal with generic orc 37 that’s as strong as a 3/6 man miniboss (slight hyperbole).
I dont know if they’ve re-balanced the areas since then, or introduced mechanics to take the edge off, or what. I hope they did. I hope they’ve brought the fun and play-ability back so new players don’t hit the same wall that destroyed a generation of players, but no matter what changes they may or may not have made… ultimately, I just cant see myself ever mustering desire to play lotro again… and that saddens me as much as the state of the game that made me quit to begin with.
I don’t want to even think of how many thousands of hours i poured into lotro over a decade of almost nightly play. Thats too terrifying a number to ever think about, lol.
I love lotro. I played it for 10 years. From release, until mordor.
I was madly inlove with lotro. It was a beautiful game. the only MMO where you actually read lore and quest text and anything else, because of how immersive it was all… and the game was perfect (before mordor). Casual, relaxing, but challenging in all the right places.
and the community was just absolutely amazing. Kind, considerate, helpful, generous. Like you said, i think the average age of lotro players was over 40… Until there was there was some issue with WoW that caused a lot of WoW players to immigrate to lotro… Then chat got less friendly, and more obnoxious, and the community got less kind, and less helpful… cause all the kind helpful people got burned by the jackholes being jackholes… Still a pleasant community overall, but no where near what it was before that WoWpocalypse.
My love and faith in the game changed with Mordor, though… Mordor broke me, It was just so pointlessly difficulty spiked on even the landscape mobs were slaughtering raid-ready players, that most of my kin, myself included, ended up just quitting the game. A few people eventually got the gang back together again for southern mirkwood, but that mordor level of difficulty was still there. No one in the kin, except for the hunters and the champions, seemed able to even 1v1 the landscape mobs. that also reflected group content… no one wanted anything but healers and hunters. was the same with mordor, but even worse with southern mirkwood. Mobs were so dumbly overpowered that only the lotro character equivalent of tactical nukes were wanted in groups… I, sadly, was not a tactical nuke class.
It really breaks my heart. I loved that game. I made great real life friends in that game… I met my Ex in that game (though in retrospect that probably shouldnt be viewed as part of the happy memories lol), Spent so many evenings bullshitting in voice chat while we did instances and group content, or just ground out old content for deeds. Was such a magical fucking experience, that I’ll probably never experience again for the rest of my life. The pre-mordor game was absolute perfection. Especially with the revamps to some less ideal/polished game areas like Moria.
And killed, to me, because devs listened to a vocal minority that wanted moar harderer.
Lemmy constantly falls into the same social trap as reddit: that we think we’re some monolith of consumerism and when we believe something we think everyone else will be on our side.
I dont know why you are whinging about this when literally no one is making this claim. In fact, we are talking about the exact opposite of it.
Go on YouTube and look up the hundreds of videos from the past few months alone of scalpers and other Pokemon buyers getting into actual physical fights, buying literally 10+ of those huge box sets, and camping out at those vending machines and buying literally everything in them the minute they restock.
I’m a vendor at comic and anime conventions here in the US. I did a show last month that was literally 99% Pokemon cards and merch, and everyone was buying that shit up regardless. There were actually maybe five booths including my own that weren’t selling just Pokemon stuff, if at all.
Yes, thats the legions of people we were talking about, before you came in with this weird tangent.
and none of it matters, cause they have literal legions of fans that will ride their ride, no matter how much it costs, no matter how poorly made it is, no matter how much nintendo spits in their face.
So Nintendo sees no significant economic repercussions from their behavior, and thus has incentive to change.
No one should own an Ubisoft game. Its a company thats at the top of the list with Nintendo as far as the level of hatred and vitriol they have for their own paying customers goes.