And she fell down into the big Underground....

Lately, I've been playing Minecraft. A lot. When my husband first showed me the game, I thought it was meh, but once I tried it myself, I found it very addicting. The graphics and gameplay are simple, and there is literally no story, dialogue, or (if you in multiplayer mode) combat. All you do is dig. And build your ultimate _________ (<--- Insert whatever you've always wanted to build here).

If you are in single player mode, the concept is simple. You start out somewhere on a randomly generated landmass, with nothing in your inventory. You must find shelter and a light source before nightfall, because soon the monsters will be out. This comic from Penny Arcade best describes the early stages of the game to me.

After a while, I kept deleting and restarting my single players saves because I wanted a landscape that was inspiring and really would challenge me to build something fantastic. When I loaded this world in, I was wowed from the start and have been in love with it ever since. However, being in the shade from the cliffs and grotto means that I have to deal with more monsters than usual, and I have died several times.

Last night, a friend of mine from lotro and I received an invite to play on another lotro friend's multiplayer Minecraft server. We checked it out, and have decided that multiplayer is much more fun than single player. Sure, the game is still in alpha, so the multiplayer mode doesn't at this point have all the functions that single player does, but the general concept is still there. I found it much more fun building things when other people could see what I was building and not only admire them, but offer advice, make their own modifications, and such.

Theories and I are in the process of building a gigantic fortress - which, due to a lack of knowledge about where the rest of the players had started building, is VERY far away from everything else, but we are okay with that. The friend who invited us built a massively long bridge/highway from their village to our fortress, so now we at least know how to get to them if they need us, or we need them. Multiplayer currently has no monsters though, so unless we are suffocating under a pile of sand and need to be dug out, that won't really be an issue....

The Strongest Horse in the World

Up until the release of Enedwaith, the highest amount of hp a horse in lotro could have was 150. Once Enedwaith was released, however, the opportunity to get two new horses with 200 hp. This may not seem like a big deal, but that 50 points could very well make the difference in whether or not you get knocked off your horse while you are riding though dangerous territory.

The only caveat to obtaining both of these new horses is that you have to be at Kindred standing with the Grey Company and with the Algraig, the two new factions. Normally, it takes me weeks to get to kindred standing with any faction, but suppose the thought of a shiny new horse or two had me all excited or something, because here I sit, just eight days after the release of the new area, and I am sitting proudly on my Grey Company horse.

 He is a fantastic blue-grey color with wonderful detailing on all his tack. His mane is also done up in tiny little braids. The name he came with was Hunter's Pride, which I wanted to change to Wolverine in honor of a rather embarrassing episode from a couple days ago, but the game told me that was an invalid choice for a name.   :(

Anyways, now just to push for the Algraig rep, which I know will take much longer, as there aren't as many opportunities to further it and the dailies can only be done, well, once a day. /sigh.

Until then I am content with my new horse, and also in the fact that I am only one of two or three possible people on Gladden right now to have the horse. That could just be because only certain people have announced it, but whatever.

Leaving Moria

So, the other night, Squid and I finally left Moria (I know, I have been slacking severely in my Lore-master chronicles and I can't recall if I even mentioned us going IN to Moria in the first place, but whatever, we left it). She had been refusing to leave Moria until the epic line prompted us to, because, in her words, "Once I leave Moria, I'm not going back." After running all the way east to First Hall, we stood for what seemed like ages at the doorway, just staring out into the last bit of darkness. Squid claimed she was afk, but our burglar buddy, Licentious, suggested that maybe she had Stockholm Syndrome and that perhaps Moria had been so bad to her that she couldn't tear herself away from it. She huffed and puffed at this and claimed that she could leave anytime she wanted to, thankyouverymuch.

So we left. The sunlight outside was bright and stark after the long dark of Moria. The elves of Lorien, of course, were snobby and wouldn't let us in. So we had to run back and forth, carrying arrows and clearing the orc muck out of the Nimrodel before they would let us pass. They are very protective of their realm, and even shot Squid for trying to enter Lorien before they said she could. Heck, they even stuck a couple arrows in me for getting too close to their borders while trying to clear out orc muck.

Finally, we had done enough menial demeaning work to satisfy the elves, and they let us into Lorien. As we rode our horses down the pathway, with twilight just coming on and the last bit of sunlight fading away into blue duskiness, Squid couldn't help but exclaim how beautiful everything was. I had to agree with her. Lorien has always been one of my favorite places. We ran around performing more tasks for the elves, helping them keep the forest alive and well, like in this screenshot, where we are singing to the sick trees. Apparently, in Lorien, that helps.

Eventually we had done most of the quests that didn't involve a lot of killing and resorted to outlandish acts, simply to see how far we could push the boundaries. One of the defining marks of Lorien architechture is the construction of Talan, or great platforms high up in the boughs of the Mallorn trees of Lorien. There is a deed to discover all of them, and in the process of climbing up all of them, we discovered that the huge branches can be walked out onto.

This of course led to all sorts of shenanigans, which, inevitably, led to misadventure. The problem with jumping around in branches high up in trees is that you will most likely fall out, and it is a lonnnnnggggg way down. And when you fall a long way, you will die. Which we did, more than once. It was loads of fun though, and in the end, as the sun came back up over Lorien, we called it a night and went our
separate ways, leaving the rest of Middle-earth for another day.

Perhaps eventually we will make our way further east towards Mirkwood, or even south into the wilds of Enedwaith, but for now I am content to sit and relax in the eaves of the Golden Wood.

Dear Turbine,

Dear Turbine,
I will admit, when I first heard you were giving lotro a free to play option I felt a strange sense of dread and uneasiness creep into the back of my mind. I dismissed it, carefully, even after getting into beta and seeing so many things that seemed, in my mind, to break the spirit of what lotro used to be. There were things in the store that shouldn't be there, there were things that cost points to unlock that should have remained open, and the fears that the community would be destroyed hung like a cloud over the beta testers.

Slowly, as beta wore on, my fears gave way into acceptance, and once the free to play headstart launched on the 8th (just last week!), my fears were for the most part relieved, as some of the major issues I had with things I'd seen in beta seemed to have disappeared. Of course, my being a vip subscriber helps alot, I'm sure, as many of the money-grabbing tactics I saw displayed for f2pers in beta do not apply to me.

I will be honest - I am thrilled that you listened to the community on several of the issues that were brought up in beta, particularly the quest dialogue revamp and the reputation horses. However, I do not believe you are ready for free to play. Why do I say this? Because, even though you added new servers and new hardware to handle server stress, I have not been able to enjoy the game for the past three days because it has been such an outright lag-fest. I know you are working on it (at least, I hope you are), and part of me is thrilled that so many people have flocked to this game, which, over the past two years, I have grown to know and love. Most of me, however, is still upset at the fact that I, today, cannot even get into the game, and have been sitting in a queue for upwards of thirty minutes now, waiting to get into a game that will be so laggy it will be unplayable. I am paying you good money every month for a product that is supposed to work, that is supposed to not give me issues. My subscription runs through December, and if I do not see any improvements, though it pains me to say it, I will probably be canceling any further payments beyond that point.

I know the cancellation of one subscriber is no real threat to your company, what with the masses of f2pers and the income they will bring you through your lotro store, and I am happy that your development team may finally be seeing the money they need to bring even more fantastic content to this game. While my cancellation may be no real threat, I want you to seriously consider the workability of your current system. If more and more people cancel, or even if the f2pers stop playing because your game is simply unplayable with so many people on, then how will you make money if no one plays? You will be back in the same boat you were in before. Remember the sayings - one vote can make a difference, one grain of sand can tip the scales, one drop in the ocean can cause a flood? Those are true for a reason.

Be wary, Turbine, and get your act together, or my letter may not be the only one you see. I know you are trying to fix this, at least I hope you are, and I hope whoever monitors the servers warned you about this and didn't blithely assume that everything would 'be ok.'

With regrets,
a disgruntled elf