Endgame Viable

I completed a second Book in LotRO over the snowy weekend. Last time we rescued Laerdan and found half of that elusive ring Narchuil. After Laerdan stormed out of the council meeting, Elrond asked me to talk to him. Laerdan believed the rest of the ring could be found in the (presumably dead) hands of a captain whose ship sank somewhere in the north. He asked me to meet a dwarf friend of his in Forochel, because he wanted to stay and patch things up with the Elves. Typical. I always have to do the work. (960 words.)

I’m a little miffed that I’ve run out of level 58 quests in the Dravanian Hinterlands only about halfway to level 59. Alphinaud and [redacted] stopped talking to me about the Main Scenario almost immediately after I ascended to level 58 and entered Idyllshire, which is apparently the new Mor Dhona. They now want nothing to do with me until I get to level 59. So I did every level 58 quest I could find around Idyllshire and the Hinterlands, mostly involving the gobbies’ loony adventures building their city government. After that, I followed two racist refugees from Uldah in their misadventures of gobbie mistrust. I thought for sure that somewhere in those quests I would unlock Saint Mocianne’s Arboretum, which is clearly marked as a dungeon on my map, but nope. That blue dungeon icon is still there, and I guess I’m supposed to pretend I can’t see the rather obvious entrance. (442 words.)

Turns out this was the only screenshot I took. As part of my continuing efforts to catch up in LotRO, I played through another Book in the Epic Story. In the last book, we were looking for a ring called Narchuil, which is pronounced quite differently from the way it looks, according to not-Ian McKellen Gandalf in the voiceovers. (It’s something like “Nar-wheel.”) (692 words.)

I know blog readers don’t care about videos, but I wanted to record my Top 10 game videos from 2016 for posterity. One day I decided to click on that Analytics tab on YouTube and found there was actually some information there, like which videos people watched. YouTube ranks videos by watch time, not views, which I suppose indicates that these are the videos that people actually stuck around to watch the most, for some inexplicable reason. (493 words.)

In the most shocking news heard since WildStar announced they were going free-to-play, Daybreak revealed they will be closing down Landmark in February. I bought one of the $99 Founder’s packs. I don’t exactly remember why, but I remember seeing that video showing them digging holes in the ground and thought that was pretty dern cool. It turned out to be the most ill-advised game purchase decision of my entire life to date. To this day it informs my Early Access buying decisions. Thanks to Landmark, I made a rule that I won’t take a chance on an unknown Early Access game unless it sells for $10 or less. (795 words.)

Last night I only had time to play one game, so I decided to play some FFXIV again, as part of my as-yet unannounced goal of catching up with the Main Scenario before the expansion arrives. I was stuck at a point in the Main Scenario where the next quest requires level 58, but I was only at about 57.8. So I thought I would do a few quests to start getting a feel for my character again. (496 words.)

Here’s a chart I just made showing all my Steam purchases in 2016. I computed the cost per hour for playing each game, based on the price I paid for the game and the number of hours I played (according to Steam). In this way I came up with a list of games sorted by best entertainment value. If the cost per hour came out more than the purchase price (such as Bastion which came out to $37/hour), then I capped it at the purchase price. It didn’t make sense to me for the mathematical cost to be more than the actual real world cost. (1017 words.)

Here’s my annual summary of MMORPGs that are on my radar for the new year 2017. Here is last year’s post. I am only considering “classic” style MMORPGs in this list, not things like MOBAs or brawlers or Diablo-clones or whatever else people call MMOs these days. If it’s not on this list I either forgot about it, don’t know about it, don’t count it as an MMORPG, or haven’t heard enough good things to bother investigating. Unless otherwise noted, I have not backed or bought any of these games yet. (1451 words.)

I’ve been dabbling in The Elder Scrolls Online again. Last time I played it for any length of time was in the two months after it launched, April 2014. It’s one of the better MMORPGs if you didn’t know, undoubtedly in the Top Five. (Obligatory warning that it does not in any way resemble the single-player Elder Scrolls games.) Visually, I would probably rank it second behind Black Desert Online for the best-looking MMORPG out there. (1158 words.)

It took a little more effort to calculate my most-played games in 2016, because I changed PCs in the middle of the year. But the results are now in, and the number one positions were just what I guessed they would be. (This data was gathered on December 24, 2016. I’ve pretty much only played Morrowind since then, although I played a couple hours of Elder Scrolls Online as well.) (363 words.)