Postcards from Middle Earth, 17 November



Autumn Festival

Well long time, no post. My life has been going through some pretty huge changes that left me little energy for blogging. I obtained British citizenship but have ended up moving to Amsterdam.

Anyway, I wasn't playing Lotro as much until the release of RoI as it seemed I need a break. I was playing Rift more. I really enjoyed the look of it and the classes, but in the end the game didn't grab me I think because the story was so incredibly generic fantasy. There just didn't seem to be much of a story. I might go back to the game now and again, but for now I've cancelled my sub since Lotro has been enjoyable again.

A lot has been going on in Lotro again but I thought I'd post about the latest festival. The main thing that happened for me is that I finally got lucky and got the skeleton horse. :) I won't use it outside of the Autumn festival time most likely, but during it I found it quite cute. I also enjoyed the quest text, as it explains why hobbits would paint up horses.



I also got the newest festival horse as I'm a horse collector. I'll never ever use it though. I suppose in a way it's nice, but the Halloween theme isn't quite for me. A kinnie joked about the moon being over the horse's rear end... that the horse is always mooning people. :P


Any of you who have read this blog know I'm big on getting deeds done as well. :P Festivals always bring those. So there is always a lot of grinding to get the consumable deeds done.

The fall festival has quite a few consumables. I will only end up completing three. It bugs me that I have to wait until next year to get them all done. I didn't grind all the quests every day as I just couldn't face it. I calculated you needed over 1200 tokens just to get the consumables. This doesn't count the tokens needed for the horse, let alone if you wanted to get anything else (luckily I didn't as the dress and cloak were the same theme as the new horse). You normally got around 50ish tokens a day so really, it does not seem possible to get everything done. It's a bit frustrating to have to wait until next year. Also, I feel slightly guilty using these on random strangers all the time. Some aren't bad like the bugs or coveritol, but the black silk gloves that slap people could be seen as rude. I try to target people on horses as the effect doesn't show or afk people in order to cause the least amount of annoyance. I've only had one person show disdain, but generally people pretend to cry or laugh it off. I always apologise then cheer for their good nature.

I very much like that Turbine has given us the opportunity to get consumables as permanent skills, but I wish they'd execute it a bit better. I'd rather still have to pay the same amount of tokens, but just automatically get the skill. Or make the consumables more expensive and require you to use fewer. Given there's a thread that's currently 43 pages long about this, it's definitely a source of annoyance for some people....hence me targeting mounted or afk people now! Though anyone who was hanging around outside the Haunted Burrow was fair game!