Chatroom Parallels

Out of boredom at work today, I logged into the Ascendere forums to sneak a look at how the Order was doing. Yes, I still have access. The benefits of being old like dirt (but not older than Grandma Covellia, fortunately) or a "legacy player" as the ATITDians would say.

There were 702 new posts waiting for me.

Wow. A couple random thoughts flashed through my mind. One being that phpBB3 is a damn reliable forum board if it kept a year's worth (the earliest was dated sometime early 2007) of posts flagged as 'new' for me.

Scrolling through most of them found them to be either induction discussions or reports on new areas, and whatever item was found, etc. And a couple of funny logs.

Um, ok. At this point, I had one of those funny feelings which I'm not very proud of, but human enough to admit having. A little surge of black jealousy and bitterness, followed by a tinge of regret. Those that remained had gone on with their lives of making heaps of alts, running mobs, exploring new areas, and generally learning a lot more than I could ever dream of, scoring their moments of successes along the way. Meanwhile, I own absolutely nothing to my name (but a naked pixie with pocket change) in RoD now.

I can never go back.

And that has a certain sting to contemplate.

Well, of course, I can always start all over again, in theory. But I also know that it wouldn't be an endeavour I want to attempt or a worthwhile investment of my time.

Logically, I know that I no longer enjoy the leveling process in RoD. The skills are not thrilling enough for me. I have no clue where to find good leveling mobs. I have been spoiled with the presence of pocket mage/cleric buff/heals following my lowbies. And three storages worth of leveling equipment from A-Z. The vets can all level way faster than I can. And character upkeep is a pain.

The runs have gotten too hard for me as well. Necessitating different classes for special mobs would bring me back into leveling hell. The risk of losing equipment, and/or having to grind favor mindlessly in order to get my corpse back is too off putting. And I'd probably never achieve Geandakin's level of power again because the goalposts have been moved. (Worse, the really old folks have even more inequitable distributions of equipment power to their name.)

Speed of updates was sporadic. Quality of them even more unpredictable - since I mislike areas with no clues and assumptions that we should just kill everything, sac everything, do everything with anything and see if something happens. (And how can I tell apart the good ones from the duds?)

So yeah. Sting of nostalgia, nothing more.

Still, I see some amusing parallels and intriguing differences with ATITD, my new dabbling game of interest.

Reading some of the ATITD forums yielded some unhappy people who had played Tales 1 and 2, but were turned off by levels introduced in Tales 3 and quit.

My suspicion is that the game changed on them. Made it too hard to achieve the same things they were used to achieving. Suddenly they couldn't chase crickets without first having to jump through hoops doing things they didn't enjoy doing in order to get the level needed to unlock the activity. The challenge went up and brought people out of flow and into frustration.

Cue the mirror of my leveling experience with RoD. I can't do it. I seriously cannot. I keep thinking how easy it used to be, and how grindy horrible the current activity I am now engaged in is. I keep mourning the fact that I am now a nobody, no reputation, no recognition. I keep getting unpleasantly surprised at something made more tedious, or stumbling across encounters and areas I no longer recognize, and find it too difficult to learn.

So I am not surprised that they cannot be coaxed back into ATITD once it changed forms either.

Someone asked them why the heck are they lurking around the forums bitching then. Move on.

I suppose that's the commonality of small chatroom games. It's so easy to care too much, and want things changed. Especially when ATITD holds out the vague hope you can, versus RoD's bureaucratic glue trap.

One interesting difference about ATITD is that they have a built-in reset. They change each Telling. No two ways about it.

We can surmise that the change is going to send some people away screaming. But more importantly, I think it might just bring in enough newbies to offset it. You can advertise, and because everyone resets on common ground, enough beginners might decide, why the heck not, and give it a go.

RoD, meanwhile, is accumulating the depression of games that have expansions after expansions built atop it. It becomes too hard to start out as a newbie. There's too much content to ever hope to learn or master. Where do you start? Is there some kind of guide?

Honestly, I'm not sure where the hell to start attacking Moria in LOTRO. The patch notes swamped me, because I wasn't keenly interested to know or understand the previous patches before. By being out of touch with CoX for an issue or two, I no longer know what has changed when or where the new content is. It's done half on purpose, because I want to surprise myself again with CoX, but I also run the risk of turning myself off from it if I no longer know where to begin.

No wonder people need straightforward guides.

Personally, I think ATITD is on to something by implementing a level system, even if it's done poorly at present (according to some.) Basically they set up goalposts to follow, so that those who are new have some task to strive towards, and break content up so that it's not intimidatingly plonked onto someone at once.

However, it may just have set itself up to turn a certain group of oldbies off after one Telling. Once they've learned all they can conceivably achieve, they may give up and not want to reinvent the wheel again the next Telling, especially if it got harder to boot.