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Well Kris and myself finally hit level 50 in Lord of the Rings Online (or “lo”-”tro”, what a stupid name). We’ve been playing it casually since Christmas, and really casually - like maybe a couple of hours a week. It’s quite suited to casual play for leveling, it’s very quest centric and there’s a bonus XP that builds up if you are offline. I think we leveled entirely in bonus XP.

Now we’ve hit 50 though, the kind of realisation hits that you need to finish your character setup - that involves getting equipment, and traits. Traits involve farming NPCs, and the higher traits involve farming stupid numbers of NPCs - like 400+ Yawn, time-sink. The other aspect equipment, is another story. For a decent setup you need a couple of bits of highest-tier crafted, which are expensive as hell (like 5-8g, and 1g takes ~1 hour to farm unless you get lucky drops). The other aspect of equipment is drops from raiding. I dont think it’s remotely like DAoC high end raiding (i.e. Caer Sidi or ML10 dungeon) but still, it’s more raiding.

We’re also going to try out the PvP aspect, which is a little weird. It’s called PvMP (Player vs Monster Player). Which is a battle between the “free people” (the characters you level to 50) and player controlled monster characters. Anyone past a certain level, I think 15, or 20 or so, can make a monster character. These can only be played in the PvMP zone, and I think they rank up, and you equip them from PvMP encounters. I don’t know anything about it really, but I’ll probably post a comparison with DAoC RvR after trying it for a bit. DAoC RvR obviously had much more attachment, actually fighting other people’s main characters, rather than some PvP alt, but we’ll see…