LotRO Update – More Questing Quandaries
I have been playing a great deal of LotRO lately. It has been a nice relaxing journey for me. I was drawn in through the anniversary deal they were running and being in the Nazgun Kinship has given me a community to socialize with. In the last month, I have leveled my elf minstrel all the way to level 40. I have not been speed leveling but enjoying the sights and sounds of the world. I probably will not even head into Moria until I finish up all the end game content. There has been next to no stress on me in this game at the moment. As for if that will continue when I hit level cap remains to be seen.
Over the past two weeks, I touched a little on some of the questing flaws in the game. While I can understand them wanting people to work together, the risk vs reward for them does not make it worth it. I would ask about specific group quests in my kinship chat but the response will always be "Oh, I never did that in any of the characters I leveled" or "Just skip it and come back to it when you are level 60" or "Just find a level 60 to run you through those, no one groups for that."
In this, it seems like it is a fundamentally flawed system. Or perhaps it is not the system itself which is flawed, but the thinking in the minds of the players. Vanilla WoW had the problem of long chains of group quests and... no one did them. Especially now when leveling, no one does them. And those quests are some of the best quest chains in the game. These problems were fixed in Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King in that all the quests chains would be solo quests up until the last quest in the chain which would be a three to five man group quest.
It is sad but true that most people do not enjoy leveling anymore. Personally, leveling is my favorite part of the game but I feel that I am in the minority. With developers today putting so much emphasis on being at the level cap, most players just want the path of least resistance. When you have multiple chains of group quests you could do or do a bunch of solo quests that give just as much or even 50% less experience, most people will choose to bypass the group quests and just go with the solo quests. While often times the group quests will give good item rewards, the gear will just be replaced in a few levels anyway. The solo quests can often be completed much faster and will give a higher amount of experience per hour, which is all most people really care about.
Either way, the level cap discussion is something for another blog post someday. I just wonder how you are supposed to get people to stop and smell the roses and actually complete all the content. So many of the zones while leveling are so great, but we as players would rather spend the vast majority of our time playing in a handful of end game zones.