指环王OL：光辉，Turbine的巨大遗憾

原文作者：By unwize
地址：http://pearlsofunwisdom.wordpres ... rbines-great-shame/

The radiance system was introduced with Mines of Moria to build upon the hope/dread system of Shadows of Angmar.

Essentially, certain bosses and environments produce differing amounts of gloom/dread, and unless this is countered with sufficient radiance/hope, your character will take a morale reduction (makes things tricky), at higher levels it causes a stat penalty (makes things difficult), and eventually it forces your character to cower regularly (makes things impossible).

Back in SoA, hope was more an annoyance than anything else. Before major bosses, you just had to remember to pop a consumable Edhelharn token (crafted by Jewellers) to give you a hope buff for the duration of the fight. A few bosses (Thaurlach, Thorog, Mordirith), had the ability to strip these hope buffs, adding a somewhat tedious extra layer of strategy as your fellowship/raid was forced to negotiate its way through various token cooldowns during the encounter.

With MoM, Turbine decided to leverage the hope/dread system as a content gating system, something which I sadly used to praise them for not doing back in SoA. Basically, players can now supplement the hope from Edhelharn tokens with something called radiance. Radiance appears on special armour set pieces, acquired by completing ‘hard mode’ challenges in the various 6-man Moria instances.

Rather than constantly inflating stats like in WoW, this allows Turbine to gate content according to your specific progress through previous content, instead of the actual power of your character. This wouldn’t be a huge issue if the progression was a well balanced and reasonable one, but for various reasons that is not the case:

Due to what can charitably be described as ‘pretty abysmal QA’, a vast number of players exploited their way through the hard mode challenges before they were eventually fixed, months later, in Book 7, which got the system off to a pretty poor start.
At least one of the ‘fixed’ hard mode challenges, the Dark Delvings, is now so difficult and unforgiving that only a small minority of players are able to complete it. I was one of the lucky ones that did it when it was just reasonably challenging!
Completing a hard mode challenge does not guarantee the radiance armour piece for that instance, as only one barter coin drops each time. A fixed group must complete each instance 6 times, so unless you pug and are an extremely lucky roller, you are looking at a minimum of 36 successful instance runs. If you are an unlucky pugger, you could be stuck at this stage indefinitely.
So who cares? Well, up until now, it hasn’t been a huge issue. The only radiance gated content has been the Vile Maw, a liar raid against the Watcher. Anyone can run in there and ‘see’ the content, even if they don’t necessarily survive for every long.

However, Book 8 will see the addition of Dar Narbugud, a large 12-man raid that is the spiritual successor to The Rift of Nûrz Ghâshu, arguably LotRO’s most enjoyable and popular piece of pre-MoM content. The difference between Dar Narbugud and the Rift? DN has strict radiance requirements (160 gloom for bosses, no less), whereas pretty much any level-capped player was good to go in the Rift.

Instead of raiding being a collaborative Kinship activity in which even the most casual of members could partake from time to time, it is set to become a luxury for only the most dedicated of players. Those that have the time and persistence to jump through all of the preceding hoops that Turbine have clumsily constructed for them.

The hardcore Kinships, likely representing a minority of players, will not break step, but casual Kinships, probably representing the majority of players, will feel the strain. They’ll have fewer radiance equipped players, and still fewer radiance equipped alts amongst those players to supplement class balance.

Do we really want LotRO to turn into WoW, where guilds more often exist for raiding first, friendship and kinship second? Ironically, LotRO raiding is becoming less accessible at the exact moment that WoW raiding is becoming more so, as if the negative charge of one is repelling the positive charge of the other, and forcing it from the raiding ‘centre ground’.

Even more bizarrely, Turbine have promised a level cap increase before the end of the year, which will bring this new raid to redundancy a good 6 months earlier than occurred with the Rift. A large number of level-capped players will simply not get to experience this content at the appropriate level, simply because they lack the time to bang their heads against a completely arbitrary restriction that Turbine think will prolong a few subscriptions. For shame, Turbine.

So, the advent of Book 8 will be a bittersweet day in my patronage of LotRO. The day when the first true instance progression was introduced, and the day that Turbine firmly cemented their flag in ‘grind for content’ territory. On that day Turbine, I will love you a little less.

很遗憾，看不懂