LORTO Revisited
After playing The Lord of the Rings Online a bit longer, I can update my original impression. There is one thing that really stands out from other games I’ve played: they’ve changed the treadmill. They haven’t actually removed the treadmill, but it’s a start. The way they’ve done this is quite simple, yet effective. The experience point rewards one gets for completing quests is much larger than the the experience one is likely to make killing monsters for the same duration of time. The rather immediate effect of this is that one spends one’s time completing quests rather than camping a spawn point. Now, doing an endless series of quests isn’t a perfect solution by a long shot. There’s only so many variations of “fetch this” and “kill that” one can go through before it starts feeling repetitive. However, it has far more staying power than killing the same monster over and over and over again (or even different monsters, for that matter). So cheers to the designers. Good call.