This week a bunch of my playtime was actually over on Bullroarer and I enjoyed it quite a bit for a number of reasons. I did get in a partial DN run on my Warden but that was relatively routine.
First up was the Beta Stress test on Wednesday which after some initial bumps got off to a pretty decent start. A bunch of us were chatting over Twitter so we were able to join up in game. This was pretty fun as I got a chance to run around with folks I don’t normally get to play with but talk with frequently. They briefly pulled the servers down but only for a few minutes and then left them up for the duration of the event. Nothing too interactive from the devs as I think they were mainly trying to stress test the store and work any of the kinks out of that. It does seem like they’ve worked some things out as it does seem to be more responsive and a bit smoother, but I still think there’s some work to be done. One very cool thing they were testing out was the “Ripcord” capability which allows Turbine disable all Lua scripts globally from the server side. This allows them to maintain control and quickly disable things if they find a loophole or some undesirable script floating around.
After some of the “scheduled” stuff, the group of us just roamed around Enedwaith for a bit checking out the areas.
I took some screenshots and managed to do a little building climbing as well.
One thing I thought was pretty cool is they finally found a home for the old crystal dwarf instances that were pulled from Moria!
I always thought those were cool spaces so I was happy to see them back in. Also, I tried to get a decent shot of the new drakes as those are some pretty cool looking monsters!
Then last night I joined some of the folks from the LOTRO Reporter Network and we ended up running the new Great Barrows instance. We started it more or less on level with the 5 of us between levels 20 and 30. Since we only had 5 we tried dialing it down a couple levels but did struggle a little bit until we brought in a couple big toons to just finish it off. I really enjoyed the new layout of the zone and thought it was a much smoother play through. Sadly my hard drive was having some issues and I ended up losing the Fraps capture of the run. The Instance Join functionality is incredibly convenient as you jump right to the instance and return right back to where you joined the instance from. Also, we only made it through 1 wing of the instance and I had enough of the special skirmish marks to get 1.5 pieces of the armor, so it seems like getting the armor won’t take too many runs through the instance. And I’ll admit I might have missed some of the loot as I was mainly just enjoying the instance. However, playing with folks on Bullroarer really makes me want to have cross-server instance join!