The Meanings of Words

I decided to fool around a bit with the Notary in LOTRO this morning, giving my toons some surnames that grant character. I've always enjoyed playing around with the rich language that Tolkien created for Lord of the Rings. Most of my toons have some meaning in their names that describes their background or character.

Heren Lokion - As we've said elsewhere on this blog, this is our "translation" of Ordo Serpentis from Latin into Quenya (high elven). "Heren" means Order, as in "Heren Istarion," the Order of Wizards. Interestingly, it's close in spelling to "heru," which means lord, and another translation of "heren" is success, fortune, mastery over. Lokion, I think we misspelled. It should be Lokeon, which is simply the word for snakes made possessive, i.e. "of the snakes." So, Heren Lokeon is "Order of the Snakes" or "Mastery over the Snakes."

Ellote - My main's first name translates to "Star flower" from Quenya.

Avouz - This was a name created via a random letter generator. Avouz was originally a character from D&D Dark Sun realm, so there was no languages to draw upon. However, treating this as an actual Tolkien word produces some interesting results. "Ava" means outside and is used to describe the Void, i.e. Avakuma. "u" is a negative, i.e. "not" or "against." The letter Z does not appear in Quenya that I can tell. Avouz is an Avari prince in LOTRO, so one could argue that his name is from a language that evolved from Quenya and it translates to "Against the Void" or "Not outside."

Saemonades - Taken from the Greek name Simonides. This one is a bit trickier than Avouz was to plug into a Tolkien language. "Si" means now. There is nothing for "mon" although "men" means region. "Ada" is man in Sindarin, i.e. "Adan" or "Edain" in the plural. "Man of the now region?" Or perhaps "Man of this time." Still an odd name for an elf, but no worse than its original Greek meaning "snub-nosed one." His surname is easier, "Mordeion," son of Morde. Morde was the elven spellcaster played by another friend of ours in our very first MERP campaign back in college.

We don't know a whole lot more about Tolkien's languages for the Rohir, Dwarves, and other races, although it is obvious he did do some work in these areas. Still, I'm not sure I want to try to figure out what Stofnar or Maeoden mean in English. I did my own little language game for Nord, claiming that "korath" means child and "nord" means north in Haradric, so he is "child of the north."

Day One - Still tired from the move...

Well, our group has all successfully gotten onto LotRO, even our friend in Thailand. The downloader kept crapping out on him, but he's got it now. Now the fun begins.

The game is visually stunning and uniquly different looking from WoW. We're all enjoying the immersion into Middle-Earth. The sense that events of the Lord of the Rings are unfolding just outside of our vision is great. They did that well. When you play a Hobbit, the tutorial zone has you evading Ring Wraiths at the same time that Frodo is. Win!

The similarities to WoW (and other MMOs) in the UI, quests, and game mechanics are widespread and obvious. The worry here is that it'll feel too much like WoW. It doesn't. The similarities have freed me to enjoy the game while not being too confused about the basic mechanics. I understand basic things like organizing bags, following my map, and drop quests.

Basic fight mechanics are similar: Push buttons in sequence based on your attack options. Combat in LotRO feels, thus far, less hurried. That's a welcome change that I hope remains. WoW combat sometimes felt frantic as I waited to time the GCD & latency to maximize my dps.

Everyone has had a chance to make a few characters & complete the starting zone at least once. We've begun to talk about what roles/characters we plan to use on group activity nights. Just like other MMOs, instances require the trinity of tank, dps, healer. Classes like the Captain also appear to fill "support" roles in groups/fellowships.

I'll probably be our tank. I'm looking hard at the Warder & Guardian. I'll probably end up with 2 or 3 active toons for a while. One for the group, one for just me & the wife and one for pure solo. We'll see. I could never maintain that many active toons in WoW. Expect me to lower that to 1 or 2 after a few months.

More to come...

Brainstorming

A few days away from the game can be a dangerous thing; Leaving me to my thoughts about the game and as a result, I can come up with all kinds of crazy ideas. Here are a few of the assorted ideas I've come up with during this holiday break....

- New zone/instance ideas - People are going to laugh when I tell them the origin of this first idea, but what the heck? I had WoW dream the other night where Avouz was trying to battle his way up a mountain. Occurred to me that might make for an interesting outdoor zone, one whose geography was not based on the horizontal, but the vertical. We've already seen this in instances (Kara, UK, DTK, etc) but not outdoors. With flying mounts and phasing, the idea could have a lot of potential.

A great mountain, held against by the forces of light by whatever villain you want to put in it. Quests would allow your faction to advance up the mountain, unlocking new quest hubs and even flight points. Those with flying mounts could do bombing runs on caves higher up to help the advance. Eventually, you'd have to face off with the boss at the very top.

Obviously, it would need fleshed out a bit, but I still think it's an intriguing concept.

I've also been thinking about a truly underwater instance. BFD was cool, but only small portions of it are actually underwater. I'm thinking one where only a very small portion of it is above, probably as little rest spots to allow casters to eat/drink. Put Naga or Murlocs as the villain. You'd have to find a way to give parties water-breathing for it to work (outside of having specific classes to cast those spells, which Blizz now wants to avoid.)

- Legacy items - One of the coolest ideas Blizz has implemented in Wrath are the legacy items, items that are bound-to-account and scale with level. It occurs to me that this might be the way to go to reward those players who have gone the distance in the past to get one of those rare and near impossible items in Classic Wow.

I'm talking Thunderfury, Quel'Serrar, Chromie's quests for armor, the lvl 60 hunter bow, Anathema/Benediction, and others . Remember all those? Obtaining any one of these items put you in the elite. They were not easy to get, even if you got the necessary drops. There was either a huge and difficult quest chain that followed after, or you were forced to farm incredibly rare items like Elementium, Blood of Heroes, or Abomination stitching, or both.

The release of TBC made all these items nearly obsolete, which I'm sure was frustrating for folks who actually put forth the effort to obtain them. The solution: make them scalable like the new legacy items. Given that the legacy items are roughly equal to a blue of their level, it's not likely they'll trump epic drops from the later Wrath dungeons, but you'd still get to see the fruits of your efforts for a time. Might even give folks a reason to go back and do those quests again, keeping some of the old content still valid.

What do folks think? Is Nord off his rocker or are these actually some pretty good ideas? Comments/criticism welcome.