Lord of the Rings Online: A Look at Book 8

Szark

MMORPG.com's Donna Desborough takes a look at the upcoming Book 8 update for Lord of the Rings Online.

It's been seven months since the Mines of Moria expansion has been released and we're just about to see Book 8 come to out computers. Where Book 7 took us out into Lothlorien and with Book 8 we'll travel into the depths of Moria.

With every new book comes many small bug fixes and tweaks and Book 8 is no different of course. The character classes have all had small bug fixes and adjustments, but everyone will be happy to hear that none of it is major. The Devs assure me that all of the changes are bug fixes or tweaks that help the characters or stop potential exploits. So good news there. One game tweak that will be brought in that has me a little unsure of is a limitation of how many instances you can enter in an hour. The limit will be five instances and hour and should only apply to raid instances.

With Book 8 also comes the next festival. Turbine has added a couple of things in the festivals this time around. First is the races that can be bet on with tokens. At the location of each race's festival is a Race Master that allows you to use a race token to bet on one of the runners to win. The race master will appear approximately 3 minutes before the race begins and the races are every 10 minutes. The one I think is the most fun is the Hobbit race. After you've placed your bet the 4 Hobbits run from table to table eating their way through the race. First one to the finish line wins of course, but you may miss the end like I did as I was laughing so much at this.

Read more here.

Mrbloodworth

 

An excellent update indeed. There is also the bree-land revamp,  the extended storyline, and the crafting revamp in this update. Also, not sure why you said raid, but there was only one raid added, the rest are simply small fellowship instances.

 

That being said, its good to see turbine continue to add things for all play styles. Frequently.

 

Haggis13

First off, I'm not trying to discredit anything here; I like the facts that MMORPG.com has these reports and that I can glean first-hand information about upcoming Books from them. That said, I find your writing style to be absolutely horrible. Not only is the report riddled with errors in syntax and semantics, but I'm not very fond of the wording either.

 

Examples of syntactical errors:

"Where Book 7 took us out into Lothlorien and with Book 8 we'll travel into the depths of Moria."

(You cannot co-ordinate two sentences of inequal value, i.e. main clause and subclause.)

"With every new book comes many small bug fixes and tweaks..."

(Many small bug fixes and tweaks is plural, so the correct form of the verb is come.)

"First is the races that can be bet on with tokens."

(Same as above)

"...there are 4 raids..."

(As a general rule, any number below 13 that does not specifically refer to an actual mathematical number (i.e. 4 + 1 = 5) is fully spelt out. The reason for this is that all these numbers are monomorphemic; one to twelve cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts, whereas from thir-teen and onwards, there are clearly multiple morphemes.)

 

Examples of semantical errors:

"In here you'll be giant water wheels and puzzles for opening doors."

(Come again?)

"The immense size is hard to convey in just words. Let's just say that there's a falling hazard that could be detrimental to your health."

(This is a tautology or at least borders on it; the semantic notion of a hazard is that it is detrimental to your health -- else it wouldn't be a hazard.)

 

Examples of wording I'm not particularly fond of:

"One game tweak that will be brought in that has me a little unsure of is a limitation of how many instances you can enter in an hour."

(While not particularly ungrammatical, this phrasing would -- in my opinion -- best be changed to something along the lines of that I am a little unsure of.)

"First one to the finish line wins of course, but you may miss the end like I did as I was laughing so much at this."

(I am not exactly sure what you are trying to say here. Is the end easy to miss? What exactly are you laughing at?)

"...you'll fast find out..."

(Obviously, fast being an adverb, this phrase has proper grammar. As it is also possible to find something out in a fast manner, it is not per se a case of 'wrong' semantics. However, this phrasing does imply the actual finding out was fast, rather than it happening early on. That is, it opposes a fact that slowly becomes more apparent to a fact that becomes apparent nearly instantly after the cue that started its becoming apparent. In contrast, a phrasing like you'll soon find out achieves the intended meaning: it opposes a fact that becomes apparent very quickly after it has become relevant to a fact that does not become apparent until it is too late.)

"Into the Foundations of Stone for this one. Here you are in the deep caves of Moria where The Nameless reside."

(This is simply not a very fancy phrasing, especially considering the previous sentence to be so short. Rather, I would make the latter an adverbial phrase for the Foundations of Stone, omitting Here you are altogether.)

"Here you get the joy of not one but two bosses to fight."

(Be careful not to use the same syntactical structure and phrasing all too often; Here you are so shortly followed by Here you get seems a bit unimaginative.)

 

Again, please do not take this as a personal insult. This is solely intended as constructive feedback. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the information the writer provided (although one might start wondering when too blatantly obvious grammatical errors start becoming intrusive to the readers' experience). You might consider re-reading your reports or getting a second opinion before uploading them to the website.

Redline65

English teacher incoming!

Radiohedwig

Originally posted by Haggis13


First off, I'm not trying to discredit anything here; I like the facts that MMORPG.com has these reports and that I can glean first-hand information about upcoming Books from them. That said, I find your writing style to be absolutely horrible. Not only is the report riddled with errors in syntax and semantics, but I'm not very fond of the wording either.


(As a general rule, any number below 13 that does not specifically refer to an actual mathematical number (i.e. 4 + 1 = 5) is fully spelt out.

Spelt is a species of wheat.  The correct word would be spelled.  Next time you get all preachy you might want to use correct spelling yourself.

Hallie_Miles

Originally posted by Radiohedwig

Originally posted by Haggis13


First off, I'm not trying to discredit anything here; I like the facts that MMORPG.com has these reports and that I can glean first-hand information about upcoming Books from them. That said, I find your writing style to be absolutely horrible. Not only is the report riddled with errors in syntax and semantics, but I'm not very fond of the wording either.


(As a general rule, any number below 13 that does not specifically refer to an actual mathematical number (i.e. 4 + 1 = 5) is fully spelt out.

Spelt is a species of wheat.  The correct word would be spelled.  Next time you get all preachy you might want to use correct spelling yourself.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spelt[2]

The correct word is spelt. The next time you get all preachy you might want to use a dictionary first.

Fuerchtegott

Actually, both of you guys are right. One can either say spelled or spelt.

Darq

As touched on earlier, a raid is two or more full groups linked together. There is a single raid dungeon in this update, a single full group dungeon, and two small group dungeons. This is common knowledge, and I really have to question how anyone who's played MMOs for more than a few days could utter the phrase "3 man raid." It is laughable to be honest.

reillan

Originally posted by Icemasta


Oh and yeah, as for the "no major nerf" comment, that's kinda false. Champions are getting nerfed hard once again with a terribly thought nerf, which will basically cause champions to get -30% incoming healing when in their main DPS stance. All other classes that can and will out-dps a champ don't get that and only champ, I found that unfair?

Even though I've got an English degree myself and could heavily comment on the syntax discussion, I've chosen not to simply for this one fact:

The text I quoted above cannot possibly be expressed enough.

The Champion nerf is possibly the biggest nerf to hit any class in the game to date (and this coming on the heels of a Champ nerf in the last book update).  It's a quick fix to a much bigger problem, one which has had countless good (and even more bad) suggestions of how to fix it, all of which would be better than the -30% Incoming Healing debuff.  The fact is that Turbine either doesn't have the time to implement a different fix (which is likely - parent company demands on releases take precedence, unfortunately) or doesn't care enough to look for a better solution.  Regardless, Champions are going to suffer and suffer heavily in this new update.

So, to the author or editor of this article: please at least put in an asterisk leading to some mention of the nerfs.

micona

Originally posted by Haggis13


First off, I'm not trying to discredit anything here; I like the facts that MMORPG.com has these reports and that I can glean first-hand information about upcoming Books from them. That said, I find your writing style to be absolutely horrible. Not only is the report riddled with errors in syntax and semantics, but I'm not very fond of the wording either.
 
Examples of syntactical errors:
"Where Book 7 took us out into Lothlorien and with Book 8 we'll travel into the depths of Moria."

(You cannot co-ordinate two sentences of inequal value, i.e. main clause and subclause.)
"With every new book comes many small bug fixes and tweaks..."

(Many small bug fixes and tweaks is plural, so the correct form of the verb is come.)
"First is the races that can be bet on with tokens."

(Same as above)
"...there are 4 raids..."

(As a general rule, any number below 13 that does not specifically refer to an actual mathematical number (i.e. 4 + 1 = 5) is fully spelt out. The reason for this is that all these numbers are monomorphemic; one to twelve cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts, whereas from thir-teen and onwards, there are clearly multiple morphemes.)
 
Examples of semantical errors:
"In here you'll be giant water wheels and puzzles for opening doors."

(Come again?)
"The immense size is hard to convey in just words. Let's just say that there's a falling hazard that could be detrimental to your health."

(This is a tautology or at least borders on it; the semantic notion of a hazard is that it is detrimental to your health -- else it wouldn't be a hazard.)
 
Examples of wording I'm not particularly fond of:
"One game tweak that will be brought in that has me a little unsure of is a limitation of how many instances you can enter in an hour."

(While not particularly ungrammatical, this phrasing would -- in my opinion -- best be changed to something along the lines of that I am a little unsure of.)
"First one to the finish line wins of course, but you may miss the end like I did as I was laughing so much at this."

(I am not exactly sure what you are trying to say here. Is the end easy to miss? What exactly are you laughing at?)
"...you'll fast find out..."

(Obviously, fast being an adverb, this phrase has proper grammar. As it is also possible to find something out in a fast manner, it is not per se a case of 'wrong' semantics. However, this phrasing does imply the actual finding out was fast, rather than it happening early on. That is, it opposes a fact that slowly becomes more apparent to a fact that becomes apparent nearly instantly after the cue that started its becoming apparent. In contrast, a phrasing like you'll soon find out achieves the intended meaning: it opposes a fact that becomes apparent very quickly after it has become relevant to a fact that does not become apparent until it is too late.)
"Into the Foundations of Stone for this one. Here you are in the deep caves of Moria where The Nameless reside."

(This is simply not a very fancy phrasing, especially considering the previous sentence to be so short. Rather, I would make the latter an adverbial phrase for the Foundations of Stone, omitting Here you are altogether.)
"Here you get the joy of not one but two bosses to fight."

(Be careful not to use the same syntactical structure and phrasing all too often; Here you are so shortly followed by Here you get seems a bit unimaginative.)
 
Again, please do not take this as a personal insult. This is solely intended as constructive feedback. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the information the writer provided (although one might start wondering when too blatantly obvious grammatical errors start becoming intrusive to the readers' experience). You might consider re-reading your reports or getting a second opinion before uploading them to the website.

nobody cares the end .

Xasapis

Why did you quote the whole thing then? To punish us?

Haggis13

Originally posted by micona


nobody cares the end .

 

May I suggest the author as a likely audience?

sanders01

 Couldn't you of just PM'd them to the author of the piece? That, I think, would of been more appropriate. 

iNeoki

Originally posted by micona


nobody cares the end .

Nice trolling, and lots of people care.



On another note, I can't wait for this update to come out, sounds like a lot of fun and some funny scenes to watch of the hobbits racing lol.

 

Haggis13

---

Originally posted by sanders01
Couldn't you of just PM'd them to the author of the piece? That, I think, would of been more appropriate.

---

Aye, I could've. I found this to be easier, quicker, and equally appropriate, though.
 
As for the actual book release, I can't wait either, especially now that they have the teaser screen at the start of the game.

reanor

Oh man, all this bickering. What a bunch of sad people...

pfloydguy84

wow and I thought I was a nerd.

Deathstrike2

It looks like this thread has been trolt.