T w e n t y S i d e d

I played several hours in Lord of the Rings Online this past week, and learned *something else* new. The game has had a 64-bit client for several years. *BUT* apparently they only made 64-bit *servers* available like, last month. Standing Stone started encouraging everyone to transfer to the new servers; they even offered a free server transfer. (If you don’t play MMORPGs regularly, this is one of the standard purchases that every MMO with more than one server offers. It’s one of the reliable money-makers. Because people want to play with their current friend group or active guild, you know.) I find it very interesting that the new servers give a pretty accurate measurement of the current population. I mean, other than what the developer claims, which may or may not be accurate. LOTRO has been considered a decently-populated game for an older legacy MMO, operating dozens of servers as recently as only a year or so ago. Under the 64-bit schema, SS is offering one RP server (role-playing), one non-RP server, and one “Legendary” server (I don’t know anything about those) in North America and Europe, for a total of six servers. This actually puts LOTRO on par with Star Wars The Old Republic which has six servers as well, although they aren’t divided by role. Since transferring to the new server, I have in fact noticed much-improved performance and the occasional improved texture. I assume there are other improvements I have not noticed.

The last several quests in the Swanfleet area cover most of the north. There actually were several quests in that delta area, but the intention was to move you to the Caras Gelebren area. Caras Gelebren is LOTRO’s interpretation of Ost-in-Edhil, the city of Celebrimbor where the Nine Rings given to Men and Seven Rings given to Dwarves, and in some tellings the Three Elven Rings as well, were crafted. While the original backstory to this new introduction is the treachery of Saruman and the presence of the Uruk-hai, this region introduces the “bigger” story that we’re shadowing in this part of the game. After completing Swanfleet we spend a bit of time in Tharbad where we meet a messenger from Rohan and Boromir on his way to Rivendell. Our character will spend the next part of the story traveling with these two and, I would guess, learning more of the backstory. The initial launch of the game focused very heavily on the events of the The Lord of the Rings films augmented by the books. As the game has grown well-beyond those films (and having adapted many locations from The Hobbit nothing was affected much by the release of those films…same for The Rings of Power) more information from sources such as The Unfinished Tales and various letters has been implemented to fill out the world. In that regard this new area is certainly superior to the original new character events.

Tharbad can be seen on the Swanfleet map as sitting astride the Old South Road as it crosses to the area to the West. That area is Cardolan, the southern area of the former Numenorian kingdom of Arnor. Much like Swanfleet this area is made up of small communities of men and Hobbits, although men are more numerous than Hobbits here. Like the rest of the West there is no unified hierarchy or law beyond the local. The Shire probably had the most advanced and largest government of Eriador in this era. Tharbad, a formally-fortified river crossing, more of a collapsed fort and ruined bridge now, is occupied by trolls. You will have several quests here crossing the area, and will return here for more quests from the first camp you reach beyond. The location is unnamed on the map, called Stonecrop Encampment in the game, and is traveled to via Stablemaster under the name of “Tharbad.” I’m still working out of this area although I have already visited the town of Herne to the Northwest. The “Epic Storyline” is just out of my experience range at this point, requiring a level in the mid-twenties while I’m barely over twenty at the moment. LOTRO has never done a “level squish” like World of Warcraft, so you can still reach something like 140 or even higher; it’s been a while since I looked it up.

I’ll be with my parents out-of-state for a few days, not this coming week, but the next. That shouldn’t affect my posting at all, but I was prompted to re-install Star Wars The Old Republic on my laptop so I can keep up with the current Galactic Season (had another week of only three events that didn’t require grouping; I definitely shouldn’t have mentioned my good look a couple of weeks ago.) Back when I was trying to get Linux installed and working I covered the process needed to install and launch SWTOR successfully, but it didn’t work this time. I installed the game in Steam, but there was a change this time. Steam now allows an account to be logged in across multiple devices. As I still had Steam loaded on my PC, Steam wanted me to “stream” the game from the PC. That’s not what I wanted, though; so I cancelled that process and changed the launch options to install the game locally. It did, but it copied the files from my PC (you’ve probably come across that setting before, and may not have even known that it worked like this.) This was actually a bit slower than installing over the internet, it turns out; most likely because of how the game is installed on a slower hard drive on my PC. Talked about that recently. When I launched the game, it kept saying my Steam app was off-line. This is apparently a fairly common issue that can occur after certain events, but nothing I tried from the solutions I found online worked. However I did find a couple of references to installs from local computers frequently causing problems. The only solution was to re-install anyway, so I uninstalled the game, shut down Steam on my PC, and re-installed the game locally on my laptop.

And got exactly the same result.

As nothing notable had changed, I was flummoxed. This was an install that had previously worked (there were other problems to solve; you can go back and read my initial struggles with Linux for an idea). A short check of the problem on-line indicated no *new* information. My eventual conclusion (without checking previous journals) was that I must have installed the game on my laptop through Lutris. I couldn’t remember. That sounds like the kind of thing I was doing more often early on. So I committed to doing that, but first I noticed I had several updates in the software manager so I fired that off first. I didn’t notice anything noteworthy in the updates, several system utilities, but I *was* notified that the system needed a restart, so I missed something important. But after the restart I loaded Steam back up and went to the library to uninstall SWTOR again. I was stopped because launching Steam had queued and started some updates that I thought had already run (various Proton versions, I think.) So, just for the heck of it, I started Star Wars The Old Republic to see what it would do, and *this* time it first installed some Windows libraries. Then started just fine. I honestly don’t know if the system update did it or the reboot, or maybe both, but the game ran fine.

Once the laptop was available I did the update on my PC. Since I accidentally left my VPN going, this update went quite a bit slower and I noticed there was a Linux system update and a Linux firmware update. So important things *did* get loaded. I strongly suspect the reboot after the install fixed more things as far as the game goes.

I always marvel at how poorly a 3D environment comes across in a screenshot. It never looks the same as seeing it in person. In the picture above we’re looking at the ruins of Tharbad from “the other side” after crossing. Hours were spent in that old fortress firing arrows at trolls, scouting locations, and collecting various lost supplies. Getting through this area, Cardolan, appears to end in Bree. That concentrates all story-lines into the trip to Rivendell, and from there following the general story-line of the books and movies. Except, of course, the game now has many, many other things you can do other than follow the movie, or beyond following the movie. I suspect something that messed up my most advanced character from years ago was a desire to get to Moria (that region had only been released a year or two earlier) as quickly as possible. I somehow ended up in the Far Downs, Arthedain, Angmar, and even way up North. I don’t even remember how, now.

Speaking of updates, I recently went back through all those Thai car show/dancing YouTube vids and created a playlist. I decided to do that right after YouTube rolled out their new interface and back-end, so once I queued up 88 videos to scan my laptop was CRAWLING. It only took about 4 1/2 hours.

And finally, weird names from Star Wars The Old Republic:

I don’t think there is any confusion what this alt is used for. That’s it for now, see you next week!

Paige Francis He/him