Elliot ‘Avon’ Gilman released a Developer Diary covering a subject that was actually brought up in our recent interview with Turbine, which is the change of reputation items into consumable items. Why is that a big change? Well, now instead of finding Mathoms, War Dispatches, or any other reputation item and having to hold onto them until you get to a barter vendor, you will be able to instantly use them to instantly gain reputation once Update 5 is released. No more travel. No more quests to unlock tiers of reputation items. The downside? Well, many NPC’s found their jobs no longer necessary and have been let go. Don’t feel bad though, I’ve heard that there’s an ever-expanding workforce at Isengard that is always looking for new recruits.
There are also some Questions and Answers within the diary which explain what happens if you try to use an item with a faction for whom you’re already ranked Kindred, if you’ll be able to sell/trade spare reputation items, if you’ll still need stacks of reputation items, etc. I encourage everyone to take a look them as they do answer some key questions and it won’t take much time to do so. I have to give this change a big thumbs up. What about you?
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December 8, 2011 at 3:05 pm
Not bad, theoretically I won’t even have to leave the Auction House anymore lol
December 8, 2011 at 9:01 pm
LOL, no kidding. Not a bad situation.
December 8, 2011 at 3:09 pm
It’s pretty nice, though by answering the question about my Moria items it left me a little confused as to what would happen to the ones I have already. It also kind of goes against the point of a reputation builder too (you’re giving a war dispatch to a faction to help them out, thus increasing how they feel about you), but I think I prefer it this way.
December 8, 2011 at 3:41 pm
I wondered the same thing about the Moria items. Perhaps they’ll leave an old-item NPC in place for a while… they still do have some for the old crafting components.
December 8, 2011 at 9:02 pm
From what it sounds like they Moria items seem like you’ll have a choice when using them to either get Guards or Miners faction. This one sounds like it might actually take a bit more time to use the items depending on if there are dialogue boxes or not.
December 8, 2011 at 3:20 pm
Be nice if they could add something as basic as Eliza to the NPCs. And why are there so few children in Middle-earth? A few hobbits, but all the other races appear to be dying out. Even the hobbits aren’t sustaining themselves.
December 8, 2011 at 3:24 pm
Freeing up inventory space is always a good thing.
December 8, 2011 at 3:41 pm
My first thought exactly!
December 8, 2011 at 4:04 pm
And vault space! And shared storage space! It sounds good all around.
December 8, 2011 at 4:18 pm
I had the same thinking: finally I will be able to free space both in the inventory and in the vaults… excellent!
December 8, 2011 at 4:17 pm
Sounds alright, but are we going to have to click through a stack of 100 items that we used to be able to turn in with 10 clicks? That’s a lot of clicks!
December 8, 2011 at 4:33 pm
My thoughts exactly. I give it a week before people are complaining about that (unless, like a potion, it’s instant, but unlike a potion, it has no cooldown). I, for one, didn’t mind having to get to the places to use them, because of the mere fact that I COULD save them up when I wanted to use them.
December 8, 2011 at 4:38 pm
My impression is that you can use them on the spot, the moment you pick them up looting a mob drop.
December 8, 2011 at 4:43 pm
Exactly. Read the entrance in the developer diary where it states it can be used when picked up: no need to stack 10 or 5 or whatever, you use it on the spot and get a free slot at the inventory. Plus, you still can save them, mail them, sell in the auction hal… all is explained in the link
December 9, 2011 at 11:37 am
Yes, I already read all of that, but none of it addresses my concerns.
It won’t free up an inventory slot if you are still working that zone, because the next mob you kill, you’ll need room for the rep item. So whether the slot is empty or has a stack in it, you need to dedicate room in your bag for that rep item. Now, if they would consolidate rep items so that there was one type per zone instead of three, that would help.
Saving, auctioning, and mailing them is nothing new.
December 9, 2011 at 11:34 am
That would just spread the clicking out over time. But, I’m not going to have my inventory open so that whenever I get a rep item I’ll be able to click it that second. I’ll let them pile up a bit, and click through a bunch at once.
I won’t have to travel anywhere, but that is offset by multiplying 10 times the work to turn in. Thing is, when I turn in, I often want to buy a faction reward that my new rank has opened up. So I’ll still often need to travel.
December 8, 2011 at 5:32 pm
That’s true, but that kind of brings us back to the first comment. What if you buy 100 on the AH?
Do you then have to stand there and click that stack 100 times (and what’s the cooldown, if any)? Or would you click it once and it’d apply all of them (or until you max out)?
I don’t know, I think it’s a fair concern
December 8, 2011 at 6:47 pm
You can put it in your quickslot bar and then keep bashing the keyboard, that would at least spare your mouse-finger
December 8, 2011 at 9:03 pm
Good tip!
December 8, 2011 at 5:59 pm
this will save so much time of going back and forth between rep npc’s and back to farming the rep items
December 8, 2011 at 6:16 pm
Macro keyboard and a stack of items save the nintendo-thumb being transferred into the mouse finger.
If they provide the same net rep gain as the npc’s then there’s no reason not to just keep the npc’s in game. Though some npc’s sell travel to skills, thorins hall and bree for example, so would have to stick around for that unless those travelskills are shunted elsewhere for cash.
December 8, 2011 at 6:52 pm
For the most part, the Faction Vendor is a separate NPC from the Reputation Item Barter Vendor. Only the Reputation Item Barter Vendor will be going away; the person for whom you buy stuff – the return to skills & mounts – will remain in-game (this vendor might be given the additional job of handing out intro quests, but the dev diary is a bit contradictory on this point).
Some of the people going away include
-Nethur (Rangers of Esteldin)
-Imyl (Elves of Rivendell).
-Eustoma Muddybanks (The Mathom Society).
Overall, I think it’s a good change.
December 8, 2011 at 9:56 pm
I always hated that snotty Imyl. I hope she goes to Helm’s Deep and gets lost in the battle
December 8, 2011 at 10:59 pm
GASP! All that travel to the rep barter NPC. Thank god they are continuing to simplify and dumb down all effort required for advancement in the game. So presumably you can now take a level 10 alt and use up all those extra rep items and advance to kindred with never having visited any of those places. Why not I guess. I suggest they give us various ‘summon NPC’ skills and portable crafting stations too, so whatever we need to craft, purchase, etc. is always right at our fingertips. No more need for towns, camps, cities, or (cringe) manual travel. The quest giver NPCs shoudl just materialize before us as the quests become available, or just pop up in a menu, so no more having to travel to a lazy NPC somewhere to get a quest. And of course, there will have to be an automatic “travel to quest location” option within each quest description. Yeah yeah, enough sarcasm. I’ll quit before i give them any more ideas to implement later.
December 9, 2011 at 1:39 pm
I think most of them have at least an introductory quest that has to be done first so you would still have to travel there first before using all the following items.
December 9, 2011 at 4:09 am
Wonderful! I love the idea of being able to use these items as you get them rather than having to take up bag space and stop what you are doing to go drop them with a NPC somewhere else.
I am concerned about the potential for increasing crime rates in some areas as unemployed faction vendors roam the countryside, robbing hapless travellers.
December 9, 2011 at 7:42 am
Every time one of these “improvements” (and I use that term advisedly and sarcastically) occur they are destroying another facet of the immersion and community of the game.
All types of teleporting (milestones, maps, instance panels, skirmish panels, raid panels, *consumable* rep items, etc.) break down community interaction and run counter to immersion. Every time they make quests not need more than one person, every time they add something to the Store (like recipes) that don’t encourage people to save and share the ones they find (because in game would be the only source). Every time you can buy the game instead of play the game. Even the housing neighborhoods were designed to break down community and isolate people instead of bringing them together (ok maybe they weren’t *designed* to do that but the effects are the same).
It makes no sense to find a well-kept mathom in the Trollshaws and have it magically make the Mathom Society like you more. Sad.
December 9, 2011 at 10:15 am
Exactly. Also add the “easy-fying” of crafting to this list (and if I took 30 seconds or so to ponder, I’m sure I could add even more). If they keep going down this road, we just as soon be playing WoW — I *would* like to make a goblin shaman…
December 9, 2011 at 1:47 pm
This sounded very nice at first until I read the comments and thought more about it. Now I think I would have been happier just to be able to turn in partial stacks instead of having to wait until I had 5-10 of them. It is always a balance between immersion and convenience. It is similar for me to the mount/dismount change, I really like the faster mounting, but I don’t like the dismount where the mount disappears before any actual dismount.
December 9, 2011 at 10:12 pm
I’m honestly not sure how I feel about this. The idea of not having to hold on to items until you have a stack is nice. But now you don’t even have to go visit the relevent faction to get rep with them? That doesn’t seem right somehow. Plus now the intro quests are gone – in the whole scheme of things it’s not a big loss but the xp boost was useful while levelling.
December 12, 2011 at 10:28 am
The other question I have is – will the level requirements go away? I have a huge pile of Wardens of Annuminas tokens in the bank since my first two characters through hit kindred way before leaving Evendim. Can my lower level alt now use all those tokens? That would be a nice feature.