Last week on my weekly YouTube Creep show, our group was fortunate enough to be on during one of the biggest engagements ever in the Moors and definitely the biggest fight since Rohan’s Release. Starting around 6pm Server time the fight began with one Creep raid vs one Freep raid. This quickly changed when Ivan came on and started making a group the raids doubled to two Creep raids vs two Freep raids. There were also several individuals running around as independents. In total Ivan and I estimate the numbers to be around 60+ vs 60+.
What was really weird was that from 9pm to around 11pm Server Time we had one unbroken engagement which is really weird because usually in the Moors you will have a 20min engagement and then one side will gain the upper hand and the fight will move to a different spot. This fight was so long likely because the spawn points between the two sides was only around 3min and with the ebb and flow the closer you get to one side the faster re-enforcements can make it. This caused the fight to constantly move back and forth between the spawn points but it never stopped and neither side had to retreat to a keep for protection. It was really interesting because this crazy, chaotic experience was Pineleaf’s first time to be in a raid battle. Since this was such a large scale battle it was very hard to control the battle and so Pineleaf now thinks that raids are pure chaos when in reality raids are usually very organized and controlled…I guess we will have to help him get the right opinion moving forward.
Below is a bonus video of Fellowship of the Creeps #7 which takes you right into the aforementioned action.
In the video it is hard to see how big this battle really was so I will try to explain why it seems smaller than it really was on the server. For one thing my computer only displays around half of the entire Freep army because of how deep their line goes. Also for the majority of the video there are also several Creeps behind me that you can’t see. This is because the actual fight had people meeting in the middle like normal but the lines also went really deep into each side, making it hard to show the scale. This also doesn’t even account for respawners and invisible solo characters.
This fight continued on this scale well on into the night after 1pm Server Time. The fight could have gone on a lot longer than that but I was fast asleep well before then and Ivan got off the server around that time so the fighting could have gone on for much longer. With this kind of fighting it seems players are once again getting excited about PvMP and hopefully this trend will continue.
With the changes in Rohan it really seems like the Ettenmoors is fixed. Now fighting is much more dynamic, balanced, and most importantly it takes place all around the map now. No longer are there choke points where fighting would always take place. Now the fights move all around the map and so you never know where you might run into the enemy. It also seems that both sides are finally very close to being balanced and so the game feels much more fun. Finally the buffs given for taking different locations on the map make each base be meaningful to have under your control where as before it was not very important to have a base and definitely not to defend a base. Luckily this seems to all be great in Rohan and has made PvMP a very fun game.
Also when your side is losing you get to take control of a ranger/troll depending on what side your on. This can allow the underpowered side to be balanced but the player as the troll doesn’t get infamy for their work and actually has to pay commendations to use the feature. As someone who has played a troll they are great for tanking things but they really need backup to go against a large number of players. The troll seems to be more powerful than a normal character but not too powerful to be game-breaking.
If you want to see how the huge raid battle came about the video of our normal episode is below. The fight starts at 17min 30sec…
December 10, 2012 at 9:39 am
it whas a epic fight ^^ cant wait till it happens again
December 10, 2012 at 9:48 am
I hope it becomes a somewhat regular event in the Moors…very unlikely though
December 10, 2012 at 10:02 am
yes hope so but dont think its going to happen
comming in the moors tonight with my new warg :p it needs to rank up
to join my warleader ^^
December 10, 2012 at 10:46 am
Well best of luck to your warg tonight
December 12, 2012 at 6:05 pm
Come play on Vanyar or Morthond a day and youll see this happens daily:p
December 10, 2012 at 10:33 am
I was once in a beta event of near those numbers, you are right.. pure chaos. The lag was horrendous at that time. I see from the vids that it seems to have cleared up a ton. well done
December 10, 2012 at 10:47 am
Yeah I was suprised by the lack of lag with this amount of players
December 10, 2012 at 10:34 pm
I have not been experiencing very much lag in high-number battles either recently.
December 10, 2012 at 10:33 am
Wow. Glad your server has lots of action. Last night I logged my creep to find an all red map and when I asked in OCC if anyone had seen any freeps the only response I got was some guy who said he hadnt seen a single freep and only one other creep fot the last 3 hours. And this was during the normal peak time of players
December 10, 2012 at 10:48 am
It is not this full on normal nights…this was a once in a long time amount of numbers…but I hope it continues.
I hope your server becomes more lively sometime soon…
December 10, 2012 at 12:57 pm
SInce I’m not a PvP’er, this is the type of thing that woudl be most liekly to get me into the Moors. You can just blend into the chaos, and not be scritinized for every little thing you do, or how you are “fail”, and all that crap. All the PvP lingo just osund sliek jibberish to me, with the “zergs” and the “shmergs”, and the bleeps, the sweeps, and the creeps(insert Spaceballs sound effects here). SO just showing up and fighting, and dying a thousand times anonymously might be fun.
December 10, 2012 at 2:23 pm
I am sorry you were judged by everything you did in the Moors…that is not really normal but on some servers it happens much more than others…
Some people really enjoy just showing up and never grouping…it is a very viable play style
December 10, 2012 at 2:38 pm
Until I saw that video I hadn’t considered LOTRO a multiplayer game, much less massively so. It seemed more a great 3D chat room with stunning avatars populated by Hobbits who’d declined the adventure. Many thanks for posting that.
December 10, 2012 at 8:56 pm
Well I think LOTRO has many suprises for us all in some way or another and I think that is what keeps us around…to keep finding those suprises
December 10, 2012 at 8:38 pm
Wow! That sounded like a lot of fun. Two weeks ago, Elendilmir had a memorial for a player who was respected in the moors. Apparently, about 3 raids per side participated in the memorial and the fight afterwards.
December 10, 2012 at 8:54 pm
wow…that is a great way to have a memorial…seems like MMO players are great about being very creative and making things very special when someone passes away. It is something you really don’t see much in any other medium…thanks for sharing and my deepest reguards to the player