User talk:Dalamb
Things I Wish I Knew Earlier
There's a lot to learn in playing the game, and one doesn't want to overwhelm a newbie with stuff to learn right away, but there are a few things I wish I'd known earlier -- generally stuff I learned reasonably recently from talking with kin, which would have helped me even at the lower levels. David 13:28, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
Deeds
- Which ones. Many deeds eventually grant virtues -- so you ought to know which virtues are good for your character, so you know which deeds are worth pursuing. https://lotro.mmorsel.com/2010/04/choosing-your-virtues.html discusses which virtues are important, and https://www.burgzerg.com/virtues tells you many things, including which deeds advance which traits.
- When. For deeds that improve class skills, you have to use the skills against creatures before they go grey. However, greys still count towards deeds that give virtues -- and greys don't attack you unless you attack them. You can thus wander around safe from critters you want to ignore while focusing on the ones you really need. Having a hunter along helps; it addition to the speed boost for running around, she can track for you (beasts, undead, or other foes).
Housing
Your house and your kinship house are locations you can travel to quickly, so in addition to whatever aesthetic benefit they provide, they have a practical advantage, too.
- The Thorin's Hall Homesteads gate is about a minute's running from the stables -- faster on horseback. So a house near those gates gives you quick access to every place to which gives swift travel: the kin who mentioned this said "It's like having another map." When I got rich enough to afford a simple house, I went looking for a neighbourhood where 1 Threshold Street was available.
- The other Homesteads are farther from cities, but can still be useful. My kinship house in the Falathlorn Homesteads has been useful in reaching Duillond during festivals, and that gives reasonably quick access to Celondim. The Bree-land Homesteads are a bit of help in reaching both South Bree and the Forsaken Inn. The Shire Homesteads don't seem quite so useful, but they're right next to the Shire race course, which can get you a nice horse during festivals.
Fellowing
As I write this:
- all my alts are fairly low level, and my highest-level is doing quests for the first time
- most people I'd fellow with have been through everything several times before, have seen everything, and are bored with reading quest text
Thus they want to rush on before I get a chance to read stuff, and I keep getting left behind, lost, and/or killed. It's worth asking if they're willing to wait, but, if not, I have to rely on the lorebook: https://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/Lorebook_home
Health Maintenance
I find LotRO is a very addictive game, and I tend to want to sit at the computer playing for hours at a time. Unfortunately this aggravates two forms of health problems I've had for years:
- Lower back aches. My chiropractor keeps repeating the same hard-to-follow advice: get away from the computer every so often -- at least long enough to stretch. A timer helps with this, but I tend to ignore it when in the midst of an intense series of quests with a fellowship. Solutions for finding break times include asking for brief breaks where the group stays in a safe place, and using /follow when the fellowship is travelling.
- Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) in wrists and shoulders. I started having these difficulties 20 years ago, and found that reaching for the mouse can be more of a strain than using a keyboard. So
- I've learned to use the mouse with both hands, and swap off when possible (though by now my normal main-hand (right) is less adept than the left.
- I'm also trying to learn to use WASD keys as well as arrow keys.
- NumLock is your friend. It's easy to stop running by pressing up/down, since I keep my hand near the arrow keys to navigate.
- A few weeks ago I had someone suggest that accurate left/right navigation is easier with the mouse, but I use the arrow keys when coarse navigation is OK, to rest the mouse arm. I still use mouse navigation sometimes when accuracy is needed, such as navigating narrow bridges during festival races.
- I need to learn to use the keyboard to invoke skills, but that has been proving difficult -- I'm too slow, and most of the time you need to use a skill very quickly.
- Hope you don't mind me adding a comment here - feel free to move it. :) Just wanted to give a big thumbs up for your attention to health maintenance with gaming. I have horrible posture when sitting at the computer because of my poor vision, and tend to slouch there for much longer than I should, so this is good advice for me, too. Regarding using the keyboard for skills, I like configuring the numpad - this gives you 9 slots (and then some if you extend it to 0, enter, decimal, and whatever else is over there) for really easily-accessed skills. When I played EverQuest, I only needed 8, but LOTRO has so many skills etc that I ended up using numpad for 1-9, then control-numpad for row two, alt-numpad for row three, and control-alt-numpad for row four. It really does takie some getting used to, but if you put the ones you need on an immediate/regular basis at the lowest level, it might help somewhat. I also use the keyboard for targeting - tab for the closest mob, control-tab to cycle through targets...now that I think about it, I might only use the mouse for dialogs and camera movement... Maybe we could write a game guide for optimizing your interface/user experience for health and accessibility benefits. :) Sethladan 17:46, 25 December 2010 (EST)
Fish
Hey Dalamb. I saw you were working on fish and such. Fish like smelts and minnows are caught everywhere in the game. I even caught a smelt inside Moria in the green toxic water of Skûmfil. ;-) Therefor it's not needed to add on each fish where it can be caught (unless you know exactly where it is and where it isn't), so I reverted your changes. I hope you don't mind too much. Please do continue adding other stuff to the wiki, really appreciate that! :) --Ravanel 16:38, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
- Thanks; I don't mind at all if someone reverts changes because of my lack of knowledge of conventions. It did bother me that there was nothing about where to catch what fish, and I imagine it takes a very long time to find out where. There's also no explanation I could find about how to qualify for the various trophies. --David 18:37, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
- That's a good point, although there are explanations you want here:
- Also, with the new patch out a few days ago, they changed all the fishing locations of where you can catch what fish. This needs to be updated and will be in time. Rogue 21:32, 4 March 2010 (UTC)
Item Pages
Please use this Create new item as it uses the correct template. You are using an outdated one that we no longer use. Rogue 21:21, 5 March 2010 (UTC)
- Thanks! --David 00:50, 6 March 2010 (UTC)
- You can add the template {{Delete Page}} to any page you want to be deleted, an admin will eventually revise them and proceed accordingly. :) Your "Item:Festival Token" is now removed. -- Goingbald 04:04, 6 May 2010 (UTC)
You've been ninjad
Welcome to Ninja status. Thanks for all the good work! --Lotroadmin 16:40, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
- I just noticed you've earned Editor status. Congratulations :) Zimoon 08:16, 11 March 2012 (EDT)
You forgot something
Hey, in editing those status pages you forgot to edit Bureaucrats! :) We feel left out. lol ;) Rogue 19:29, 21 October 2010 (EDT)
- I didn't really forget -- I just wasn't sure from the existing page where they fit into the scheme of things. I guessed it was just added to Administrator rights but didn't at the time feel like risking a wrong guess. David 21:28, 21 October 2010 (EDT)
- Bureaucrats are the high council I guess. Mainly filled with the founders (and a selected few others). We as bureaucrats have basically full access to every aspect of the wiki. At least, I tell myself that. :) No biggy anyway I was more teasing you than anything. Rogue 00:02, 22 October 2010 (EDT)
Removing Links?
You've been doing a lot of good work lately, but I really wonder why you're deleting links from within descriptions. I noticed in To Imlad Gelair that the entry no longer has the links like Elves of Rivendell that you'd introduced in your original revision on 2010-11-16T14:42:36. IMHO the more links the better. David 13:11, 31 March 2011 (EDT)
- I personally agree with Starbursty on this one. Descriptions/Flavors should not have links. Links belong outside the infobox or the descriptions of in-game information. They belong in the headings below the infoboxes or in the walkthroughs (with the case of quests). Walkthroughs were meant to have all the extra information, including reputation or where to go. Rogue 15:22, 31 March 2011 (EDT)
- There was a time when I thought more links were better, but as time went on and I saw and managed a lot of the articles, linking to everything and anything remotely linkable was more of a link spam more than anything. In the original version of the articles that I did, I was linking to everything. Now, if I came upon some of the articles I did, I clean them up. It is neater and doesn't have the blue-black-blue-black-blue-splotched look to the article. -- Starbursty 16:21, 31 March 2011 (EDT)
- All of that sounds plausible, but I I'm uneasy about justifications saying belongs or spam or clean up, which to me are aesthetic judgements that other people can (obviously given my query) disagree with. I was thinking from the practical, operational point of view of someone using the descriptions. If an article mentions X, I don't want to have to type into a search box to find X. I want to click directly where I'm looking: at the word or phrase I want to find. It's more work without the link. I am in favour of editors making their own choices about things like that when they create an entry, and editing the stuff you once created is pretty much the same thing. But if somebody else goes to the trouble of creating such links, do you plan to delete them? That way lies reversion wars. David 19:08, 5 April 2011 (EDT)
- There was a time when I thought more links were better, but as time went on and I saw and managed a lot of the articles, linking to everything and anything remotely linkable was more of a link spam more than anything. In the original version of the articles that I did, I was linking to everything. Now, if I came upon some of the articles I did, I clean them up. It is neater and doesn't have the blue-black-blue-black-blue-splotched look to the article. -- Starbursty 16:21, 31 March 2011 (EDT)