TROLL IN A BASKET

Oddities of LOTRO, part XXVI: A Trapped Troll

This enraged (indeed, seriously pissed off) troll can be found lurking in a wooden shed in Carn Dum, along the road leading to the CD prisons; you're most likely to run into him while completing Book 12, on your way to kill twelve Poisoners and two Jailers. Don't worry, however; a level 10 hobbit armed with a sharp stick could (eventually) take him down, because no matter how furious he gets, he can't come out of his shed - he just stays there, roaring and lunging, but unless you get close to him, he can't do any damage.

Morale of the story: even trolls need to exercise and stay fit in order to reduce that unsightly chubbiness around the backside.

BOOK 12 ONSTREAM

Book 12 is now up and running, not without a certain amount of grief - some people took as long as ten hours to download the patch from the servers. A sightly larger than usual number of minor glitches, of which the most serious appears to be a (partial) malfunction of the Auction House search, with certain items appearing but not others. Some players report getting stuck in odd locations, or being unable to contact a GM via the Help command.

A pleasant surprise for many was the discovery that their reputation with various factions had increased overnight, in some cases dramatically; it's too bad that nearly all the faction rewards continue to be rubbish, with the sole exception of the somewhat tougher than usual Northern Council horse (it's expensive, though, at slightly over 5G).

Visually, the first thing to strike one is the large number of people running through the streets of Bree dressed in what seem to be oriental-style bathrobes; once again, LOTRO's clothes designers have shown that restrained elegance and simplicity are not part of their fashion vocabulary. To see the complete range of new cosmetic clothing and accessories, consult Yatta's encyclopedic compendium at http://www.gaxonline.com/profiles/blog/show?id=1511077%3ABlogPost%3A84990.

TORRENT OR CARRIER PIGEON?

Well, the good news was that yesterday, Codemasters released the patch for the eagerly-awaited Book 12 a day prior to the update going live on the servers. The bad news was that for some strange reason, they decided to only do so as a torrent - the problem with that being, as shown by the howls of anguish on the forums, that a great majority of players hate torrents with a passion. I have to admit to being one of them myself, but the passion doesn't seem entirely unjustified when you consider that many people were reporting estimated download times of between one and five days...

By early Thursday morning, the system seems to have collapsed gracefully, resulting in a flood of "tracker offline" or "torrent rejected by tracker" messages. One generous player, RevHellfire by handle, went so far as to mirror the patch himself and post the link on the CM forums, adding the warning "no promises as to how long I'll leave it up if it gets hit hard".

At the end of the day it hardly matters, since by early afternoon today we should be able to get the entire update off the servers, but it does leave you wondering why they opted for torrent when they could have used carrier pigeons - so much more efficient.