ZG redux

What a difference the level cap increase makes. We blasted through Zul'Gurub with nary a wipe, and hardly any close calls. Realization number one: that is a heck of a long dungeon. We stopped after about half the bosses and 4 hours. But it was entertaining - I am reinforced in my belief that raiding is the part of the game I enjoy the most (or perhaps rather that doing anything in a group is more fun). Now, unfortunately, I have to grind rep in order to actually claim the prizes from the items I picked up inside. And I hate, despise, detest, and generally disdain grinding rep.

farming and rep

Female Gamer has written a post title Farming is Boring, which addresses the rep system WoW and apparently LotRO have decided to use, whereby you earn reputation with a community for each of their enemies you kill, and since you need a lot of reputation to get their super-duper-awesome thing, you end up killing a bajillion of their enemies in a pointless rep grind.

What makes more sense? Well, think about it - do it like your favourite book or movie. You live among them, get to know them, do a big quest for them. Since in the game world 'living among them' and 'getting to know them' is synonymous with doing quests, then the most sense is to have quests, little and big, that relate to the tribe or town in question. Simple stuff - 'can you find my sheep' or 'Timmy fell down a well' or whatever. And frankly, some of the stuff should be irredeemable. Kill the chieftan, forget ever getting their help (except through some crazy 'I rescued your new chief's son from some absurdly powerful enemies' type quest - and even then there should be factions in the town who will never trust you).

Either way, in addition to being boring, earning reputation exclusively through killing is a bit morally dubious, isn't it?