Let me start things off by saying I'm not a fan of the Lord of the Rings. The movies were a lot of fun, the books were good enough. The setting... well it doesn't really get my heart pumping. It just isn't that interesting to me anymore.

Now that we've established I'm a heathen, LotRO is bland and uninspiring. The visuals are realistic and overall nice. But on the flip side, bland. Very bland. Compared to the over the top flavor of WoW or the shear beauty and detail of GW LotRO is just... boring. Every weapon I've seen has been realistic at least, which is a nice change from over the top and stupid like some of WoW's weapons, yet, for all that a world with immortal elven smiths and dwarven Master Smiths really should be able to have better looking gear. I don't need flaming swords (mind you they would be nice) or The Aegis of the Blood God but damn guys. Give me something.

This really goes for the armour, hell especially goes for the armour! Now we all know I'm a whore for style and I want things to look *good* this has been... well... problematic so far. You see I'm level 14 and so far I have yet to get one piece of armour that wasn't the same colour and model. And that's awful. Absolutely awful. Frankly none of the armours I've seen even on high level characters are all that compelling. It's realistic and that's not a bad thing, but after say... WoW with the tier armours (I'm still drooling over War tiers 2-5) I don't get the same thrill. It's just... bleh.

Which brings us to PvP. And I absolutely don't care. I don't consider LotR to have "honest" PvP. Some players take the roll of monsters / monster classes with separate gear and all that. Half of the time you're not on your own character that you know and use, whom you geared and gained your skill on. Or at least half of the players aren't. And that's just... well bleh. It's still a contest of skill but it's not one I enjoy.

On the plus side, the Traits and Titles system is really cool. Really really cool! Not talent points cool...

At 0144 I earned Tyrian Grandmaster Cartographer... I ended up revisiting far more missions than I ever wanted to and slogging around in the middle of nowhere. Hours and hours of nickel and dime gains. But I did it. It's done.

Cantha is at 96.2... ugh. It probably took 5-6 hours to get from 96 to 100 in Tyria... It can wait a while.

... when I really couldn't afford it. I'm a cunning bastard sometimes, not often, but sometimes. Take my current goal in Guild Wars: maxing my reputation with the Ebon Vanguard. I realized that turning in a partially completed hero's handbook and farming a bit to bring my rep as close to 80k as possible without going over and then turning in another book would allow me to skip out on farming a lot of rep in hard mode. So I filled one handbook, partially filled another, turned it in and went hunting for some rep.

While out rep farming I had the most spectacular luck. First a black dye drops. Then three of the first four kill benefits (25 kills and you get a boost) were hunt ranks up! Great I'm getting a tonne of rep stupidly fast. But... now I have to watch my rep gain like a hawk. Then I get a boss bounty while I'm within spitting distance of a boss, but doing it would push my rep gain over 80k. Gah! So I let almsot 400 rep go.

In the end... I finished it out with exactly 79,999. I shouldn't have farmed it so close but I was feeling arrogant. I could have gotten so much more out of that farming run but... alas... it wasn't to be.