Confronted with The Old Problem again on Monday, in Lord of the Rings Online, although LotRO is hardly the only culprit. I've been gushing about what a rollicking good time I've been having in there for some weeks now so I shouldn't be surprised that some of my other online friends (mostly from the Tuesday N00b Club and Guild Wars) have expressed an interest in trying the game out and have rolled up new characters on our server, [EN] Glirain.

I'd invited them to join the LotRO Kinship, of course, and we chat and natter during play, but there the friendship ends for all practical intents and purposes, as unlike GW, LotRO is very much an MMO of The Old School. You start here, must go here, here, here and here, IN THAT ORDER AND NO SHORTCUTS!, which is great if you're doing it together as a static group, taking pains to keep level with XP, as the original LotRO gang are, but a pain in the backside if you come to the thing later on and are at the wrong end of a twenty level xp shortfall between you and your friends.

We happened to be missing a few of 'Team A' this week, so took the opportunity to backfill some missing Books for a couple of the later joiners of the current L40 team. In doing so, we tried our best to include some of the newer folks, offering a less than ideal choice. Would you prefer a team of friends who can one-hit everything, in which you'll get no xp at all, but an almost certain prospect of getting the quests ticked off, or a group of random strangers of the correct challenge level, for full xp, who are likely to fly apart or wipe before even ticking the first objective off?

Of course if this had been Guild Wars, where everyone caps at L20 very early on and the entire subsequent game is appropriately balanced for that, or City of Heroes with its outstanding disregard for the strictures of the Level Grind, none of this would have been an issue. There really is no excuse for any MMO, from CoH's launch onward NOT to have a sidekicking mechanic by now, but so far, only EQ2/EQ and AoC does anything remotely similar. WoW,WAR, and sadly, LotRO all remain unrepentant in their belief that game content progression is more important than meaningful social accessibility, and its personally very annoying, because when I gush here or on the podcast about how awesome a time I'm having in whatever game, its nearly always because of the people I'm playing with, and much less about the games themselves anymore.

This makes me feel like I'm lying to people who take any of it as a recommendation, as in the case of our new LotRO recruits, purely because the game mechanics mean that when they join, they'll have to solo or PUG their way up to where we are, and try to catch up, if they can, rushing content on the way, which really is nothing like the kind of gameplay experience you get from being in a full group from the word go, moving up together. It seems very difficult to include new players once you're well underway on the typical LevelQuest MMO, and its high time we got clear of that kind of rubbish. If you are currently writing an MMO and it doesn't have a mentoring system, you deserve a slap with a large fish.

All very frustrating and I hope they're having fun with it all anyway.