Life lesson learned in "Lord of the Rings Online".
I recently reached level 120 while questing through the north lands of Dale and Ered Mithrin (The Gray Mountains). Naturally, I moved on to the next zone for my level which is the Vales of Anduin (absolutely beautiful landscapes btw). So, I traveled to this area and started running quests for the Beornings, big friendly Bear people (my kind of folk, "Bears", [wink, wink]). Then I started getting killed. Over and over again. As it turned out, the natural progression of difficulty in relation to your gear and level decided to take a hard incline and leave me behind feeling woefully underprepared and corpse-dragging my way through (crossing a dangerously high level zone by moving, getting killed, and then doing it all over again until you reach your goal).
Frustrated, and feeling like I'd hit a roadblock, I decided to go back to Dale and Erebor, about five levels below me, and finish out some quests there. One of the quests I ran into was simply finding some ravens which had been sent out. I went to the location on the map where the ravens were supposed to be, except I couldn't find a path up to them. I crossed raging rivers, tried scaling mountain inclines which were just too steep to climb, and nothing I did got me any closer to my goal. Frustrated, I asked questions in the chat, but no one seemed to have the same problem. I thought maybe it had been glitched because I just couldn't see the path to where I needed to go. I considered quitting this character (my main) for the moment and going back to level another one. Regardless, I shut down and did something else, eventually going to bed.
As I pondered what to do with it the next day, I decided to give the ravens one more look see. I circled the steep outcropping where the first one was supposed to be until I saw something I recognized on the minimap. A campfire. I had seen that campfire before, but not in my last go around. I knew that it was on a path that I had been on before, but not when I was looking for the raven. I went looking for that path instead of retreading the one I knew looked like it would take me to the top, but instead led to a long drop off the side. I found it, and eventually found my way to the top and the raven I was looking for.
Emboldened by this, I went looking for the second by a different way than I had tried the night before, and once more found the path. I eventually finished that quest I had only the night before thought glitched and incompletable. Then I turned my sights on the Vales of Anduin that were handing me my head every few feet. I picked up and finished a relatively easy quest which didn't look like it would lead to anything. But upon its completion, it led to a "quest" which basically had me listening to someone tell a story, upon which I would receive a pair of gauntlets which were a godsend for survivability. This chain led to another which handed me a helmet which helped even more. And suddenly, the Vales of Anduin weren't quite as punishing and unforgiving as they had been. I just had to follow the right quest chains and not be so impatient.
The life lesson here is that what looks impossible and frustrating at first may just need to be looked at from a different point of view with patience. The path may not be visible at first. You may not be able to reach what you're aiming for by what looks like the most direct route, because that's not the path intended by the Developer. You've got to look for the right "quest chains" and do them in order, no matter how insignificant they look, and regardless of whether they promise what you need at first. Sometimes you've got to just follow the chain whether it's three quests long, or fifteen before you see the piece that you need to progress further. Sometimes it's as simple as listening to a story. Sometimes it's culling dragons from a stone staircase. Lots of dragons. Sometimes it looks impossible when it's really not.
I was ready to quit and give up on that character because I was frustrated with an obstacle I didn't understand wasn't really an obstacle. If I had, I wouldn't have seen the real way forward, and I would have remained stuck at level 120 instead of moving on to 121. The only obstacle which really prevented me from progressing was my perception of the problem and my lack of understanding at the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment