FYI, the Landroval server has a fairly high concentration of role players. Now some role players can be quite tedious, but I'd rather be surrounded by an over-abundance of third-rate Tolkien wannabe's than the illiterate wing of the twitch-reflex crowd. And that's why I play in Landroval.
Having said that, I still turn most of the communications channels off.
I have six characters and a rather salacious orc. Apart from my orc, my most advanced character is 33, almost everyone else is in their twenties. The only plateaux that I've encountered so far come from being in the wrong places and doing the wrong sorts of things -- in other words if you get stuck below level 33 it's because you need to expand your thinking and your horizons. If you find yourself getting stuck or bored, just ask yourself where else you can go that you haven't been before. If you don't push the envelope a bit you don't advance. (And prospecting for ore in areas that are way too dangerous for you is a real challenge and quite a blast).
Many years ago I used to play a text-based game that involved a lot of mindless grinding and repetitive actions. I'm pleased to observe that there's very little of that in LOTRO -- if you need to do something over and over again, it tends to be because of a conscious choice, e.g. wanting to produce an industrial strength quantity of some manufactured substance.
One of the reasons for having multiple characters, by the way, is so that each one of them can specialize in a different crafts skill. I'm not sure what you do about weapons and armor after the early levels if you don't make them yourself. And my most active and important character is my level twenty cook, who will almost certainly never go beyond level twenty and who will do nothing but grow vegetables and cook food for everyone else.
Great post. I'll put a link to the
other thread on this for future reference.
You're right about plateaus, and as usual, I've dug myself out. I took another trip out to the Lonelands on the weekend and found that a simple bump up of one level made a difference in finishing some spider-related quests.
On an exploring trip a while ago I did a quick run over the Last Bridge into the Trollshaws, got the warning message "danger - this is for experienced players only with lots of tough monsters" etc. and got stomped by a troll and never went back, vowing to get up to level 40 or something before I tried. Well, I'm at 26 at the moment, but one of the quests in the Lonelands is to go to the bridge and get some water. (I find out much later by "cheating" that you don't really have to cross the bridge, but I wanted to find out on my own so I didn't look). Lo and behold, the Trollshaws aren't so scary either - made it all the way to Rivendell through a "secret" pass in the mountains - absolutely gorgeous. Took a trip up the pass to the Misty Mountains but turned back because I still couldn't fight any of the monsters there.
Minor spoilers ahead.
Back to Weathertop, cut north through a valley I had never traversed before, and found some other quests in the North Downs that I had previously plateaued on as well and again, just a one or two increase in experience has me at a point I can easily defeat my enemies and gain XP, so I've cleared the orc from the farms in Kingsfell, explored to the north, gathered Periwinkle, and am now in the Fields of Fornost and
discovered quite by accident that what I had thought was a huge enemy encampment is actually a friendly enclave in the northern reaches of the forest.
End spoilers
So yeah, just when you think you've run out of things to do, it pulls you back in.