Truthfully, one of the main bulwarks that keeps LOTRO inviting, is the respectful armor designs for the female characters. This is one of the few games that eschews sexism prevalent in most games.

Anyway I never feel as if the game is actively trying to push female gamers away. Generally the more women in any group means the group is calmer on the whole.

The IP, such as LOTRO, determines the demographic of people attracted to the game. This is taken from the demographic of people attracted to that type of game, in this case MMORPGs. Sometimes it pulls in people who might not have thought of playing an MMO as well, but I’d say that’s far smaller.

LOTRO tends to attract an older audience and, though it is not always the case, older typically means more mature.

As is discussed above, game features also play into that. However, I’d argue the difficulty of content tends to breed hostility as well. I currently play City of Heroes, and most of the content (Incarnate trials non-withstanding) is laughably easy, and I believe because of that the community is more laid back, and less interested in min-maxing and more interested in playing what they enjoy.

“With TBC we had three tiers:
Tier 4 containing Karazhan, Magtheridon and Gruul’s Lair
Tier 5 containing Tempest Keep and SSC
Tier 6 with Mount Hyjal and Black Temple.
Zul’Aman and Sunwell Plateau were also added in content patches.”

So…

Mag/Gruul = Nax/Malygos (first tier)
TK and SSC = Ulduar (second tier

In terms of actual raid loot tiers – that’s how it lines up – this conversation was about comparing BC and WoTLK – I’m at a loss as to how it’s confusing.

You really really don’t know what you’re talking about. Please go read wowwiki. TK wasn’t even from the same expansion.

@Azuriel said “If you went into Trade with “LF 5 DPS 10m ICC fresh run” you would get 20 replies. Given 20 replies, who wouldn’t want to pick the best five that would ensure the quickest, smoothest run even if all 20 would ultimately work?”

It’s funny you write that because a month ago I organized a Karazhan run for level 68 and 69 only. I wanted an undermanned group as is my preference and decided to run with 1 tank, 1 healer, and as few DPS as possible (I wanted the group to be slightly above 3000 DPS).

Too many players showed interest and I chose to bring into my group all the players who had never seen the content, regardless of their gear or performance. We ended up with 4 DPS (~3150 starting DPS for the group) and except for the protection paladin and myself, no one had ever stepped into Karazhan.

We cleared it over two evenings – we did suffer a couple of wipes because I did not explain the fight mechanisms clearly enough – but everyone had fun and showed up for the second evening.

Depending which blogs you read, you would know this is typical of me because I run level appropriate content with undermanned and/or undergeared groups. The possibility of failure is what makes it interesting to me.

Simple fact is – content was cleared and the only block in Outlands was the release date. For an example just look at how long it took China to clear out Black Temple.

Full expansion clear when the guild was wearing mostly (vanilla) nax gear within what… 3 months of BC releasing in china?

That’s not hard… it would have been faster if there weren’t so many keys involved.

Compare that BT kill with Icecrown. Which didn’t go down until the buff started to kick in.

It’s easy to think of BC as hard but most of that was due to flagging/key requirements, and lack of content. If a guild in most pre expansion gear could clear BT through the end boss then it wasn’t gear checks that were in the way.

Everyone seems to think that was was ‘teh hardcore’ though so /meh – I’ll take EQ’s old Rathe encounter that had to have someone do the math and explain to the devs there was *no mathmatical way to beat the encounter as the game stood* forcing a nerf before it went down as one of the more ‘hardcore’ – not sure why that’s some kind of standard though – would you really enjoy the game more if the encounters were set ‘unbeatable’ and then nerfed until just 1-2 guilds per server could take them out until the next expac?

The game design where players are A) encouraged to grind points on a daily/weekly basis, AND B) can fail through no fault of their own, is what encourages in-game elitism. Wrath had GearScore and achievement elitism not because it was necessary to complete the content, but rather because the pool of people who *could* complete the content was immense. If you went into Trade with “LF 5 DPS 10m ICC fresh run” you would get 20 replies. Given 20 replies, who wouldn’t want to pick the best five that would ensure the quickest, smoothest run even if all 20 would ultimately work? Cataclysm is like Wrath, except 15/20 of the players would torpedo the entire run, so you only end up pugging with people you know (or with people who can prove they did it already).

LotRO has some pretty difficult content – but the difficulty tends to be a challenge in playing your character well, not so much about having the highest numbers on your character sheet. That might make a difference because again, it makes stat elitism pretty silly.

And last but not least – I wonder how much difference having 6 man groups instead of 5 makes. It’s not just having an extra person to talk to – there’s that bit more flexibility in the group make-up, and that bit more ability to bring along a player who is less experienced (or a nice guy but just not so fast with his fingers).