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They haven't said anything about which servers will be allowed to go where, but if I had to guess I think Silverlode will be one of the servers getting shut down. I feel like they'd do best by having Brandywine, Landroval and the next 1-2 most populated servers open to transfers from any of the lower pop servers. I've barely logged in during the past year, but I don't think they have enough players left to adequately fill more than 3 servers (they have 15 US servers now). If the login counts from various websites are in any way accurate, there's maybe a couple thousand active players total in the lower 12 servers.
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Mar 3, 2015 22:32
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What'd be nice is if their new hardware let's them say "ok we're going to combine everyone on to 2-3 servers" and we end up with population density that probably hasn't existed since Moria or Mirkwood came out.
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Mar 3, 2015 23:10
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The last time I looked at login statistics, Brandywine had more people logged into the game at 3am than Silverlode has during primetime. I used to not really care that I was basically playing a singleplayer game because I had goons in kinchat to talk to. Then came the times when I'd go an entire play session without seeing a single other player in the game world, and the whole time I was the only person online in the Nazgun. That's what made me take an extended break. If we go to Brandywine and there's Moria-like population density, it'll be like the old glory days coming back again.
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Mar 4, 2015 00:27
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Those are my hopes too. Of course, they would have to be strong and force everyone onto a single server, which they won't do because of ~reasons~ but even two servers would be nice. Sucks that it won't be until after u16.
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Mar 4, 2015 02:03
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If they fix server transfers I'd say brandywine is the best option for long term....landroval would be the backup if brandywine isn't an option.
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Mar 4, 2015 02:54
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ruffz posted:They haven't said anything about which servers will be allowed to go where, but if I had to guess I think Silverlode will be one of the servers getting shut down. There are servers with far, far lower populations than Silverlode. It's relatively healthy, and its survival depends on how extreme Turbine want to go with the closures. There has been no suggestion so far that they will eliminate all low-pop servers. A vocal minority still wants the option to play on one. Nowhere comes close to Brandywine, so making that comparison is pretty meaningless. Windfola's annual peak is probably lower than Brandywine's quietest period.
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Mar 4, 2015 13:04
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I don't think I'd be surprised if Turbine ends up leaving Brandywine out of transfers entirely, because it's the highest-pop server. It doesn't need even more players, unless they're cutting the number of servers down to just a small handful. The servers that are middling-to-high seem to be better "destination" choices that would result in a more even spread of the playerbase.
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Mar 4, 2015 15:52
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They've probably got destination servers in mind for each of the server types (NA, EU, GER/FR, RP etc.) but part of their pitch for the closures has been a period of just opening the doors and seeing where players fall before making any major decisions. Brandywine will be an unplayable mess for a while when everyone migrates.
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Mar 4, 2015 16:58
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I've been re-reading LOTR, and I'm starting to get an interest in collecting bear asses in Middle Earth. One question I've got is about the story-content and if it's more than just being "The Guys following the Other Guys".
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Mar 4, 2015 18:38
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Server merge is the only reason I would log back too. I played on and off since beta and my lifetime sub was a really good investment over the years but since the last expansion I have only logged in a few times, haven't even reach max with my lvl 95 guys. Be sure to let us know on the board when it's happening so I re install and hopefully still have some fun with the game 
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Mar 4, 2015 18:42
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SirPhoebos posted:I've been re-reading LOTR, and I'm starting to get an interest in collecting bear asses in Middle Earth. One question I've got is about the story-content and if it's more than just being "The Guys following the Other Guys". Some parts can feel like that, and if you've played the early book quests before I'd suggest skipping them and trudging ahead. My 56 guardian is the farthest I've ever made it, but I'm also going through the books again and it really makes me want to hang out in Middle Earth as much as possible. I can't wait to get to Rohan and see if they call me Holbytla.
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Mar 4, 2015 20:13
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So some former Turbine employee spilled a lot of beans on Lotrocommunity.com and it's... yeesh. http://massivelyop.net/2015/03/04/former-lotro-employee-dishes-out-behind-the-scenes-secrets/ Interesting reads. The guy must never want to work in games again though.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:56
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Cutedge posted:Interesting reads. The guy must never want to work in games again though. Reading his posts, he certainly does have a... unique perspective on things, shall we say? Like how he talks about MoM being a terrible expansion that caused subscribers to leave in droves, or how the Watcher was a terrible raid encounter designed by a dev with no previous experience, or how no one has ever complained about having too many skills in an MMO.
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Mar 4, 2015 22:47
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He's very much an old school MMO guy designing MMOs, which makes for a bit of lens. The talk about PvMP is fascinating though.
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Mar 4, 2015 22:59
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Nipponophile posted:no one has ever complained about having too many skills in an MMO. Yeah I think it's interesting that he would say such a thing when I've heard plenty of people say they won't play EQ2 based on the fact that you have 30 skills at like level 20. Not to say that the skill revamp for LOTRO was particularly well thought out, it definitely seemed like they were following WOW's lead. Of course, at that point WOW had already dropped that system they were apeing. When it comes to lens, I suppose it's worth noting that he was QA and a lot of QA seems to think that devs don't know what they are doing ever. Granted, it's true in a lot of cases but take with a grain of salt I guess? I may be one of the only people who apparently liked SoM. It definitely was more entertaining for me than RoI.
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Mar 4, 2015 23:04
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Cutedge posted:So some former Turbine employee spilled a lot of beans on Lotrocommunity.com and it's... yeesh. If we're to believe these posts (seems like we should given the seemingly realistic perspective and many in house pictures) then I actually kind of enjoy how the whiners on the forums for years were all completely justified. Makes it easier to remain glad Sapience was fired, since his job was basically to convince us we were wrong about them having 2 employees on PVP, drastically cutting back on game quality, and wasting loads of money on Infinite Crisis. That was a game you could tell wouldn't compete in the market with a single screenshot or ten seconds of watching the ugly client stutter around on a twitch stream. Hopefully all of Turbines' other projects will continue to fail and someone will speak up at a meeting.. "What about doing LOTRO stuff again?"
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Mar 5, 2015 00:01
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extra stout posted:Hopefully all of Turbines' other projects will continue to fail and someone will speak up at a meeting.. "What about doing LOTRO stuff again?" What, you aren't excited for Turbine's upcoming iOS Game which appears to be a Clash of Clans clone? http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-03-03-turbine-developing-batman-arkham-underworld-for-ios
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Mar 5, 2015 00:06
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I want to duck back into this again for fun, but I don't want to play alone. I never hooked up with the SA outgroup in LOTRO - do you guys actually play? Some of the posts from the last few pages would make me think otherwise. I'm on normal best country america time, not some crazy moon time, if that makes a difference.
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Mar 5, 2015 00:21
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Cutedge posted:So some former Turbine employee spilled a lot of beans on Lotrocommunity.com and it's... yeesh. Most people never want to work in video games ever again after spending several years dealing with the horrible poo poo-sausage making process that is game development. It's fun at times but most programmers and such will make better money in other industries and you probably won't get 00+ hour work week crunches where you've got a large chance of being fired afterwards like in game development. If a studio treats its employees like poo poo then they deserve to have that brought to light if they're unwilling to fix it. That Lotro was down to only around 85k subs after Mirkwood's launch is loving insane though. I remember Turbine guys telling me about how with Moria they had several hundred thousand subs. I'd love to see their monthly user charts from Moria to Isengard. I can confirm that most in the industry (that I know) thought Lotro was a continuing success, and that the F2P swap was to try and get a surge like DDO did. I guess their tripling of active players with F2P didn't actually push them nearly as high as most people though.  Considering when this guy said they left, any NDA they were under has likely ended since it was probably a 5year duration at best, and so they'd be at no risk of repercussions from Turbine even if they're who they say they are. This guy's on BVRandywine apparently so maybe we'll see him there if we can move to that server in 56 months. Nipponophile posted:Reading his posts, he certainly does have a... unique perspective on things, shall we say? Yeah I'd need some serious data to back up the claim that MoM caused people to leave in droves. Lotro wasn't in a good place by the time that expansion came out because original SoA content was loving awful. Think of North Downs before the revamp, or Trollshaws. Now imagine that EVERYWHERE. To say nothing of the fact that Old Forest was basically "bring a competent group or gently caress you because this is an elite-dense clusterfuck area." SoA was like a stab at old EQ roughness and it was awful. Even MoM still had issues with mob density originally but that got fixed at least. e: I had to laugh when he said the player council was a gimmick probably cooked up by someone (rick?) when the player council was Turbine trying to copy the CSM from EVE Online. Their posting of screenshots they took of ESO during internal alphas as an employee there isn't doing them any favors in not burning industry bridges if the thread starts getting passed around. Evil Fluffy fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Mar 5, 2015 |
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Mar 5, 2015 00:21
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Before I take the plunge, I'd like to make sure the game is not imploding like STO apparently is.
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Mar 5, 2015 04:20
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Evil Fluffy posted:Yeah I'd need some serious data to back up the claim that MoM caused people to leave in droves. He said Mirkwood caused subs to tank, not MoM: "We were hurting bad after SoM-subs were declining hard". He went on to say that he thought MoM put things in a bad spot (doing too much with too few people), but not that it caused subs to drop. SirPhoebos posted:Before I take the plunge, I'd like to make sure the game is not imploding like STO apparently is. Eh, it's on life-support. They're bee-lining for Mordor pretty hard right now. I didn't play until the new The Hobbit movies started, and even if it got shut down tomorrow, I'd say I really enjoyed my time in the game. Play if you're just a big LOTR nerd and love the idea of running around Middle Earth. It's a pretty drat enjoyable experience. If you're looking for an oustanding MMO, then you might want to look elsewhere - it's mostly solo play here, doing very unoriginal bear-rear end quests forever. The landscape, a lot of the quests [if you're into the lore] are worth reading, and are great for the LOTR nerds though.
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Mar 5, 2015 06:31
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SirPhoebos posted:Before I take the plunge, I'd like to make sure the game is not imploding like STO apparently is. It's not. It already imploded. (Seriously, I really need to .txt this) Only bother playing Lord of the Rings Online if you are a fan of THE BOOKS The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King and/or The Silmarillion. If you've only ever seen the Peter Jackson movies and think "I'm a little bored with WoW/ESO/Rift/STO/etc at the moment, I wonder if I might like LotRO" then keep looking- this game is highly unlikely to be what you were looking for. This game has seen better days. Much better days. If you ARE a fan of the Tolkien books, then start downloading right now. It's completely free until at least level 32ish, and seeing all of the important Tolkien landmarks is absolutely loving awesome. In fact, the game is still completely loving awesome until you get out of the opposite end of Moria, and it gradually but discernibly goes downhill from there until you get to Eastern Rohan and realize that the game isn't great at all anymore. Western Rohan(Helm's Deep) is even worse, and Fangorn Forest is unimaginably bad. That said, Western Gondor is slightly better than Helm's Deep, but Central Gondor is making that appear to have been a slight fluke(at least so far for me). Brave New World fucked around with this message at 06:40 on Mar 5, 2015 |
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Mar 5, 2015 06:38
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If you make a character on Brandywine and use an xp disabler at 65, the game's as good as it ever was.
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Mar 5, 2015 11:44
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So is everyone migrating to Brandywine?
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Mar 5, 2015 16:44
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SirPhoebos posted:So is everyone migrating to Brandywine? Right now we're not doing anything. They've announced they're making the server transfer feature not suck, and while I don't think they've said so explicitly (please correct me if I'm wrong!), we're all expecting them to offer free server merges from low populated servers to higher population servers. They've also said they're looking at tools to help an entire kin move. So we'll just have to wait and see until they get it all done, and announce exactly what they're doing.
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Mar 5, 2015 17:04
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SirPhoebos posted:So is everyone migrating to Brandywine? I'm voting yes and that we all slowly level up a new guild of entirely beorning bears until we can transfer our mains there. Then we'll have a guild ranked up incase they don't figure out a way to transfer guilds properly.
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Mar 5, 2015 23:33
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How are the races different besides class options? Also, are the Beornings one of the VIP classes?
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Mar 6, 2015 01:33
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SirPhoebos posted:How are the races different besides class options? The races are all terrible except for hobbits. Dwarves are ok too I guess. Beornings aren't VIP, you just have to purchase them to use them.
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Mar 6, 2015 01:38
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To be fair, Man Captains are cool enough but only by proxy. I always like saying I was a Man Burglar too, has a nice ring to it. Note - I play a Hobbit Guardian, the best loving combination. ukrainius maximus fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Mar 6, 2015 |
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Mar 6, 2015 02:26
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I always suggest that people shy away from rolling a human first, because their starting area will come off as extremely generic by fantasy standards. Don't forget, fantasy all but starts with Tolkien(only Conan and the works of Fritz Leiber predate him), and it's a very subdued, low-magic setting. Breeland will come off as nothing more than "generic midevial wood fort poo poo" to a newbie. If you roll a Dwarf, and you've played WoW, remember that Ironforge is a direct ripoff of Thorin's Gate- not the other way around. Consider rolling a Hobbit. They hit a bullseye when they designed The Shire. Elves are the master race, though. Show some class and roll immortal.
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Mar 6, 2015 02:51
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Brave New World posted:I always suggest that people shy away from rolling a human first, because their starting area will come off as extremely generic by fantasy standards. Don't forget, fantasy all but starts with Tolkien(only Conan and the works of Fritz Leiber predate him), and it's a very subdued, low-magic setting. Breeland will come off as nothing more than "generic midevial wood fort poo poo" to a newbie. My greatest regret was making an alt an Elven warden. Should've gone with hobbit. As revenge I've made him a farmer who spends all his time there anyway.
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Mar 6, 2015 02:59
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Play whatever you want, race benefits won't make or break you. Each race gets a quick travel skill to the corresponding town, but from Moria and after it doesn't really matter. E: dwarf minstrel playing bagpipes is pretty rad, even if the bagpipes don't sound quite right
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Mar 6, 2015 04:16
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I lied earlier when I said I was at 91. I was actually at 90. So now I put myself at 92 to be on track for my proposed plan. I leveled super fast for some reason in Eastfold. I netted nearly 50k per quest and the quests were just white. I've slowed down just a bit in Broadacres but not by much. I wonder if I won't end up over leveling the whole region.
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Mar 6, 2015 04:20
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Is it worth finishing all of Moria if it's my first time through? I'm already level 58 and have just started the Redhorn Lodes, so I've got the Flaming Deeps and Foundation of Stone after that. I've been enjoying it so far, but I don't want to level too much and miss poo poo once I get out. I have one of those xp halters but using that seems so foreign to me.
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Mar 6, 2015 13:02
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Glass of Milk posted:Play whatever you want, race benefits won't make or break you. Each race gets a quick travel skill to the corresponding town, but from Moria and after it doesn't really matter. Dwarf minstrel...best minstrel.
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Mar 6, 2015 13:20
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ukrainius maximus posted:Is it worth finishing all of Moria if it's my first time through? I'm already level 58 and have just started the Redhorn Lodes, so I've got the Flaming Deeps and Foundation of Stone after that. I've been enjoying it so far, but I don't want to level too much and miss poo poo once I get out. I have one of those xp halters but using that seems so foreign to me. I'd at least explore those areas, I liked Foundations of Stone had some cool stuff in that zone so maybe just explore Flaming Deeps and do the main quests in Foundations.
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Mar 6, 2015 15:34
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If you're planning on playing a second character, it might be worthwhile to select a handful of regions within Moria with a good level-spread and do those start-to-finish, while leaving the rest for your next toon. Also, the Epic will have you running all over Moria without much connection to how the regular quests progress.
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Mar 6, 2015 16:15
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I've always done all of Moria, but I don't own Mirkwood or Enedwaith, so my options from 60-65 were pretty limited. If you're in the same boat, you can finish off Moria and probably be somewhere around 62-63, which is a not-unreasonable number of BB or skirmishes away from 65.
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Mar 6, 2015 18:48
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Evil Fluffy posted:That Lotro was down to only around 85k subs after Mirkwood's launch is loving insane though. I remember Turbine guys telling me about how with Moria they had several hundred thousand subs. I believe it. The content quality between Moria and Mirkwood was such a drastic drop off that it doesn't surprise me they lost probably 70-80% of the subs they had at the height of Moria. Late in the Moria expansion is when the Nazgun began the transition from a raiding kin to a casual one. All of the Moria raiders hosed off to other MMOs after they cleared the last of the raid content, and most never came back. LOTRO really isn't a bad MMO, it's just average and comes across as bland to people that aren't uber Tolkien nerds. I doubt I'd play the game at all if I didn't love the books.
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Mar 6, 2015 19:08
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^^^ Oh I definitely wouldn't have played the game more than a month tops if I wasn't a Tolkien fan.ukrainius maximus posted:Is it worth finishing all of Moria if it's my first time through? I'm already level 58 and have just started the Redhorn Lodes, so I've got the Flaming Deeps and Foundation of Stone after that. I've been enjoying it so far, but I don't want to level too much and miss poo poo once I get out. I have one of those xp halters but using that seems so foreign to me. The storyline is worth doing but you don't need to try and do all of Moria's quests because you'd probably be level 62-63 by the time you finished even if you didn't use xp boosters when turning in the 20ish GS instance quests. When I played through Moria for the first time on Silverlode years ago I did most of the quests in there and was about to hit level 63 when I stepped out the other side. When you enter Moria you've officially hit the "I have too much poo poo I can do" part of the game as far as XP goes.
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Mar 6, 2015 19:33
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