Revisiting my LOTRO Goals

Goals and resolutions can be a pain in the rear to attain. Those big, lifetime changes you'd like to make to improve the quality of your life can take years to accomplish, generally through the means of baby steps.

While browsing my Twitter feed this morning, I passed a "Daily Grind" link from Massively, which serves to probe the player-base with a question to answer in their comment section. Today's post dealt with long-term MMO goals, and made me remember my goals I had left in LOTRO Academy's "Goals for 2014" episode. Below are the following LOTRO goals I have left for myself to accomplish:

1) Get both my Riddermark lore-master (currently 44) and my Arkenstone captain (currently 46) to at least level 75. Alas, no combining their levels, or I’d be done already! ;)  

2) In honor of Pineleaf’s “Skirmisher of Middle Earth” (SoME) goal, I’d like to get ONE character (most likely my main, Riddermark hunter) to attain the SoME title. I think he already has decent progress, so finishing it off would be great.  

3) I would like to complete at least one raid that I have not done before (BG, any OD wing, Flight or Smaug [Erebor], Saruman [ToO], or DN), and two 6-man instances that I have not done before (Roots of Fangorn, Foundry, Lost Temple). Level does not matter – it’s the experience that counts.

Thus far, I have not fully accomplished any of these goals. Then again, I had basically forgotten I had these running goals for many months this year, so no specific focus has been made toward their completion. With roughly 2.5 months left until 2015, I guess I should start giving it the old college try. Running through each proposed goal, individually...

1) Leveling Challenge: One of the bigger problems with this challenge lies in the fact that neither of these characters were in existence during my month of VIP. As such, neither of them have Swift Travel, which allows for MUCH quicker travel while leveling. Adding up all the times you need to travel here and there across the world (especially for the Epic story quests), having Swift Travel accessibly is a pretty huge boon to leveling in LOTRO. Not having it kind of makes it a turn-off to leveling those characters, so I have not focused my efforts in their leveling. As it stands, my lore-master is level 48 , and my captain is level 51. This is likely the most difficult of my listed challenges for me to complete.

2) Skirmishing Challenge: This is the goal that I had probably forgotten most about. I do not skirmish that often, and as such the information about my progress on skirmish encounters is something I have not looked at in forever, on any character. On my main (hunter), I believe I have 20 encounters remaining to complete the SoME deed (out of 18 skirmishes, each containing anywhere from 5-9 encounters). Considering you'll only get about two random encounters per skirmish, this is a rather RNG-based challenge. I think I'll be happy enough if I can get to 10 or under encounters remaining.

3) Instance Challenge: Combined with my general "whatever" attitude toward completing group instances, and the dwindling server sizes on which I play, I'm not sure I would honestly fully complete this challenge. I have done Dar Narbugud (DN) at least twice with a group, but that is probably the easiest of the raids I have listed. I have not fully completed any of the 6-mans I mentioned, though I did get to the end of Lost Temple solo...aaaand promptly died due to DPSing too quickly.

Anyways, these goals should be less important than my real-life laundry list, but there's something about virtual goals that make it more desirable to attain. I assume it's the fact they are generally easier to accomplish, plus there is no real downside to not quite making it to the finish. That just makes it that much more fun to add it to next year's gaming goals!

Do you generally make MMO/gaming goals for yourself, or do you simply pat yourself on the back when you finish something and say "Well done, me. Well done!" ? Share in the comments below!