So! I've just had a heck of an evening discussing the quirks of the set 0 D-rarity cards, and I think I've found some tidbits that some people here may find interesting (and, if any of you remember any details of how LOTRO worked, maybe you can even help finish the story! There are still holes even now...).
To set our scene, first take a moment to take a look at the bottom quarter of the cards listed at
set 0 on the wiki (i.e. everything after 0P129). There are D-rarity cards and W-rarity cards, as well as a few other odds'n'ends that we'll ignore here. First, look at the range of D cards, from 0D1 to
0D24:
0D1 - 0D14 are DGMA league cards, issued as league prizes (someone correct me if I'm wrong). Starting with
0D16, we suddenly have LOTRO-only cards, which were all part of the Triumph and Menace series (which, as far as I can gather, was a randomization mechanic facilitated by the electronic client: at the described trigger, dice were rolled, and if you met a certain target, you got an RNG reward).
There are a few inconsistencies here:
I've known about the 0D8 conflict for a while (it was an enormous headache when I was setting up a local database; I eventually decided that Troll was a typo for 0D18 and stuck him there instead), but I hadn't really thought about the gaps until tonight. I hopped on the Facebook group to ask whether 0D15 was supposed to be a physical card (that we just didn't have a scan for), or if it was supposed to be a T/M card that we lost, or if it was supposed to be a buffer between the two lest T/M infect the other cards.
Everyone agreed that 0D14 was the last physical card made in that series. Someone theorized that 0D15 was where Troll was supposed to go, but as far as typos go I wasn't convinced. Besides, if Troll was 0D15 and not 0D18, then that just shifted the question: what was 0D18?
Some time ago, someone on the Facebook group released a LOTRO data dump, which included all the game files and, most importantly, the text associated with each card. I had used this spreadsheet (spliced together with TLHH's own spreadsheet) to create a comprehensive local database, and I poked around in there to try and get answers.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, there is only a single D card in the game client's data as it currently stands today:
0D5:
Theodred, Second Marshal of the Mark. At first glance this seems to me like a result of the client not having access to the server, and so only having whatever was in the program's cache the last time the owner ran it.
But then I was reminded that there was more than the text dump! There were
image files, and crucially, each card has its own portrait stored in a folder somewhere. There might be answers there!
Cards were divided into sets (until set 16, after which someone was super lazy and just started chucking everything into that one folder instead of making a new one for each set). As I poked around, I found that the LOTRO D cards were in card_images_league:
Success! There's some information to glean here. First, my original question was (probably) answered: 0D15 was
Gimli, Dwarven Delegate.
The other gaps could be similarly surmised: 0D18 was a Gollum card, and 0D19 was Boromir (or at least the portraits used Gollum and Boromir). 0D22 was Easterling-related.
And then beyond that, there are portraits for an 0D25 (which the same portrait as
Frodo, Mr. Underhill) and an 0D26, which is a Nazgul.
Considering that
0D16,
0D17,
0D20,
0D21,
0D23, and
0D24 all line up with the images we have in the wiki, I concluded that this was probably a good explanation for what the gaps were supposed to contain.
But that left us no closer to identifying where, exactly, that Troll is supposed to go. At this point I began to theorize that perhaps 0D8 wasn't a typo at all, and that there was a whole line of 0D1 - 0D14 cards which were lost to the goblins. For this theory to be correct, it would mean that there were really
two D rarities, one meaning DGMA and the other meaning Digital (similarly to how there are two different P rarities, for Premium and Promotional).
As I poked around more, I stumbled on our friend Troll, hiding in card_images_online:
But...wait. Those are the W-series cards!
So it turns out Troll wasn't conflicting with 0D8 at all...it was supposed to be
0W8! As far as typos go, I could believe that one.
I poked around the LOTRO text dump for a bit, trying to shed some more light on this, and finally realized why D cards weren't (for the most part) represented. In LOTRO, all of the Triumph/Menace series were actually listed as W cards, with plenty more besides!
0W1 -
0W13 here line up with the W cards in the wiki, and
0D16-0D24 are represented as 0W16-0W24, with even more cards not listed in the wiki here.
SO HERE'S WHAT I THINK HAPPENED:
World's Apart (the company that ran LOTRO), either with a Decipher designer or on their own, were tasked with introducing some cards with features that leveraged the unique electronic medium. They come up with Triumph/Menace, and release it one way or another for people to play with, as cards 0D1 - 0D13.
But then someone at Decipher finds out, and, facepalming, explain that the DGMA series already exists! The D rarity is taken!
So, World's Apart rebrands those digital-only cards with W rarity (named after themselves). Later when evolving league cards are introduced, they use the same branding, and everything goes smoothly.
My only question is: how did the old D-branded W cards end up in the wiki? My running theory is that in the post-Decipher scramble to get everything backed up, someone scooped up images from the Wayback machine that were pre-rebranding and, since they seemed to fit the DGMA card series, put them in place without further questioning it. But perhaps I'm wrong, and these were actually on Decipher's store page (for some reason), which pushes the question to "why didn't Decipher get their act together", which has a clear historical answer.
Well, I say that's my only question, but there's one more.
...what about Army of Moria? Where did
that come from?
As I dove back into the database to make sense of it, I make a surprising discovery: in the LOTRO dump, Troll is listed as
0W8 and is described exactly as we see in the wiki at 0D8. However, in the French/Italian/Spanish translations of the title and game text, we see Army of Moria!
So here's what I surmise: Army of Moria was the original major Moria card for the Triumph/Menace series, but since it was so generic (and there was already Army of Isengard and Army of Harad), they decided to exchange this with
Cave Troll of Moria, Menace of the Underdeeps (D (as I think about it, they have essentially the same card text!). This was done late enough in the process that the French/Italian/Spanish translations still had the old English placeholder (and was never in fact translated, unlike German),
and the card image itself ended up on Decipher's website. Oops.
Now this is all speculation. I could be very off on this, but I think by and large this is at least consistent with the evidence we have available to us.
TL;DR
- The Triumph/Menace D-rarity cards are actually old W cards and should be listed separately
- Army of Moria is likely a card that was never actually released in any capacity
- My database is twisted in all sorts of knots over this and needs fixing, lol
If you have anything to add to this archeological history, please let me know! I'm particularly interested to get the story from anyone who remembers when the D cards were added to the DB/Wiki way back when, if anyone can even remember it besides Kralik.
Topic: D- and W-rarity cards, LOTRO, and a whole lotta Digital Archeology (Read 3207 times)