Okay, well I did try it at one point......and my impression was that of a rougher uncut version of World of Warcraft set in the lord of the rings universe.

It is really not that great of an MMO.

I keep Lotro on my system and play completely F2P. It is fine to do that if you just want to be a tourist and look at the pretty scenery, since you can get to the areas you haven't paid for and do kills in them - you just don't do the quests. I bought Evendim on deep discount and Misty Mountains for some reason (less recommended). I don't really worry about capping or end game  though.

A follow-up comment related to grinding: no grind mechanism in an MMO has ever made me want to strangle a puppy quite as much as virtue grinding.

*twitch*

Tried it also.

The virtue grind killed any interest I had in the game.

To put it in DDO terms, think of it this way:


- You have to buy each feat slot in the DDO store unless you have ever been VIP. (One month VIP is mandatory to play this game).
- Once you buy the feat slot, you have to 'earn' your feat by doing large numbers of 'kill 360 rats' type quests. Yes they are mostly 360 (the numbers are lower than that in low level areas). That just levels up your virtue by one point, and they cap at level 12 (or did when I quit, might be higher now)
- You can also clear out entire zones questing as an alternative to the kill option, but doing this you will outlevel each zone before you have the required 75-80% quest completion rate. Ever run quests massively overlevel in an MMO before? It is not fun.

Basically it's 'grind easy shit until your asshole bleeds'.

FakeStrake wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2013 at 1:00am:


You get TP from completing deeds on all characters, without regard to server. And the good news is that TP awards are more generous in LOTRO than in DDO. The bad news is that you still need to sub for one month to get all those quality of life things that make playing LOTRO tolerable.

FakeStrake wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2013 at 7:04pm:


Seriously progression limiting. A one month sub unlocks all your trait and virtue slots permanently, whereas you'd have to pay for each of them individually. It's like the equivalent of being forced to pay for feats in DDO.

Other stuff is more convenience-oriented, but in my mind no less essential. The riding skill at level 20, swift travel unlocks, extra bags, no gold cap, etc.

So the introductory video for this Coursera course told me to download lotro and make a toon

FOR EDUCATION!

So what the hell is this Happy Cloud thing and how the fuck do I download the game without it

Is that what they use now to replace Pando?

Memnir wrote on Aug 2^nd, 2013 at 2:37pm:


Do you want them to continue to play it? If not, have them do the hobbit quests. Pie deliveries was my task during alpha testing and it pretty much sucked. I hated the interface, bad quests, and the camping of sites for kills. Then, the stuff started to creep into DDO sealing that fate for me as well.

Latest LOTRO deal is a free 14-day VIP trial (note you need to manually cancel to avoid auto-billing.  You also have to trust Turbine with your credit card again.  So maybe "hopefully free" would be more accurate).

For those of you unfamiliar with the differences between DDO and LOTRO costs, this is pretty big news for cheapskates who play LOTRO (and haven't sprung for VIP yet).  To put it simply, premium doesn't buy you much in LOTRO: you have to have logged your character in sometime as a VIP (I'm pretty sure it is mentioned above).  Once you do that, you get:

Fast Travel (LOTRO teleportation service.  Remember that LOTRO is a landscape game where you have to virtually move your character around for each quest.   Fast travel is critical and this can't be bought with TP).
5 Inventory bags:  LOTRO doesn't have any coin lords: you either buy your bags with TP, go VIP (once...), or do without.
Unlocked gold cap:  Unlike DDO, LOTRO characters never outgrow their gold cap through leveling.  You either live with it, bump it up to 5 Gold as premium (gold is somewhat valuable in LOTRO), or get rid of it through VIP or ~350TP.
Unlocked virtues:  While this is an invitation to grind (see above posts), it is pretty much expected for raiding and charged per character (expensive with alts) otherwise.
If you are level 20+ you can get riding skill as a quest reward (note that while horses can be bought in-game, you need "riding skill" that has to be bought with real money (or this deal), and those 95 TP add up with a few alts.
[you also get premium out of this deal.  It gets you only one character slot (Moria, part of the quad pack includes two more).  It lets you mail gold (although they just added "bags of gold" at the vendors, so you have ways around this while f2p) and a few other required things.  I'm pretty sure premium helps, but mainly expect to shell out real money shortly after hitting 30th (out of 90) level.]

For LOTRO players already starting out, it is a great deal.  For everybody else, it is basically $15 off the minimum price of LOTRO.  Note that they recently had the quad pack (all the expansions save the most recent) at half off instead of the usual $40 (black friday), so I'd probably included that as the rest of the "required" costs.  Throw in the mithril edition* ($20) if you aren't into deeds and have a bunch of TP to spare.

* http://www.impulsedriven.com/products/ESD-IMP-W2777
(This shows up for $10 a few times a year.  It missed Black Friday so I assume it is due for a sale sooner or later).

wumpus wrote on Apr 3^rd, 2014 at 10:21pm:


provide a link please, I tried to find any mention of this and nothing....