f13.net

I keep thinking, as I  and some others have said before, that I should be having more fun.  There are nice graphics, lots of quests and some are even clever, there's a story of sorts, crafting, (which will hopefully prove interesting as it gets more cooked) combat isn't great but it's not awful either, (with very few exceptions that's about as good as it gets with combat without mentioning CoH/V)....

Why am I not having as much fun as I think I should? 

I do understand it's beta... and just out of alpha, even.  Still, I've had great fun in some beta tests.  Shadowbane, WoW, SWG, CoH, to mention a few.  I haven't always stuck with the released game long due to all sorts of things... but I had good fun in beta and out.  LOTRO, however, has given me very little joy from almost the start.  I'm not saying it isn't entertaining at time.  I've had a little fun here and there.  But overall, I've found it rather "meh", even though it is well crafted and has all the ingredients for a decent game.   I was chatting to Xanthippe a couple of days ago and she said, basically, she feels like playing, logs in and then loses interest soon after.  I have the exact same experience... and it's not because I'm not trying.  I do TRY to have more fun.  Some games, not so many these days though, I don't have to try at all...  the fun just comes.

Anyway... I think I know one of the reasons WoW seems more fun than LOTRO.  LOTRO hardly has any dumbasses.  In WoW, wherever you go, people APPEAR to be having fun.  Dancing naked, hopping around, challenging each other to duels, spitting on defeated enemies, just plain annoying you for no reason....   There is hustle and bustle.  It's like the difference between New York City and Akron, Ohio.  There is so much colour and movement.  Even in beta,  things were always happening.  A lot of them annoyed me, but it was something.  In WoW I can stand at the auction house and lose myself in it for ages and then walk outside and people are in my face, almost any time of day.  More than two years later, there are still people dancing naked in the streets and attracting onlookers.  People are having nasty and mostly stupid arguments on the chat channels.  The characters and armour are weird and garish looking.  There is always something to look at.

Anyway, my solution to insuring a healthy game is more colour, (hot pink, lime green, candy apple red)  more emotes, (lots of dancing, nasty spitting and gestures, etc)  the ability to get as naked as your rating allows,  and gear the advertising towards dumbasses.

Other than the setting, there is really not much to differentiate it from any other similar game in the genre. There are definitely some cool little touches (I really like the achievements book), but the core gameplay is just way too derivative. No PvP really lowers the ceiling on how fun it can be as well.

I think my interest began to wane after about 3 days of LotRO.  I thought maybe it was that it reminded me too much of DDO, but then I started playing a different game currently being tested, it kinda died on me after 3 days too.  I chalked it up to me being done to death with the same ol', same ol', but then I popped back into WoW last night, and enjoyed myself.  Though, in about 3 days, I'll probably be bored of that too.

I hate to say it, but it's rather vanilla.  The setting is the reason, but it manages to not be epic enough to grab me, which is what the LOTR setting should do.  It should be big and dangerous.  It doesn't really feel dangerous most of the time.  If the nazgul, like, got right in your fucking face right there at the beginning, I think it would add to the pulse-pounding that you should be feeling in that sort of situation.  Then, of course, you'd have the inevitable letdown as you are assigned to go kill ten boars in a flowery field.

But it is a damned pretty flowery field.

Forgive me for asking if this is already a known thing but I've been wondering all along...

What exactly are this game's selling points/differentiation markers between it and it's competition in the market.  In other words, once you get beyond the setting in middle earth, what the intended hooks/cool stuff?

Xilren
(btw, if you'd rather i didn't post/read this forum until i actually get in the beta, let me know)

You just reach a point with these type of games where you really have seen it all. I think you're just now realizing that you're there.

Like with FPS games, I played the hell out of wolf3d and doom and those games, up until the quake 3 release. The last fps game that I really dove into was Quake2, and since then I've tried many - if not all of them - in demo or beta or some form, but I've just not been hooked. Especially Quake4, it was just laughable to me.

Dungeons and Dragons Online and LOTRO were laughable to me in the exact same way. Same with Vanguard, and even WoW.

Welcome to bitterness. Good luck with talking yourself into hitting the post button instead of deleting everything you have typed while saying, "nobody cares" out loud.

(I've hit the back button 3 times so far in typing out this post)

edit:

I'll go a little further with this since this is a private forum and all. Here is what I remember from LOTRO beta.

Downloaded the game, installed but I wasn't allowed to play for a few days. That made me irritated, and I didn't mark the date that I could play on the calendar or anything - I just remembered that I had it about 5 days after I could actually begin playing.

So I fired it up again, patched a bit of data (quickly, no complaints about patching and the front end. it seems really solid, especially for a beta) and fired up the game.

I forget what character I tried to make at first, but it wasn't allowed / wasn't in the game. That kind of made me irriated so I made a female (something, hobbit I think) bard. I don't even think the actual class is called bard, and it's only been 2 weeks or so and I've already forgot that.

So finally I'm in the game and it's this pretty interesting newbie experience / handheld quest on rails thing. It's presented well enough that it doesn't piss me off. I go along in this for about 15 minutes and then I get to a part where I have to clear out some spiders and advance with my NPC buddy, but the spiders never spawn and my buddy is sitting there, frozen, shaking in fear from all these spiders that never spawned. I log out in disgust, not seeing any way to exit the tutorial and get on with it.

Forget about the game for another week.

I log back in and fire up my female bard and she's sitting in the area surrounded by spiders, and my NPC buddy is still hanging out, shaking in his boots. Cool, I whack the spiders and we go onward. The quest actually 'fixed itself' once the crap spawned. That's good enough I guess. I finally complete the tutorial (took me like 8 days to actually do this 20 minutes of gameplay) and i'm out in the real world in some city.

It runs like crap, I'm loading and loading and then a few dozen player characters that all look exactly alike swarm my screen. Fuck I hate newbie cities. So I lag around the main city trying to run to a different area, I get outside the main gates and it's nothing but fucking wolves as far as the eye can see.

Now, I don't know about you guys but I actually had a wolf-dog hybrid for a pet. If a stranger came to my house and stepped out of his car, there is ONE THING that he wouldn't see - and that would be Panamon, the wolfdog. So I see all these people boringly autoattacking wolves, and I mean like 20 people within about an acre if I were to judge it. "Great" I think - the very first REAL quest in this game and I guarantee it's a KILL 20 WOLVES quest, just like Lineage2 or something awful.

So I head to the right, kinda following the road to see what other zones I can get to that don't have people LOLZ'ing in shout and 2 PCs for every pixelated wolf that is standing in plain site in the middle of the plains while there are trees all over the place, and I get to what looks like a zone boundary/ change in scenery. Oh, I can't go that way. It was blocked for some reason that I don't recall. Either it was down for maint. or it was because I was too low level, or I didn't meet some requirements. Fuck.

I turn around and keep the road within sight and follow from the OTHER side, running by some cool looking ruins and I run by - get this - more fucking wolves and some SPIDERS. Yes, spiders and wolves. I bet there are beetles somewhere that I'm missing, because every awful fucking newbie zone needs BEETLES.

So I evade these big spiders by running STRAIGHT THROUGH their big webs. At least most of them aren't physical boundaries, but some of them are. It would be great if they trapped you or slowed down your character by a bit, and the more you moved the more you slwoed down and the more you ALERTED THE SPIDER WHO SET THE WEB HINT GAME DESIGNERS ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING SPECIAL IT'S ALMOST 2007.

Anyways, I get past all these spiders and I see this wall, and it looks like I might have went in a candy-cane like path, where I looped around at the end and this is the back-entrance/exit to the town that I started in, and there's this little crack in the wall, about yay high, perfect for a fucking hobbit bard. Can I go through it? No chance. It looks perfect, but of course it wasn't meant to be.

So I turn back around and look at all the spiders and shit that I have to run through to find another zone exit and I just don't feel like doing it at this point. I log out.

A few days later I log back in, still staring at the spiders and webs and shit. I log back out after a few seconds and uninstall the game.

THE END

I back out of posts all the time, never posting lots of things.  Anyway...

I guess I need to get back in there and play a bit more before I comment further.  Credence and whatnot.

It is pretty, I agree.  I don't dislike the game at all.  It's just that nothing jumps out at me that makes it all that special.  But, who knows what's to come?  In most games, I don't see a huge amount of difference from beta to release.  Polish and finishing bits and bobs but there could be several huge patches that might inspire me.  I'll definitely stick around to find out.  I just wanted to pass along my hot pink/more asshats idea.  It seems to work for WoW.  I'm even antici.....................pating the Burning Lesions expansion!  I wonder what sort of dance the Horde Elves will do?

You can tatoo that on my ass and call me Shirley.  I agree with the rest of what Feet said as well, up to and not including the hot-pink part.

Please don't add wacky colors or huge boobs.

How do you figure hot pink and huge boobs are wacky?  OH!!!  You mean "whacky!"  (NNWWSNM)

Hot pink is wacky.  Huge boobs are usually not wacky.  If I had mentioned the boobs first, would you have asked me why I thought hot pink was huge?

For you!!!  For no reason at all!!!

(http://64.72.125.88/ps-thumb/tn_39457407-5.jpg)


At least it's better than my usual hobbit pr0n.

See, I like boobs and all, but whenever I see game models with disproportionate whoppers, it doesn't serve to spark my interest or even elicit a guffaw. No, it reminds me that the game developers are twelve years old and just found daddy's Playboys.

As for the game itself, I've mostly said my peace in other threads. There's nothing that's jumping out, grabbing me, and yelling "OMFG PLAY THIS GAME THIS FEATURE R4WKS" in my face. It's not quite accessible enough for the true MMO newbie, I think, and I don't know how well an 2nd-MMO ex-WoW addict will like it. I think the audience here is representative of the burned-out veteran demographic, so...

I'm enjoying LOTRO, it needs a lot of work but the foundations for a very successful game are there.

It seems like no one is there.  There are these really nice towns and I'm the only one in them so it's a lot of soloing.  I'm sure that will change in time though.

Overall I really am enjoying it.  I am a bit perturbed at the fact that I can't do the main quest line though.  I ran into a bugged quest really early on and can't get past it that point.  Some of the quests are pretty good but without the main story line and no other people I feel like I'm wandering aimlessly.

vex

Maybe you should try roleplaying in general chat. 

We could roleplay Night Elves wearing hot pink thongs.  Less Killing, More Dancing!

I am not above being one of the dumbasses I talked about, you know.

I asked this a few weeks ago, and never got an answer.

Anyway, just like a few others here, I cannot say the game is bad, but nothing really hooks me into playing. There are plenty of things that I believe are well-done at this point...but nothing that urges me to play.

Also, we need some PvP to play with. At least as a Captain, I can see a lot of oppurtunities for group synergy, and it would be more fun in PvP to try these things out.

Just some minor observances:

Why is there no seamless way to rotate the camera around your character to see what they look like from the front?
Click-to-move as an option also feels like it should be there, but isn't.

To be rather blunt, a lot of theinterface feels lifted straight from WoW, so you might as well get the little things like that as well


The female hobbit /dance emotion is pretty pathetic. If you called that animation /clap it would be ok.

Pretty sure that if you use the arrow keys on your computer, it rotates the camera around.  Can't recall at the moment if it's the keypad arrows or the arrows but one of those does it.


[Edit: moved the end quote thingie so my response doesn't appear in the quoted part]

It's keypad arrows, but when have positioned the camera to the front and you right click to change an item of clothing, the right click action resets the camera angle, that's annoying.

Thanks for the heads-up, but mmm.. un-needed awkwardness in the controls.

The crap /dance is the same for Dwarfs as well.




I was thinking about what Signe wrote up top... the lack of dumbasses has got to be pretty heavily related to the fact that we're in early Beta, and that it appears that a lot of the Beta invites have been given to large guilds and the like rather than randoms. I mean, I got into the wow stress test beta, but there were about half a million of us by that stage.

Another factor might be the types of fans that each of the two IPs attract. WoW has what my brother used to call "battle.net kiddies" which Schild calls "Blizzard fans". LOTR on the other hand, and this is just from my limited experience on their boards pre-beta, seems to have a lot of people in it who seem like LARPers. There was one long thread complaining that the female leather armour wasn't covering enough, and a long discussion as to whether a patch of brownish-tan pixels in a screenshot were leather or in fact bare skin!. These are the people who go to roleplaying stores wearing their elf-cloaks. They are utterly humourless when discussing the way they feel things should be in "their" middle-earth. They act a lot like the VG fanbois, actually, only their reverence is for their own internal depiction of ME instead of Brad's underpants.

Hehe, you know what Daddy likes.

I don't want that in LotRO, though.  I'm not a LARPer like what Azazel talks about, but I'd like to think that LOTR is more serious than WOW.  Kind of what I thought DAoC might be until I zoned into Tir na nOg.  Anyway, armor that actually covers the body makes sense and helps immersion.  Everyone being disproportionate in some way, especially in some way that is a cheap attempt to give me a chubby, does not help immersion.

fuck shit board ate my post.

quick version.

it turned out that the texture was leather, not skin but some humourless cunts thought it was and started a multipage whinefest because they thought she had some armpit skin showing between her small covered-up boobs and armoured arms.

Signe's OP example might be extreme, but there's a space between the massive stupidity of WoW's playerbase and people who are so deathly serious about their chosen make-believe world that anything that doesn't match their personal (or PJ's) vision of it is heresy.

Played quite a bit over the weekend and my Guardian Hurn is now level 31.

Negative Points:
Crafting system seems to need a lot of work so I'm keeping my drops on an alt for now.
Combat against Elites takes too long and if only a single elite it can be boring.
A few quests are bugged, a horse route from Bree to North Downs doesn't seem to exist (Beta so no problem)
Although there's plenty of other quests, I really don't like the fact that a few quests still exist for crap mobs above level 20 (boars mostly, but there's also a single sickle-fly quest in north downs as well).
Directional sound can be a bit iffy, sometimes I'm fighting one mob and the sounds indicate I have an add to my left when there isn't.
Loot is fairly uninspired and it seems like not much of it has been created.  (I'm using a purple shield and have an uncompleted quest that gives this same shield as the reward).
Vendors can be confusing, from a quick glance double handed and single handed weapon vendors look the same. 
Vendor Items should sort on level requirements not type.
It's easy to get level requirements and armour value mixed up when comparing items (to what you have equipped) at a vendor as both values are close together.  I'd change the armour value figure or level requirement to coloured text.
Right clicking resets the camera, makes it annoying and difficult to visually compare items of equipment.
One achievement is the title "Bog-Hunter" that may sound fine in the USA, in the UK it has a dual meaning of "Toilet-Hunter".
I took my first class trait at level 30, I get more energy on a success block, not sure this is working, it might be but if there's a visual clue when I get the power boost I constantly miss it.

Positive Points:
Music, very spooky in certain zones and it really adds to the atmosphere.
Zones, 
Lone lands is ok, probably my least favourite zone and I'm not sure why.  Weathertop is excellent, not had any quests for top myself, probably due to the current bugged epic quest in the marsh.
Bree lands are fine, not great, it's a welcome surprise that Bree town is so large, though I'd expect more quests to start or finish there.
Shire - excellent, only went once but it seems to capture the feel of the place really well.
Old Forest, I expected to dislike this zone as I hate getting lost.  Got lost and spent a few hours wandering round in circles, loved the zone, honestly not sure if paths actually changed or not.
Barrow Downs, again excellent, very spooky and well done, it's a real surprise to discover South Barrow Downs.  Looking forward to exploring the Great Barrow instance, not tried past the entrance as yet.
North Downs, my favourite zone, I have completed about 50 quests and have maybe another 50 to go.
Some quests are really well done and have been a lot of fun to solo.
Combat against multiple mobs works well as a Guardian, some real touch and go moments when fighting 6-10 lower level mobs at once.
Traits seem like they might work well, providing they actually make a difference to combat, run speed etc.
The whole book idea for achievements, exploring, number of quests, titles etc is excellent.

The success of the game is going to depend on what happens during the rest of Beta and I doubt I'll level up this high again if they do a character wipe.  It's unclear if they will nerf the main Guardian skill as it seems pretty good compared to the others and I really don't think Guardians are currently overpowered.  Some 30+ quests are unfinished, some 30+ mobs don't have combat animations (Earth-Kin).  Lots of items need unique icons, in fact there's a massive amount of artistic work still needed.  The numbers of elites concern me and I fear that the end game will be largely based on raiding for loot.  The game badly needs a decent crafting system and more item loot, no idea what pvp (monster play) will be like, big question marks on what the level 35-50 content will be, as I seem to have seen most types of monsters from the books already.

Last night I rolled up a hobbit guardian (Tarragon) and made it to level six, trying to do those pre-searing quests again.  The game is coming along nicely.  The thing I really noticed, gameplaywise, is that playing a Guardian is fun.  By that, I mean quite unlike a Loremaster.  It's probably a combination of being tougher and having more to do in combat.  Maybe a loremaster is a "different" kind of fun... if that's the case, my loremaster should be able to do library/research quests rather than combat.

I had three special skills right off, and while I had about that many when I was being a loremaster in Alpha, I'm actually enocouraged to use all of these for two reasons: first, they are effective and the timers are set such that when I have fired off #3, #1 is ready again; second, I like the new odometers A LOT.  I love me some odometers.  Hit creatures 2500 times to get a mini-ding?  Kill 30 brigands to get a title?  Sold.  One of the things I liked about EQ2 were the collections, and I'm glad to see Turbine pursuing this route with such zeal.

The hobbit introduction is nice.  Definitely had a creepy feeling as I walked alone down the road.  Still had the nazgul-behind-the-fence problem, however I did actually get a twinge of danger right there at the end.  I just think nazgul should be really scary.

Now for the funny part.  My wife "caught" me playing at 0230 last night, apparently I had the sound volume too high.  I forced myself to bed at 0330.  This morning she asks me what I was playing, so I tell her.  "But you're not supposed to know that," I said.
"I saw the bill last month, I know you are playing it."
"No no, that was something else..." and I proceeded to tell her about being in the beta (like she has anyone to tell even if she would) and how I was in the alpha.  Apparently (!) she is really impressed with this and the conversation ended with her telling me that I should go upstairs and play tonight.  She never tells me to do that.  Hoooray for Bat Country!

Another weird thing: we were watching the WoW episode of South Park and she says, "Does the real game look like that?  That looks awesome."  It begins!

First Impressions (I'll just post 'em here):

The client is nice. Better than SOE. Though I said this about DDO as well.

The graphics haven't totally turned me off. Looks like they're going for a slightly stylized look....Which is probably for the best. I also welcome the fact that I can roam and see the world (unlike ddo).

The music is cool, but this game needs more environmental and combat noises. Needs voicework too (is that planned?).

I like the quests so far. Things are scripted, as opposed to completely static pez dispensing. Thought it was cool that a survey pop ups after completion too. Every beta should have that.

The interface, while understandable, feels very cluttered. Buttons and icons are too small as well.

Combat is another ho hum, hotkey affair, but I can tolerate it for the time being... Everything else about this game seems better than DDO (or AC2 for that matter).

I got in last night along with another buddy of mine so we made two humans and after we ran a couple quests we stopped for a smoke break.

I think we were both unsatisfied with the introduction. I'm supposed to rescue someone from a series of fences and kill 5 people? I'm going to light the whole place on fire!!!! Muhahaha! Oh wait, there is a black rider.. intro done....

So we decided to make a few other characters. I rolled an elf. And wow - talk about a much better intro. I felt like I was in the world for a few seconds, holy heck - That's Agent Smith! Err Elrond.

If there isn't a 40 man raid zone with a 1000 orc siege force you have to destroy the game has no hope.

Speaking of which, redo the human intro so you are captured by orcs, have Merry and Pippen save you. I mean you have all this IP to work with, SHOW IT! BTW is there a war on? What am I doing here? Oh I'm killing pigs in a field. I forget the part in the books and the movies where the characters did that?

Yeah, I started out Elf, kind of liked it....Went human...Kind of meh. Might just stick with the elf character after all.

Plus, the human males look like a cross between Fabio and George W Bush. I really hope that isn't the model they're settling on.

the models in DDO look better - why the step back?

My human has a ZZ Top sorta beard going on.  I think its a nice touch!

That's about the only way to cover the Fabio jaw. But I'm playing a Champion. I don't want to look like a hobo.

The eyes are all GW though. I hate them.

Everything seems to be a bit slower and staggier... why?  WHY?

I keep making the observation that gravity in Middle Earth must be like the moon, or my character should be a pro NBA player as their hangtime in the air is just awesome.

If I'm in attack mode and jump, my weapons leave my avatar and float in the air beside me.

[EDIT]

Another thing (unrelated to the above):

Stone Trolls and Elephants should be the only races that "tank". I find it funny that they were so loyal to the property that they removed playable wizards, but yet, decided to maintain status quo and include "disloyal" ideas like the Guardian class. :evil:

Speaking of that, the entire class system is underwhelming, unvaried, and unimaginative.

As I wander through the towns and countryside, I find myself thinking.. Boy I thought there were more spriggans in DAOC...

Of course I look at the character creator and think wow - they stole a lot of hair from WOW.

They stole the interface from WoW too....Just made the borders much more bulkier (they should be toned down a bit...especially that mini map. It's HUGE.).

But like DDO, they still use plain Roman fonts (for the quest text and such). It looks as amateurish as a Linux app. Get some fancy Tolkien-ish fonts on this thing asap.

I won't knock them too much on how ugly the humans are. WoW's look like cleft lipped Chip 'n' Dale dancers.

And to further comment on the class system: Fuck, if you're going to take out magic wielding, you better make up for it in melee in a big way. "Tank", "Duel Wielder" and "Rogue" will not do.

The influx of new players has really made crowding a bit of a problem, at least in Chetwood. The world suddenly feels a lot smaller, since there is a PC behind every bush now.

Other observation: Is there a war on? I thought there was a war on. No one seems to be talking about it.

All thse things are immaterial if they do not fix the graphics loading issue for me. It feels like Horizons all over again and that will just not fly.

Ostensibly this new patch will address some of that, but I do not have my hopes up.

I'm not running a sub-average machine;

AMD 64 3500+
1.5 gig of ram
Nvidia 7950
One SATA drive

Yes, I could have a faster processor, but I think I'm not behind the general population of gamers, especially in the video card dept, and yet, any other MMO out there runs five times more smoothly than this.

You're machine is better than mine, but in the same "family" maybe?

Barton
1.5 RAM
Nvidia 6600GT OC'ed
SATA drives

Anyways, the game runs OK at High, but I have to turn AA off. I'm better off running it at Medium though.

Intel Prentiss 3.0 (or is it 3.2?) CPU
2 gigs RAM
Radeon x1600 w/512 RAM
SATA


I run everything at full and have yet to receive a single hiccup.  Its perty!

I pretty much run everything at max, too, and have no problems.  Now and then, if I play during prime time, I stagger a bit in towns if they're crowded.

AMD 64 3200
2 gig RAM
Nvidia 7800
Some generic POS drive that came in this generic POS eMachine computer

Mmmm... Malaysian fish cakes. 

Check your Karma!

I'm running on a laptop that's good enough for EQ2 and Oblivion (the latter doesn't exactly look like the 360 version, naturally).  I've had some lag issues in populated areas or when I crest a hill and have a long vista, but it's not all that bad assuming there's debug code in there still.

AMD 64 3000+
1.5 gig of ram (maybe I need to ask for more for Xmas)
ATI 128 card (all in wonder?)
Hardware 3D only, which wasn't detected by the game at install.

I really enjoyed my first few hours of playtime.  While I'm sure there are still plenty of major issues, I'd have to say that the thing most "wrong" with it at this point is polish.  A lot of that stuff has been mentioned already, from the timing on the animations, to the lack of ambient sound in populated areas (especially during the day), there's lots of room for general improvement to what seems like a really fun "world" game.  At level 8, I don't even feel like I've had to fight that much, which is backed up by what seem like low numbers on my combat achievements, and the quest lines (for Hobbits, at least), seem to follow a nice progression through the Shire.  I almost feel like I make too much money from vendor trash, but I'm not gonna complain too loudly about that.  I'm not sure how the loretards (this from a guy who's guild since 99 is called Servants of the Secret Fire, which we're pretty sure we won't get this time around) are going to react to this game, but I think it's a sure bet to shatter the Britain Bank record for most awful name misspellings in MMOG screenshot history.

I did find one stellar bug this morning.  Apparently I forgot to bind when I got to the shire, so when I used the Map to go back to what I thought was Michel Delving, I wound up in Pre-Searing Archet.  It was all a bad dream!  Hooray!  The guards at the gates to Combe won't let me through til the Brigand issue is resolved!  But... but... Oh shit, I can't get out of here.

So I walk into a building, and sure enough it won't let me out.  General Error probably isn't there to hand over any prisoners to the Constable.  I logged the bug and just for fun typed /death.  I wind up outside of Archet, but this time there's a guy next to the graveyard who wants to tell me about crafting.  It's now Post-Searing again and I can walk to Combe, but I still have to run all the way back to Bag-End to continue questing. 

Side Note - I wanted to let the game tell me about crafting, without reading forums or whatever.  It wasn't until, at level 8, I tried to use a Forge in one of the Hobbit villages and it told me to go to Combe if I wanted to craft.  This should probably happen sooner (of course, I might the only person who would enjoy starting the game as a crafter and then falling into some kind of adventuring through storytelling, but like I said I'm sure that's just me).

Yeah, the crafting bits could really use some more detail. You can muddle through it, but it isn't terribly intuitive. I would like to see a rebalance of the professions too...some of them just seem slapped together for little reason.

Crafting is actually one of things I am interested in, which is strange to me. I like it that I can make something USEFUL right off the bat (still using the Rowan bow I made for myself, and made one for Furiously). Having an auction house will GREATLY increase both the utility and the profitability of the crafting professions.

That's really odd, because we have pretty similar machines, Signe, mine being a hair better than yours, yet I'm having a lot of texture loading stutter, no matter what settings I run the game at, even at low.

I've defragged my HD, I've even used that contiguous file defragmenter on the entire Turbine folder, and I'm still getting stuttered graphics loading.

Any tips Trippy or anyone else?

Did someone think copying the sitting pose from DAOC was a good idea?

For Male Hobbits, in particular?

Sorry - furry feet scare me - I couldnt make one. I should clarify - female sitting position for non-hobbits.

Don't be sorry, I'm being confusing today.  I was actually agreeing with you, a follow up question to your original question, if you will.

I need to roll up a female dwarf to see if they can have beards.  I always loved that. 

I'm enjoying the game so far, but can see why there may be some apprehension.  I'm not sure what my long-term goal in the game is (beyond having fun, of course).  I assume that this is another trip to some max level x followed by some large encounter scheme (raiding).  I enjoy the atmosphere but do have a couple of early complaints similar to those above:

1) The game is a bit bland.  It's pretty, but there's no sense of urgency. Aren't we pressing to deal with Sauron's army?  I don't feel the impending doom.  Perhaps it will get more evident when I get up a few levels... I'd like to feel it from the start though.

2) I don't feel like a hero.  I feel like a citizen with an attitude.  Kill some boars, kill some spiders, or fedEx this for me.  It's an old system, but it could really be used to generate some sense of heroism.  What about timed missions that people could actually fail. 

3) The intro jail thing had me feeling a lot more like a spectator than an active part.  I'd  love to be the one responsible for saving people and chasing off Sauron's minions.   

Granted, all of these points are pretty minor.  I'm hoping I'll have more constructive input as I get a bit more experienced.

I don't know what it could be, Engels.  I had a problem with everything a while back, even sites such as f13, and found that it was some stupid bit torrent thing popping up and gobbling resources.  Other than that, this cheapo computer with a nice graphics card hasn't given me any problems running stuff so far.  I hardly ever defrag or clean up, either, although I did it recently for no reason.  The only thing I try to remember is Ad-Aware because it makes me feel good.

Engels, your machine is better than mine, too.  Choppiness sounds like you have something running in the background.  This happens to me on occasion but usually goes away before I can be assed to figure out what it is.

I get some serious lag when I first load the game, but then it smooths out. I still get major items (like Bree) that 'pop' into view when they should already be well within video range.

I will give you the age old advice from the WWIIOL forums when anyone had problems running their godawful bloated code- buy more RAM!  :-D

Sauced's post made me realize that I must have done something wrong on my last run through Archet as a hobbit.  I thought that several quests must have been yanked since I ended up with the invasion quest pretty quickly and didn't have anything else on my list, nor did I notice any more rings.  I went through the Archet-burns thing and popped up in Minor Delving, or whatever it's called.  After playing this game for so long, I still have never been to Combe for some reason.  No wonder I can't figure out what to do with my craft skills.

Honestly, if I hadn't had the buggy experience this morning that basically put me right next to Combe (let alone the guy who gave me a quest to go there - I Repeat, this guy should be in Archet pre-burning), I'd still be clueless in the Shire.  At least, until I got into Bat Country later and gave in and asked for help.

Oh - I've ran across 2 ruins that house brigands.

they look identical. (The one by Combe and the one near Combe in the hobbit direction.) If I notice and think..."Hmm - that seems lazy." most people will also.

See, this is the wierd thing; HL2 runs like a dream. FEAR runs like a dream. Eve ran like a dream except for of course, those insta situations.

I just refuse to believe that this MMO, on LOW settings has load times issues whereas HL2 at uber max omfg ramped up graphics doesn't make my machine twitch.

I wonder if its as Signe suggests, some network connectivity issue. Any quick tests that I could run to see how bad a ping/latency/whathaveyou I may have getting out of my box and to the Arwen server?

Ssss....tttt.r.reess....s.s.sss  tt.eess.t.ttting...g.. iii..s.ss.s.ss  ffffffu....nnnn.n.n...

Try Microsoft Flight Sim X on Super High if you wanna see a good machine break down and cry.

Except that those games are zoned while LOTRO is mostly seemless, so it has to stream world and texture data from disc to RAM and VRAM as you move around. That is why it "stutters" at times.

My motherboard has two nic cards, one is a Yukon 100Mb the other is an Nvidia 1Gig. I was using the Yukon. I switched to the Nvidia 1gig and it seems to have fixed a lot of the stuttering. Not that my computer was actually pulling down anywhere near that type of bandwidth, since I get 6000 mb/s at the best of times, but I think the Nvidia card manages data better. The problems I was having are all but gone now, even at high settings.

The game barely pulls down 4K a second in normal usage. It is not a bandwidth issue. I can clearly hear my hard drive trashing around everytime there's some graphics stuttering -- there's no question it's a hard drive streaming issue.

Me running from Buckland to the market fountain in Bree (the spike at the beginning is from the initial login):

(http://www.pandadesigns.com/f13/lotro_bandwidth_1.gif)

I hear ya, Trippy, and the stuttering when entering a zone with a ton of new graphic content to load still does create a stuttering effect as you describe, but I think my problem was nic-card related simply because of the dramatic change I noticed when I switched the nic cards. Nothing to do with bandwidth, but rather how that secondary Yukon card interacted with my computer in general. Both were integrated, but I think that performance wise, the Nvidia one had a leg up somehow. Either that, or the Yukon one was semi-broken somehow.

[EDIT] Bah.

The Yukon uses CPU to do some of its job. The Nvidia one doesn't. You might try plotting CPU usage doing the same thing under both scenarios.

Aha, Furiously probably nailed it! But I'm curious, where does one get a CPU plotting program, other than alt-tabbing to the task manager?

Played for about six hours so far. I'm a pro :)

On that graphic choppiness, I encountered something like what was described 10 minutes after being in the game. Prior it was beautiful and smooth. I wouldn't win contests with my screengrabs, but that this runs on my 4.5 year old rig means they're smart. So 10 minutes in I get slapped with 0.5 FPS or close. Quiting did not. Restarting comp did nothing.

I fixed it though. Simply changing the screen resolution to a new setting resulted in the smoothness. I didn't even need to ACCEPT that setting. Just make the change. Then I let it revert back to what I use (1680x960, whatever the highest one is). I need to do this once an hour. Maybe some sort of graphics memory leak thing?


Otherwise, still learning too much to really comment on. One thing I do like is the CoX-esque pre-casting thing (able to queue up the next spell while the timer refreshes)


What's going to separate this from WoW enough to draw those people in? No idea. Not sure even story would be enough. LoTRO is defined by the movies, and while this game does an awesome job of being evocative of the movie aesthetic (without being able to use Jackson's stuff), lacking the epic save-the-world linearity is going to be a problem.

Very odd. It can't be a graphics memory leak (at least not the traditional kind) otherwise rebooting would fix it. And the game isn't keeping cached graphics files (like BF2 does) as far as I can tell so it's unclear why changing the res would temporarily fix the problem.

What GPU are you using?

Could be completely unrelated :) By GPU do you mean my video card? Sapphire Radeon 9800pro (128mb). AGP on my ASUS motherboard with nForce 415-D. 1gb RAM. At first I was thinking it could be fragmented data, but swapping resolution wouldn't really solve highly fragmented texture file access I wouldn't think.

Girlfriend and I just had a long discussion about immersion in an mmo, largely sparked by Schild's claim that MMOs don't have 'love'. That brought us around to the fundamental differences between a fantasy RPG and a non-fantasy rpg. There has to be a sense of a pre-technology world and a huge world confronting the 'brave band of adventurers'.

I fear that LoTR is going to fall flat on its face in this aspect. I don't require a McQuaid like vision of eternal player torment, but the Lone Lands, for instance, have teh ruins of Eanrienglaedabinaeril 3 feet away from the Lost Cairn of Bolrigifoodingleblatrin which in turn is 4 yards from the respawn point, which in turn is 2 feet from the Medium Weaponsmith.

That just ain't gonna work. I think its too late tho.

Most games are set up like this. But players put up with it in other games because their expectations are different. For LoTRO, they may want an "epic" that just isn't there for them. It's the same challenge SWG faced: delivering the epic of the movies in a static timeline.

Having said that, I found the Elven starting land of Eldion (or close to that) to be pretty appropriate scaled. It felt big. Not in a West Karana "what's the point" sorta way, but big enough and big looking.

It's just that when I found a barren looking ruin, there was a whole bunch of vendors there... reminded me of most other MMORPGs: the setting is irrelevant to the services offered therein.

I can forgive starter newbie areas being a bit more compact, with pure 'entertainment' value content being conveniently close to trainers and vendors and the like. Its a starter area after all. But once I've cut my teeth on some content and I'm in week 4 of playing, I'd like a bit more to chew off than a simple clone of the newbie area, only with higher level mobs. I don't think its too much to ask.

I don't have a problem with the world so much as I do the classes. They're horrible.

Being loyal to LotR is only a part of it (a part I don't place much thought on, to be honest). The biggest reason being: If you're going to take out magic, then I believe it has to be made up for in a big way. They haven't done that.

As far as LotR specific reasons go: The Guardian class, for example. Tanks.

Lets not get into how shitty a concept Tanks are to begin with --- A good enough reason is that they simply aren't in the movies or the books.

If you want to find the most effective way to implement combat that is completely unlike that portrayed in the Lord of the Rings, then this is how you would do it.

I don't fully lay the blame on Turbine though. I blame earlier testers.

They didn't really take out magic though. Or, is it that Lore Masters are so gimped at later levels nobody plays them? The guy I've got casts damage, AOEs, buffs/debuffs, summons pet(s) and has some light crowd control down the road. Seems great for how I prefer to play. Certainly not faithful to either the books nor the movie really, because there's no restrictions on the number of Lore Masters, but I'd let this one slide because, well, I like me my flash bangs :)

And Engels, I agree. I want far flung vast wilderness at higher levels. It's something that always bothered me slightly about WoW: no matter where you go, you're within 5 minutes of a vendor. But then, I play a Mage Engineer, so am 5 minutes from anywhere ;)

Remember those elves with the polearms that showed up to defend Rohan? They should include those dudes, kind of like the Human specific Captain class. Make them AoE melee.

Dwarves should get a Drunken Master.

I don't know about Hobbits.

How about "Decoy" or "Abductee".

Here's what I see as the biggest problem: What will someone from another MMOG (WoW etc) find in this game that they haven't already experienced elsewhere?  There's no "COOL!" factor.  Nothing really stands out as being a new experience to me. 

I'd like to think that I'm not so jaded as to be unimpressed so easily.  I really wanted to like this title, but after almost a week, I haven't found anything that really grabbed me.  There's just no "hook".

I agree it's a big question. The first few hours are critical for any newbie, veteran from other games or not. So far the cool factor has been the use of queued actions (ala CoX) and a couple of compelling world-altering stories (like the Elven-Male starting one where you witness the entombment of records lest Dwarves get 'em, or the Human one that involves rescuing Hobbits). WoW doesn't really have that in the early levels, even for Draenai and Blood Elf. But then, after those opening events, LoTRO becomes another WoW. At least, so far.

But then, what was really different about WoW? Most of its oh-geeness for vets was the pace, and some combined class abilities. For newbies to the genre, it was anything we found interesting in our first games.

I'm  not saying LoTRO is gonna be a smash hit because of its tweaks on convention or because it attracts zillions of new entrants to the genre. I just think there may be some amount of wow here, enough to draw people who are new or bored with other games.

Oddly enough there seems some disparity between the impressions based on starting areas. How many are there? So far I saw 5 options for Human and I think 5 for Elf. Is this a problem analogous to SWG, where with the breadth of starting area options (at launch there were like 22 or so) almost guaranteed picking one that sucked?

That's why I'm playing WoW again and can't bring myself to log back into LOTRO.  Well, that and I'm playing FFXII which is kind of like a single player MMO.  Playing 3 MMO type combat engine games at once would slay me.

Even then, I'm finding it hard to double up on my diku, especially when the LOTRO is just a different flavored re-hash of what I'm playing with my friends. One with worse combat, worse classes, and IMO worse art.

The lore could be the saving grace, the main story line could be a major hook.  But there has to be a LOT more of it.  More narrative driven quests please, less collect 12 goblin toenails.  If I could follow the main story line with only doing a few sidequests here and there to level up.. that'd be fantastic. 

I'll probably log in to fufill my testing duties (I feel like I'm being neglectful) after I finish up with FFXII. Still, I think I may have gotten to the point where I'm not going to play a game just because it's a new setting or a little different.  If there's another game that does everything it does and better, I'm going to be playing that game.

That's not something you can put on a game box.  I'm sure some marketting genius would call that "innovative, interactive combat". I never even noticed that as something special. You can't transfer that feature into months of subscibing.


A complete quest driven advancement from 1-60 was a big thing for me.  Now I expect that standard from any MMO I'm playing that isn't just a sandbox.  If someone wants to make that a feature now, they better expand or do better.  Otherwise, there wasn't a lot completely new that WoW did, but it did everything it did BETTER than anyone else with a greater degree of polish.  A game putting WoW in its sights better nail areas like art direction, combat, travel, PVP, etc.
 

I don't think those are different staring areas.  I believe there's a starting area for each race, not subrace options. I could be wrong.

Do people know when the races converge at a common area or at least start to get together?  Prolonged separation could be a problem for friends playing with each other.  Not all of my friends love dwarves.

The hook is the Middle-earth setting. Unfortunately other than the story-line quests the world feels like "generic fantasy MMORPG" which is ironic considering that Tolkein invented that setting but which is now more closely associated with D&D, EQ, and now WoW. The rest of game has a generic feel as well with no interesting or inventive gameplay elements. They sort of tried with the traits customization system but the effects are so small, at least at the early parts of the game (wow I get a whole 0.1 increase in my out-of-combat regen rate, sweet!), that they seem meaningless. Even AC2 had a more interesting game mechanic with its flexible skill system.

Those aren't, those are just part of your character background.
The Dwarf area runs out of quests at around 12 - 14 and the storyline quest sends you to talk to Strider in Bree which continues the same storyline as the Man side.

I'm sure this is going to get some laughs, but I actually enjoyed AC2 a lot more than I'm enjoying this beta.  I don't feel like I'm a part of the Tolkien trilogy here.  I feel like genericnoob_0136 running into an open field to kill some spiders/pigs/bears/rats.  The ability cues are similar to what I've used in DAoC and CoX, so that's not a huge selling feature.  The quests have been mildly entertaining, but the world seems too compressed.  I keep telling myself that "maybe I'm not high enough level" or "maybe I'm not the right class...".  Then I realize that a MMOG at this point in the game needs to be FUN FROM THE START FOR ALL CLASSES.    I hope someone at Turbine has an epiphany soon... else they may be having a hard time breaking even on this one.

There's a lot wrong, not enough character customisation, combat could be more interesting and too many of the same types of mob.  I also don't really like the human starter area, I dislike Breeland (excluding the barrows) and the western part part of the low lands isn't great either (excluding weathertop). 

But I think we should remember that at the end of the day all that's in yet is the level 1-40, in my experience after level 20 it does improve so, that's at least something. 

Post level 20 you get to see some really nice mobs, the instances for Weathertop, Ivar the bloodhand in low lands and Fornost are all excellent.  Comparing the instances to WoW is difficult for me because I quit WoW at level 57, but I would certainly put Weathertop and Fornost at about the same level of enjoyment as SFK and SM in WoW.  I was in a Fornost group with 5 members of Extra Crispy the other day, we cleared through to one boss mob in a tower, but his event was bugged and we couldn't flag him hostile to kill him.  We cleared through to a Shade boss mob (both boss's have very nice graphics) who was also bugged in that he kept respawning, so we killed him about 8 times.  Spent a good couple of hours in Fornost and still didn't see everything as I had to log when we were about to go through the west gate.

Traits and equipment seem to make much more of a difference to your character as well, Trippy said above that traits don't do much, I agree but later on I think it might go the other way.  I finally equipped a shield mastery class trait that gives 5% extra block and 5% extra damage mitigation, it made a massive difference, in fact I think the whole system of combat might end up being broken at higher levels.  If I concentrate on might for block, pick up +% block, parry and evade items, combined with virtue and class traits for damage mitigation I really think at level 50 as a Guardian a 1% extra block chance item might cut your damage taken by 10% if I understand the combat system correctly.  Again the customisation issue hits here as I can't really imagine any other Guardian at my level choosing anything except the exact same class traits as me (ok there's a vexing blow trait that's quite attractive, but I wouldn't waste a slot on any of the others).

So the pre level 20 game needs a lot of buffing as you really want the game to be fun from the start to attract players.  But I think it's too early to predict success or failure, a lot will depend on implementing a decent crafting system, pvp, combat improvements and adding enough different types of loot.  In short, important though the early game is, it's the end game that a lot of players will be most interested in when deciding if they want to try it or not.

My main complaint at the moment is that there are too many fellowship quests for the main storyline, because I play off peak it I have only completed the epic prologue, I have books 1-V open but stuck at various parts as I need groups. 

I don't normally group that much but as there isn't enough solo content after level 35 I have been forced to group.  Sometimes it's really obvious they really haven't thought about how people play, they need to make it more solo friendly but when they add fellowship content they should engage the brain with how people play.   

As an example, there's a fellowship quest chain in Northern Trollshaws, it goes as follows.

1. Meet Scout.
2. Kill 10 elite spiders
3. Grab fangs from 6 elite spider type A and 6 from type B (forget the names)
4  Destroy 12 egg sacks of both types of spider.
5  Kill the queen.

I was in a group that did a few quests then hit this quest chain, we fought our way into the spider area to do part 2, then back in to do parts 3 and 4.  By this time we are sick of spiders and it's taken so long the group breaks up.  So I log back in the next day and get an invite to do the same quest again, but the new group has 4 people who need to start from the beginning so I get to go through it all again until we get to part 5, when after a couple of hours, I have to log out with the Queen still incomplete.

So I have spent about 4 hours on one quest chain and still not seen the end, that's stupid, they either need to retain the standard, solo quest until you have a fellowship quest to complete the chain, or make it so parts 3 & 4 can be done at the same time to cut the number of steps and increase the chances of finding someone on the same quest stage as you.  It's a blast to be in a group and the conjuction system works really well, especially now I just refuse to play a set way for conjunctions and tell bossy player, I'm doing what I like, live with it.

Except if the early and mid games aren't all that fun why would they stick around till the end game?

I don't think the mid game is that bad, I have leveled 2 characters, one to 38, one to 40.  It's only with the release of WoW that the early game in an mmorpg has been really enjoyable.

So I'm not saying the early game shouldn't be improved a lot, I'm just saying a lot of people bought DAoC, Lineage 2, EQ & UO because of the end game and not because they expected the leveling up to be fun.  There isn't an end game in LOTRO yet so drawing conclusions on what's going to happen are a bit early imho.

UO doesn't have an end-game in the raiding sense. EQ didn't originally have one either (why would anybody want to fight encounters with more than 6 people?). DAoC and Lineage II are about the large-scale PvP/RvR battles which LOTRO isn't going to have. And with WoW people do expect the levelling up part to be fun now from the very beginning, unless you think everybody that's going to play LOTRO on release will have never tried WoW.

End game does not equal raiding, can you point me to where I said it did?  Did I piss you off or something, because I certainly don't remember enjoying leveling up my stealing, mining and smithing skills in UO.
Forgive me for thinking that the low level game (pre 20) that you spend 1 - 2 weeks in, isn't as important as the end game where they hope to grab you for a year or more.

You didn't but you listed UO, EQ, DAoC, and Lineage II so I commented on those games.

You said:
And I'm saying that given the WoW experience people aren't going to be willing to wade through a medicore game to get to some yet undetermined end game anymore, unlike your examples which were all pre-WoW. Therefore Turbine should fix up the early and mid games so that they can better keep those people around till the end game. In other words you are saying the early game is not important, it's the end game that's important, and I'm saying that's the wrong strategy. Hell WoW didn't even ship with raid content initially -- they focused all their attention for the initial release on the levelling experience.

Bolded a couple of parts.

I also said

and


Which was in response to Nebu saying they might not break even on this.  Are you speed reading or are my english skills just worse than usual?

I didn't say that you said the early game didn't need to be improved. As you quoted yourself as saying:
And once again I'm saying that's the wrong reasoning and the wrong strategy.

Early game captures people. End game keeps them. Both are important, but for different reasons.

People need to be motivated. Newbies to the genre can love all the new sights and sounds, but veterans who've been in a few games need to quickly see the differences. LoTRO looks very different in the first few hours of play, but mechanically it is  very similar to anything else. However, as noted, there's some key systems missing. People get through this learning process and eventually finish it. What do they do at the level cap though? What keeps them trying for the level cap? A sense of accomplishment doesn't work here because it's just a number. Players spend their entire character's life gaining stuff. While they hit the level cap, there is no sign that says "Game Ends Here". So they expect to continue gaining stuff. When they can't, well, that's why WoW 1-59 has long been perceived as so very different from WoW 60.

You need to capture people and keep them motivated.

You'd know way better than I, so I'll ask: does LoTRO offer the same? EQ2 does as far as I was able to tell. Actually, it may have had too many questions (by sheer quantity, since so many were shades of the same thing).

I do agree that queued actions don't move boxes at retail; however, I don't think LoTRO can rely on just that. Boxes at retail talk to consumers not already here. Given that this entire genre is linked back to LoTRO, it's certainly a title many vets already know is coming, whether they're interested or not. As a feature, queuing the next action is at least a feature to differentiate from WoW, and just about any other MMO.

Yes, I believe it will.  The quests are the same quests we've done in WoW, however, but with horrible directions in the quest log (has this improved?). So, it's quest based advancement that at best will be equivalent to WoW's in variety and amount.  Early on, around 15-20, I almost had too many quests.  Arthur Parker seemed to imply that later on most quests fall into being fellowship quests. That'd bother me if it's true.

The problem is for this game is that equivalent isn't good enough.  If I want equivalent, I can play the current game I'm subscribed to and have already established myself in.


I think these touches and minor differentiations matter if they're part of a combat system that's better.  The little touches won't amount to much unless they're parts of the game that improve upon what's already out there.  Otherwise they're just minor quirks that someone's going to enjoy if they already enjoy the game or system as a whole. 

Queued actions work for CoX because it's combat is different and more interesting than your standard MMO fare.

I understand what you are saying but mmorpg players are more connected and switched on than ever before nowadays.  DDO and AC2 both suffered heavily from having people hit max level in the first couple of weeks and saying "there's nothing to do".  Polishing the low level game shouldn't come at the expense of having end game content tested before release, the major source of information about LOTRO will come from the power gamers who are going to blow past it to pvp, raiding and crafting in a week anyway.

And yet that's exactly what Blizzard did with WoW -- they focused on the journey not the destination (the end game in this example) initially -- and most people who play WoW aren't raiders which implies that to them the journey is what's important, not the destination, or at least the journey is interesting enough that they keep playing till they eventually reach the end game. Yes the power gamers are going to blow through the regular content, good or bad, to get to the end game but are those the people Turbine should be catering the game to?

I think there's a level 30-40 zone missing, Entmoors or something, currently you hit level 34 and run out of solo quests.  I was doing level 41-43 solo quests at level 36 because I knew where to go to do them.

It also wasn't helped by my skipping a lot of the early fellowship quests, the lowering of exp for mob kills and the current issue they have with lower level mobs hitting too hard which restricts the fellowship quests you can solo at higher levels for extra exp.

Y'know, looking over DDO lately as well has made me appreciate Turbine a little more. They don't really have a shortage of good ideas. They're just not pulling them off right. DDO's attempt at platform like combat and movement, LotR's slightly broader world and soloability, DDO's deep skill system, etc. -- Both games combined could have possibly put a big dent in WoW's popularity.

Are you saying they should cut back on the current plans for crafting, monster play and high end raids to rework the 1-20 game?  That's 3 starter zones, maybe I'm unusual but I have spent about an hour in the shire and have not even visited the Dwarf/Elf starter area yet.  I'd agree combat needs some work and some more character choices to make your character more unique are needed but I think they are stuck with the sizes of the zones and most of the quests as they are at the minute.  I believe that shipping without decent crafting, at least two high level raid areas and monster play would be a major mistake.

Well, they have two choices:

1) Make the entry game SO fun that people will happiy hang around or

2) Create an endgame so novel an appealing that people will endure anything to get to it (a la DAoC)

I don't see either happening yet.  That's the real issue. 

Man, what the hell does endgame have to do with LotR? That should be the least of it's priorities.

Am I playing a different game then everyone else?  I feel heroic.  Yeah, first 8 levels or so were mediocre, but I hardly notice them due to the interesting quest lines.  Then at one point (at level 10) I ran into some Mordor type creatures, complete with dread effects and whatnot, and felt a rush.  After this I dove into the main storyline and am enjoying that immensely.

Crafting needs work.  Badly.  Can we finally get a DIKU were crafting was actually handy for the level you are?  The current crafting has great potential, but needs some serious work.

I don't. I'm lucky if I can kill two blues with my Hunter if I don't get a chance to fully prep before hand (charge up, lay a trap, etc.).

Maybe thats the difference.  I am playing a Captain, and do pretty well for myself.  I use different techniques while engaging enemies as well;  I like this.  It is nice not depending on auto attack!

I'm a captain this time around, too, and it works out pretty good for me when it comes to solo play.  Unfortunately, like many have said, I don't really find the game compelling enough to drag me away from FFXII or the books I'm reading currently.  I log in every so often but I don't find it particularly motivating.  Maybe it's the "funk" I'm in at the moment, but as I've stated before, I keep thinking I should like the game more than I do.  It seems as if it SHOULD be more fun... it just doesn't FEEL as fun as it should.  God, it would be so cool to have CoX combat in this sort of game or have interesting bits like there are in this game in CoX.  Either or.  I don't care.   I would be all over it.

This post MIGHT not make sense.

I'm playing a Champion. It doesn't feel better than any pre-CoX melee combatant. I just queue up the same basic power attack over and over again, or use a frontal aoe for multiples.

Maybe I'll try a Captain.

I played a burglar for the past week and I feel anything but heroic.  Hell, I don't even feel that sneaky.  I was hoping to pop from the shadows with a powerful attack or sneaking past some guards to get into a key area.  Up to level 20 I don't even see a reason why this class is in the game.  I don't bring anything all that important to a group.  If that improves at higher levels, great.  Be nice if they were to give me a hint that might be the case.  I'd rather learn that I'm important in game than from some fan site.

It's not just reworking newbie zones -- it's improving the fundamental gameplay. Go back and reread some of the early posts in this thread. Look at how many of the people in Bat Country played for a little bit and then stopped. Unless they decide to convert the game into a player-driven economy crafting is not that important and having a working auction house or other goods distribution system is much more important. Raiding, as I've already said, isn't a top priority if people are going to stop playing after they get to level 10 or so. The only open question is the monster play. That might be interesting and the only thing, other than the setting, which will distinguish the game from others out there.

Guardian was fun pre-nerf (I didn't play him much afterwards so I can't really compare) and I was able to wade into groups of mobs a la a Tanker in CoH and come out victorious. The Hunter, unfortunately, is very poor when taking on multiple mobs at once because it is too easy to interrupt bow skills (they even nerfed Hunter's further recently by allows mobs to cancel attacks). Minstrels in contrast have insta-cast DD spells and you can cast them on the move while Hunters have slow ass firing times and you have to stop and wait for the server to register that you've stopped before you can start the firing animation. They even slowed down the focus buildup skill in the most recent patch making the Hunter even more "sluggish" to play than before.

Hey guys, it looks like the Dwarf areas are 1) underpopulated and 2) far more unfinished. Looks like a place where input is needed even more.

That's cause that huge group of people that made Dwarves when the area first opened have progressed through (quests end around level 12).

People have been giving plenty of feedback on the Dwarven areas but feel free to give more if you like.

Hell, for one, the intro quest doesn't even give me enough cash to train. The NPC trainer quest is the first quest that follows the intro.

All the scripted battle scenes with Gimli and Gandalf cut off the music and sound. Just becomes dead silent with chat text over their heads (perhaps someone else can run through and see if it does the same thing on their machines?).

I noticed that I can't swim underwater. Does that change? Are there any underwater scenarios later on (i.e. the Dead Marshes)?

Just thought it was strange, since DDO makes use of water, and both are basically using the same engine.

WoW definitely feels like more of a condensed world than this one. That may play a factor in the enjoyment. I can accept some areas having a different level of content completion than others (feels like Humans have more than Elves in newbie areas, for example). But I'm not familiar enough with all areas to know if density is good anywhere comparatively.

First impressions are huge. But for those not in beta, or who aren't here yet at least, what I think matters most are the newbie areas, class distinction/abilities, and the sense of always having something compelling to do. If it's just WoW in Tolkien space, that's not going to be enough to woo people from WoW. What I don't think matter right away are economy and Raiding. Those are very important for crafting, which isn't done, and the endgame, which nobody is at.

So, what will compel people to this game? And I mean beyond the license. That'll maybe move boxes, but it's a license most relevant to people already in this genre anyway. This is household name stuff. But it's also been iterated so many times since the 70s, the core differences have become fewer and fewer as years go by. I understand why LoTRO feels pretty much like WoW in terms of mechanic, but I wonder: how different could it have been?

LoTR defined the rules of Lore
EQ1 et al have defined the rules of Play for this type of Lore?

It potentially could have been quite a bit different but Turbine took the conservative approach in every single design decision about the game.

It could have resembled the movie based beat-em-up titles a bit. At least as far as the action goes. Those aren't particularly great games in their respective genre, but they would be great as far as mmo's go.

This is what I was getting at when saying it could have used some of DDO' features, just taken a step further (like dodging, blocking, frogger like obstacles, spikes flinging out of walls, wall climbing, etc.).

It's funny that the most popular LotR based games are fast paced action adventure titles and real time strategy games, and they decided to just wing it with another Diku model (with a ripped off WoW interface to boot).

There's a patch every 2 weeks normally on a thursday, the Dwarf and Elf area was just added after the wipe so that was about 3 weeks ago.  I haven't even visited the Dwarf/Elf area yet as what they seem to do is add enough to get a section of the game working and then revisit it later.  I know they just recently added quest rewards to the trollshaw area and that's been in the game since I started in September.  I also have not gone through the epic storyline much yet, as various parts were badly bugged the times I attempted it.  North Downs is currently the most complete and enjoyable zone in my opinion.

The big changes I'm waiting for are to the combat damage system, grey mobs used to aggro but not hurt you much, then they super buffed them and are I believe gradually bringing them down again.  The damage bonus from the "Might" skill is rumoured not to be working and race traits aren't in the game yet.  So I'm expecting another revamp to combat skills in relation to power usage, when soloing about half my skills aren't worth using as their power cost isn't worth the damage output.  The problem is even worse for groups of mobs, it's a lot more effective to concentrate on killing one mob at a time and ignore aoe skills as a Guardian, due to mob health regeneration.

Don't think you can swim underwater, being in water seems to stop certain skills being used, healing etc.  There's boss in Fornost that's makes use of this as he's in a largely water filled area.

What's really starting to bother me about this game is a complete lack of originality in just about every aspect.

The quests are so pat that they seem to have been designed by the SOE bimbo advertisement girls. I found a quest last night referring to the "Lay of Nimrod(el)" and I just couldn't help but wonder if they're just laughing at us.

The combat mechanics are completely derivative of CoX/WoW, but without the seamless execution of either. They work 'alright', but infuse little or nothing to the genre.

The mob selection is repetitive and have an entirely EQ-esqe level of overpopulation and pointlessness. I'm all about wolves, really, but we're talking dozens scampering about in the open fields.

I smell management over-involvement in this project; a total top-down creative design that's stifled every attempt by a dev to infuse any creativity. In some situations, that's good. If your management is the head of Cryptic. Most of the time, however, management has the literary imagination of a filing cabinet and I fear that's what's going on here.

I do enjoy many aspects of the game, but overall, the play feels entirely by wrote based on ancient diku stratagems. Its stale, and its not even out of the box :(

I really feel like I'm playing DAOC, only without the PVP. Then again I'm playing a hunter.

That's pretty much how I feel.  I feel guilty having a beta key since I don't really feel much like playing it.

Arthur, thanks for clarifying when they added Elf/Dwarf lands. They felt new, mostly because of their seemingly-sprawling mass. Reminds me of the difference between Night Elf and Troll lands in WoW. The former is the most content-complete experience I've had in this genre. The latter felt like they decided at the last minute they needed to add the race.

I disagree strongly. I think the ONLY choice is number 1. WoW's endgame is pretty uninspired to be honest, but people stick around for it because it's the only show in town, and they have a significant investment (social and character) after having played through a very entertaining early game. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Lineage II has a diabolical and boring grind before a reputedly brilliant end-game. They just recently managed to get 100,000 'players' in the US, more than half of whom are bots used to make the grind bearable.

I loved castle sieges in Lineage, and because it was one of the first Mac online games I endured the grind to get to the point where I could participate in the sieges. However, I couldn't even cope with the low-level grind in Lineage II, despite having a strong desire to play the siege warfare game again using a more involving graphic engine. That's from somebody who actually understood the end game and fell into the demographic of being a player looking for that sort of game experience. No wonder L2 choked.

I didn't play DAOC either, even though it seemed like it would have a similar end-game appeal as the Lineage games. I won't go through a shit grind to get to a game, and now that WoW is out of the bag, nor will most of the MMORPG community. That day is done, McQuaids. People may want character development and powerful shiny in RPGs, but they want the game to be fun from day one.

LotRO fails at fun, despite being a well-executed environment with some good mechanics. They need to take a seat next to Raph at fun school.

Kinda what I'm wondering here: what isn't fun? I ask seriously, having read through the thread. Are there specific things that could be fixed, or are people basically writing this off?

I'm not so starry-eyed to believe people invited to beta believes themselves to be there to make a game better. But if there ever is such a group, we'd be a part of it I'd imagine, particularly those who've been around since August (I'm in all of five days here, so it still has that new-car smell to me). LoTRO specifically targets us. Maybe they hope the license will draw new people in. But who in MMOGs haven't been playing them because MMOGs deliver experiences based on Tolkien's work? That's why I said earlier that the iterations of Tolkien have sort of defined the rules for iterating Tolkien.

WoW did that the best so far, only by nature of how many people they appealed to. LoTRO copying that model, to me, is something of a mistake. Nobody smaller than the Military or Pharmaceutical companies have the cash to go up against them directly. So where does LoTRO need to differ?

Crafting to me is not an answer. For one it has a narrow appeal by default. For another, beyond consumables, crafting will always be made irrelevant by drops eventually. The latter is just easier to control by the devs.

Combat? What could change there beyond balance and polish?

Does LoTRO need PvP, maybe against some shadow force working for Mordor that isn't an obvious good-guy/bad-guy thing? I say that because, typically, the bad-guys are out-numbered by the good-guys, by default. People don't come to these games in droves to play an anti-hero. That's a fun activity for some, but is not the widest appeal. Even WoW's "bad guys" are just misundertsood.

Better story-driven quests? A sense of linear narrative, working towards a larger goal? This is sort of where I'm at actually. WoW is a persistent world of activities. There's no sense of advancement there. No matter the quest, your alt can do it all again, years after you technically "solved" it. Does LoTRO require the ongoing narrative people thought justified AC1? And is that not present enough?

People say 'polish' when discussing WoW, but its actually meticulous detail in arranging the scripted quest content such that it flows well for the players engaging it. Alliance is better than Horde for a reason - they rushed the completion of Horde, and minor things make a big difference. Consider the path of an Orc - the Valley of Trials is great, the quests are fun and involving, and you can do them yourself without difficulty as you learn your character for around an hour (first time through). Then it's off to the troll village and the orc town that are half a large zone apart. This isn't like your Goldshire experience - there are tiresome quests getting mob drops that are too infrequent, and a lot of running. Then there are a couple of quests that are tough for solo play, particularly with certain classes - a human in his castle, a goblin with his imp. Forced grouping at a much earlier stage, and in the latter case it is in the middle of a quest chain that leads to one that is involved in the Durotar to Barrens transition. If you group up, the preponderance of 'mob drop collecting' quests becomes frustrating, as these are quicker to do solo.

The reason most of these games fail, and the reason that low level WoW Horde fails (certainly in comparison to the Human and/or Night Elf experience) is that you need a story arc that is engaging and it needs to fit a level of tough that requires players to make use of their developing class abilities without forcing them into grouping or circumventing mechanics or content. Some people may never want to group, but most will - but after they have had time to digest the game mechanics, learn their character, and meet a few people. When you do put a group encounter in front of people, it should engage that group long enough to make it worthwhile - forming a group to kill a goblin for five minutes is sloppy design. And sloppy design is what LotRO, and most every other MMORPG exhibits in spades. That's why you can't 'patch in the fun', and why rushing a launch is fatal.

Like I said in the other thread, I don't really know how to comment well on a diku other than: "Trash it."

But....

Getting rid of wolves is a good idea. Or, alternatively, if I am going to fight wolves, then make it where I have to fight an entire pack at a time. If I'm going to fight orcs, make it 3 at a time (and possibly scale it up later). And then keep groups of 3 swarming after me. Make this game feel like pre nerfed CoH -- Make it fast, and make me feel like an overpowered badass.

Up the mob count, up the base power of attacks, and up the speed at which those attacks cool down.

A party battle should have 5 characters taking on 20 mobs at a time.

And just in case anyone thinks I'm jumping the gun here, the Return of the King console title pretty much plays out like this (or any of the LotR titles for that matter....Just that the Return of the King is the only good one). Just about any action title does. Console games have no qualms about making characters feel heroic. Neither did the movies (take that scene when the Fellowship had to fight all of those orcs and that big Troll in the first movie, for instance). MMO games have all kinds of problems with making players feel like badasses.....And that tradition needs to be broken.

Also, before anyone says "Only Gandalf, Aragorn, and Legolas could pull off that shit...Not Joe Noob", I should remind them that Eowyn soloed the freakin' Witch King. She had never even been in battle before that.

Not to say some kind of hyper-combat system is the end all, be all or anything, but it's a start at least.

[EDIT] I think I'll hold off on specific polish/quest complaints until the next patch.

I am beyond frustrated at this point. My level 19 hunter is utterly incapable of living through a fight with more than 1 mob in it, no matter how far below my level they are. All my quests require me to either fight my way through dozens of fucking wolves with aggro radii the size of Alaska or try to sneak past them, aggro them anyway, and then die when I have 10 wolves chewing on my ass. The quest directions are vague and all but useless.

The Lone Lands are a mess. Seriously.

I am done until the next patch. I picked up Civ IV again- couldn't find my DVD, so I did myself a favor and found a good No CD crack for it  :evil:

Ya, I picked up Total War II till the next patch. For now, its Christians vs Moors till they do some tweaking.

Rather than continue to grind away on one character, I've chosen to make a few different races/classes and look at the various starting areas.  I really love the look of some of them.  I've also found that the classes vary greatly in ease of play.  I'm not sure how this changes at the higher levels, but have to hope that things even out later.

Well, I figured I'd add my comments here.

I've only played very briefly but so far I have some things I like , a big ho-hum, and one thing I dislike.

Ok, my likes:

Classes seem cool and have a decent movie feel. Ditto the races obviously.
The Elf intro was cool. The human one was semi-cool but not to the same level.
I was intriqued by the whole "parts of the game play out in a story-mode" thing that happens with the Nazghul towards the end of the intro.
I like the potential of the various titles, kind of reminded me of accomplishments on XBOX360 or the Badges in COX.

Dislikes:

At no point did I ever feel like a hero. I felt like generic newbie 3063 in every other MMO I've ever played.

Ho-hum:

See my dislike. So far the license feels mostly wasted and I feel like I've played this game before.

My thoughts:

Make us heroes damn it! I don't want to be some random human extra. I want to be a frigging hero tearing through hordes of Orcs! I want to feel like I can kick ass like at the end of the Fellowship when Boromir and Aragorn each kill like 2 dozen Orcs. This "kill 12 wolves" stuff is what every other MMO does, it shouldn't be what I'm doing in LOTR. I should be fighting evil, I should never, ever be in a 1 on 1 fight unless it's a boss or something. I should wade into hordes of enemies and lop their arms off. And it should happen right off the bat.

Combat's not fun, it's frustrating.  I don't know how to change it specifically, but WoW combat is more fun.  CoX combat is more fun than WoW.  EQ2 combat is less fun than WoW.  LOTRO's is less fun than EQ2.

People smarter than me can, I'm sure, quantify these different approaches to combat. 

I don't mind the combat all that much, but it's also not really impressing me. 

My main beef is that there's one good tactic for playing a low-level loremaster.  Basically, I send in my raven to debuff the target, then perhaps have him distract a ranged-using second enemy.  The first target rushes me and I try to spam effects while casting burning embers and autoattacking away with my staff.

Really, I think autoattack is what creates a lot of the "meh" feeling for me. 

I would prefer to see each class get a few varied attacks that must be activated, with varying cooldown timers ala CoH.  Perhaps the melee classes have this, but as a loremaster, I'm left wondering if my other abilities are doing much for me in combat...it's really all about my two damage-dealing spells ... stuff dies so fast that it's hard to use all of the abilities each fight.

I do, however, like that I have very little downtime between fights.  Now if only the fights involved just a touch more strategy. 

Effectively, combat in LoTRO is just like combat in almost any diku-inspired MMO. It's the details that are slightly different, things like what archetypes get what abilities, and how everything can be adjusted by Achievements (themselves sorta like the EQ2 Traits system and whatnot).

I feel the "meh" can be resolved by balancing and timing. The reason I said what I did above is because what combat currently is probably can't be changed anytime soon. The only game to radically reinvent combat was SWG, and it took them two and a half years even to launch the new system. I know some people feel "radical" includes major nerfs or adding items with stats, but that's just balance and adjusted inputs, not a wholesale redesign of the user experience.

CoH combat is the most engaging combat system I've played in a stats-based RPG. Mostly I felt that was because of the way archetypes could be combined, but also because almost all abilities were front-loaded insta-casts with countdown timers afterward. It felt very twitchy, in a good way. LoTRO just uses the same old tired convention of casting bars and timers. I do like that they borrowed the next-ability queue thing, but that still just autoactivates the next casting bar.

It's not awesome, but it's servicable. If they believe droves of players will come anew to the genre because of the license (otherwise, why bother taking on a license?) then I feel the game can succeed well, based on how it iterated EQ>WoW.

But I actually feel most LoTRO players will be coming from inside the genre. LoTR is a huge brand that resonates strongly with people who've played in every conceivable iteration of that world for decades. So by borrowing every convention of EQ-like MMOGs, LoTRO is just another MMOG. It currently lacks any real reason for the license, outside of the city names and occasional NPC name. After the first few minutes of seeing Tolkien's world derivated here from the movies from the books, this game is, at heart, something we've all already been playing.

For newbies who came for WoW, this'll be a reminder to them of all of the investment they made in WoW, potentially driving them back to their social circle, only some of which left.

For veterans that have been around longer, we've played this even more...

It runs like ass on my PC. Sadly my Beta feedback is limited by this.

I do like some of the art, but all the animations are so nasty that whenever I move I am saddened. I don't know if the art style is deliberatly 2dish looking, and without shiny, or if it's just me bettings, but it made a nice change.

No PvP though, and the world just feels so stale. Guildwarsish.

I agree with many of the posts here, and I haven't even double-clicked the icon since a couple of weeks before the wipe.

Combat either needs to be sped up to much, much faster and let me use my abilities more often instead of waiting for cooldowns, or it needs to let me just hit auto-attack and let me type to my friends while we wait for the mob to lose via attrition. This middle ground LOTRO tries to straddle is really quite unfun.



This one quote nails it for me the most. Though I should point out that I despite the mild guilt, I still can't bring myself to bother to log onto LOTRO and yet I have no problems motivating myself to play WoW right now.

So awful, but so true  :cry:

Well, I tried to play today, and it seems that the game is borken. OOC chat didn't work in North Downs, I was ghost-stepping all over the place, and certain mobs, bears for instance, wouldn't aggro me when shot at, only when I got right up next to them.

I also noticed an odd glitch; when someone approached my by horseback, first he appeared for a flash 'naked', and then just as he swung by, all his armor appeared on him.

They did add in fancy hats. Which is cool and all, but I'm getting that itchy Horizons feeling here. Focus people, focus!

Sounds like the hallmarks of a good stress test to me :)

This was yesterday, before the stresstest. The land was all but vacant.

Well - I got this email today...

Hello Furiously, We at The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ Beta Program Forums would like to wish you a happy birthday today!

Y'know....

I take back everything I said about combat.

City of Heroes, WoW, GW....Whatever.....They all feel as slow and unexciting during the same early levels that I've played this. It's not a problem with Turbine specifically.

So....I apologize.

If I were newcomer to CoH or WoW "today", I'd probably quit within 10 minutes. They don't feel any better than LotRO.

So...Instead of saying LotRO's combat is shit, I'll just say that the combat from all of these games is shit. LotRO included.

For that, I won't apologize.  :-)

[EDIT]

As an aside, games with power increases should still feel nearly identical in the early game as they do in the late game (i.e. GTA:SA, GoW, THPS, most sports games).

I felt downright heroic right off the bat with CoH.  I felt like a superhero at level 1.

When I was talking about combat, I was referring to combat in similar levels.  WoW combat, while weak the first 10 levels, doesn't feel as weak to me as LotRO combat.  I don't know why WoW combat doesn't particularly bother me, yet LotRO combat does.  But it does.

I think it's because in WoW everything is faster pre-10, from combat to XP to quests to quest bonus XP to regen to content simply being more close together (for everyone but Tauren ;) ). LoTRO is more hit or miss. Some quest XP bonuses are good. Some areas are compact (Humans for example). Some combat is fast.

Totally agree on CoH though. For LoTRO, I'm surprised we're not fighting off wave after wave of Orcs and Wargs right away. That, to me, is a big miss here. Wolves and spiders? Really?

I'd have to disagree. WoW combat feels faster, and COH combat is fast and furious compared to both games. I also think COH went the right way by having no auto attack. I'd like to see something similiar in other games. WoW is probably the last game with Autoattack that I will excuse.

I disagree with the  negatives on the pacing of the  introduction. This fits in very well with the lay of Middle Earth before the war of the ring. Bands of marauders plaguing towns, shady operations run by  hidden, sinister groups,  Good folk clearing out the countryside so that the fields can be tended and the sheep may freely graze.,  It's not epic, but Rings didn't start out epic.

The Lord of the rings didn't start off with Aragorn  slicing Twenty Orc Necks with  Legolas dancing on their heads to finish the job. It was a birthday party.

Now, it may stay like this, and that would be a shame, but for the beginning, I don't have a problem with a little spider bashing in addition to beating down some Raiders.


But this three headed beast of a crafting system sucks eggs. Why do I have to be a weaponsmith if I want to be a scholar? I call bullshit on that, and there better an auction house or Vendor consignment or something at release.


yesterdays massive lag indoors nearly did me in for testing. Is it like that a lot?

Some of the stats make little sense, they need to brush up on their tooltips, but that's fixable.

There is a roadmap post somewhere on the official boards; an auction system will be added.  Lag has been wretched since they invited a gazillion people.  On a side note, I felt a tear fall down my cheek as I watched the official boards degrade to utter shit this week.  Poor Cal and Tiggs sure do have to put up with a lot!

I feel sad that I let this sit in my inbox for the better part of a month. Now I'm part of the great unwashed :(

I've just been reading the old threads. I'm afraid to read the new posts for fear of wanting to kill my fellow man.

I think they have probably three times as many people trying to play the game as Arwen alone can handle. And probably quite on purpose :) Hopefully they shut down the Stress test accounts, to reduce signal/noise ratio on forums until they're ready for that many more people, err, "collaberating" in the test. But I fear they'll instead launch two more servers and let people drift away as they become disenchanted with an unfinished experience, making sure the world knows all about their unhappiness when they don't care about breaking the NDA.

They'll go with the second option, based on AC2 experience.

Damn shame, This game doesn't completely suck.

It sucks that you need beta tests to market games successfully these days.  I almost think it'd be better without them -- except for the massive bug-hunting stuff.  Most people willing to beta have already played an MMO and are more likely to be ultra jaded....

Or mabye that's just this expanded community's trip, I dunno.

Aside from some of the "so what" moments that some of the combat has, I do think it's a pretty nifty game. 

I think betas as a marketing tool are way overrated. Keep it small outside of Stress Tests, until the last month or so. Then the game is pretty much what's coming for launch, so let the players bang on it awhile. If you've done it right you shouldn't have fundamental parts still missing. If you did it wrong, well, you're better off just not having a beta :)

Didn't one of the "Laws of Online Gaming" address that catering to jaded folks was a good idea?  :-P

It's a stress test!....For game design.


....Or maybe I'm just imagining things.

Stress test to hit concurrencies, not to have a zillion people restarting spiraling complaint cycles over issues long since identified and queued for correction. I swear these periods are the very essence of the "one step back" period in the two-steps-forward, one-step-back that has become public beta testing.


Heh, not the one's I've subscribed too :) Seriously though, if you can find in his Laws anything that sounds like that, lemme know. The only thing I can think of that's close is the bit that talks about trying to understand the opinions of folks who are leaving. And I think that one was a contribution.

I was thinking about this the other day and I think the big problem, or difference, between LoTR combat and WoW combat is the lack of instant attacks. With the queued system every attack happens on the next hit, and there's no involvement really. You can keep 2 or 3 attacks queued up and you just sit back and watch combat happen basically. With instant attacts especially reaction instants, there's more involvement with the combat. It was the same in early DAoC iirc, I remember being frustrated I couldn't cancel queued moves there.

I don't really know what's up but everywhere outside the dwarf lands the game runs like ass on my computer, a X64 3200 with 2g memory and a 7600gt 256 meg vid card. I can run full 4xaa, 16 aniso and high environment detail in the dwarf newbie land  but if I go anywhere near the shire or bree I get maybe 12fps and below. Updated to he latest nvidia drivers and that didn't help either. I went for a run to Rivendale the other day and the fps just got worse in every zone I went through.

It wasn't late at night was it? I logged in around 4-5 am the other night and it seemed like they were doing database management or something because anything associalted with server responce was in the toilet. I even had the high server lload icon up continuously for about 30 min.

I played the first couple of levels a few days ago as a dwarf, and as some people already has stated, it's poo. I don't know if the art direction gets better later on, but at least as dwarf everything feels second grade. How the mobs are placed, how the area is designed, models, textures, everything has sort of second grade feeling to it. The use of lighting is almost non existant, the world feels bland as hell. So I start out with all of the cool dwarfs from Bilbo, and right in front me stands gandalf.

I'm not the kind of players who likes to read walls of text, so I head of to the first quest in a cave somewhere. It's the usual kill 3 of those, 4 of those and get me some hides from another bunch of foozels. In the cave there's an event where some NPCs are having troubles with a troll and gandalf comes to the rescue I recall. Anyway, since there's no moody music and no voice acting at all, it simply feels like slaying just another foozle.



I think this game has a fundamental problem, it seems like they want to make me a part of an ongoing story, however they haven't made it feel special in any way and frankly, that sort of stuff fits best for single player. What I think they should've done instead is to try and create atmosphere and mood, but they haven't, at least not as far as I came. AO is a very good example of this and accomplished it nicely. When you get into a town in AO there's small flying cleaner robots flying around making cool sounds. There's NPCs walking the streets having conversations with each other. There's huge speakers throwing funny commercials at you. There's diffrent music depending on where you're at. This game should try to do the same thing, create a feeling that you're in middle earth.

Also, I played a champion, and it didn't feel unique in any sense, it's just another melee DPS dude. Say what you want about AC2, but at least it had unique and cool classes, and this game is supposedly made by the same dev house?

Every game out there has WoW-itis, Sairon. Its all about the NPC with the question mark above his head. The days of yore where the world came first and activities within the world were 'stuff to do' within that world are gone. Gone with AO and SWG. There's a perception that there's no market for a Fantasy Sand Box, and that folks just want to connect the dots in a crazed accumulation of exp via whack-a-foozle quests.

All that considered, I think that LoTR's graphics are pretty good, especially on higher graphical settings. The weather changes, the reflection of the stars on the water, the beautiful rendering of smoke, all seem make the world rather beautiful to me. But if you'r running an older rig, fuggedaboutit. It'll look a palsied sub par game.

However, at least its all playable, unlike another beta game I am quickly burning out on.

Gave it another whirl today, had the game decide gfx settings for me and it looked pretty good technicaly. The humans starting area is really tons better than dwarfs. It was pretty enjoyable in fact. However, just as Engels going at, it tries to be WoW, and I don't think it will manage to survive because of it.

It's going to do very well I think, there's a lot of content compared to something like AC2.  Try to get to stick it out till level 10, go to bree (which is worth seeing anyway) and visit the monster controller near the mud gate on the west side of the town.  The whole Dwarf/Elf starter area might get another polish, it's a fairly new zone, Rivendell and the Shire are worth a visit as well, even if you don't like the gameplay.

Is there any vision?  I can't find a preview where they say what they want to do with this game.  What's the planned end game?  Any good info on the personalised story we are supposed to get?

Some random impressions from a lvl 7 minstrel (I'm trying to be positive since I'm playing for free):

- Deja vu
- Monster play seems interesting (I hope I'll be able to try it)
- Suffer the same identity crisis has other quest driven mmorpg : you talk to a NPC to start a quest while an other players come back to him to end the very same quest.  Been there, done that.  Still doesn't make sense.
- Quest grind
- Having played AC2 for 2 weeks ans DDO for 3 days : same interface & engine.
- Minstrel sounds like a nice class, but why am I killing mobs with my lute?  It's odd when you're fighting at range but it's just sad when you're in melee : my character does a strange atk chain where he plays the lute while swinging his sword (from auto-atk) in between the lute atks.  I guess it would make more sense with a tank in front of me, but solo it's really silly.
- Why does my sword magically floats 2 inches from my waist in 2007?  DAOC had better graphics for equiped weapons ages ago.
- How will the community and economy develop.  The only interaction I can see is crafting and monster play.  Anything else?

I'm enjoying it.

- Pretty graphics - nice sky, nice water. I like the atmosphere of the towns
- Regular cinematic/scripted quests, where the NPC leads you into a special dungeon or whatever
- I like the way the characters carry the weapons on their backs. They really look like they are equipped for a journey into dangeropus territories. I think WoW does the same thing but it's less noticeable for some reason.
- Nice music.
- Yes there are quests to kill boars and bears but there seems to be a reasonably high proprtion of interesting quests - go kill the boss, go steal something, go burn something etc. I'm not saying these are groundbreaking but they are more fun than go kill ten of whatever.

Overall it is not groundbreaking but I find it fun. It seems to rip off EQ2 more than WoW, but it's EQ2 done well.

Bad points:

- No housing? Dunno if this is actually in or will ever go in. Having said that, I can do without an instanced room in some inn anyway. Few games seem to do the kind of housing I like, which is UO/SWG style, where you actually place a house.
- Tolkien fanatics telling people off over the broadcast channel for not knowing every detail of the books.
- Storyline quests are cool but of course it makes no sense for you to do something important only for the NPC to tell the next PC that comes along that it needs to be done again. Don't think there is any answer to this in a game based on pre-written quests though.

Okay, so there's obviously some features here that's not in your average diku MMO, I think it would be wise of trubine to try and give the player a little taste of what makes LotRO the game to play in the really early levels. I hadn't read up on the game before I started to play, which I think is pretty common for the average customer. The first 10 levels hints very little at for example monster play and other intresting concepts. Now I haven't even tried monster play, but by the sound of it, is there any reason for why it can't be present to some little extent in the newbie experience? I have another friend who's in the beta outside of f13, and he didn't get all that excited by what he saw. Yes it's only a beta so you can't really draw any real conclusions, but I think it's cruical for any MMO to really impress in the first logon a player makes, that is the very first few hours.

I logged back in again over the weekend and started a new character on the new server.

The only thing I have to report at the moment is that it plays pretty smoothly with settings on high on 1920x1080 on an AGP Radeon x1600 and 3ghz athlon 64 with 2mb RAM.  Which honestly is pretty impressive to me.  Much better than it was a few months ago.

Even on a 61" screen though the graphics seem to be missing something though.

I stopped playing last night when I zoned into an instance of the Inn in Archet and got stuck because apparently it was the wrong instance to be in.  The door out was barricaded but I was not on that quest yet and there was some other random guy stuck in there with me.

Before or after the town burns down?  I know there was some bug with people getting stuck in teh wrong version of Archet a month or so ago.

Well before it burns down.  I just did like the third quest where you go kill a spy and come back and tell the commander dude about it.  As I recall the quest where the thing burns down is much later.

I assume that if I log in later it will sort itself out.

Yeah, I think the bug I was thinking about took people from post burn to pre burn Archet.  It'd be interesting to see if that was related somehow, though.  I don't think you can access the inn in post-burn -- I guess your inoperable door comment made me think of it.

Actually, I think this is a fairly common bug. I have had this a few times - you enter a place and certain parts (usually doors, sometimes NPCs or useable bits of furniture) do not load. Re-logging fixes it.

There really does seem to be a problem with the early game in LOTRO, it's nice and all but doesn't grab you as much as it should.  I think it's a lot to do with combat not being as interesting and items being fairly bland.  It improves post 20 but having just hit 43 again last night, it really improves again after 42 or so.  I can now take on 4-5 mobs of about my level at once, it really adds to the danger/fun as, thanks to slaying weapons and greater damage mitigation, my AOE skills are now approaching useful.  I had to grind for a while as there's a lack of quests in the mid 30's but grinding mobs is now actually fun, I'm grouping and helping lower level players out with quests and still making good exp with the new rest bonus.  I left bat country and joined a fairly active guild as well.

I think the whole combat system is going to give them long term problems, take my Guardian as an example. For a Guardian the stats I value most on items are in the following order, Block > Parry > Evade.  If an item has one of those stats I will choose it over virtually anything else, might is nice but an extra 1% miss makes a big difference if my understanding of the system is correct, the only exception being weapons, as always dps > all.

Currently equipped
Two bracer's that give 1% Block each (Both quest rewards)
Necklace that gives 2% evade (quest reward)
Pocket item that gives 1% block & 1% Parry (quest reward)
Light shield that gives 2% Block (quest reward) (I actually dropped about 300AC just to get the 2% Block instead of using a heavy shield)

So that leaves my two ring slots to fill and your standard armour slots that you get upgrades to via quests/drops.  I already have my eye on a quest reward ring that gives 1% parry, so after that I doubt I'm going to be able to improve my non armour slots much.  This means crafting, loot drops and even quest rewards now have little interest to me, there seems to be very little chance of anything dropping that's going to be an improvement.

The solo exception is weapons, but again thanks to having a nice cash pile I have been able to stock up from the AH in addition to the generous quest rewards.
My standard highest dps weapon, a purple sword that also has 1% parry (AH purchase) I use this for any mob type I don't have a slaying weapon for, at the minute that's just beasts & dragonkind
Axe of human slaying (/ooc purchase)
Dagger of insect/spider slaying (quest reward, I obtained this at level 36 from a level 43 quest, used it as my main weapon for 5 levels as the standard dps were far better than anything else)
Hammer of Ancient evil slaying (a drop)
Club of Orc slaying (Quest reward)

So I'm not sure how they can make items much better at level 50 for a Guardian, I have seen plenty of level 50 crafting items necklaces but nothing compares to 2% evade as they don't have block, parry or evade.  The same goes for bracer's, the only thing better than 1% block is 2% block, parry or evade.  +10 might, +20 vitality, I just don't care.  This 100% system combined with class traits that can reduce damage mitigation just means any Guardian with any sense is going to pick the same equipment and very similar traits. 

I'm not sure how they can fix it, I'd far rather have had a bell curve system like AC with character templates, at the minute I suspect  any similar level Guardian to have 90% of the same equipment and traits equipped as I do.

I have only just now come to the definite conclusion that this game needs voiceover.  The intro sections that I have seen are impressive visually and lorewise, but I can't watch Elrond or a ringwraith while simultaneously reading text.  It's great that they made it more readable and added floating text, but while I'm reading text I am missing the Dread effect, or worse, some other piece of text that's important.  The only solution I have been able to come up with is VO, at least for the hectic intro areas (elf starter battle or burning Archet come to mind).  I don't think it's necessary for most other things, like "go get me some boar meat".

I keep going back to this game wanting to really like it.  Instead all I get is that it is just another PvE mmog.  Nothing draws me in.  Nothing compels me to play it compulsively like I have other MMOGs.  I keep logging on trying to put my finger on exactly what it is that the game is missing... but I'm just not finding it.  It's so... generic in a gameplay sense despite how good it looks. 

Well, I logged in again last night and fortunately the door to the inn reappeared so I could get out.  The quest I was on said I needed to run to the hunting lodge and talk to the guard dude's son.  So I get over there and I see on map thingie that there is a quest inside the building.  Guess what was missing?

Having doors stay where you put them is pretty important I think.

So, more disappearing doors.  Also, whatever idiot decided that noobs should be subjected to 10 minutes of shaky screen and blurred vision for dying should be taken out and executed.  If I had payed for this game 10 minutes of that would have me bagging it to return to the store.  I am serious about this.

Yeah, that's my take on the player early player experience too (have only made the mid twenties thus far).  The classes, mobs, quests, loot, crafting of the early game are just not that exciting for people who have played these style games before.  The best part of the early game is all the traits and titles you can earn, and the instance chapter quests; that part I like (and seems directly inspired by CoH badges taken further).  It's not BAD, it's just hard to see how this game will be able to draw people away from existing games with that early play experience.

Monster play is pretty good since it's a short jump to end game pvp (getting to level 10 with a pc can be done in about 3-4 hours for an experienced mmorpg player), but the new abilities and choices come with their own rank 0 to rank 5 grind too.  The guys playing monsters this morning said the pc's won last night purely due to having more rank 4 and 5 guys then the monsters, not a disparity of numbers of players.  And the non pvp parts as monster have their share of typical diku grinding.  example, we took back the lumber camp yesterday at lunch to switch it to monster control.  Had ~22 people raid it and took it in about 30 mins (mainly waiting to coordinate of course), but the final boss battle against the captian general who controlled the camp for the good team reminded me why some of this design drives me nuts.  As a level 50 spider with just a few purchased enhancements, i have about 3600 HP (morale, i know) and my standard biting attack can do ~110 damage plus 30-40 dot damage so call it 150.  The captain general we had to take down to switch the flag had 134,000+ HP and was hitting some players for 2000 a shot; god knows what the armor and defense ratings she had.  That's close to 40 times the health of a player, and 15 times the damage per hit.  It's just a stupid escalation of numbers.  So of course, we use standard npc strategies to separate out the mobs 1 by 1 (including the "1 person shoot the boss then run her around while we kill the lieutenants bit") and just dogpiled on her to wear her down and out.  20+ plus people all standing on top each other swinging at this 1 npc; you couldn't even see her in the crowd, and just had to watch your health bar to figure out if you drew aggro.  It's just stupid.

I know that's not unique to LotRO by any stretch but the whole elite mob escalation thing just drives me nuts in these games.  We have normal mobs, signature mobs, elite mobs, elite elites, elite elite elites, arch nemesis mobs, etc etc and the only difference is an exponential increase in health and power, not strategy or tactics.  (On the other end, I also hate raid concepts where you have to follow this contrived series of steps perfectly to even make the boss fights winnable, i.e. "destroy these 4 columns/generators/magic obelisks all within 30 seconds of one another to then kill these lieutenant mobs in a certain order, to trigger a portal that only left handed females should go through, etc etc.  Both of those options suck from a design standpoint.)

I think the game overall will work fine (compared to say VSOH), i just don;'t know how many people will switch to it.

I agree with Xilren & Nebu, this game could from a game design pov been great a couple of iterations ago, however just doing a diku and slapping on a couple of extra selling points isn't cutting it no more. The coming generation which LotRO is competing against is much more intresting and ground breaking. Of course those could flop, but LotRO isn't necessarily better than WoW and directly tries to compete with it. It might do OK though, since the majority of the market isn't as burned out of these type of games as the majority of us are.

I'm waiting for an MMO with a tekken style figthing system.  Get rid of levels all together and depend on player ability.  Don't think that has retention because people will master it too quick?  BS.  The longevity comes from competition.

I imagine latency is the reason we haven't seen such a thing yet.

I think that will appeal to a diffrent crowd entirely, I'm not saying it wouldn't be good but I wouldn't bet on the majority of the MMORPG gamers going for it.

I guess it depends how you do it.  I think that perhaps part of the "I'm too old for twitch" syndrome is that twitch is associated with FPS play as well as console play.  If you could make the combos similar to square, square, circle (or whatever they may be on a console) in opeation, but do it on the keyboard somehow...or with mouse gestures...I don't know I can see how it could be made to feel less twitchy.  I can't, however, come up with a good design idea for how to do it besides the idea of transparency.