2701

This is actually a really big problem. I find that I spend a third of my time in-game wrangling my inventory and selling junk and making space which there never seems to be enough of.

Part of that is my own neurosis, since I never want to throw anything (especially crafting materials) away even though I know that most of them are essentially worthless.

2702

I certainly enjoy it solo, but I am in no way a ‘hard core’ player. I just putter about in Middle Earth ;)

2703

Ditto. The other night I got the hideously ugly cosmetic cloak of the eager beaver for turning in some absurd number of tasks while power leveling my champion. There is no way I’m ever going to use this but I haven’t been able to bring myself to delete it yet.

2704

Yea, have the same problem.

which is probably why all my TP points have been spent on bag/bank/shared vault upgrades on all my 8 characters…

The latest hobbit movie really made me want to go back and play my LOTRO characters :)

2705

Everything I’ve heard/read about Helm’s Deep is the opposite of good. Depressing, this was one of my favorite games when it was in Moria/Mirkwood, and even Isengard. I played in Rohan but didn’t stick with it, my old kin vanished…along with 3/4’s of my server. I was looking around for an MMO to play again and thought of this right away, but after weighing the $ price of the expansion vs. everything I’ve heard…ugh, it sounds like I should keep looking. Which makes me sad.

2706

Word is that Turbine had a pretty good round of layoffs today.

— Alan

2707

Bad news. We’re never gonna get to Mordor at this rate.

2708

We’ll always have Moria…

2709

Shame about the Layoff. I still think LOTRO is one of the better MMOs out there; it just has a few ‘issues’ that are very annoying.

Also would be nice if they could “merge” the servers in the background, so you would still login to ‘your’ server, but in the background it would actually be a merge with some of the other servers to increase population. Would probably help a bit with retention on some servers, instead of having some of them be mostly dead (or in Monsterplay – onesided). That way they didn’t have to announce that they merged servers due to low population (and thus have bad press, causing some people to ignore the game as ‘dying’).

Course, I suppose a lot more people would be playing if Mounted Combat didn’t feel so horribly laggy.

2710

Sadly, the writing seems to be on the wall. I’m still enjoying it in the meantime. Hopefully performance issues don’t get in the way of my enjoying those last 20 levels. Maybe we’ll get one last half-hearted expansion out of it.

2711

As a solo player, I think the Isengard expansion was pretty phenomenal, Tons of content, great story, great loot. I was sad to hear that Rohan and Helm’s Deep were not up to the same level.

2712

Well, from people tweeting who apparently watch Turbine, the LOTRO staff has been fairly completely decimated. It’s probably a good time to see what you want to see in that game and wrap it up.

2713

Moria was quite nice, I never got to do much with Mirkwood/Isengard as I pretty much outleveled the zone through Skirmishes and Moria, then I went on for Rohan and Helms Deep.

Rohan had some of the best looking areas in LOTRO (and mmos in general) though. Enjoyed a lot of the open areas with mounted combat and few people around, but as soon as mounted combat encountered some buildings and more players it would start lagging horribly. (And best looking cloaks).

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Tiny album: http://imgur.com/a/vA1fa

Are they really losing so much money on LOTRO or is it just Warner doing culling so the CEO has enough money for blow?

Sucks if the game goes stale and dies now, I still have like 19000 turbine points to spend.

2714

Ugh, that is terrible news. I was a Day One LOTRO subscriber from the start and spent nearly 3 years subscribed (should have bought the Lifetime sub, would have saved a bundle over the years). I returned when it went F2P, and loved how they treated former subscribers with the F2P stuff. While I never resubscribed I did spend more real money on TP and expansions post-F2P. At this point I own everything but Rohan and Helm’s Deep (plus I never bothered to repurchase Forochel as I hated that zone when I was a subscriber) and could play up to level 85. My highest character is only 62 currently, and the one I play the most is my Champion from the QT3 guild on Nimrodel who is only in his 40’s. I return from time to time and fall in love with the game again for a few weeks, and that’s been just fine for me for the past three years or so.

Now it sounds like I should return and make a serious effort to see the content I have purchased but not seen thus far. Content such as Mirkwood, Isengard and all the books, skirmishes and other content that were added since the game went F2P. I would absolutely hate to see Lord of the Rings Online go dark, a large chunk of my online gaming “heart” would go with it, but I also realize it is inevitable as the game is going on seven years old (come April). Hopefully the game stays live for at least the next 12 months or so and I can reconcile it’s departure by playing through a lot of the content before it goes away.

2715

Nobody really knows, obviously, but I don’t think the last expansion did very well. They may just be cutting their losses.

Might’ve helped if they’d kept some reason for the raiders and groupers to stick around, but there was basically no group content at all in the last expansion and the big battles thing apparently kind of sucks (I’ve never played it).

2716

(Full disclosure; I quit playing the game shortly after RoI)

My impression is that they’ve been managing to stretch out a last ditch money grab for YEARS now, which is both impressive and disgusting.

They never really recovered from the misstep that was Moria, although they were really trying to and sincere in their efforts for some time. I’d say things changed somewhere between Mirkwood and RoI. They knew Mirkwood wasn’t enough to sell as a full expansion, so they priced it at $20, or free with a multi month subscription (the only sleazy thing about it was adding 5 useless levels to make it seem more expansion-y than just the content drop it was). By RoI, they didn’t care anymore that they were missing a good part of the content MMO players expect in an expansion, and charged full price. From there it just went to being less and less in each expansion, and the latest expansion was received about as well as a steaming turd from what I’ve seen on lotrocommunity.com. The few solid bloggers I read who still followed the game gave up during the beta for the latest expansion.

I’d had some hope that when they went F2P they’d turn things around, since for a little while after they focused on developing new things people had been asking for forever and selling them, which was completely fine by me. However, RoI made it clear that was just a brief honeymoon period in the new model.

I’d love to play on a server frozen at Mirkwood.

2717

It’s hard to say - I always got the feeling that things were a little tight budget wise over there. I left before the WB takeover, so I’m really going on what little rumors I’ve heard.

When I talked to friends over there, they were usually pretty upbeat, but most folks were dealing with the MOBA that they were working on. My understanding was that the games were holding their own as far as revenue was concerned, but that’s just supposition.

If I had to guess, I’d say some bean counters at corporate took a look at income projections for DDO and LOTRO, and decided that the market was only heading down. Second screens and device convergence are what keep people engaged these days, and both those games were originally designed for the subscription model. They successfully made the leap to F2P, but it’s pretty hard to stay relevant 7-8 years after launch (WoW and Eve are the only others that come to mind) without major retooling. I would guess that the live teams are being cut to subsistence levels for now, to see if they can regain profitability.

It’s a shame - I still have a lot of friends over there, and they’ve done some great work. I hope that Infinite Crisis takes off for them, so there might be a little love to return to DDO and LOTRO.

Edit: Just saw the above - it looks like some of my assumptions were wrong. I hadn’t been following the expansions; I didn’t know they had gone off the rails like that. :(

2718

I have to give Turbine props for having some absolutely amazing folks working there, historically at least. There were things that game got right that the industry still stumbles with, really inspired feature design and development. Even when the game was losing its way, every now and them some genuinely amazing feature would be released.

2719

I played from beta and had a lifetime sub since launch, grabbed collectors/special edition when I could and probably spent a lot more on turbine points (etc) for other stuff as well…

The big battles was sort of a disappointment yes. At least some of the early ones felt a bit ‘meh’ when you soloed/duoed them… some of the others were “ok-ish” but I guess not what you imagined when you thought about helms deep. But then again, I suppose it would be really hard to make a proper helms deep ‘encounter’ without changing the underlying tech that LOTRO used… (Which I suppose was pretty much the Asherons Call Engine v3.0)

I am not sure about the group/raiding thing but I believe they were only server-based, so you never had the option of doing cross-server dungeon groups or raids, a bit like how WOW first reinvigorated dungeon-ing and later raiding with LFR (which was a great idea). It would be great to be able to visit the many 6-12-24 person raids in LOTRO at end level (or even scaled for my level).

They did introduce a good dungeon tool that let you queue for Loads of dungeons/skirmishes, but depending on your server it would be a short wait or a long wait - or an endless one in many cases…and it seemed like a lot of groups were formed using the LFF channels instead of the tool (so it wasn’t good enough).

For the raiding guilds I guess there is just too many games to pick from – and when a server population drop you either have to move server (and lose more players) or just keep at it until the guild dies. And the same goes for group. It doesn’t help if you have lots of great group content as you level up if you cant find anyone to do the group content with (or if it becomes a major hassle). The “Landscape Soldier” helped somewhat I guess, but it wasn’t enough. The way they redesigned the book quests to ‘buff you’ was a good idea to let you complete the epic story arch without having to spend a week trying to find someone else who were on the same book quest. (Just a shame the Epilogue ones required dungeon groups that noone did anymore).

Still, I would be playing LOTRO and do raids with people from LFF if I didn’t constantly have to micro manage my bags and the 32-bit performance drops in Rohan didn’t piss me off too much to make me quit playing.
Hope to return some time soon though, to finish leveling and try some more of my multiboxing. But recently returned to wow for 3 months on two accounts so need to finish those before doing anything else – and then TESO will be out, so… its tricky.

Another thing that kinda ruined LOTRO for me was that each time an expansion hit they would make Creeps tougher, but my Freep would then have to level 5-10-15 levels more + get gear, before I could do PVP again. Wish they’d just buff your level at least, and get you some starter PVP equipment through some quest arch, then let you ‘grind for better gear’ with points which you could then use in PVE (scaled or endgame). Legendary weapons in LOTRO were another great idea, that I wish other MMOs would go with.

Feels kinda shit to do raids for months to get a Legendary Weapon (in wow), only for the expansion to hit and it be replaced by a Green weapon. Course, then the challenge would have to remain so perhaps they would need some system to either allow you to ‘raid for the item’ with a iLevel limit (know wow had this for an achievement) or only be able to get a ‘cosmetic’ version.

Only did guild raiding at level 50 in Helegrod (that dragon was way too hard) and the Rift for a bit, before I quit and only returned with Mirkwood. By that time my entire guild were gone, and some had moved servers.

Hopefully new MMOs will have a solution for the server issue. GW2 let you guest other servers and I believe they had a free transfer every week… but it would be nice if you didn’t have to think about it at all, without having overpopulated quest/starter areas and whatnot. LOTRO introduced open tagging in many areas and ‘autoloot’ which helped a lot and would be useful in crowded areas (except the engine would start lagging)…

But; LOTRO isn’t dead yet. So hopefully we’ll get to see the ‘endgame’ eventually. And if it does go down – it would be great if they somehow opensourced the server-side part or provided binaries so you could run private servers where you could still play. But I suppose the Tolkien estate would kill any chance of that…

2720

I’m surprised to hear this take on Isengard from someone who worked there but then, I’m a solo player so my perspective and priorities may differ from industry expectations. As I mentioned up thread, I’ve really, really been enjoying the Isengard content. The epic quest line is more interesting and dynamic than at any other point and there is a ton of solo content. (Of course, that includes the Great River content which was released later.) I guess I recall folks complaining that the raids were released several months after the rest of the expansion and that they were super buggy, at least initially. Again, as a solo player, none of that has affected my experience.

From there it just went to being less and less in each expansion, and the latest expansion was received about as well as a steaming turd from what I’ve seen on lotrocommunity.com.

That’s definitely been my perception from afar (haven’t played either of those expansions yet) and just reading what was included with the Helms Deep expansion actually was my first inclinkling that the game’s future might be in jeopardy. I was shocked at the expansion’s cost based on the advertised content.

I’d love to play on a server frozen at Mirkwood.

That feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater to me. Aside from my positive experiences with the Isengard content, I do think that some of the changes they’ve made over the past few years have been positive ones. Things like auto-looting, storing loot in a temporary bad until you want to collect it, consolidating alerts to a single pop-up icon, making reputation items clickable, the barter wallet, etc have all enhanced the game’s play-ability. I’ve even really enjoyed the recent class revamps and trait trees, at least for my hunter and champion. I get where end game players may be frustrated by the lack of content and I disagree with the pricing of the expansions based on their relative lack of content, but there is still a lot to love about this game, including the new content.

I mention this a lot but one of my best decisions ever in this game was to purchase the experience disabler at level 75 so that I could enjoy all of the content available at that level without over-leveling it. (That said, I hate how much that disabler costs, I hate that it’s a per character purchase rather than per account, and I hate the many different ways Turbine has been bloating experience gain (crafting XP, scaling festival XP, multiple +100% XP weekends) to drive people towards that purchase.)

I will say that I appreciate the level of discussion on these forums because the official lotro forums are unreadable. It’s hard to tell what is valid criticism because people bitch about EVERYTHING. It makes you hate the game to read those forums.