Just kind of reminds me of when WoW claimed to be implementing mounted combat…and we got a simplistic vehicle-mechanic-based jousting minigame that was inexpressibly tedious and used for like, two dailies and one boss fight and then (thankfully) never seen again.
I found my endpoint in Oct.
There’s a lot non-mounted after 80 as well. It takes a while to get a hang of it and its doable, the biggest problem is the lag that randomly occurs as you are riding aorund.
Still, even at 80, I bet there is a lot of old content you haven’t completed, go do it! :) - Just a shame it doesn’t give xp, and the rep-grind items that you get on lowlevel content cant be used as they are level-locked below your current level.
draxen
2804
Uh oh, LOTRO has announced a whole raft of world (server) closures.
19 servers are closing I think, leaving 10 left
Details are here:
https://www.lotro.com/en/game/articles/world-closure-announcement
I’m actually surprised there are enough players for 10 servers to continue.
I can’t even remember the last time I saw any buzz about this game.
Cool. I kind of wanted to get my Nimrodel toons off that server and onto Landroval, but didn’t want to pay for it on a game I rarely play. Now I get it for free, yay.
Interesting. I didn’t even know they had that many servers still active. I have a very old level 54 Guardian on Arkenstone whom I abandoned way back when the QT3 guild started up on Nimrodel. All my other characters since were created on Nimrodel. Looks like I’ll be porting them all over to Arkenstone now to come full circle.
I really should go back and try to play at least one night per week. I have all the content from the base game up through Rohan that I either bought for extreme discounts on sale or paid with using Turbine Points earned. Sadly I stopped playing before getting any of my characters beyond Moria, so there are three expansions worth of content I own but have never experienced.
Gil102
2808
Back when LOTRO first came out, I bought a lifetime subscription. Played it for awhile, but not nearly enough to justify the $200 lifetime. Shelved it for…wow…6 years or so and when I came back, I had a ridiculous 25k Turbine Points or something. As I was playing with friends who somehow talked me into reinstalling it again, so to repay them for their selfishness, I bought them all what I felt was the dumbest and most useless thing I could find on the Turbine Store: the Night Swan. Totally worth it.
biosc1
2809
Aw…I just fired this up the other day after taking a few months off.
I took a few months off and came back to so many points I was able to grab all the expansions (they were on sale at the time, but still neat).
It’s not shutting down. They’re just closing the underpopulated servers.
This is a good thing, even though I don’t play the game these days. The last few years have seen Nimrodel nothing but a ghost town. I could literally play in certain areas for hours and never see another player moving about.
Istari6
2812
Too bad it appears to be in decline. I dove into LOTRO back in 2010 or 2011 and had an absolutely amazing time. What I loved most was the exploration, the uncertainty about what lay over the next hill. Yes, I knew the overall layout of Tolkien’s world, but Turbine had done such a masterful job of filling in the details and corners of that landscape.
Then as I was working down into Eregion, anticipating entering Moria for the first time, they removed Fog of War from all Maps. The LOTRO experience completely changed for me, and I lost the desire to keep playing. I’d always hoped they’d restore Fog of War at some point, but that seems doubtful as they pull support.
Ah well, had some of my best ever gaming experiences in LOTRO. I just hope someone else will create Tolkien’s Middle Earth again in the future with such depth and devotion to the lore. Perhaps there will be a VR version in a few years?
Chris
You should’ve seen the Old Forest before they revamped its map. You could easily get lost in there when the game launched for an hour or so.
Anyone know of a global account-wide command to see total hours played or do you still have to do it per toon? I’d almost be scared to run it, I probably played 20-25 hours per week the first few years.
Derbain
2814
LotRO remains near and dear to my heart, but I fell out of it somewhere around Riders of Rohan and Helm’s Deep. I never warmed to the mounted combat and while I enjoyed the stories their quests told, I was thoroughly Rohaned out by the second expansion dedicated to Rohan. A lot of folks didn’t like the Moria expansion, but treading the halls of Khazad-dum remains one of my favorite MMO experiences.
I was sure that every patch they changed up the Old Forest, just to mess with people. It got far less mysterious once they added the map for it.
Razgon
2816
An hour is probably a bit much, but yeah, I got lost in the Old Forest for 10 minutes at least - Love the game, but its getting long i the tooth as well. I’d love an updated version of it, but I doubt we’ll see an MMO as massive as this one again.
Smaller areas, instanced areas and less off the rails exploration is unfortunately where the MMO’s are going.
Granath
2817
I agree with this post. LOTRO is probably my second favorite MMO of all time and the one I have the most pleasant memories about. I was enchanted the first time I walked through the fields of the Shire and remained that way ever since. I had difficulty finding a character class that I liked but from a lore and world standpoint, LOTRO is probably the best MMO ever. I too was lost in the old forest for more than an hour the first time I went in there. The Mines of Moria was a fantastic expansion and may represent the pinnacle of world building in a MMO. It certainly was not perfect due the long travel times and the difficulty getting a mount to speed things up but from a sheer exploration standpoint Moria was amazing in both scale and content.
I also burned out on the planes of Rohan. The mounted combat system was not good and I gave up on it after a while. It was simply easier for me to do things the old fashioned way, but since the mobs were tuned for mounted combat it made questing more difficult. The scale of Rohan just became too great and while beautiful there was simply not enough to keep me entertained after leaving the Argonauth area. So my burglar sits still waiting for me on the endless plains of Rohan, hoping one day I will return.
mok
2818
Would it be a fair statement to say this style of MMO play is slowly shrinking and moving towards extinction? - and like many other forms of play it is basically the style of the previous decade and not the current one?
I try to think of where it will be in 10 years, and though there will still be these grand size MMOs it is hard to see it being very vibrant.
Also, it seems guild/clan organizations driving play and requirements has changed in the last 10 years…at least it seems they are making less noise.
The problem with MMOs is that they lost sight of their USP - being able to play online with other people. What happened is that WoW hit, then everyone wanted a piece of the pie of this previously-untapped playerbase. But it was thought that this untapped playerbase was comprised more of casual players - which I think is correct. The trouble is, developers somehow got it into their heads to equate “casual” with “solo”, and started designing MMOs to accommodate solo players more than anything else. This is what led to the emphasis on “story”. It also led to an over-emphasis on Achievement and collecting shiny things.
But the other path, the path not taken, was to make teaming easy for casual players. The way forward was shown by City of Heroes, but nobody took it.
Hence, decline in that old school type of MMO, characterized by tab targeting combat.
The thing about tab targeting combat is that it’s great for people playing in teams, because it’s easy to chat while combatting. Absent that advantage, it’s more boring than action-based types of combat, which aren’t really so conducive to chatting.
Basically MMO design drove itself into a cul-de-sac where you now have MMOs comprised mostly of fickle players grimly, silently soloing, collecting shinies, and staying in the game only so long as the devs can desperately create enough shinies for them to pursue. People don’t group up casually. And grouping up casually was what made MMOs MMOs - either (in the earliest iteration) because the combat was so hard you were glad of assistance, or (in the City of Heroes iteration) because it was made super-convenient to build PUGs.
Grouping up casually led to friendships forged in-game, which led to a close-knit community, which led to a long-lasting MMO.
Gil102
2820
I have no intention of every going back into the Old Forest. I’ve had too many damn spiders dropping down from the trees scaring the crap out of me every damn time. I will admit, though, I think most of the world would be really cool to experience via an Oculus. Just as long as some mods in puppies or kittens for all the spiders. Damn, now I’m jumpy.
