LOTRO to relaunch as free to play?

instant0 · 2015-10-16T16:23:25.000Z

Daagar:

Wasn’t Wildstar the modern interpretation of this (Everquest rightly being the first)? And it didn’t pan out. There is a market for brutal hard MMOs of this nature, but it isn’t a big market (not big enough to sustain an AAA title). And among that niche crowed, they still seem to prefer EQ as the gold standard. Project 1999 is doing quite well for what it is.

Wildstar presented itself with the endgame being ‘hardcore for big guilds only!’ which is probably why they failed as a subscription mmo.

For LOTRO, Hopefully this year they’ll give you a XMAS present with a item you can send to one of your character to immediately boost them to 80 :-) I want to try “near endgame” with a Warden, or I guess I’ll just stay playing on my Burglar.

Another good feature would be if the unlocks you get on one character would be applied to all. Course, they would earn less from the Turbine store from that I suppose.

AlanSmithee · 2015-10-17T05:20:42.000Z

Timex:

Hey folks, I heard that they are shutting down some servers so characters need to move or something?
Does anyone know if I need to do anything if my character is on one of those servers being shut down, or will it be automatically migrated? Or can I just migrate it whenever I want later on?

Apparently there is an issue with housing; you have to unhook everything in your house and put it in your inventory. Otherwise it disappears onto the aether.

Daagar · 2015-10-17T09:22:40.000Z

Reinstalled this last night, and sadly was reminded why I can never get into it. The UI is soooo dated. The font is too small, too serifed, and too fuzzy and it just really detracts from things. Actually, pretty much all my issues are just with the font. And all the lo-res loading screens. The dated character models aren’t as much of a distraction as I remember, and the environments hold up pretty well. Wildstar, for all its sugar-rush hyper in-your-face busy-ness, has a very tight clean UI - even with their small font, it is a legible small font.

instant0 · 2015-10-17T09:43:55.000Z

You know you can configure the UI, right?
Both in options and http://lotrointerface.com/

You can also run a DirectX injector to improve the graphics somewhat.
Check out: Reshade + MasterEffect Reborn

There should also be a HQ Texture pack available that improves the graphics by a bit. Some of the older areas of the game do look a bit dated though.
Not sure how you get the pack, but it should be out there. 2GB or so I believe.

Install the game on a SSD/Ramdisk and you wont have loading screens :-)
For Ramdisk you can use the command line “imDisk” application. (You’ll need about 29GB free for the LOTRO-image)

Loading the game


imdisk -a -t vm -f "E:\_Images\Games\LOTRO.img" -m V:

Saving the image if there has been a patch:


echo Press Enter to Save Image from V: to E:\_Images\Games
Pause
rawcopy -mlds \\.\V: "E:\_Images\games\LOTRO.img"
Echo Press Enter to Dismount V:
pause
imdisk -d -m V:

Edit: Wildstar has a really good ui, and their “UI-engine” is the best currently available.

Daagar · 2015-10-17T09:48:04.000Z

Thanks instant0 - sadly, not a single one of those options fixes my only real complaint of the font being whacked :)

instant0 · 2015-10-17T10:34:03.000Z

Looked around for font replacement but couldn’t find any. Do not really understand what you experience as a problem with the font however, you got any images to illustrate it with?

Edit: Wow, haven’t had the game crash in ages. Now it started again… cant even remember what the fix was back then.
Well, technically it was the nvidia drivers that crashed — so game was running after the drivers were re-initialized.

tylertoo · 2015-10-17T11:44:04.000Z

I have four characters on Landroval, which is remaining open, and six on three other servers that are closing. Does anyone know – can I put those six all on Landroval, giving me a total of 10 there? Is there a limit? I’ve got a lifetime sub.

EDIT: Figured it out. I can have up to 9 characters. That’s plenty.

charmtrap · 2015-10-17T12:13:52.000Z

tylertoo:

I have four characters on Landroval, which is remaining open, and six on three other servers that are closing. Does anyone know – can I put those six all on Landroval, giving me a total of 10 there? Is there a limit? I’ve got a lifetime sub.

Even if 10 is above your character limit, you can still move them. If you’re above your limit it’ll let you pick which ones you want to be accessible and put the rest in mothballs until you increase your character slots.

Daagar · 2015-10-17T12:57:11.000Z

instant0:

Looked around for font replacement but couldn’t find any. Do not really understand what you experience as a problem with the font however, you got any images to illustrate it with?

I wouldn’t say it is a technical problem needing a screenshot - I’m likely seeing what you see (I very likely have a crappier monitor, though). Purely a nit-picky-I’m-old-and-set-in-my-ways-need-sharp-fonts aesthetic thing. I’m one of those guys that has to set up his text editors with certain fonts and color schemes and all that, so it is a personal issue :)

tylertoo · 2015-10-17T13:08:49.000Z

charmtrap:

Even if 10 is above your character limit, you can still move them. If you’re above your limit it’ll let you pick which ones you want to be accessible and put the rest in mothballs until you increase your character slots.

Thanks for clarifying. A few of these characters were created back in 2007 and barely used, so its not like I’d miss 'em ;).

instant0 · 2015-10-17T13:15:39.000Z

Looks like the ingame turbine store got an overhaul, much quicker and easier to navigate UI now + you can resize the window.

And I spent another 700 turbine points… to increase my Shared vault once again. Now I have 30 free slots, so I should be able to hit 94 or 95 tonight. :)

tylertoo · 2015-10-17T13:55:53.000Z

instant0:

And I spent another 700 turbine points… to increase my Shared vault once again. Now I have 30 free slots, so I should be able to hit 94 or 95 tonight. :)

Great idea.

DTG · 2015-10-17T16:13:21.000Z

Peter Frazier:

Apparently there is an issue with housing; you have to unhook everything in your house and put it in your inventory. Otherwise it disappears onto the aether.

I didn’t encounter that. I only logged on for a short bit, but I think my hooked housing items got piled into one housing box, overfilling it but still there.

biosc1 · 2015-10-20T20:00:03.000Z

instant0:

Looks like the ingame turbine store got an overhaul, much quicker and easier to navigate UI now + you can resize the window.

And I spent another 700 turbine points… to increase my Shared vault once again. Now I have 30 free slots, so I should be able to hit 94 or 95 tonight. :)

The store is sooooooo much better now…and, like you, I spent a bunch of points on storage options ;)

mrcjhicks · 2015-10-30T23:40:47.000Z

New Quest Pack is out: Minas Tirith!

This time around there’s apparently three new areas and a couple new Epic Battles. Fun. I was pretty on the fence about those when I first did them, but they can be quite a bit of fun when you’ve got some points in the specializations.

instant0 · 2015-10-31T01:20:33.000Z

Cool. Getting “VIP”/“LIfetime” for LOTRO was the best MMO investment I’ve made. Still need to reach 100 though. Struggling with very limited inventory space though. So my questing kinda stops when I have 40 different ‘task items’ in my inventory and forced to offload them to the bank or find whichever task chest somewhere that I can deposit them in.

Turbine going F2P on LOTRO was the best way to get even more money out of me :)

baruk · 2016-05-19T20:24:46.000Z

New quest pack is out: The Battle of Pelennor Fields
The Far Anorien region includes 3 new instances:

Blood of the Black Serpent - Ride with Theoden-king against the the Haradrim and fight by his side as he slays their king. Mounted combat optional for portions of this battlefield instance.

The Quays of the Harlond - Fly to join Aragorn and his men as they arrive on the Pelennor and turn the tide in Gondor’s favour in this second battlefield instance.

The Silent Street - While the battle rages below, Denethor vies with Gandalf over the body of wounded Faramir. But they are not the only ones who have come to make claims and vie upon the Silent Street, mortuary path of stewards and kings!

Also included is a new battlefield raid coming out in patch 18.2, apply to test it out here.

Far Anorien isn’t cheap at 1995 TP, if you plan to grind a few turbine points then Patch 18.1 has your back, having the notable change of reducing slayer deed requirements by about 30%, some by a lot more eg. barrow of taradan spider slayer deed has seen an 80% reduction, dropping from 150/300 to 30/60.

instant0 · 2016-05-20T05:29:28.000Z

Time to check my Burglar then :)

Haven’t been playing the game much this year unfortunately, there is so much that steals time. I should probably uninstall everything but LOTRO, HotKeyNet and VMWare Workstation so I could focus on just one games.

Keep hoping that their patch notes will include two bullet points

Added a 64-bit client, performance increase by 40% and gotten rid of the lag when using warsteeds.
Moved all the task items to their own bottomless inventory (resulting in inventory slots being sold in Turbine Store dropping by 90%).
Alternatively
Increased stack size of task items from 50 to 2 million.

charmtrap · 2016-07-08T03:02:43.659Z

Is this the end finally?

Massively Overpowered

Turbine layoffs confirmed: Turbine is transitioning into a ‘mobile’ dev studio

It sounds as if Turbine may have been hit with another round of layoffs. Former Community Manager Rick Sapience Heaton tweeted this cryptic message alluding to bad news f

Telefrog · 2016-07-08T04:11:04.994Z

Yikes.

[quote]
“Turbine is transitioning into a free-to-play, mobile development studio, and as a result we are eliminating some positions. The Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons online games will continue to operate as they do now. Re-focusing and reducing the studio size was a difficult decision for the company, and we are grateful to all of the Turbine staff for their considerable contributions.”[/quote]