I've tried this game so many times -- as recently as last night -- because of threads like this. I want to see this awesome story and great community, but I just haven't got to it yet.
Last night, I was on my level 8-9 dwarf doing the starter quests. The graphics and the combat just hurt my eyes. I thought that if I wanted to play an old game like this, WoW is so much better (in combat, animations, smoothness, etc.) As far as quests go, I cannot say yet. The game was so ugly in the starter zones, I kept thinking I needed to play BDO to heal my eyes.
I just uninstalled LOTRO *again* and then I see this thread.
Please, help me understand.
Well, to be fair, level 8-9 takes about 20 minutes so you haven't even scratched the surface. I'd say for someone to really get a taste for the game they need to get to at least Lothlorien, which can take a considerable amount of time if you want to do everything before it.
Seems like it took a lot longer. I did read all the quests, killed all the mobs, looked around everywhere for hidden stuff...But I have 5 characters with the highest being level 10. I may have re-rolled. I don't even remember. But my highest level char now is 10. Steam says I have 80 hours in the game
LotRO used to be my main MMO, played it for the first 5 years after release before calling it quits. So, my information is going to be a bit outdated, but what you are experiencing hasn't changed much I don't think.
On the starter zones, I'd say pick a character and push through them. The dwarf/elf starter zone (Erid Luin) is pretty dreary and I seem to remember spending far too much time running back and forth to quest givers. The hobbit starter zone (shire) I think is amazing and really gives you that LotR feeling, but, you're doing hobbity quests - delivering pies and mail, chasing off wolves. It doesn't have that epic feeling. The human starter zone (Archet) feels like generic fantasy village.
So, push through to bree. Once you reach Bree (level 12ish?) things start opening up more. The world feels more open and the quests start taking you to interesting places. You head into the midgewater marshes, or down into the old forest to fight walking trees and big spiders, or west towards the brandywine bridge to meet some hobbits, or into the barrow downs to fight some wights.
In terms of interesting story lines, the ones I enjoyed the most were the epic books. I think in the human starter zone you might meet strider briefly, but you have to get past the prologue and into the main epic books to pick up the best stories. These are when you are indirectly helping the fellowship - chasing off people following Frodo, investigating what happened to the Nazgul after the Ford of Bruinen, having a chat to the fellowship whilst they rest in Rivendell, following the dwarves as they reclaim moria after the fellowship passes through.
Some of the epic books don't provide both good gameplay and good story. There are quite a few epic books that are used as vehicles to guide players around the zone, so the actual gameplay is just "go there and speak to X, then go here and speak to Y", but the stories are still OK.
In terms of gameplay, LotRO always felt quite slow compared to a lot of games. It had a 1.5s GCD, lots of skills with long cooldowns plus a lot of running about. This makes the beginner experience pretty uninspired and makes it feel a lot like a clone. Things start to change for a soloer fairly late unfortunately. Most classes usually have some sort of key skill or spec that really brings the class to life. With a loremaster, for example, that skill was March of the Ents which you don't get until 39-45 range. However, by level 30 every class should have a good range of skills so that rotations are interesting and you have to make meaningful decisions when it comes to cooldowns.
Group play is really where the gameplay came alive. The dedicated support classes just kicked ass and open up so many more options for tactics, plus the game just had a lot of interdependency. It pushed the game far beyond the majority of MMOs in terms of player skill, it was just a shame it only occurred in difficult group content. When the game launched there was tons of group content whilst leveling, but nearly all of it got removed.
In terms of community, I'm too far removed to be able to comment on how it is now. It certainly was great. As the game was group focused at launch, plus based on player skill rather than gear, it bred a community that was used to helping each other and being polite. The in game voice chat made pugging much more successful than games without voice chat. When they removed the group content it did change the community a lot, but enough old timers were still there so it remained better than most MMOs.
My recommendation would be to push through your starter zones and get to the point where you are doing skirmishes. They are pretty much the only group content left whilst leveling up, but they scale to your level (well, u pick a level) and group size and can be repeated. So, once you reach skirmish level, start joining in groups or creating groups and see how things go. Beyond that, you won't see much of the community until you hit endgame or unless there is a server event.
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You're not alone and unlike people think, it has nothing to do with being a graphics "snob". Hell, i play Space Station 13 and... yeah... graphics aren't exactly its strong point . There are just certain features you expect games to have, or have perfected in modern times, that these older games lack. I'm a huge DAoC fan, for instance, but I try to play that game now and, apart from grossly dated graphics, the GUI is horrible, the animations are jerky and the overall feel of the game lacks everything I'd expect of games these days.
I'll also add, that it's not just those visual features, but some of the core mechanics as well. Nowadays, we expect our animations to be fluid, our hitboxes to be accurate and the combat to be tight. Not in these older games though! You could stand 10 feet away forman enemy but still swing and hit eachother. Enemies can fire a spell,, you run out of range and sight, but still get hit by it. You can stand on one side of a wall and hit an enemy through a poorly clipped corner of the wall. You can have a party of 12 occupy the same square inch of a dungeon.
I disagree. When your focus is on the superficial, weather it be graphics or how fluid animations are, to determine how good a GAME is, it is the same thing.
This is the same argument that has been around forever that no one really knows is even the main argument. Its function versus form. It controls how you see and interact with the world.
If you name the games that you think are great examples of graphics, animation, fluidity, hit box accuracy, art style, anything, I am willing to bet all those games are ones I dislike due to mechanics and systems. I won't say there are no exceptions, but almost every game that puts a focus on form over function, style over substance, is just shallow and lacks any complexity. And it isn't just triple AAA games, Pyre is a great indie example. These are games my little kids can play and do well enough with. They look good, have all the pomp and pizzazz, but have nothing to offer my kind.
The usual exceptions to this are games that started out with a focus on form over function, lost popularity and had to add some depth to attract my kind and for longevity. Wow is an example of game that did the opposite, and bet my kind were hooked enough to make the game kid friendly, and now the have a boring kids game that plays super smooth and my kind moved on to games that valued us.
This isn't an I'm right or you're right kind of thing, it is a how your brain is programmed. It is as useless as arguing over as being if introverted or extroverted is correct, or if apples taste better than oranges.
There is and will always be a couple games both peoples can agree are okay or decent where our circles overlap. I also think younger people become deprogrammed over time and most end up in my camp, and is the reason why old men don't care about pretty anything that embarrass teens, and old women have sensible haircuts and wear comfortable footwear. But on the other hand, kids spend more on games and like the superficial far more than function and they do all that texting and tweeting and watching other people play video games online and other weird thinks that hype games and are the main target of the superficial games.
Yes EQ2 was a solid themepark game,had nothing to do with Wow as MOST Wow players were new to online gaming or at least mmorpg online gaming.Wow was never as good as EQ2 and now,well i have not played Wow in a long time so idk about now but since these games stick to the same old ,i doubt Wow is any good now either.
I would still play FFXI over all of these,i still feel ffxi is better than every single mmorpg out there and yet could have been improved a ton if made for PC from day 1.
There is no other older game i would want to play,i simply pray that somewhere out there "Triumph" is a new game coming out at least worthy of me looking past the typical adverts and wanting to actually play.
The thing about older games is that we were at least getting a decent effort,they were pushing the limits of game design "decently"now a days the games look like college kids playing around with a game editor.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I think LOTRO looks great. Character models are a bit fugly, even the updated ones, but overall the game looks great. I absolutely hate the stutter though. That's the worst thing about the age. Apparently it's something to do with the way the server handles things..
Really, though, it's not an old game. It's had loads of updates and expansions. Mordor is brand new.
Frequently updated old games are still old games. Everquest is still getting updates. LotRO isn't that old, but it is getting a bit long in the tooth.
I've tried this game so many times -- as recently as last night -- because of threads like this. I want to see this awesome story and great community, but I just haven't got to it yet.
Last night, I was on my level 8-9 dwarf doing the starter quests. The graphics and the combat just hurt my eyes. I thought that if I wanted to play an old game like this, WoW is so much better (in combat, animations, smoothness, etc.) As far as quests go, I cannot say yet. The game was so ugly in the starter zones, I kept thinking I needed to play BDO to heal my eyes.
I just uninstalled LOTRO *again* and then I see this thread.
Please, help me understand.
If setting, story, and community are absolutely core to your enjoyment of a MMORPG such that they can outweigh your dissatisfaction with the presentation it may be worth at least plugging away until you get to Bree. Things start picking up a bit with the story there, and there is often a social community presence there. If you're lucky, there may even be a concert on the go, with players using the game's music system to perform.
Other than that it is a tab-targeting based MMORPG like so many others, but with busy work and PvP that has a Tolkien flair attached to it. Honestly, other than a hobbit, what adventurer would consider hauling about pies when you've already been made aware of hints of a rising darkness that suggest you should be on your way to Bree without delay.
Came in pretty late to this game. I think I restarted this game about 20 times already and haven't decided if I might stick to it yet. It's a good game though, has that old school feel.
anyone else finding comfort in reliving the memmories of the past?
(on a sidenote, LotRO is great )
I didn't know that's a special thing, since that's the natural stage for me. Just finished replaying a text adventure from '87 and for more on-topic, now that TSW is gone, from my remaining 3 games I used to hop around, even the "youngest" is almost 7 years old.
Same with singleplayer games, I rarely find good ones nowadays. Like @blamo2000 said above, it's all about looks, with pushing mechanics and gameplay to the back. Maybe that's why when I play "new"(ish) games I used to pick indie adventures (pixel art ftw) or games like Stick of Truth / Fractured but Whole. Even with Witcher 3 I had the feeling that in some areas the visuals were more important to CDPR than the gameplay. (don't get me wrong, it was a great game)
So, yep. Reliving the past, all the way, Bachus I think I go and play some Vice City now.
Actually, now I remember that I did have a character that made it to Bree. I even made it to Weathertop and I remember killing midges and wolves. I even made it on a quest to Tom Bombadil's and killed Barrow Wights. That part was more fun. But I don't even know where those characters are now. Maybe they got moved to a different server?
I'll probably go back and give it a try when I'm in a quiet mood.
There were a couple moves during the history of LotRO, but only the Codies -> Turbine move was a "fatal" one, for former Eu players, with the possibility of losing characters. Besides that, your characters are surely there, on one of the servers When you launch the client hit the transfer button, that will gather all the data from the servers (closed ones too, in case you've missed the latest 30to10 server consolidation), and lists all your characters on all the servers. Just the character names, and the levels I think, but that's more than enough. *edit: levels are enough, since if you were at Weathertop that means around level 24ish, and that will stick out from the other characters
If you find them on a now closed server, you can move them onto an open one for free, I think even if you already used up your free transfer before.
I played on the EU servers and I think my characters are all gone by now.
Initially when I betaed and played the game at launch I had difficulty sticking to it. I would get to Bree and for some reason I would stop playing but once I got passed that I managed to get the character all the way up and also bought the Mines of Moria expansion but my friends quit playing so I quit too and I have never come back after that. I had about 5 characters all fairly high and this was before the F2P thing. It's a good game the quests are very good and you also had some interesting group mechanics. The colour thing.
I also found that I have over 4200 Turbine gold coins (not sure what they are called now). I'm not sure how I got those either. What should I spend them on? I have a Premium account. Not sure what that means either, it's been so long. I did buy some kind of dlc pack off Steam a few years ago, so maybe it all came with that.
Shoot, I already missed that once in an another thread and did it again... Apologies, just checked and transfer don't show the level, just the character name, and the last login date. That way it's a bit more difficult to find the proper characters...
Premium account only means that you were either a VIP once (subscriber), or at least spent more than $5 on the game somewhere in the past. It has some advantages over the Free account: +3 character slots, a higher (but still too low) gold cap, better login priority on the full servers (rarely an issue, mostly at festivals on the 2-3 most crowded servers), I think +1 bags of inventory, and the ability to sell on AH (free players can only buy). Oh, and can mail gold around the alts.
Not much benefits for newly rolled characters, but for those already created while the VIP period, it is great, since those characters stay VIP forever (no gold cap for them, can swift travel, have all the trait slots unlocked).
4200 is quite a sum (around $40 if you buy it without any discounts). What to spend it on? No straight answer to that, it heavily depends on your playstyle. A general answer used to be the content (when it is quest pack week, you can unlock 7-8 zones or maybe even 2 expansions with that sum). If you are a hoarder it could be spent on inventory and shared storage, on wardrobe slots and cosmetics if you like outfitting and roleplay. Unlocking the selected crafting guild if you prefer to lean on crafting (only the first two tiers of the guild are open for non-subscribers). Or, buying the creep classes if you prefer the PvMP.
currently playing LOTRO but still only level 22, I wish they had a way to get caught up cheap, it looks like it is going to cost some $$$ to get all the expansions. I find it superior to modern games, I want a deep engaging game not to run from ! to !. Also playing bit of DCUO so yes, to me graphics matter little. I do wish LOTRO had a better population, I mostly have to play it like a single player game and see people once in a while in towns (Gladden server). Maybe it gets better as I get higher but right now its near impossible to find groups.
currently playing LOTRO but still only level 22, I wish they had a way to get caught up cheap, it looks like it is going to cost some $$$ to get all the expansions. I find it superior to modern games, I want a deep engaging game not to run from ! to !. Also playing bit of DCUO so yes, to me graphics matter little. I do wish LOTRO had a better population, I mostly have to play it like a single player game and see people once in a while in towns (Gladden server). Maybe it gets better as I get higher but right now its near impossible to find groups.
You're on the wrong server. Move to Crickhollow or Evernight... even if it means starting again. It'll be worth it. Gladden is statistically the least populated US server, almost half the population of Crickhollow:
Depends on playstyle as well If you like roleplay and lots of player-made events and concerts, Landroval. If you're more of a lone wolf, then as Darkrayne pointed above, Gladden. I personally am on the Eu side, but I know Brandywine and Crickhollow used to race for the most crowded title in the NA, so if you like lots of people around, pick one of those (based on the forums here I believe quite a lot of NA-located mmorpg.com posters are on Crick, but @Torval may have more info on that). The fifth one on NA, Arkenstone, is the middle ground population-wise, and I think that is the unofficial Oceanic server for the players from down under. (meaning the peak time is maybe shifted by 1-2 hours to the usual NA peak hours)
edit: just checked the stats Darkrayne linked... Brandy is only third? so much for the past's glory during the transfers there was a period where Turbine even removed Brandy from the transfer goals, because it was full with login queues all the time.
Legend of Zelda and Mario are good examples of having good games with poor graphics. Games that had a lot more secrets than the original game. That's what comparing a game like Everquest to a game like WoW is like. Legend of Zelda had no guidance and had lots puzzles, secret areas, and clues. It also created everything randomly if you beat the game so you could replay it again, but nothing would be in the same place. Mario had secrets like being able to jump through the top of the ceiling or jumping over the flag that was fairly unexpected. There were all kinds of little secrets like this throughout NES games. EQ had a similar quest and experience approach. Everything was learned through experimentation. In modern games, they look nicer and the gameplay is often smoother. The big difference is that new games point you everywhere you need to go and usually give you an example of how to complete something. There is no experimentation on the players part outside of possibly raid content. Even the equipment is fairly straightforward since there are now class sets and color coding.
One other thing to think about with graphics is its impact on health. One thing I've noticed with more advanced games like the Witcher 3 is there are so much detail and animations that they can strain the eye a bit to take it in. More simple graphics with fewer animations can be less of an eye strain and also allow for focus on more complex world design. This can be seen in many old games.
edit: just checked the stats Darkrayne linked... Brandy is only third? so much for the past's glory during the transfers there was a period where Turbine even removed Brandy from the transfer goals, because it was full with login queues all the time.
I think the endgame population on Brandywine is still a contender for top spot. Crickhollow just has a much larger stream of new players at the moment 'and' a large endgame population.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
I've been thinking about trying the Ultima Games for a long time. The only RPGs I played on a PC in that time period were the D&D ones and I only vaguely remember them. After that, I played mostly on Nintendo. I recall playing a game called Lands of Lore which I believe I still have the disks for. The Ultima games remind me a lot of NES and SNES RPGs I played like Dragon Warrior, Final Fantasy, and a lot of other JRPGs.
Ultima VII is very very dated now, not just in appearance but also in design. Ultima VII more than the other games in the series because the real time combat is just really awkward and does not hold up today at all. I think that you can only appreciate it if you played it when you were younger.
I played it back then and it was great. I was pretty young though. I don't think I could play it now that I've been shown what's possible.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
That may be true, but I did play Dragon Quest VII recently. It has pixelated 2D graphics and the jarring type of turn-based combat where you constantly jump back and forth. I am actually used to that from other games and kind of enjoy the experience. I especially like the music (though I don't know if Ultima series has good music). A lot of it is dependant on if you find the dialogue and gameplay amusing. I find old games sense of humor often meshes better with mine than modern day. It is a bit more laid back. I never really minded turn-based combat and random encounters.
currently playing LOTRO but still only level 22, I wish they had a way to get caught up cheap, it looks like it is going to cost some $$$ to get all the expansions. I find it superior to modern games, I want a deep engaging game not to run from ! to !. Also playing bit of DCUO so yes, to me graphics matter little. I do wish LOTRO had a better population, I mostly have to play it like a single player game and see people once in a while in towns (Gladden server). Maybe it gets better as I get higher but right now its near impossible to find groups.
You're on the wrong server. Move to Crickhollow or Evernight... even if it means starting again. It'll be worth it. Gladden is statistically the least populated US server, almost half the population of Crickhollow:
Comments
On the starter zones, I'd say pick a character and push through them. The dwarf/elf starter zone (Erid Luin) is pretty dreary and I seem to remember spending far too much time running back and forth to quest givers. The hobbit starter zone (shire) I think is amazing and really gives you that LotR feeling, but, you're doing hobbity quests - delivering pies and mail, chasing off wolves. It doesn't have that epic feeling. The human starter zone (Archet) feels like generic fantasy village.
So, push through to bree. Once you reach Bree (level 12ish?) things start opening up more. The world feels more open and the quests start taking you to interesting places. You head into the midgewater marshes, or down into the old forest to fight walking trees and big spiders, or west towards the brandywine bridge to meet some hobbits, or into the barrow downs to fight some wights.
In terms of interesting story lines, the ones I enjoyed the most were the epic books. I think in the human starter zone you might meet strider briefly, but you have to get past the prologue and into the main epic books to pick up the best stories. These are when you are indirectly helping the fellowship - chasing off people following Frodo, investigating what happened to the Nazgul after the Ford of Bruinen, having a chat to the fellowship whilst they rest in Rivendell, following the dwarves as they reclaim moria after the fellowship passes through.
Some of the epic books don't provide both good gameplay and good story. There are quite a few epic books that are used as vehicles to guide players around the zone, so the actual gameplay is just "go there and speak to X, then go here and speak to Y", but the stories are still OK.
In terms of gameplay, LotRO always felt quite slow compared to a lot of games. It had a 1.5s GCD, lots of skills with long cooldowns plus a lot of running about. This makes the beginner experience pretty uninspired and makes it feel a lot like a clone. Things start to change for a soloer fairly late unfortunately. Most classes usually have some sort of key skill or spec that really brings the class to life. With a loremaster, for example, that skill was March of the Ents which you don't get until 39-45 range. However, by level 30 every class should have a good range of skills so that rotations are interesting and you have to make meaningful decisions when it comes to cooldowns.
Group play is really where the gameplay came alive. The dedicated support classes just kicked ass and open up so many more options for tactics, plus the game just had a lot of interdependency. It pushed the game far beyond the majority of MMOs in terms of player skill, it was just a shame it only occurred in difficult group content. When the game launched there was tons of group content whilst leveling, but nearly all of it got removed.
In terms of community, I'm too far removed to be able to comment on how it is now. It certainly was great. As the game was group focused at launch, plus based on player skill rather than gear, it bred a community that was used to helping each other and being polite. The in game voice chat made pugging much more successful than games without voice chat. When they removed the group content it did change the community a lot, but enough old timers were still there so it remained better than most MMOs.
My recommendation would be to push through your starter zones and get to the point where you are doing skirmishes. They are pretty much the only group content left whilst leveling up, but they scale to your level (well, u pick a level) and group size and can be repeated. So, once you reach skirmish level, start joining in groups or creating groups and see how things go. Beyond that, you won't see much of the community until you hit endgame or unless there is a server event.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
if i ever want to returm i wil rememberthat
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
I disagree. When your focus is on the superficial, weather it be graphics or how fluid animations are, to determine how good a GAME is, it is the same thing.
This is the same argument that has been around forever that no one really knows is even the main argument. Its function versus form. It controls how you see and interact with the world.
If you name the games that you think are great examples of graphics, animation, fluidity, hit box accuracy, art style, anything, I am willing to bet all those games are ones I dislike due to mechanics and systems. I won't say there are no exceptions, but almost every game that puts a focus on form over function, style over substance, is just shallow and lacks any complexity. And it isn't just triple AAA games, Pyre is a great indie example. These are games my little kids can play and do well enough with. They look good, have all the pomp and pizzazz, but have nothing to offer my kind.
The usual exceptions to this are games that started out with a focus on form over function, lost popularity and had to add some depth to attract my kind and for longevity. Wow is an example of game that did the opposite, and bet my kind were hooked enough to make the game kid friendly, and now the have a boring kids game that plays super smooth and my kind moved on to games that valued us.
This isn't an I'm right or you're right kind of thing, it is a how your brain is programmed. It is as useless as arguing over as being if introverted or extroverted is correct, or if apples taste better than oranges.
There is and will always be a couple games both peoples can agree are okay or decent where our circles overlap. I also think younger people become deprogrammed over time and most end up in my camp, and is the reason why old men don't care about pretty anything that embarrass teens, and old women have sensible haircuts and wear comfortable footwear. But on the other hand, kids spend more on games and like the superficial far more than function and they do all that texting and tweeting and watching other people play video games online and other weird thinks that hype games and are the main target of the superficial games.
I would still play FFXI over all of these,i still feel ffxi is better than every single mmorpg out there and yet could have been improved a ton if made for PC from day 1.
There is no other older game i would want to play,i simply pray that somewhere out there "Triumph" is a new game coming out at least worthy of me looking past the typical adverts and wanting to actually play.
The thing about older games is that we were at least getting a decent effort,they were pushing the limits of game design "decently"now a days the games look like college kids playing around with a game editor.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Other than that it is a tab-targeting based MMORPG like so many others, but with busy work and PvP that has a Tolkien flair attached to it. Honestly, other than a hobbit, what adventurer would consider hauling about pies when you've already been made aware of hints of a rising darkness that suggest you should be on your way to Bree without delay.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
I didn't know that's a special thing, since that's the natural stage for me. Just finished replaying a text adventure from '87
Same with singleplayer games, I rarely find good ones nowadays. Like @blamo2000 said above, it's all about looks, with pushing mechanics and gameplay to the back. Maybe that's why when I play "new"(ish) games I used to pick indie adventures (pixel art ftw) or games like Stick of Truth / Fractured but Whole.
Even with Witcher 3 I had the feeling that in some areas the visuals were more important to CDPR than the gameplay. (don't get me wrong, it was a great game)
So, yep. Reliving the past, all the way, Bachus
Thanks for the thought responses to my question.
Actually, now I remember that I did have a character that made it to Bree. I even made it to Weathertop and I remember killing midges and wolves. I even made it on a quest to Tom Bombadil's and killed Barrow Wights. That part was more fun. But I don't even know where those characters are now. Maybe they got moved to a different server?
I'll probably go back and give it a try when I'm in a quiet mood.
Thanks again!
When you launch the client hit the transfer button, that will gather all the data from the servers (closed ones too, in case you've missed the latest 30to10 server consolidation), and lists all your characters on all the servers. Just the character names, and the levels I think, but that's more than enough.
*edit: levels are enough, since if you were at Weathertop that means around level 24ish, and that will stick out from the other characters
If you find them on a now closed server, you can move them onto an open one for free, I think even if you already used up your free transfer before.
Initially when I betaed and played the game at launch I had difficulty sticking to it. I would get to Bree and for some reason I would stop playing but once I got passed that I managed to get the character all the way up and also bought the Mines of Moria expansion but my friends quit playing so I quit too and I have never come back after that. I had about 5 characters all fairly high and this was before the F2P thing. It's a good game the quests are very good and you also had some interesting group mechanics. The colour thing.
I also found that I have over 4200 Turbine gold coins (not sure what they are called now). I'm not sure how I got those either. What should I spend them on? I have a Premium account. Not sure what that means either, it's been so long. I did buy some kind of dlc pack off Steam a few years ago, so maybe it all came with that.
Apologies, just checked and transfer don't show the level, just the character name, and the last login date. That way it's a bit more difficult to find the proper characters...
Premium account only means that you were either a VIP once (subscriber), or at least spent more than $5 on the game somewhere in the past. It has some advantages over the Free account: +3 character slots, a higher (but still too low) gold cap, better login priority on the full servers (rarely an issue, mostly at festivals on the 2-3 most crowded servers), I think +1 bags of inventory, and the ability to sell on AH (free players can only buy). Oh, and can mail gold around the alts.
Not much benefits for newly rolled characters, but for those already created while the VIP period, it is great, since those characters stay VIP forever (no gold cap for them, can swift travel, have all the trait slots unlocked).
4200 is quite a sum (around $40 if you buy it without any discounts). What to spend it on? No straight answer to that, it heavily depends on your playstyle. A general answer used to be the content (when it is quest pack week, you can unlock 7-8 zones or maybe even 2 expansions with that sum). If you are a hoarder it could be spent on inventory and shared storage, on wardrobe slots and cosmetics if you like outfitting and roleplay. Unlocking the selected crafting guild if you prefer to lean on crafting (only the first two tiers of the guild are open for non-subscribers). Or, buying the creep classes if you prefer the PvMP.
I found my lost characters. They are on a server I never heard of, so I will transfer them. Any ideas on the best NA server to go to?
http://lotrostats.gefallenehelden.de/r10.html
I personally am on the Eu side, but I know Brandywine and Crickhollow used to race for the most crowded title in the NA, so if you like lots of people around, pick one of those (based on the forums here I believe quite a lot of NA-located mmorpg.com posters are on Crick, but @Torval may have more info on that).
The fifth one on NA, Arkenstone, is the middle ground population-wise, and I think that is the unofficial Oceanic server for the players from down under. (meaning the peak time is maybe shifted by 1-2 hours to the usual NA peak hours)
edit: just checked the stats Darkrayne linked... Brandy is only third? so much for the past's glory
One other thing to think about with graphics is its impact on health. One thing I've noticed with more advanced games like the Witcher 3 is there are so much detail and animations that they can strain the eye a bit to take it in. More simple graphics with fewer animations can be less of an eye strain and also allow for focus on more complex world design. This can be seen in many old games.
I played it back then and it was great. I was pretty young though. I don't think I could play it now that I've been shown what's possible.
I will move my characters over to Crickhollow NA