This is fine for players that have avatars at the cap, but it has really very little for the vast majority of active players. Thankfully Turbine has not made this game like Wow where you can level an avatar in a matter of weeks to end game.
Ya, its sooooo hard to lvl /sarcasm
Originally posted by JeroKane
Worst of all is, that they dare to charge FULL price for it.
$30 is full price now? get over yourself, if you paid full rpice ytou damn well CHOSE to pay full price, you could have paid $30.
Apparently stating the truth in my sig is "trolling" Sig typo fixed thanks to an observant stragen001.
Turbine killed LOTRO by pandering to the most casual of casuals and letting some of the best character progression things (if there has even been any for TWO years now) only be sold in the turbiune shop.
And you are liar too. There is absolutely nothing of "best character progression things " in store.
Its amazing how clueless the haters seem to be, cantr get over there own whinyness i guess.
Apparently stating the truth in my sig is "trolling" Sig typo fixed thanks to an observant stragen001.
Turbine said all along the Isengard was coming in two parts.
It amazes me how you're surprised they have added this content so soon when it really should have been part of the underwhelming xpac.
This! You said it pretty much!
Isengard is going into the Turbine history books as the most underwhelming expac ever released!
Even Mirkwood brought much much more to the table than Isengard and this update5 combined!
You lie. RoI is much bigger than Mirkwood, two times minimum. U5 consist of instance cluster like in SoM but with bigger raid and Draigoch raid too.
So full RoI (U4 + U5) is much bigger than SoM
The Draigoch RAID was supposed to be released in early spring this year! But was posponed and later convenientely suddenly added to the RoI expansion.
Appearently Turbine managed to fool you with that lol.
The EPIC book of Siege of Mirkwood was way better than the utterly boring EPIC book of RoI, wich is nothing more than an "On Rails" guide quest series to drag us along to unlock questhub to questhub to questhub!
Siege of Mirkwood didn't only bring a whole Instance cluster directly with the Expac, it also brought Skirmishes with a lot of Skrimish instances directly playable and unlockable ones part of the Epic Book!
They didn't even bother with new Skirmish instances in the RoI expansion either! They just scaled up the old ones, so people can grind their brains out in the same ol' same ol' skirmish and classic instances at level75, like they have done already for the past 2 years.
So please! ! Turbine dropped the ball with this Expac! It was incredibly underwhelming! Simple as that!
And you can simply see it in activity on the server! When RoI released, we had over 30 peeps online every night in our Kinship, now there are hardly more than 10 peeps online at days... often less. People are already bored again and moved on.
A lot of people aren't even going to be bothering with the new instances either (me included), as RoI was so underwhelming and boring, that a few new instances isn't gonna change!
RoI is the last bit of money I will ever be giving Turbine.
I started playing the game about six months out from launch, and had a wonderful time. Then MoM launched and it became my primary MMO. Moria was amazing - pretty much everything I wanted in an expansion, except for the LI system (which was a massive grind that wasn't really what many players wanted).
Then came Mirkwood. Mirkwood was...lacking. While I enjoyed it to an extent, there was just something lacking about it. Compared to Moria, Mirkwood was tiny - Turbine did call it a 'mini-expansion', but it honestly wasn't an expansion at all, but rather a glorified book update.
Then came RoI. Never have I felt less excited about going to a new region in the game. Seriously Turbine? Another round of this duvodiad nonsense? A storyline that literally tells you "Go goof off here, you can start this next part whenever you get bored. Which will probably be pretty soon." Even free use of private instances couldn't add excitement to it. The phasing system was a waste of time - shuffling NPCs and placables is useless if you don't fix the atmosphere as well.
And that's probably my biggest problem with the game now. SoA and MoM were both dripping with atmosphere and detail. Even Mirkwood did in some points. But it's something that seems completely missing in RoI.
Goodbye Turbine. You were great once, but you've since moved into the gPotato/Nexus stage of development - forget the fans, they're just cash dispensers, after all.
Yeah, I pretty much feel the same about LOTRO. Ever since Mirkwood I had the feeling of being stuck, not anymore moving ahead. RoI was so lame. And I must, alas, add to the crowd of those who felt the F2P/shop transformation was not too good. So many just "cheap" players in the broadest sense, death of community and other issues. I felt the F2P was a short animation but in long term a huge drop of quality players.
Somehow the game just lost the "magic". But then, it isn't so bad. I had 2 years fun, great fun, and IMO that was good enough. But truth be told, I can't see for the love of the maker imagine how the remaining areas of Middle Earth could possibly be fun. LOTR is a low fantasy world. The later half of the world is highly dominated by the Fellowships own doing, and Middle Earth can only add so many more version of spiders, boars and wolves before it REALLY gets boring. They just can't alter that without tossing the entire lore out of the window. I mean, do we really want to fight spiders, boars and wolves and of course the same orcs until level 150? I think not.
But I leave it behind with peace. It was good while it lasted.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Turbine said all along the Isengard was coming in two parts.
It amazes me how you're surprised they have added this content so soon when it really should have been part of the underwhelming xpac.
This! You said it pretty much!
Isengard is going into the Turbine history books as the most underwhelming expac ever released!
Even Mirkwood brought much much more to the table than Isengard and this update5 combined!
You lie. RoI is much bigger than Mirkwood, two times minimum. U5 consist of instance cluster like in SoM but with bigger raid and Draigoch raid too.
So full RoI (U4 + U5) is much bigger than SoM
The Draigoch RAID was supposed to be released in early spring this year! But was posponed and later convenientely suddenly added to the RoI expansion.
Appearently Turbine managed to fool you with that lol.
The EPIC book of Siege of Mirkwood was way better than the utterly boring EPIC book of RoI, wich is nothing more than an "On Rails" guide quest series to drag us along to unlock questhub to questhub to questhub!
Siege of Mirkwood didn't only bring a whole Instance cluster directly with the Expac, it also brought Skirmishes with a lot of Skrimish instances directly playable and unlockable ones part of the Epic Book!
They didn't even bother with new Skirmish instances in the RoI expansion either! They just scaled up the old ones, so people can grind their brains out in the same ol' same ol' skirmish and classic instances at level75, like they have done already for the past 2 years.
So please! Give us a friggin' break! Turbine dropped the ball with this Expac! It was incredibly underwhelming! Simple as that!
And you can simply see it in activity on the server! When RoI released, we had over 30 peeps online every night in our Kinship, now there are hardly more than 10 peeps online at days... often less. People are already bored again and moved on.
A lot of people aren't even going to be bothering with the new instances either (me included), as RoI was so underwhelming and boring, that a few new instances isn't gonna change!
Couldn't agree more. Well said. I dont understand why people try to protect this expansion, when its obvious that it is such a fail.
I would like to know why challenged posters continue to put tons of extra carriage returns in their posts? It makes the forum hard to read and is outright rude. Lets exercise some restraint when posting with the CR's. As to the expansion there is a lot more in this expansion than Mirkwood, saying otherwise means you really have not played the game much.
My Sub for LoTRO expires on Jan 11th, but to be honest I've not logged into the game since mid-Nov'ish. (I buy 3mo subs)
I did purchase the RoI expac but it just did'ent grip me like previous ones have. I loved MoM (Although alot of people hated it for some reason) and even SoM was fun for me.
RoI seen a gear explosion stat wise but a pure dumbing down on options. 122 stat pieces were IMO horrible although I understand WHY they did it after the way gear progression was handled from MoM > RoI.
There was no real expansion on our characters from 65-75. New abilitys? Meh in 10 level's I really did'ent feel like I had gotten anything on my Guardian. (Some other classes got it better, The wifes Minstrel got a class over-haul which was nice and Cappys got some decent stuff)
No new instances, well that was fine since I knew they were comming soon (tm). But no new skirmishes? nada? That was pretty lame and tbh the book quests that spanned RoI (I say spanned, most people had them done by 70ish) were mostly boring to me (Personal opinion) I just did'ent get into them like I did with previous book quests. I mean look at earlier VOL III books, chasing down the wights on the path of the dead to see if they would heed the call to war. Interesting. Vs running around in a dungeon feeding Orcs and carrying weapons about? Dull.
The land mass added was respectable. But it just felt like filler to me. Crafting was supposed to be getting a boost, which IMO most crafts did'ent. Weaponsmiths still only make OH's for a few classes. The Tailors and Armorsmiths could make some neat stuff, until you realize that any muppet can get 4/6 raid set from easy dailys. So helm and shoulders yey ! Even jewler's ended up worse this time around since 12-man skirms were farmed and better items were available to any non-mouth breather who could answer a *12-tuck LFM* call .... /sigh
To those still enjoying the game, rock on. For me it just, as I've said, felt like filler and drove me away /shrug.
Turbine broke LOTRO when the legendary item system. It wasn't so bad in Moria, started to get annoying in Mirkwood, but in RoI, it just plain sucks out any fun the game offers.
Not that RoI offered much. Something happened to the quest designers - they've seemingly lost any sense of fun and have become downright mean spirited, frequently having you help the bad guys, or making NPCs very unpleasnt. Last year's winter festival had you harass the homeless in a setting right out of a Dickens christmas story, only without a happy ending. It's like they hired a bunch of Noam Chomsky fans, trying to show that we're really the bad guys or something...
It makes the forum hard to read and is outright rude.
I hope that was sarcasm
As to the expansion there is a lot more in this expansion than Mirkwood, saying otherwise means you really have not played the game much.
Please enlighten me because I must have missed a whole lot while getting two of my 65s on the RoI railroad and with the second I had to do my best to keep him from falling off out of sheer boredom. Oh and yes I did the s4m grind to gear one of them doing the same old instances/skirmishes that where introduced with MoM and SoM.
I have to say it makes me laugh to see how honest people are about lotro here but i have yet to see the mmorpg site do a honest review of roi.
They lied about pvp map 2 times in a row. They gave us a bird and a tree and called it a pvp update. Well turbine u blew it and dec 15th ill pull 45 kinships and a 132 people at last count for swtor.
Im looking forward to no more advertisements to "buy now" on loading screens and to sign in.
4 years in and lotro is still the same another 4 years wont fix it.
Turbine broke LOTRO when the legendary item system. It wasn't so bad in Moria, started to get annoying in Mirkwood, but in RoI, it just plain sucks out any fun the game offers.
Not that RoI offered much. Something happened to the quest designers - they've seemingly lost any sense of fun and have become downright mean spirited, frequently having you help the bad guys, or making NPCs very unpleasnt. Last year's winter festival had you harass the homeless in a setting right out of a Dickens christmas story, only without a happy ending. It's like they hired a bunch of Noam Chomsky fans, trying to show that we're really the bad guys or something...
Much of the current discontent can be traced back to one event that changed Turbine itself. After that there have been many noticable trickledown effects, especially if you have been in LotRO as long as I have been. That event was...
Warner Brother's purchase of Turbine.
A corporate giant that is great at making Movies but knows absolutely nothing about developing and managing a MMO. A corporate giant with a massive ego to go along with their other virtues.
(The F2P change was a condition of the proposed buyout so it's the buyout itself that is the real motive of change)
Nothing is going to change at LotRO folks. Adapt or get accused of "Tilting at Windmills" like I did when you complain. Seriously... WB does not care one bit what we Players want or think. All they look at are spreadsheets. Expect all further LotRO Xpacs and/or expansions to be similar in quantity and quality to RoI.
There *IS* indeed some good content in RoI, some content worthy of my time, but overall the quality has been lacking since the buyout.
Enough said. I am going to go "Tilt at some Windmills" now.
As to the expansion there is a lot more in this expansion than Mirkwood, saying otherwise means you really have not played the game much.
Really? Please tell us of all the (appearently not advertised) secret hidden stuff we obviously haven't discovered yet then??
Qua zone size (I have traveled west to east, north to south) Dunland+Gap of Rohan is not much larger than Mirkwood.
Isengard can (in size) pretty much be compared to Dol Guldur (after Update5). I actually liked all the DG Quests / skirmishes and instances a hell lot more then Isengard/Orthanc.
The Epic Book questline of Mirkwood was way better than the one in Isengard. Much more engaging and fun! With various instances (skirmishes).
Mirkwood actually brought us the skirmish system. What new did Isengard bring? ..... that's right! NOTHING.
Rise of Isengard is nothing more than a glorified Questpack and a downright overpriced insult for VIP subscribers.
And then lets not even talk about the new crafting tier and what a total insult and horrible unfinished garbage that was! With so few recipes, it wasn't even funny and not worth the trouble grinding it! /facepalm
Right now, there is not a single reason to stay VIP anymore. It's much cheaper than just buy the 500TP a month yourself if you really need and use it.
The instance cluster was supposed to come with ROI expansion. So either they released expansion early or just didnt manage to complete it, well, do your own cospiracy theory ;P
The epic story ended up a bit abruptly, also fits in in above mold.
Those are objective complaints, everything else is only opinion on...stuff.
And yes, its better to go freemium than VIP, it was like that from the start.
RoI was very disappointing for me, they did absolutely no ui improvements to the gameplay and added a tiny continent a couple of raids/skirms and expected that to be satisfactory. oh and not a single voice over.
As to the expansion there is a lot more in this expansion than Mirkwood, saying otherwise means you really have not played the game much.
Really? Please tell us of all the (appearently not advertised) secret hidden stuff we obviously haven't discovered yet then??
Qua zone size (I have traveled west to east, north to south) Dunland+Gap of Rohan is not much larger than Mirkwood.
Isengard can (in size) pretty much be compared to Dol Guldur (after Update5). I actually liked all the DG Quests / skirmishes and instances a hell lot more then Isengard/Orthanc.
The Epic Book questline of Mirkwood was way better than the one in Isengard. Much more engaging and fun! With various instances (skirmishes).
Mirkwood actually brought us the skirmish system. What new did Isengard bring? ..... that's right! NOTHING.
Rise of Isengard is nothing more than a glorified Questpack and a downright overpriced insult for VIP subscribers.
And then lets not even talk about the new crafting tier and what a total insult and horrible unfinished garbage that was! With so few recipes, it wasn't even funny and not worth the trouble grinding it! /facepalm
Right now, there is not a single reason to stay VIP anymore. It's much cheaper than just buy the 500TP a month yourself if you really need and use it.
this ^ plus no new pvp map. After dec 15th and the 20th especially lotro pvp is toast when gw2 comes out ill be getting mail to buy roi for $ 2.95 like i get mail from rift.
Turbines problem is they have big mouth and idle hands that cant deliver what the mouth promises. If they dont release the "new" pvp map between dec 15th-20th it wont matter after that.
The point made about wb by others is spot on. The first thing wb did was put in the store. Not fixing the game they even spent money saying hey next xmas will give you roi with mounted combat and new pvp zone just wait till this year. So we waited no new pvp zone once again. Mounted combat is just an idea and will never make into the game looking back at all the fluff/spin they talked about it. Knowing how turbine is even if they could implement it would be only in skirmishes or make it worthless somehow like you have a 99% miss chance 1% chance to hit.
It's nice to see new content, again and again in LoTRO.
I haven't been playing that much the last few years. But as a lifetime membership from day 1, I keep coming back to try the new content. LoTRO is a robust and stable game, I really like the quests, some of them are more than original then just kill x or pickup x items.
It's nice to see new content, again and again in LoTRO.
I haven't been playing that much the last few years. But as a lifetime membership from day 1, I keep coming back to try the new content. LoTRO is a robust and stable game, I really like the quests, some of them are more than original then just kill x or pickup x items.
Anyway keep up with the good work Turbine.
It's also ncie to see how this game becomes more and more mainstream. No longer needing to actually run to an instance. Summoning Horns introduced. Then the fast travel introduced and now Looking for Group. We'll no longer have to actually interact with anyone. Yey for that!
It's amazing how they manage to defy their original fanbase, only to attract the attention of bandwagoneers. Most of the vets are no longer around. Check their forum. Most posts come from people who've been active for less than a year, and I'm not talking about the former codies.
Why cater towards the needs of a group which jumps ship more often than I change underwear? Seriously, game is going downhill very fast and I'm no longer around to see it. Goodbye and good riddance.
Oh also, their shamefull display of greed towards Europeans was my original reason for leaving. 99.99$ for one year does not equal 89.99€. Add to that the CC debacle and it's gg.
Lotro continues to be one of the best MMO's out there. But I recognise how much it has changed for the worse. It is simply that other MMO's are becoming shadows of their former selves much faster while new MMO's are a bad joke when it comes to the ethos that old MMO's where built on.
Lotro is ahead because all the others are so poor these days, not because it is as great a game as it was when launched.
This is fine for players that have avatars at the cap, but it has really very little for the vast majority of active players. Thankfully Turbine has not made this game like Wow where you can level an avatar in a matter of weeks to end game.
Actually, this is precisely what is going on, you can level a character to level cap in just a few weeks, which is strange imho, as it is obvious the f2p crowd pays well and one would think Turbine would make the journey to level cap last longer in order to milk them more.
Let's get this straight: there are plenty of people still happily playing and enjoying LotRO. The bitter former players are just very, very vocal, especially on mmorpg.com.
Funny how people keep saying that everyone will be back from SWTOR in a month or two when a good portion of the people I used to play Lotro with left for rift and still have not come back. Guess they did not get the memo that they were supposed to drop the new game after the first month.
ROI was a disgrace, you want more proof it was rushed out? Just go talk to the riders who happen to have the same mini voice messages as the Rangers.
When I read that we have yet another raid fight that two bosses have to be killed in seconds of each other I almost lost my mind, how many times are we rolling this "tactic" out Turnine?
For those who keep saying that U5 is part of the expansion and ROI is so much bigger then SoM, well I guess we would have to include update 1, 2, and 3 as part of SoM since they all came out before RoI.
Come back on the 1 Mar and we will see how many players are still sold on SWTOR.
Just check the official forums. It's full of complaints for obvious reasons. Stop using 'SWTOR' as an excuse. People do not leave because of it. They leave because LotRO fails to deliver, or should I say, the Warner Bros. approach failed to deliver and continues to do so.
When I started playing we had a small dedicated core with a nice group of casuals around it. None of us ever left for any other MMO, nor did we leave anything for LotRO. We've been through the Aion hype, the Age of Conan hype, the Warhammer fiasco and Lord knows what else. If LotRO had been any better, we'd easily survive this SWtOR hype as well.
LotRO and LotRO alone is responsible for our lack of interest.
This is fine for players that have avatars at the cap, but it has really very little for the vast majority of active players. Thankfully Turbine has not made this game like Wow where you can level an avatar in a matter of weeks to end game.
Actually, this is precisely what is going on, you can level a character to level cap in just a few weeks, which is strange imho, as it is obvious the f2p crowd pays well and one would think Turbine would make the journey to level cap last longer in order to milk them more.
Nonsense unless you constantly buy leveling and other buffs and all the quest packs, you are not going to level to end cap in less then a few months. I get tired of people grossly exaggerating the leveling process. Sure you can speed this up a lot if you are willing to spend a good deal of money.
My experience is that most people who enjoy the game go vip, it makes the game much easier to play.
Comments
Ya, its sooooo hard to lvl /sarcasm
$30 is full price now? get over yourself, if you paid full rpice ytou damn well CHOSE to pay full price, you could have paid $30.
Apparently stating the truth in my sig is "trolling"
Sig typo fixed thanks to an observant stragen001.
Its amazing how clueless the haters seem to be, cantr get over there own whinyness i guess.
Apparently stating the truth in my sig is "trolling"
Sig typo fixed thanks to an observant stragen001.
The Draigoch RAID was supposed to be released in early spring this year! But was posponed and later convenientely suddenly added to the RoI expansion.
Appearently Turbine managed to fool you with that lol.
The EPIC book of Siege of Mirkwood was way better than the utterly boring EPIC book of RoI, wich is nothing more than an "On Rails" guide quest series to drag us along to unlock questhub to questhub to questhub!
Siege of Mirkwood didn't only bring a whole Instance cluster directly with the Expac, it also brought Skirmishes with a lot of Skrimish instances directly playable and unlockable ones part of the Epic Book!
They didn't even bother with new Skirmish instances in the RoI expansion either! They just scaled up the old ones, so people can grind their brains out in the same ol' same ol' skirmish and classic instances at level75, like they have done already for the past 2 years.
So please! ! Turbine dropped the ball with this Expac! It was incredibly underwhelming! Simple as that!
And you can simply see it in activity on the server! When RoI released, we had over 30 peeps online every night in our Kinship, now there are hardly more than 10 peeps online at days... often less. People are already bored again and moved on.
A lot of people aren't even going to be bothering with the new instances either (me included), as RoI was so underwhelming and boring, that a few new instances isn't gonna change!
Yeah, I pretty much feel the same about LOTRO. Ever since Mirkwood I had the feeling of being stuck, not anymore moving ahead. RoI was so lame. And I must, alas, add to the crowd of those who felt the F2P/shop transformation was not too good. So many just "cheap" players in the broadest sense, death of community and other issues. I felt the F2P was a short animation but in long term a huge drop of quality players.
Somehow the game just lost the "magic". But then, it isn't so bad. I had 2 years fun, great fun, and IMO that was good enough. But truth be told, I can't see for the love of the maker imagine how the remaining areas of Middle Earth could possibly be fun. LOTR is a low fantasy world. The later half of the world is highly dominated by the Fellowships own doing, and Middle Earth can only add so many more version of spiders, boars and wolves before it REALLY gets boring. They just can't alter that without tossing the entire lore out of the window. I mean, do we really want to fight spiders, boars and wolves and of course the same orcs until level 150? I think not.
But I leave it behind with peace. It was good while it lasted.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Couldn't agree more. Well said. I dont understand why people try to protect this expansion, when its obvious that it is such a fail.
I would like to know why challenged posters continue to put tons of extra carriage returns in their posts? It makes the forum hard to read and is outright rude. Lets exercise some restraint when posting with the CR's. As to the expansion there is a lot more in this expansion than Mirkwood, saying otherwise means you really have not played the game much.
Personally I found RoI very stale.
My Sub for LoTRO expires on Jan 11th, but to be honest I've not logged into the game since mid-Nov'ish. (I buy 3mo subs)
I did purchase the RoI expac but it just did'ent grip me like previous ones have. I loved MoM (Although alot of people hated it for some reason) and even SoM was fun for me.
RoI seen a gear explosion stat wise but a pure dumbing down on options. 122 stat pieces were IMO horrible although I understand WHY they did it after the way gear progression was handled from MoM > RoI.
There was no real expansion on our characters from 65-75. New abilitys? Meh in 10 level's I really did'ent feel like I had gotten anything on my Guardian. (Some other classes got it better, The wifes Minstrel got a class over-haul which was nice and Cappys got some decent stuff)
No new instances, well that was fine since I knew they were comming soon (tm). But no new skirmishes? nada? That was pretty lame and tbh the book quests that spanned RoI (I say spanned, most people had them done by 70ish) were mostly boring to me (Personal opinion) I just did'ent get into them like I did with previous book quests. I mean look at earlier VOL III books, chasing down the wights on the path of the dead to see if they would heed the call to war. Interesting. Vs running around in a dungeon feeding Orcs and carrying weapons about? Dull.
The land mass added was respectable. But it just felt like filler to me. Crafting was supposed to be getting a boost, which IMO most crafts did'ent. Weaponsmiths still only make OH's for a few classes. The Tailors and Armorsmiths could make some neat stuff, until you realize that any muppet can get 4/6 raid set from easy dailys. So helm and shoulders yey ! Even jewler's ended up worse this time around since 12-man skirms were farmed and better items were available to any non-mouth breather who could answer a *12-tuck LFM* call .... /sigh
To those still enjoying the game, rock on. For me it just, as I've said, felt like filler and drove me away /shrug.
Turbine broke LOTRO when the legendary item system. It wasn't so bad in Moria, started to get annoying in Mirkwood, but in RoI, it just plain sucks out any fun the game offers.
Not that RoI offered much. Something happened to the quest designers - they've seemingly lost any sense of fun and have become downright mean spirited, frequently having you help the bad guys, or making NPCs very unpleasnt. Last year's winter festival had you harass the homeless in a setting right out of a Dickens christmas story, only without a happy ending. It's like they hired a bunch of Noam Chomsky fans, trying to show that we're really the bad guys or something...
R.I.P. City of Heroes and my 17 characters there
I have to say it makes me laugh to see how honest people are about lotro here but i have yet to see the mmorpg site do a honest review of roi.
They lied about pvp map 2 times in a row. They gave us a bird and a tree and called it a pvp update. Well turbine u blew it and dec 15th ill pull 45 kinships and a 132 people at last count for swtor.
Im looking forward to no more advertisements to "buy now" on loading screens and to sign in.
4 years in and lotro is still the same another 4 years wont fix it.
Much of the current discontent can be traced back to one event that changed Turbine itself. After that there have been many noticable trickledown effects, especially if you have been in LotRO as long as I have been. That event was...
Warner Brother's purchase of Turbine.
A corporate giant that is great at making Movies but knows absolutely nothing about developing and managing a MMO. A corporate giant with a massive ego to go along with their other virtues.
(The F2P change was a condition of the proposed buyout so it's the buyout itself that is the real motive of change)
Nothing is going to change at LotRO folks. Adapt or get accused of "Tilting at Windmills" like I did when you complain. Seriously... WB does not care one bit what we Players want or think. All they look at are spreadsheets. Expect all further LotRO Xpacs and/or expansions to be similar in quantity and quality to RoI.
There *IS* indeed some good content in RoI, some content worthy of my time, but overall the quality has been lacking since the buyout.
Enough said. I am going to go "Tilt at some Windmills" now.
Really? Please tell us of all the (appearently not advertised) secret hidden stuff we obviously haven't discovered yet then??
Qua zone size (I have traveled west to east, north to south) Dunland+Gap of Rohan is not much larger than Mirkwood.
Isengard can (in size) pretty much be compared to Dol Guldur (after Update5). I actually liked all the DG Quests / skirmishes and instances a hell lot more then Isengard/Orthanc.
The Epic Book questline of Mirkwood was way better than the one in Isengard. Much more engaging and fun! With various instances (skirmishes).
Mirkwood actually brought us the skirmish system. What new did Isengard bring? ..... that's right! NOTHING.
Rise of Isengard is nothing more than a glorified Questpack and a downright overpriced insult for VIP subscribers.
And then lets not even talk about the new crafting tier and what a total insult and horrible unfinished garbage that was! With so few recipes, it wasn't even funny and not worth the trouble grinding it! /facepalm
Right now, there is not a single reason to stay VIP anymore. It's much cheaper than just buy the 500TP a month yourself if you really need and use it.
The instance cluster was supposed to come with ROI expansion. So either they released expansion early or just didnt manage to complete it, well, do your own cospiracy theory ;P
The epic story ended up a bit abruptly, also fits in in above mold.
Those are objective complaints, everything else is only opinion on...stuff.
And yes, its better to go freemium than VIP, it was like that from the start.
No doubts new cluster will be fun
RoI was very disappointing for me, they did absolutely no ui improvements to the gameplay and added a tiny continent a couple of raids/skirms and expected that to be satisfactory. oh and not a single voice over.
this ^ plus no new pvp map. After dec 15th and the 20th especially lotro pvp is toast when gw2 comes out ill be getting mail to buy roi for $ 2.95 like i get mail from rift.
Turbines problem is they have big mouth and idle hands that cant deliver what the mouth promises. If they dont release the "new" pvp map between dec 15th-20th it wont matter after that.
The point made about wb by others is spot on. The first thing wb did was put in the store. Not fixing the game they even spent money saying hey next xmas will give you roi with mounted combat and new pvp zone just wait till this year. So we waited no new pvp zone once again. Mounted combat is just an idea and will never make into the game looking back at all the fluff/spin they talked about it. Knowing how turbine is even if they could implement it would be only in skirmishes or make it worthless somehow like you have a 99% miss chance 1% chance to hit.
It's nice to see new content, again and again in LoTRO.
I haven't been playing that much the last few years. But as a lifetime membership from day 1, I keep coming back to try the new content. LoTRO is a robust and stable game, I really like the quests, some of them are more than original then just kill x or pickup x items.
Anyway keep up with the good work Turbine.
It's also ncie to see how this game becomes more and more mainstream. No longer needing to actually run to an instance. Summoning Horns introduced. Then the fast travel introduced and now Looking for Group. We'll no longer have to actually interact with anyone. Yey for that!
It's amazing how they manage to defy their original fanbase, only to attract the attention of bandwagoneers. Most of the vets are no longer around. Check their forum. Most posts come from people who've been active for less than a year, and I'm not talking about the former codies.
Why cater towards the needs of a group which jumps ship more often than I change underwear? Seriously, game is going downhill very fast and I'm no longer around to see it. Goodbye and good riddance.
Oh also, their shamefull display of greed towards Europeans was my original reason for leaving. 99.99$ for one year does not equal 89.99€. Add to that the CC debacle and it's gg.
Lotro continues to be one of the best MMO's out there. But I recognise how much it has changed for the worse. It is simply that other MMO's are becoming shadows of their former selves much faster while new MMO's are a bad joke when it comes to the ethos that old MMO's where built on.
Lotro is ahead because all the others are so poor these days, not because it is as great a game as it was when launched.
Actually, this is precisely what is going on, you can level a character to level cap in just a few weeks, which is strange imho, as it is obvious the f2p crowd pays well and one would think Turbine would make the journey to level cap last longer in order to milk them more.
Not just on mmorpg mind you.
And to add my voice to those dissapointed with Lotro... SWToR is soooo close!
Come back on the 1 Mar and we will see how many players are still sold on SWTOR.
Funny how people keep saying that everyone will be back from SWTOR in a month or two when a good portion of the people I used to play Lotro with left for rift and still have not come back. Guess they did not get the memo that they were supposed to drop the new game after the first month.
ROI was a disgrace, you want more proof it was rushed out? Just go talk to the riders who happen to have the same mini voice messages as the Rangers.
When I read that we have yet another raid fight that two bosses have to be killed in seconds of each other I almost lost my mind, how many times are we rolling this "tactic" out Turnine?
For those who keep saying that U5 is part of the expansion and ROI is so much bigger then SoM, well I guess we would have to include update 1, 2, and 3 as part of SoM since they all came out before RoI.
"Onward to adventure".
Just check the official forums. It's full of complaints for obvious reasons. Stop using 'SWTOR' as an excuse. People do not leave because of it. They leave because LotRO fails to deliver, or should I say, the Warner Bros. approach failed to deliver and continues to do so.
When I started playing we had a small dedicated core with a nice group of casuals around it. None of us ever left for any other MMO, nor did we leave anything for LotRO. We've been through the Aion hype, the Age of Conan hype, the Warhammer fiasco and Lord knows what else. If LotRO had been any better, we'd easily survive this SWtOR hype as well.
LotRO and LotRO alone is responsible for our lack of interest.
Nonsense unless you constantly buy leveling and other buffs and all the quest packs, you are not going to level to end cap in less then a few months. I get tired of people grossly exaggerating the leveling process. Sure you can speed this up a lot if you are willing to spend a good deal of money.
My experience is that most people who enjoy the game go vip, it makes the game much easier to play.