LOTRO free to play going ahead.

You can buy them with Turbine points too, so might be cheaper to pick up the points somewhere rather than pay cash for the expansions. Think Helm's Deep is 4,500 points.
 
I play on and off, I'm on Snowbourn, been playing for nearly 5 years, but the game is a shadow of its former self.

This, I have been playing for 5 years now. Game was fantastic in 'vanilla' (shadows of Angmar) and through Mines of Moria. It is currently in a terrible state such that I would not recommend anyone starting to play it or coming back to it.
 
Can you explain why it is such a 'terrible state' ? I played this a while back, and although I didn't delve very deep, it felt pretty slick for a free MMO.
 
Can you explain why it is such a 'terrible state' ? I played this a while back, and although I didn't delve very deep, it felt pretty slick for a free MMO.

No plans on including a decent endgame, the game currently has Epic Battles as their endgame which aren't traditional group content and are super easy, and boring after 2 or 3 times.

Class revamps using trait trees which totally dumbs down playing your class, and compensates lack of sophisticated class development with sky high DPS numbers.

No expansion planned for 2014 and no raids/group content either.
 
Apparently the license is due for renewal at the end of 2014, and there's a lot of speculation that it's not going to be renewed with Turbine. That's why they're not planning to invest in it to any great degree over the year.

No idea if it's true or not, it's all rumour at the moment. But I'm bloody well going to get at least one toon to 85 or 90 or whatever it is now, to see all the content, just in case :o
 
Turbine have stated that they plan to 'support' LOTRO for many years to come, which they claim answers the licence debate, which doesn't give the players a straight answer at all. They are always intentionally vague.
 
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Can you explain why it is such a 'terrible state' ? I played this a while back, and although I didn't delve very deep, it felt pretty slick for a free MMO.

The game has been stuck in Rohan for close to 2 years now, solo questing is the most uninspired it has been for years and is mostly just doing chore type quests (washing up) etc. for the various Thanes of Rohan by clicking on flashing objects.

There is no sense of danger or excitement related to the world, not like when Angmar, Moria (and even Mirkwood at a push) where the level cap zones. The difficulty of landscape mobs has been nerfed every year such that most can be 1 or 2-shotted... You will never die when landscape questing. The recent class balances have made every class massively overpowered so that scaled instances (raids) are beyond face roll status. A lot of 6-mans can be soloed (none require a tank or healer). Some classes can solo 12 man raid skirmishes

Turbine have removed landscape questing and the epic books are now completely soloable. It used to be the case that most books would require 1 or 2 (sometimes 3) semi-challenging group instances in order to complete. Now you just click through the quest dialogue with little no sense of accomplishment or danger.

While Big Battles are an interesting new feature and a good way of telling the helms deep story they are ultimately rather hollow, much like mounted combat was last year they are an interesting side game but nothing more than that.Turbines refusal to develop a new instance cluster within the next years has made the loyal raiders desperately hoping for a new multi-boss raid quit or seriously contemplate their future in the game.

PVP is the worst it has ever been with most loyal PVPers having left the game and moved on. The PVP community always used to have a good laugh but it is mostly just exploiters and fight-clubbers left now.

So many things are missing or broken in the recent expansion. The game has become progressively more buggy over the last 2 years and the game suffers from lag and performance issues The amount of content RIFT receives in comparison to LOTRO is embarrassing.
 
The game has been stuck in Rohan for close to 2 years now, solo questing is the most uninspired it has been for years and is mostly just doing chore type quests (washing up) etc. for the various Thanes of Rohan by clicking on flashing objects.

There is no sense of danger or excitement related to the world, not like when Angmar, Moria (and even Mirkwood at a push) where the level cap zones. The difficulty of landscape mobs has been nerfed every year such that most can be 1 or 2-shotted... You will never die when landscape questing. The recent class balances have made every class massively overpowered so that scaled instances (raids) are beyond face roll status. A lot of 6-mans can be soloed (none require a tank or healer). Some classes can solo 12 man raid skirmishes

Turbine have removed landscape questing and the epic books are now completely soloable. It used to be the case that most books would require 1 or 2 (sometimes 3) semi-challenging group instances in order to complete. Now you just click through the quest dialogue with little no sense of accomplishment or danger.

While Big Battles are an interesting new feature and a good way of telling the helms deep story they are ultimately rather hollow, much like mounted combat was last year they are an interesting side game but nothing more than that.Turbines refusal to develop a new instance cluster within the next years has made the loyal raiders desperately hoping for a new multi-boss raid quit or seriously contemplate their future in the game.

PVP is the worst it has ever been with most loyal PVPers having left the game and moved on. The PVP community always used to have a good laugh but it is mostly just exploiters and fight-clubbers left now.

So many things are missing or broken in the recent expansion. The game has become progressively more buggy over the last 2 years and the game suffers from lag and performance issues The amount of content RIFT receives in comparison to LOTRO is embarrassing.

Pretty much sums it all up, good write up.
 
Turbine have just sacked a load more of the developers who work on all their games. LOTRO will be pretty much in maintenance mode from now on.

Thinking of playing it? Do yourself a favour and don't bother.
 
Lotro has just gotten so dull, Moria was okay but pretty much every patch following the release was nerfing content across the board, from fellowship requiring quests in bree or anywhere else up to a huge portion of Moria content. It's become so so tame that it's basically a joke now. For the first what 2 years all the new content was difficult/worthwhile, but now they've nerfed all the old content and all the new content is pre-nerfed.

The thing that really irks me about the book quests is not that they are solo-able now, it's that they are so awful.

Again up to moria most of the book content was brilliant, both in terms of story/going around finding actual real clues like finding the dark rider in Trollshaws, to the instances, they were difficult and with real fights with exceedingly rare instances like seeing off the fellowship in Rivendell.

Now every other instance is sitting around watching people.... talk, the instances like the Angmar ones, even solo, are mostly awesome(though could be harder and a real challenge with actual chances of dying). THe vast majority of book instances now are awful, boring, no challenge, no fighting, short, uninspired. Crap stories, meaningless guff.

They turned a really really great MMO into an absolute pile of turd. These days I buy a new expansion, play for a week, level one character, get bored to tears and give up. I have no interest in great equipment now, hell from what little I could tell there isn't even high end kit in the latest expansion, well second age's easier to get than ever at max level, but no armour at all, and a seemingly entirely pointless end game battle system, that while interesting the first time, is quickly realised that it's painfully easy and also quickly realised that the rewards are crap, pointless and with no real given reason for leveling up the reason to repeat them is just not there.

The really irritating thing is, I used to enjoy re-rolling because starter area's up to end of Angmar was brilliant.... then they nerfed everything and it's so easy and boring now it's worthless. Some of the changes are good, better quest giving locations with less insane running back and forth, but when the difficulty got nerfed everywhere for all content, it just became so dull.
 
I can't quite believe how easy-mode it's gotten since the talent tree update. There's no challenge at all, it just makes it all incredibly boring. Actually considering selling my lifetimeaccount, which I never thought I'd do for lotro.
 
Being a founder in Lotro from beta I am gutted to see the game's demise taking place.

Moria and Lorien were the last brilliant updates we had to the game, from there onwards it was all downhill and turbine tried changing the game too much.

I would love to go back 6 years as we approached MoM and all anticipated what would be next after SOA, exciting times especially seeing as we were still with Codemasters.
 
I have to say I pretty much gave up on LoTRO with the mounted combat system. Also a founder and played it every day for a few years. If I log in once every 3 months now it's something, and even when I do, I usually log out very shortly afterwards.

I've twice as many points as I need to buy the latest expansion, but I just can't be bothered to play anymore.

Pity
 
The daft thing is with the pay to win/f2p mode they went is... they made the game so embarrassingly easy they made it utterly pointless spending points.

I buy the stat tomes purely because I get the free, I dunno 500 points a month or whatever it is. But there is no need, there is zero difficult content that requires even decent gear.

When I played the beta I was amazed, as I played from release and getting to angmar I loved it and loved playing with new alts. I loved the first updates, the book quests and Moria was mostly great. Then all downhill, a little at a time at first but then a huge update that nerfed pretty much everything everywhere :(

Back then I could not wait for all the future expansions and up to essentially finishing the game. For a couple years I haven't had any interest in finishing it, I'm not convinced it will ever happen. Every expansion is a trying to milk everyone boredom fest of crapness.

I know companies like to milk everything but, they could have essentially tied it up by now, the painfully slow pacing of the game in terms of expansions and moving forwards with the story has killed it completely.
 
Does anyone know the best server to use at the moment? I'm on Evernight and it doesn't seem very busy. Also, is it possible to transfer for free?
 
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