Thread: LOTRO is my new home good bye warcraft

I had been playing WOW from day 1 and straight up to cataclysm. I thought that it would be the only mmo that i would ever like. And i realize now that i had a pretty narrow view of mmo's. I left that game because there was one day that I realized that if I had all the money back that I spent on maintaining mine and my wifes accounts, I could have retired. WOW changed way to much and way to often. Blizzard had an annoying habit of NERFing everything that made the game fun and charging way to much money for what they offer. If you sit back and look at the games structure youll realize that their ideology is "the longer we make them play, the more they will have to pay". Henceforth you have everything from quests that make you run all over the map and drop rates of a million to one. I would find myself in a ridiculous cycle of buying gametime and pounding through levels and ignoring the lore just so i could get that gear and rep before my game time ran out. When it did i found myself not playing for a month or 2. Then the cycle would repeat itself. I could go on but im going to stop there.

Then I tried LOTRO.

I found that the thing I liked best about this game was that you already have a good idea about the lore before you ever play. Unlike wow. After god knows how many years I still have no idea what that story is all about.

The FTP is genius. I have been playing for about 6 months and I am a casual player. Im on every day for a few hours but im not pounding through content to meet an insane objective. Knowing that my account will never be frozen I can leisurely enjoy the game and story.

TP are also something different. I can pay for content on an as needed basis. in 6 months i have paid 20 bucks for 2 area quest packs and bunch of cosmetics. in 6 months of wow I would have paid $150 just for the game and 6 months of gametime.

I found LOTRO graphics much more slick than wow. I realized how old wows game engine was and that blizzard was trying to make "phasing" look like something new and attach their name to the idea. when LOTRO had been doing it since day 1. LOTRO uses "phasing" in a very cool way. to attach mood to a certain point of game. or to clear up congestion in an area. WOW overkills phasing. Every 2nd quest in cataclysm is phased. I dont even know what plane of existence im in half the time.

Housing is ok. It could be better. I find it a little cheep that a regular house has limited storage space and decorations. but i guess at a few silver every week its nothing to ##### about.

There is a flipside to part of this tho. The Devs maintained wow with impeccable prudence. LOTRO devs seem to be napping all the time. After the update in march 2012 the lag has just been insane. its not on my end either. start a fight and before you know it im button smashing to stay alive because im still casting my first spell and almost dead because the animal is still somehow killing me but only my toon is lagging. Nothing like time warp when im in the citys and people are running on one spot and the next minute they are half way through bree. The travelling horses are also making me loose patience. For the past month they have been stalling and i end up logging out and logging back in just to get them running again. Its like they fall asleep at random points. All i can say is that the wow devs would have had this fixed in a matter of hours with patches. LOTRO devs are loosing my faith cause its been over a month and there are points where the game is unplayable.

LOTRO seems very consistent. meaning they arnt changing things every 2 weeks like blizzard does. there is logic behind their expansions. wow expansions are there just to crank the level cap and add content because everyone becomes bored. The total overhaul of orgirimar was one thing that turned me way off. where is the logic behind totally changing a city. It would be like taking Bree and moving everything around just for the sake of change.

I have not yet done any instances because instances were never my thing. I was always a pvp person. I was miffed when i found no ingame pvp. but i was happy when i found MvP pvp or whatever its called. a unique way of integrating pvp into a game i must say. I have only tried it once but I will be definitely checking it out more in the future.

In the end all I can say is goodbye warcraft. Your old and dying. no change will save you now.

And hello LOTRO, Brandywine will have to put up with me for a long time.

Welcome to Middle Earth. I think you have very accurately identified one of the great strengths of LotRO, namely that the lore already exists, and thus the devs are somewhat constrained in what they can do. Some folk would say this is a disadvantage, but to me it is a huge benefit.

Other games have a blank canvas in front of them and are free to draw on it whatever they want. While this may be good at the beginning, it can spiral out of control over time, and you can end up with an idea that might have been good at the start suddenly turning into Kung-fu Panda!

There are other games with pre-existing lore, such as the Star Wars and Star Trek franchises, but the additional aspect that LotRO has is the story. We know where we are going, albeit we don't know the precise schedule. This means that while the devs can embellish the edges of the story, the journey itself is mapped out for them. And because we the players know as much about it as they do, we have our expectations which they have a commercial imperative to meet, at least to some extent. This tends to make for a more harmonious relationship less fear that we could be sent off in some random direction at any minute.

So, once again, welcome. It is good to have you on our mutual journey.

Welcome home! Always nice to see new faces around town. I play mostly on Nimrodel but I have a 30 something champ on Brandywine I level from time to time when I'm bored. Maybe I'll see ya sometime.

P.S. - Yea, the devs seem lazy at times here vs wow(I played wow first too), but the community more than makes up for it. The community here is the real draw, people are just nicer and more mature.

Originally Posted by mjk47

you can end up with an idea that might have been good at the start suddenly turning into Kung-fu Panda!

I was wondering what you meant by this and just found out about wows new expansion. Boy am I glad im playing LOTRO now.

Thing is though people dont think about how much Pandarens are actually in the lore of Warcraft, been around longer than Kung Fu Panda. I still like both games and still pay for my sub (well I dont but family member does lol). It may not be everyone's cup of tea but this race was going to be a race for BC but was scraped. Its one of the races in Warcraft people were asking for since WoW came out and after seeing the Pandaren Brewmaster in War3.

Welcome!

Originally Posted by Jayarih

Thing is though people dont think about how much Pandarens are actually in the lore of Warcraft,

it was easter egg so i doubt we can call it normal lore race.

Welcome to the OP. Glad you enjoy it.

Originally Posted by Moejo

P.S. - Yea, the devs seem lazy at times here vs wow(I played wow first too), but the community more than makes up for it. The community here is the real draw, people are just nicer and more mature.

I think it is more a matter of resources.
WoW could easily have 50-100 devs working on a single bug if it is important. And give a bonus to the one who really finds it. And its QA team is likey ten times the size of Turbine's as well. So such a problem would likely have never seen the live systems in the first place. Size in that regard does matter.
Turbine does not have such liberties as they have less people working on the whole product.

Of course a lot of people and myself included are a bit disappointed that they could not reliably fix what was introduced in U6, they found a few problems but they still did not get to the core. Well maybe they did already and work on a patch and test it already.

Welcome to Middle Earth and we're happy to have you here. Yes, the recent update has caused some issues, but I'm hoping once Turbine gets their act together after merging with Werner, things will get better. Turbine in the past has really knocked it out of the park with some of their updates (Mirkwood, Moria, Brownlands, etc).

I am feeling much the same way, I'm done with wow. The costs, the endless nerfing, botting, it was out of control, hope this is my new and only go to game for a long time

Originally Posted by Wanderv

it was easter egg so i doubt we can call it normal lore race.

It may have been an easter egg in the game but Pandarens have been fleshed out as a race for years, they exist in the Pen and Paper Warcraft D20 game. They were set to put them in around BC but went with Dranei for alliance instead. Blizzard has put them into the Warcraft lore and have had them around longer than most people believe them to be.

Originally Posted by Arachelwyn

... hello LOTRO, Brandywine will have to put up with me for a long time.

Welcome to Middle-earth, I'm glad you're enjoying playing here!

Originally Posted by monk_tbd

I think it is more a matter of resources.
WoW could easily have 50-100 devs working on a single bug if it is important. And give a bonus to the one who really finds it. And its QA team is likey ten times the size of Turbine's as well. So such a problem would likely have never seen the live systems in the first place. Size in that regard does matter.
Turbine does not have such liberties as they have less people working on the whole product.

I agree with this. The OP mentioned how much money they have saved playing Lotro compared to WoW. And that's an important thing to note, along with the size of the player base of each game. WoW devs have a lot more resources with which to create and fix things. It has always been thus, and as much as we complain and want (even need) some things to get fixed, there's a reality here that's hard to ignore - it takes money, and WoW simply has access to more of it than Lotro does.

I could not agree more with the original poster. Been playing wow since the start and have leveled 9 characters to max level. After cataclysm (which was a huge disappointment) I was getting more and more bored by the game. Especially when I found out that for some rewards you had to do certain dailies like 400 times.... I already have that in another activity as well... that is called work!
A few years ago i met a guy at work who played LotRo and he shows the game to me. I was lmao! Playing a game where you could swim but not dive... where you had to wait for every door you opened (he had a slow laptop so it seemed for ever). so then for me wow was THE game.
But me and my GF (we met online in WoW: she was the guildmaster of the guild i was in) decided to give LotRo a try... and we never looked back. The game is brilliant and we love every aspect of it!
So much to discover.... so much to find out... (so much getting used to not having flying mounts...).
If my colleague from all those years ago would still be working in my company I would tell him that it turned out he was right all along!
Little note: I read The Books 35 years ago (yes, they already had invented the printing press back then) and now virtually running around in the same world gives it an extra boost!