Thread: The reason why people like WoW better than LOTRO

Originally Posted by LeonardoB

I did a little bit of research on WoW and on MMORGPS in general and learned somthing: people play MMORPGs because they want (in a sense annyway) another world to dwell in; somthing that is out of the world. They want something different from the world as we know it. Think about it would you be DEEPLY interested and drawn to a game where you can only play as a human and do ordinary things? of course not! People want these games because they want to be a hero or an adventurer or simply because it makes they forget about who they are for a short time. I LOVE LOTRO, and I have to admit that it (again in my opinion) is FAR superior to anything WoW will ever become. BUT (yes, there is a "but") WoW drives the unreal into well...... an unreal level which is why it looks childish on the outside to someone who has never played it. But this is what player WANT. As good as a game as LOTRO is I believe it lacks some out-of-this-world things. like for example WoW has flying mounts. can you capture what it would be like to have a FLYING mount in LOTRO!??!??!?!? Or gigantic trees like in WoW's Sheterglen? Lothlorian has HUGE trees but the place is too..... unchallenged. WoW does a great job on satisfying the desire to be.... something more in a place where it just is a dream come true.
Personally I admit that I would probably switch to WoW if I wasn't a fan of the movies and the lore of Middle-Earth
just something to think about

While i understand what you are getting at, i view it the other way around. LOTRO lost / has not what WoW has in terms of World continuity in a nutshell.

WoW is high fantasy with crazy ideas.
Lotro is low fantasy. But turbine added Wizzards, lightning storms green and blue flashing skill effects, purple aliens to it. Everyone who likes low fantasy get's kicked in the nut's everyday because his Weapons have to _shine_ in gren, blue red. Many have left this abomination of Middle-earth. If they want to raise purple flaires and launch fireballs out of their hands, they go for the real thing. With all this it's just a bad copy with middleearth names slapped on it.

Turbine didn't realize that when making those changes.

Guess what would happen if Blizzard would suddenly remove their absurd Tier Armor design for low medieval fashion? No glowing Armors / Weapons. No flightmounts no Cows or Pandas?


But honestly it's just one of many other reasons. WoW did reshape know gameplay and created new forms from already known. Look at battlegrounds or Instance finder. Both nothing really new, but both cure a craving. Now Turbine? They still tinker each update around how one should barther his tokens for rewards, instead taking the reward system to a new level with real new system mechanics. #

Example?
The LI system? It's good enough as a grind occupation as much as daily quests are, but LIs are not really growing with you or have significant customization additions to be worthy to be "more" than just +2 Stats more on a new Weapon. It's a solution to deliver fast easy to develop content. (New Rune tiers anyone?). It's a equivalent for Item Enchanting (+1,+2) or Rune socketing from other MMOs. But that's all it really is. Nothing growing of Legendary truly uniqure shaped on it. (For that it would require meaningful differences and alternatives).

Originally Posted by Fankdango

There have been and there are MMOs like this. They seem fun for a very short time because it becomes a rinse and repeat that requires players to read a particular mob animation before you hit the "jump out of the way" button you're referring to. The problem with that concept is that if you can learn how to evade an attack consistently which will be the case after some practice, any player who has enough patience can take down opponents FAR from their normal ability but players who don't have as much time and aren't inclined to memorizing routine movements are frustrated rapidly. If you don't believe me, look at demon souls/dark souls. Great challenge but turns off a vast number of players. Now try to multiply the complexity of "dodge, slash, dodge" gameplay with 11 other people who have to do the same thing as they interact with you via healing, tanking, and support roles. Action MMOs seem sexy but far harder to implement than most people realize. I've recently played some of the most difficult mob pulls in ToO t2 and I promise you, you will not be wanting to manually evade attacks while trying to survive the onslaught that will bear down on you. CC, heals, tanks, dps all have to be precisely timed and positioned. A mistake form 1 person can spell the difference between long CDs being burned with nothing but a wipe to show for it and a total success where no one ever went below half morale.

Unless your fighting another human player, "action rpgs" that present real skill based challenges hinge on a players ability to learn monster animations then form a basic routine which they have to cycle for an extended period of time. Fights like that are usually extended because the skill part centers around correctly repeating the routine without losing concentration.

The precise benefit of manual evasion, it allows better players to tackle harder content with their ability rather than a number on their character sheet. This in my opinion is a good thing, casual players can get by playing normally but you will always have the choice to optimise your play to make it more efficient.

Granted, with how LOTRO is designed manual BPE is probably unsuited.

Originally Posted by defrule

The precise benefit of manual evasion, it allows better players to tackle harder content with their ability rather than a number on their character sheet. This in my opinion is a good thing, casual players can get by playing normally but you will always have the choice to optimise your play to make it more efficient.

Granted, with how LOTRO is designed manual BPE is probably unsuited.

Again, this manual dodging vs. statistic argument isn't the point of my reply. There is a place for manual bpe and thats great and fine but it isn't some great idea that developers simply refuse to implement. Content is extremely hard to balance as it is, and forcing players to learn enemy attack patterns and exposing vulnerable points in this environment is simply detrimental to the game community as a whole. I am a old-school gamer myself and was raised on a staple of castlevania/contra/ninja gaiden games where memorizing the enemy attack patterns was the only way forward. This game mechanic still works for most SINGLE PLAYER games (or at the most 2-4 players) but is far from ideal in a game that requires so many people on screen (12 for a raid). You also have to take into account that such hardcore, old-school type of skill-based gaming isn't appreciated by many players. This doesn't mean those players aren't worth having just like players who aren't that fast or good at their class are still great to have around in the community or even in raids.

I will even go as far as saying that manual bpe and attack timing can be hardly called skill for many players who see raid strategizing and optimizing character builds and skill rotations as far more cerebral and therefore more worthy of being called "skill-centric".

Forcing people to focus on manual bpe and timed attacks will alienate far more players than it would satisfy and possibly create a game that is centered around long-drawn out 1 on 1 combat which gets monotonous very quickly. This would also make most skills virtually superflous since any challenging encounter would require finely timed movements that would not allow fancy or slow movements to be feasible. That is why so many action games with manual bpe are criticized for funneling players to reuse 1 or 2 attacks or combos.

couple of things stick out for me

wow released 2004
LOTRO released 2007

WoW was able to increase bag/storage space by "a lot"
LOTRO is hampered due to server issues/technical issues

WoW able to do dungeon Finder
LOTRO - instance finder - not many people use it to for groups - once again hampered due to Technical issues

WoW - if you got hacked and/or items are lost/destroyed by accident - WoW will replace/remiburse most items
LOTRO - only a GM can go back 7 days - if longer than 7 days your SOL - once again - hampered by techical issues


so WoW was released 3 years earlier than LOTRO - and yet was able to make significant improvements for thier playerbase for greater enjoyment of the game and not be hampered due to techical issues

somone needs to ask Turbine to ask Warner Bros for a huge infusion of cash so they can make some much needed improvements to LOTRO, but once again - hampered due to technical issues

have a nice day folks

Originally Posted by Rainothon

- WoW was there first and seized the market-leadership;

It's true that Blizzard arrived with a QUALITY game just at the right moment. They still beat EQ2 which was released a couple of weeks early, simply because WoW at release was a better rounded and polished game than EQ2.
So yes, WoW has the success is has because it came at the right moment... but also because it was good, very good, compared to the competition.

Originally Posted by Rainothon

- WoW was more casual at start than LOTRO at start, easier questing;

This is just wrong. Both games were exactly the same complexity wise at release. I was there for both, Nov. 2004 on US servers for WoW, April 2007 pre-order early access for LOTRO (and beta of both before, of course).

Originally Posted by Rainothon

- WoW has world-PvP as a core-feature;

This is true, but it would NOT work with LOTRO. Max level Orcs camping Hobbiton and killing "noobs"? That just doesn't work in that setting. More PvP could have been added through different means though.

Originally Posted by Rainothon

- WoW as a game has stronger marketing than LOTRO;

True, but don't underestimate the power of the "Lord of the Rings" franchise.

Originally Posted by Rainothon

- Blizzard as a developer has a dedicated fanbase spanning a multitude of games;

Turbine and also, more important, Lord of the Rings, both have a dedicated fanbase, bigger than any Blizzard game.

Originally Posted by Rainothon

- WoW has a more international focus than LOTRO (Asia, Oceania);

Well, while LOTRO doesn't have dedicated servers in Asia, nothing stops people from there to play. There never was an IP check and restriction in LOTRO, since day one you could play from anywhere in the world on either US or EU servers, to the opposite of WoW which had (and possibly still has) restricted access to their regional servers.

I like both games for different reasons. One advantage I do think LoTRO has over WoW is that as the game advances things are getting increasingly epic in terms of scope and scale. I think WoW was riding high with The burning Crusade and ultimately peaked with Lich King, but Cataclysm and Pandas seems like a step down and I'm not sure where the developers can go to rescale the heights of previous expansions... LOTRO on the othe hand does not make this problem with Rohan, Gondor and Mordor (to name the obvious) keeping us entertained for the next 5 years at least.

I doubt very much that the reason millions of people choose to play WoW can be boiled down to one or two or even a few reasons. There is not one reason that anyone plays any MMORPG. There are dozens. We are a diverse people.

But I can give you the reasons that I am continually drawn back to WoW for short periods even though LOTRO will always be home to me. And I can give you the reasons that my husband, who plays LOTRO only because I do, loves WoW more than any other MMO.

I'm going to say it point blank: I think turbine's storytelling is terrible. I realize that I'm apparently in a minority here, but in my opinion the only good story aspects of this game come directly from Tolkien. Anything that Turbine makes up is really sub par. There were some interesting bits in the later chapters of Volume 1, but on the whole it was implemented in such a way that I couldn't take it seriously. Volume 2 was just stupid, especially from a lore perspective, and I could not manage to care in the least. The Mirkwood book was incredibly stupid from premise to finish. Volume 3 so far is just a giant snooze fest. *yawn* Can we do something interesting now please?

On the other hand, I find WoW's story fascinating. People actually do interesting things and stuff that affects the whole world actually happens. What's more, my character is at the center of the story, doing things that matter, becoming a real hero. WoW has no real limits. LOTRO is confined to pathetic little stories that must try (and sometimes fail) to exist within the boundaries of Tolkien's works.

Sorry, Made of Lions, but story-wise LOTRO completely fails for me and WoW delivers.

That's the main reason my husband and I share for enjoying WoW. For him, in addition, he just loves the world of Azeroth. He's a huge Tolkien fan like I am, but Turbine's Middle-earth just isn't Middle-earth for him. It's too different. Azeroth is his gaming home. He far prefers the game play and finds it vastly more rewarding. He hates dungeons in LOTRO but enjoys them in WoW. His crafting (one of his all time favorite MMO activities) is more useful and profitable in WoW. The classes in WoW are more diverse and fun in WoW (for both of us).

Ultimately it's all a matter of taste and depends on what an individual wants out of a game. One simply has to accept that everyone games for different reasons and everyone enjoys different styles and stories.

WoW has Chuck Norris.

That is all...

Originally Posted by Khafar

Being first matters - a lot. It gives a company an inertia that's extremely tough for others to break (unless the company that's the 900 pound gorilla in that market screws up badly). It gives the company holding all those cards the opportunity to define and shape the market... in this case, by appealing to a far broader set of gamers than prior MMOs had. The shear size of the game became a huge draw all by itself, as nearly every gamer knew people playing WoW.

This is a bit like what happened with Apple and the iPod/iPhone/iPad. There had been other MP3 players, other "smart" phones, other tablets. But Apple made them better, cooler, smarter. They advertised more, and acquired an almost cultish following among technophiles. Most everyone had friends/relatives/coworkers with those devices, and they wanted them too. Apple grew those markets enormously - and now sit pretty in all of them, with the largest market cap of any company in the world ($600+ B).

Interesting that you didn't mention another first .. IBM with the PC forever trumping Apple with the Mac. PC getting the entrenched user base is a hurdle Apple has never been able to get over. I see the same thing going on with WoW vs Lotro, and really, WoW vs any game. To beat WoW, a developer is going to have to change the genre - bring something big to the table that no game currently provides.

Then go play it.

WoW has a higher population because:

1. It's better positioned in the market.
2. Better advertising.
3. Has been around the longest.
4. Lowest Common Denominator.


Panda-monium will be the first huge population hit they take...

I hate all MMO's.

One small thing I like in WOW is that random landscape mobs don't just stand around ... some of them have quite a lot of fun with each other:


Leave my fish alone bear!

The reason why people play WoW over LOTRO is "gameplay". WoW gameplay and combat is extremely fluid where as LOTRO gameplay and combat is very clunky. Otherwise, LOTRO has a lot of stuff that is better than WoW.

Unfortunately tho, gameplay is the most important thing for a game. LOTRO has amazing scenery, great lore, good storytelling, awesome crafting, unique music system, deeds, titles and events but when i start killing a mob I can feel the difference between WoW and LOTRO. Also this problem is not limited to LOTRO, there are a lot of MMOs with very clunky gameplay which in my opinion cost them a lot of subs.

I enjoy them both tho.

Originally Posted by hex2323

WoW has a higher population because:

1. It's better positioned in the market.
2. Better advertising.
3. Has been around the longest.
4. Lowest Common Denominator.


Panda-monium will be the first huge population hit they take...

Interesting how several posters will not admit this: one of the reasons WoW has more players is because it is a better game in many aspects. It has better customer service, it has less bugs, combat is better, it actually has full PVP. Players come to try Lotro and then leave because they don't like the game systems that are here. Things that are not good here drive people away - such as the lack of bag space, the lack of a working dungeon finder, lack of option to do PVP at all levels, lack of good AH features compared to other MMOs. Also, lack of end game content, and for many years after Moria, just plain lack of content. Turbine's own unethical actions have also driven players away - anyone remember having a big point sale "to prepare for ROI", and then making it incredibly expensive to use points to buy the expansion.

Turbine has acted like a minor league game company - they could not put out a polished game, or put out content as fast as Blizzard and other MMOs like Rift. They cannot invest enough to make the game less buggy - or even to meet their own content schedule (keep promising free Dragon raid, new PVP map, etc.) This too is the reason why WoW has more subscribers.

I know some of you will hate to hear it - and don't want to hear anything negative about the game and the game company - but this too is reality. Lotro has some limitations, and Turbine is unable to make a game as polished and bug free as WoW. It's a cycle: less players/subscribers > less money > less game > less players.

WoW is a childs game, it's a cartoon interactive stupid baby game- IMHO.
Lotro is for the serious, it's a story driven game for people who take their gaming much more seriously.

I've played both for since they released, and what I think makes WoW more enjoyable for most is that it does not have so many minor annoying "stuff", that after awhile get's pretty darn annoying(-350 will and fate, I'm looking at you). For instance, if WoW had a debuff that completely removed your mana/power regeneration, they would most likely remove it once people said how annoying it was and that it didn't make something hard, just tedious(or make it go away when combat ended). LotrO however still has it, even after countless threads and posts on the subject.

Now I love LotrO and will most likely play it for a long time more, but it still got alot of minor annoyances that should be gone by now.

Premium MMO -> WoW
Microtransaction MMO -> LOTRO

Premium > Microtransaction

In my opinion ^^

I've never played WoW and the only reason I ever tried LOTRO was b/c it was F2P. After subbing for 18 months and seeing all the seams of the game and intrusions by the store I can say for me I prefer a premium experience. The P2W/P2ReduceGrind model isn't for me. I have zero problems paying a subscription, I have plenty of room in my budget for entertainment. The fact that Turbines goal is to push the store on me until I quit bothers me. The game is really fun and I had a blast playing it. I just prefer a game that once I put my money in for the month that's it, I can just play. I have a feeling I would prefer WoW to LOTRO if I did try it, just b/c it isn't based around a store.

I think I pay about 12 dollars a month for SWTOR, which is two dollars a month more than I was paying for LOTRO. I have access to everything in the game and every player has the same access to stats/consumables/services as every other player. I don't have to worry about some sort of meta currency to remove my relics...I just use credits (gold). Works out much better for me.

I probably won't play another f2p/p2w game.

I think honestly it's down to what's previously been said. WoW came out in 2004? And LotRO followed in 2007, those 3 years were crucial to Blizzard, in which they gained an enormous following and set themselves in stone as the most popular MMO.

If LotRO had done it first, it makes you wonder whether it'd have ended up much the same as WoW is now. In most ways LotRO is superior, depending on what you play MMO's for!

LotRO is realistic and true to it's source material (Mostly..) LotRO also probably has a larger cult following than WoW as Tolkiens' work is revered among the greatest literary works ever written. I would guess that most people who play LotRO have read the books or at very least watched the movies (Or played another LotR game) There will be some who are just trying it out without any prior knowledge.

I play WoW from time to time, because it is drastically different to LotRO, for no other reason. I agree the community is poison and the focus on end-game and gear is going to drive it into the ground eventually, but the game is.. fun for the most part, It's silly and colourful. LotRO's atmosphere is usually dull and depressing but to a LotRO player that is immersive because again it's true to it's source material!

Personally it is my opinion that if WoW had come later, that LotRO may have the larger following, but we'll never know. However LotR in any form is bound to last a lot longer in any form of art than WoW.

Fact.

-Tails-

Originally Posted by Cindir

Turbine has acted like a minor league game company - they could not put out a polished game, or put out content as fast as Blizzard and other MMOs like Rift. They cannot invest enough to make the game less buggy - or even to meet their own content schedule (keep promising free Dragon raid, new PVP map, etc.) This too is the reason why WoW has more subscribers.

I know some of you will hate to hear it - and don't want to hear anything negative about the game and the game company - but this too is reality. Lotro has some limitations, and Turbine is unable to make a game as polished and bug free as WoW. It's a cycle: less players/subscribers > less money > less game > less players.

This. Lotro had the potential to be up there with the biggest MMOs, and for a few years it looked like it might be on its way to achieving that. Sadly, that just hasn't turned out to be the case. Lotro's getting old and just hasn't been built on as stable a platform as WoW to age well enough. There are too many bugs not resolved now, either through lack of care, or because the engine simply wasn't designed well enough to weather the years. Something WoW obviously got very right. Although it wasn't for me, WoW had good gameplay regardless of anything else, and even regardless of a story. Lotro as an MMO only exists because of the story behind it, without the story it's just a generic aging mmo. Lotro has a lot of good things, built around a framework of not so good gameplay, which is never going to be enough to compete against the biggies. Throw in the recent trend of buggy content and lag, and its obvious why WoW has the numbers and Lotro doesn't.

Why do more people play WoW?

1. Blizzards name and reputation brought it to the masses.
2. It'll run on any kind of ###### PC.
3. It became an internet fad practically overnight and so FOTM folks flocked to it.

Originally Posted by Mysterion

Premium MMO -> WoW
Microtransaction MMO -> LOTRO

Premium > Microtransaction

In my opinion ^^

Beware the misinterpreted facts folks that will pounce on this one

I agree with you 100% -- For me, what really shut me off about LOTRO and sent me back to resub WoW is the intrusion of the ingame store. I haven't quit LOTRO, but my playing time is severely curtailed. It's only a matter of time before I put the game on hold. At least Turbine/WB haven't put billboards along the roads or in the gathering points ... yet.

I really don't care if the company is able to milk a few extra dollars out of the game they wouldn't have otherwise. If they made enough money that the product was in the black, then that's how they should have kept it.

Originally Posted by Mirarian

Then there are people like me who walked away from WoW because the toxic community there (dungeon finder and raid finder) finally pushed my last straw for patience after 6 years. I checked out LoTRO since it was free and I was looking for something ELSE to do besides log into WoW and force myself to run more heroics and random raids. Inside a week I was premium. I haven't done more than log into WoW to keep my guilds going since January. I don't miss it. When my subs run out there(WoW) I will be cancelling them and getting a regular sub here.

Why? The community. Overall folks are generally pretty nice here. It just feels more like relaxation time than the stressful panic mode that is endgame WoW.

So....you're saying WOW even has more riffraff than LOTRO?

If the story line behind Lotro and WoW was replaced by a generic story / generic mobs, would people still play?

I think for most WoW players, the answer would be yes. For most Lotro players, the answer would be no. I think that says a lot about the quality of gameplay. WoW will always have numbers because it has quality gameplay, so appeals to a wide variey of people, not just a limited demographic. People don't come to Lotro for the gameplay, they come either because it's free, or because they like LoTR. Its gameplay simply isn't good enough for it to appeal to the mass market.

Originally Posted by Chilly

WoW is a childs game, it's a cartoon interactive stupid baby game- IMHO.
Lotro is for the serious, it's a story driven game for people who take their gaming much more seriously.

Interesting post. This reminds me of my kids calling each other "baby".

It is exactly the opposite. A serious gamer will not play Lotro - because they will want serious raiding or serious PVP. They will demand a AAA+ game and so they will be trying SWTOR or RIFT - I think Lotro just can't cut it for a serious gamer (although I can't say firsthand how raiding compares here vs. other MMOs). Not to say a serious gamer could not make a home in Lotro - just that the typical serious (hardcore? dedicated raider?) gamer will want something different.

I do agree that lotro is more mature story-wise and WoW gets seriously kiddy-ish. Too much for me - if I want the better game play and better PVP and grouping options of WoW I have to ignore the kiddie cartoon factor.

Originally Posted by PoeticNightmare

You should add a big "SOME" in front of people, in the topic title. As it does not apply to everyone obviously.

I, for one, hate WoW because of the world. I don't want to escape into some triply cartoon. I want to escape into the world I've been reading about since I was a kid. I was a never a MMO player and Lotro is the only one I play. The reason is because of my huge passion for the books. I would imagine this applies to many people. Most mmo's are for MMO fans. LOTRO is for Tolkien fans as well as MMO fans. In my opinion, this is what makes it better than WoW by a huge margin...

Quoted for (well, it's my exact sentiment), bold added to emphasize wherein I include myself.. (<- these extraneous characters added because I needed at least 10 for the post anyway)

Too many to quote have said that WoW is larger than LoTRO because it was first. The only problem with this statement is that WoW wasn't the first large MMO. EverQuest was available some 5 years earlier, and did fairly well by most standards (that is, when not compared against WoW's subscriber numbers).

I never played UO but it came before EQ.

WoW has a greater player base primarily, in my opinion, because of better marketing and larger (dollar) resources used. Of course, this is not to discount the many other reasons, there isn't a single reason. Marketing of any product is simply that important in order to get customers.

Originally Posted by Vhivi

Beware the misinterpreted facts folks that will pounce on this one

I agree with you 100% -- For me, what really shut me off about LOTRO and sent me back to resub WoW is the intrusion of the ingame store. I haven't quit LOTRO, but my playing time is severely curtailed. It's only a matter of time before I put the game on hold. At least Turbine/WB haven't put billboards along the roads or in the gathering points ... yet.

I really don't care if the company is able to milk a few extra dollars out of the game they wouldn't have otherwise. If they made enough money that the product was in the black, then that's how they should have kept it.

I try to avoid these threads as they tend to fill pretty quickly with fanboys of various stripes and people who like to talk about "the good old days," but I do have to point out that your last paragraph doesn't make much sense.

No for-profit corporation in the history of that fabricated entity has ever simply decided it has made "enough" money. Indeed most corporations (in the US) are required by law to maximize their profits which is why they can be so harmful to society at large. You may disagree with the freemium model as a matter of principle, but it works or Turbine and numerous others (NCSoft and Cryptic to name a few) wouldn't be doing it.

In my opinion, there are several freemium MMOs out there that have a lot of story content and are stable and well-maintained and interesting to me as a player. These include LOTRO, DC Universe Online, Star Trek Online, Age of Conan, and Champions Online. However, I simply don't have time to invest in playing more than a single MMO on a regular basis (and it would probably drive me crazy if I tried), so I spend most of my MMO time in LOTRO.

I've never played WoW, mostly because I've never been comfortable with subscription model MMOs and I don't have any real interest in playing Blizzard's neutered "Starter Edition." I've paid for subscriptions to MMOs (several of the ones listed above before they went freemium) briefly but I discovered that I always felt an obligation to play as a result of the continuous financial investment, even if I might rather be playing an offline single-player game. It creates a sense that you have to maximize the time you're putting in to justify the fiscal expenditure and that ruins the fun for me. When I play a freemium game, I'm comfortable that I can take a day or a week or even a month off, come back and get used to the systems again, and enjoy the experience without feeling guilty about spending $15/month for something I'm not using or deriving any satisfaction from. Heck, I just did this recently with Kingdoms of Amalur--sinking most of my leisure time into that and only really returning to LOTRO when the anniversary festival started. In the few years I've been playing LOTRO, I've spent, in real-world money, less than what a six-month subscription to WoW costs, and I'm okay with that.

Originally Posted by LeonardoB

For the most part I've seen that WoW beets LOTRO in a landslide of population.
LOTRO has better graphics
LOTRO has a story; WoW does not
LOTRO has one of the best crafting systems out there
LOTRO is a book-based MMORPG naturally appealing to LOTR fans; WoW has no basis.
LOTRO gameplay (in my opinion) is better that WoW's
SO WHY DO MORE PEOPLE PLAY WoW?????!!!
I did a little bit of research on WoW and on MMORGPS in general and learned somthing: people play MMORPGs because they want (in a sense annyway) another world to dwell in; somthing that is out of the world. They want something different from the world as we know it. Think about it would you be DEEPLY interested and drawn to a game where you can only play as a human and do ordinary things? of course not!

Ahem. Sims.

People want these games because they want to be a hero or an adventurer or simply because it makes they forget about who they are for a short time. I LOVE LOTRO, and I have to admit that it (again in my opinion) is FAR superior to anything WoW will ever become. BUT (yes, there is a "but") WoW drives the unreal into well...... an unreal level which is why it looks childish on the outside to someone who has never played it. But this is what player WANT. As good as a game as LOTRO is I believe it lacks some out-of-this-world things. like for example WoW has flying mounts. can you capture what it would be like to have a FLYING mount in LOTRO!??!??!?!?

Oh, not again. Not only would it break Lore, they'd have to rewrite the entire Turbine engine, which is essentially two-dimensional.

Or gigantic trees like in WoW's Sheterglen? Lothlorian has HUGE trees but the place is too..... unchallenged. WoW does a great job on satisfying the desire to be.... something more in a place where it just is a dream come true.

And, in your judgment, LotRO doesn't?

As the apocryphal Scotsman is supposed to have said, "It's just as well we don't all like the same things, or think what an oatmeal shortage there would be."

My take is that WoW succeeds because it appeals to the lowest common denominator.

Originally Posted by djheydt

Oh, not again. Not only would it break Lore, they'd have to rewrite the entire Turbine engine, which is essentially two-dimensional.

Well, hey, the system's half in-place already: just create a Summon Great Eagle token that works like a "skirmish soldier" time item and sell it for, say, 150TP. :-)

If you have something which plays like WOW, have same mechanics like WOW (gear grind, vertical lvling system) why would you play it instead of WOW? I mean LOTRO is one of so-called thempark WOW-clones, granted with different things here and there but still.
Disclaimer: i never played WOW, nor am i planing to do so, its just if you are not Tolkien fan LOTRO doesnt have many other things to offer you imho, thus so many ppl plays WOW. And i know WOW is just o clone of EQ etc, etc.

Mmm...


WoW in fact is not better than LOTRO, if they were: We would not be here :<)

Wow does have a story line, in fact it has several, are they as classic as Tolkien? That is a hard standard to beat.

LOTRO character graphics are more aestethic than WoW, never been too crazy about the swords that are twice as large as me, and wearing clown colored costumes.

PvP and Battlegrounds is much better in WoW than here, hands down.

LOTRO does not have as stupid gear grind as WoW, but WoW allows you thru Battlegrounds to get just as good gear as from raids, thus allowing for level PvP playing fields, which LOTRO does not.

LOTRO has incredibly marketing funding, which LOTRO does not, come on "They Have Chuck Norris" enough said...

GM customer service in LOTRO is much better than LOTRO.

The landscape graphics in LOTRO is better than WoW, I love to simply just go an explore the world for what it looks like.

Raids: All games suck at this, I can't think of one where the players does not have to follow a strict script to do them, worse yet, requires specific builds within classes, and even quality of gear worn, and of course the developer locked mix of classes too, not friendly at all to the casual gamer. As I said all games suck at this.

Crafting: Lotro actually has the friendliest, least annoying system, yet lately they have done very poorly in recipe distribution for Tier-6 and Tier-7. Also LOTRO, like WoW, have not given much effort to ensure there is a crafting market to speak off; DAOC is much better at that, but their crafting is ultra-annoying!

Transportation: Travel in lotro is nothing to be truly proud of, but there are a lot of games out there that are worse.

From my overall assessment:

I like LOTRO. it is thematic, and you can truly taste Tolkien. There are truly no other games as thematic and true to it as LOTRO, Star Wars is thematic, but based on a rather shallow mithos, DAOC is arthurian mithos based, but post Arthur that it kinda misses the boat all together. If they ever make a Game of Thrones MMORPG, I would definetely be there to try it, but it is said that Martin is today's Tolkien :<)


Sue

I love lotro, i dislike wow... But cant close my eyes and not see that wow is the greatest mmo ever.

The biggest reason i think lotro couldnt be a leading mmo is its lore.

Let me explain that: Tolkien's lore is great, the greatest of all if you wish, if it wasnt for him, we wouldnt have any fantasy lores, games etc. But a lore of such greatness, is a heavy bound for gaming developers. The lore didnt allow some basic features for mmo games. Some examples:

a) Lore couldnt allow magic caster classes. There goes a big group of people that love controling the 4 elements.
b) The main reason people play mmo games is having fun. Second? Of course the competition with other people all over the world. If you want that kind of gamers, you make the best effort for PvP. And here comes lore. Even though Middle Earth has great dark side, with sorcerers, wargs, orcs, trolls, goblins, uruks etc, they couldnt be a playable realm, because of two reasons, 1) If they wish to have a starting point (like shire, ered luin, archet) they should either have mordor or orthanc at the launch and 2) If they choose open pvp world, lore doesnt allow to have tons of enemys at some regions. So the pvp is actually a mini game or a side game if you wish.

Despite all these "flaws" Lotro is a great game, still standing high after 5 years, and i am glad Turbine never thought of making a game that would kill wow. You can see where are conan, warhammer, aion.

Originally Posted by Tuarwen_Telumendil

a) Lore couldnt allow magic caster classes. There goes a big group of people that love controling the 4 elements.
b) The main reason people play mmo games is having fun. Second? Of course the competition with other people all over the world. If you want that kind of gamers, you make the best effort for PvP. And here comes lore. Even though Middle Earth has great dark side, with sorcerers, wargs, orcs, trolls, goblins, uruks etc, they couldnt be a playable realm, because of two reasons, 1) If they wish to have a starting point (like shire, ered luin, archet) they should either have mordor or orthanc at the launch and 2) If they choose open pvp world, lore doesnt allow to have tons of enemys at some regions. So the pvp is actually a mini game or a side game if you wish.

This is another perennial argument but Turbine's not really afraid to break lore when it comes to "giving the people what they want." Loremasters and Runekeepers really are caster classes and RKs are definitely akin to elementalist classes in other games.

On the LOTRO PvMP, I actually think it's pretty cool. I like the idea of PvP being restricted to "evil" toons, and because my personal preferences do not lie with PvP for the most part, I don't think not having to worry about ganking, spawn-campers and other manifestations of bad behavior is a bad thing at all.

Originally Posted by Cindir

Interesting how several posters will not admit this: one of the reasons WoW has more players is because it is a better game in many aspects. It has better customer service, it has less bugs, combat is better, it actually has full PVP. Players come to try Lotro and then leave because they don't like the game systems that are here. Things that are not good here drive people away - such as the lack of bag space, the lack of a working dungeon finder, lack of option to do PVP at all levels, lack of good AH features compared to other MMOs. Also, lack of end game content, and for many years after Moria, just plain lack of content. Turbine's own unethical actions have also driven players away - anyone remember having a big point sale "to prepare for ROI", and then making it incredibly expensive to use points to buy the expansion.

Turbine has acted like a minor league game company - they could not put out a polished game, or put out content as fast as Blizzard and other MMOs like Rift. They cannot invest enough to make the game less buggy - or even to meet their own content schedule (keep promising free Dragon raid, new PVP map, etc.) This too is the reason why WoW has more subscribers.

I know some of you will hate to hear it - and don't want to hear anything negative about the game and the game company - but this too is reality. Lotro has some limitations, and Turbine is unable to make a game as polished and bug free as WoW. It's a cycle: less players/subscribers > less money > less game > less players.

Give WoW the Tolkien IP, keep gameplay the same, I still wouldn't play it.

Give LOTRO WoW's lore, I would definitely not play it.

You talk of reality. You mean opinion.

I was merely pointing out the things I think account for WoW's larger player base. It's my opinion. You are entitled to yours.

I see it this way. LOTRO's gameplay is slower, someone said clunky. In the Tolkien books as well as the movies based on those books, combat is only part of the story. Less than half. So, LOTRO by nature is more about lore and story and graphics that immitate the Howe/Lee styles. The combat fits because it's slower paced, less fantastical (low end magic), but more tactical.

In WoW, people want combat. They don't want to read 3 pages of quest dialogue. 2 paragraphs is enough, then let's get to fighting and looting. So, slap some WarHammer cartoons on a generic 3 d world, and let's go at it.

When I spent my time in WoW, there were plenty of bugs and exploits and 3rd party prgrams and botting and macros and tons of other completely infuriating things. LOTRO has its own set of infuriating things.

Turbine IS a smaller company. And they do a great job with less than 1/3 the resources Blizzard has.

Everything stated in this thread is semantic garbage, including my posts.

Better game? Ha! Gamers can't ever come to a consensus on that. Higher population? Uhuh. It's more accessible. That's not better. That's just easier to get into. Harry Potter sells. Doesn't mean it's a better series than Lord of the Rings. Popularity does not determine quality in any entertainment form. People may like it, people may not. Is Lady Gaga better than Aretha Franklin? She must be because more people are listening to her! PLUS, those old Aretha albums have scratches and glitches in them!!!

Bleh.

Agruing quality when it comes to entertainment is useless.

I gave reasons why it was more populated. Doesn't mean the uninitiated masses made the right call.

Originally Posted by Tarmas_Eldar

If anything, I'd say that LOTRO has tried *too hard* to ape WoW's mechanics, the developers having made certain "that's just the way it has to be" assumptions about how MMOs work, based purely on that being the way it is in WoW.

It's ironic that you point out the mistake of making assumptions...by making a huge, pull-it-out-of-your-butt assumption.


Rip

I was in the closed beta for WoW. At that time, I thought it had some potential. Along came launch. I created my characters on Argent Dawn (RP). Every time the PvP servers went down, the most immature leet kiddies crashed the server just to be complete @#@#@@#%#$$#. Eventually, that stopped when the servers became more stable, but the community was never one that I found appealing (especially after the great ones I experienced in prior MMORPGs). Quit less than a year in and never looked back.

LoTRO, by comparison... I was in the closed beta and became a founder/lifetimer at launch... 5 years later, I'm still here.

/shrugs

Originally Posted by hex2323

I gave reasons why it was more populated. Doesn't mean the uninitiated masses made the right call.

But it does mean that WoW has been much more successful than Lotro. Which is what a business sets out to acheive. So, they obviously got something very right. As for a game peddling to the lowest common denominator, I'd say making a game F2P was doing just that. You could say that Turbine have gone for quality over quantity, however if the numbers don't bring in enough dollars to fix serious bugs in a timely manner, which has very much been the case recently. It doesn't mean jack.

Originally Posted by Opticals

Too many to quote have said that WoW is larger than LoTRO because it was first. The only problem with this statement is that WoW wasn't the first large MMO. EverQuest was available some 5 years earlier, and did fairly well by most standards (that is, when not compared against WoW's subscriber numbers).

Just to clarify what I believe the people who have used this statement mean is that WoW is the first AAA mainstream MMO. While EQ, AC, UO, and a handful of other MMOs predate WoW by a fairly good margin, it wasn't until WoW released that MMOs hit their 'stride'.

As for EQ's population numbers, they were relatively tiny compared to any of the MMOs released today, but they were sufficient enough for Sony to draw in a fairly decent profit margin.

What drove a lot of people to WoW has been recorded as recognition with both the brand and developer name. Following that, the marketing blitz that Blizzard put behind the game came into full-swing and lead us into what we see today.

Originally Posted by monteeburns

But it does mean that WoW has been much more successful than Lotro. Which is what a business sets out to acheive. So, they obviously got something very right. As for a game peddling to the lowest common denominator, I'd say making a game F2P was doing just that. You could say that Turbine have gone for quality over quantity, however if the numbers don't bring in enough dollars to fix serious bugs in a timely manner, which has very much been the case recently. It doesn't mean jack.

And if they fixed all the bugs? At least the major ones?

My brother joined because of Free to Play. He's hardly the Lowest Common Denominator. Many of the good players I've met recently joined because of Free to Play.

Just because people have less money to spend on a game than you do doesn't mean they're worse people.

Or were you implying something else about people who play a free game?

Originally Posted by DarkCntry

<snipping good info> ...

What drove a lot of people to WoW has been recorded as recognition with both the brand and developer name. Following that, the marketing blitz that Blizzard put behind the game came into full-swing and lead us into what we see today.

Helpful info. I would think what made people stay with WoW for years is that they really did it right. There are a lot of people who played WoW as a subscriber for years. I am also sure people brought friends into the game also because it was done very well.

Well, we will always have Moria. : )

I wonder what the next really big MMO will be - if there ever will be one after WoW. Possibly SWTOR or GW2? It does not seem quite possible that Rift will ever dominate - but they seem to have pulled off something.