Lotro in 2024 - New Player Impressions

Faherya

Member
Hello everyone! I hope you are all well. Getting straight to the point, I discovered LOTRO at the beginning of the year, I have been playing for a few months and I would like to share my impressions about the game (not that anybody cares lol). Coming from a completely new player, with no knowledge whatsoever about any aspect of the game prior to my first sessions. I had not even seen any videos about it.​

Negative Points

  • There are several things that make me want to pay for the game. Expansions with new areas, new quests. The occasional cosmetic. But storage is definitely not one of them. Having such a low limit, both in inventory and in "Storage" is absolutely frustrating. I increased the entire limit that is possible to purchase with gold coins, house included, but it is still simply not enough. If you want to keep a stock of items for crafting, forget it.
  • Oh, how it breaks. I play through Steam, using Windows. Every time the operating system updates, I have to redo the steps to fix the game recommended by the community to get it working again.
  • I believe that, at this point, lag is considered a tourist attraction.
  • As a matter of honor, I have to condemn lootboxes. But it is perfectly possible to ignore them and I believe they have no significant impact on the game.
  • If you're a new player, skip Monster Play mode. It's not for you. Aside from literally competing against experienced and equipped players, your only chance to get stronger is by doing missions while hiding. That is, if you can kill the monsters on the map. Or you just pay-to-win with LOTRO points, wich sucks.


Positive Points

  • No one can deny that the amount of detail in the game is absurd. Each quest, each character, is a great complement to the books and I recommend it even to my friends who don't play but like Tolkien's work. There is a big difference between reading about the Shire and walking through it. Thank you for this experience. This was the reason that made me buy a few months of VIP.
  • This point is so important that I need to emphasize it again. The game is huge. Some days I spent several minutes just walking around the map, looking at the scenery, textures, and following guards (NPCs). Some details of the scenery left me thinking for hours (Ex: Gollun's painting in the Goblin City, amazing)
  • I've encountered a number of bugs on my walks. Fences near stables that can lock you out if you buy a trip from the wrong side, bodies of water with no water mechanics, bridges where bosses can fall off and be attacked from above with no chance to fight back, etc. But I'll list these as positives because out of all the games I've played, these are pretty minor bugs. Most of the time, you'll only find them if you're actively looking for them.
  • I LOVED being able to enter expansion areas before purchasing them. I mean, I was able to walk around Cardolan and get to know the area and then decide whether or not I wanted to do the regional quests. This is just amazing, wish everygame did something similar with their tons of DLCs.
  • I've tested all the free classes. Of course, given my limited time, they've been quick runs so far and I haven't been able to see them all in detail, but they seem to be well-balanced. Except for one thing, this is the first game I've played where your character can be a healer and deal a lot of damage at the same time. I'm talking to you, Rune-keepers. My main is a Hunter and the learning was quite intuitive. In the first levels it is already possible to identify the limits of what I can and cannot do without having to kill myself to find out.

I need to take a paragraph to talk about the game's community. I've never received so much help in any other game in my life. It's amazing how many people are willing to take a few minutes (or hours) to guide you, teach you the mechanics, help you with quests, etc. I'm sure I've made some lifelong friends there. If you ask for help, in less than five minutes someone will help you with your quests, craft you a new set of gear, give you a pile of gold, and be available to answer any questions you may have. The only thing they will ask in return is that you return the favor to the other person in the future (I try to dedicate some time to this activity, even if it's just crafting fishing rods lol). The only downside to the community is that, like any "old" game, you'll only start participating in interesting events in the end-game. I mean, you could do instances and gather points to be ready when you reach 150, but no. If you're not asking for help, no one will do instances or events with you until you reach level 150. This means that there are two possible paths: 1) you ask for help and someone will "carry you" until you're leveled up enough. I don't like to bother anyone lol 2) You level up by doing quests until you're strong enough to do an instance in solo mode. In a way, this made me feel like the game "pauses" at level 100 (When you should already be able to manage on your own or with people of the same level as you) and only continues when you reach, by any means, 150 (I'm currently at 107).

Again, not that anyone cares. But in case anyone reads this thread and is wondering if the game is worth it: If you're a Tolkien fan, by all means. If you're not, the game is still worth it.​
 
Last edited:

Varonica

Active member
Fortunately I don't play through Steam so this never happens;

Oh, how it breaks. I play through Steam, using Windows. Every time the operating system updates, I have to redo the steps to fix the game recommended by the community to get it working again.

It's not a negative for the game I feel, but for Steam. But yes I have never played Monster play, loot boxes just get thrown away, lag is a problem, hope the new 64bit servers will fix that, storage is small compared to many other games, ludicrously small unless you fork out money for the upgrades, so the only point I can argue against is the game breaking, it's not the game, it's Steam that's is at fault for that. Otherwise an excellent summation of the problems apart from one missing you may not have encountered yet.

The one problem I have is the confusion that can be caused by having different times periods based in the same areas, Gondor and Kings Gondor for instance, wouldn't be the once I have found myself in the wrong time period for what I am trying to do, and this is particularly confusing to new players. Could it have been handled differently, I don't know, but it is a confusing experience sometimes, it does take some getting used to, specially when you have teleports that take you to the same area but different time periods.

However I also feel that all these problem are completely negated by how awesome the game is and how much new content is added on a regular basis. I have played almost continually since just before the Mirkwood and Great River expansion and having major updates year after year is great. Glad you are enjoying the game.
 

Faherya

Member
I haven't been to Gondor yet, so I haven't noticed this problem. It's interesting that there are so many things to do that you can play without realizing that something is missing. Almost every day I discover a quest that I should have done ten levels ago. lol
 

Weirdjedi

Ranger Informant
Lootboxes have come a long way. In the early days, they were simply another way to open a box with some random rewards. You'd find a Sturdy Steel Key very rarely somewhere during your playthrough and then use it to open one of these Steel-bound lootboxes. Once Standing Stone Games took over, they wanted to bracket the rewards according to level. They came out with Black Steel Keys with the Mordor expansion in an attempt to get people to complete the content. You essentially had to do every quest in the expansion to unlock the additional content, such as weeklies and group activities. To form one of these keys, you needed to complete dailies to make fragments for a couple days.

Eventually, they scrapped the idea of obtaining keys from gameplay entirely and made them available to purchase with Lotro Points. They would create cosmetics on a seasonal basis (around 8 months) that could be obtained from the lootboxes. This wasn't much of an issue in the early days since the items were also available to barter for Figments of Splendour. Players could accumulate this new currency in a number of easy ways. Unfortunately, things have been getting more difficult when they chose to make a few of those cosmetic rewards exclusively through the lootboxes. While they did eventually put some of those items on the barterers about a year later, the discouragement of not making a full outfit or obtaining animated decorations can pressure people to buy some lootboxes.

We usually recommend people to add them to the game's filter system (Alt + R). Not many people are aware that you can filter quests, items, and even sounds using this system. There are ways to obtain enough Lotro Points to buy pretty much anything in the game but new players simply aren't aware of exactly how much you can get just by doing deeds through the zones. You get 915 just by doing all the deeds in the first four zones.
 

diligentcircle

Well-known member
If you're a new player, skip Monster Play mode. It's not for you. Aside from literally competing against experienced and equipped players, your only chance to get stronger is by doing missions while hiding. That is, if you can kill the monsters on the map. Or you just pay-to-win with LOTRO points, wich sucks.
Something I've noticed is that the upscaling system (used mostly for Ettenmoors but also used in a less important way for the High Elf tutorial) is quite bad below level 50 or so. It'd be nice if they could fix it so that it at least works ok enough at level 20 (the lowest level you can play in Ettenmoors).
 

Faherya

Member
It's also bad at "higher" levels (like I said, I'm at 107). I can't even do the quests in Ettenmoors because it takes me almost two minutes to kill a single normal monster. That's when I manage to kill them haha, most of the time I die.
 

diligentcircle

Well-known member
I said "below level 50 or so" because when I went back with my level 65 Rune-keeper, I found I was able to fight standard (NPC) enemies just fine. I think it might have something to do with the Legendary Items? But I'm not sure.
 

Mistlos

Beware the liars, the unkind, and the hubristic.
LOTRO on Steam has been largely fine for me but I believe it's because I had already been playing through the standalone client before, which I assume correctly installs some important files that Steam doesn't/didn't. And then when I wanted to move LOTRO to a different drive, I installed it through Steam, as I wanted to try how it would go, and it's been fine. ?‍♂️

So yeah, if anyone really wants to play on Steam, install and run the game through the normal launcher first, perhaps. If that fails, follow the extra steps I'm sure you'll find from people online as this is a fairly common problem.

Alternatively, there's also this community/user-made launcher (for both LOTRO and DDO): https://www.nexusmods.com/lotronline/mods/1 -- I haven't tried it myself but I saw it get suggested at least once to maybe help with issues. I've since been tracking it on the NexusMods website and it recently got updated.
 

Faherya

Member
@diligentcircle Oh, I see. Not sure if my LIs made much difference, I never had entered on Moors before them.
@Mistlos I didn't know about this mod, I'll check it out, thanks! What I did was download the dependencies and write a script to reinstall them whenever I need to.
 

Mistlos

Beware the liars, the unkind, and the hubristic.
@diligentcircle Oh, I see. Not sure if my LIs made much difference, I never had entered on Moors before them.
@Mistlos I didn't know about this mod, I'll check it out, thanks! What I did was download the dependencies and write a script to reinstall them whenever I need to.
When you try it, let us know how it goes. ? I don't see it talked about enough and so some recent info would be good.
 
Top