Originally posted by Zorndorf

Originally posted by Axehilt

Originally posted by bastii

I thought it was quite popular, Xfire shows it as second most played P2P game after WoW. Xfire might not be very reliable, but a lot of my friends are playing it though.

 

Where do you see that?  I haven't perused Xfire much, but all I could find was this (sort by rank) which ranks things as:

1. WOW
2. Aion
3. Silkroad Online
4. Guild Wars
5. EVE
6. Cabal Online
7. Basma (a foreign MMORPG I've never heard of before.)
8. Runes of Magic

Is there a better way of ranking the games?

 

 

Wait for the post launching period of Aion and be sure both AoC and War were also up there in the exact SAME position of Aoin 3 weeks after launch.

And ... AoC and War didn't have "the advantage" of having player loggings of 7 + Hours (due to the shops and waiting queues).

I am pretty sure Aion within 3 months will not better Lotro as a subscription based game.

Unless the shops (read pro gold miners) stay of course :))))

Unless Lotor is in China and Korea. Which i don't remember ever reading that happen Lotor can't even come closer to Aion.In 3 months Aion had more subs than Lotor ever had. I am 100% sure you are wrong.Lotor is soild NA/EU game.Aion is global game

edit-I look for it,Some time this year Lotor will be China

Before I read any of the other replies I'll tell you why I quickly lost interest in it during the free trial I tried.

1.  Solo quest grinding.  I hate it.

2.  The rest of the game would have to be absolutely amazing to compensate for the flaw in my first point, and it wasn't.  The graphics were fine but nothing special.  The combat was very ordinary.  Mobs were ridiculously weak (as usual because it's meant to be a single player game).  There was no sense of community, adventure, exploration or anything else good and fun because it was just a single player guided tour, content on rails type of game.

Landroval server has a very healthy population. Aion may have more subs worldwide but it will not maintain the subs in the west that LOTRO has. Aion will do well in the west for a few months but I look for a significant drop in subs a few months in. Aion just isnt a game that will hold western gamer interest for a long period.

Played the trial, liked it. What I didn't like was the character creator. I couldn't create a char I really liked, and since I see my char constantly, that made me not play past the trial.

Well, I guess the dev's probably had two routes to go:

1)  Create the world of Middle Earth, basically a Middle Earth Online:  a vast open Middle Earth world filled with mystery, wonder, and beauty.

or

2)  Create a linear Lord of the Rings story experience.

And they did the latter, option 2.

Given the biggest, most revered fantasy setting the world has ever known, and set on heels of the biggest movie releases ever, they gave players a lame linear experience and basically (IMO) failed.

People who have read Tolkien have often told me they would like to visit Middle Earth.  Not a one has told me they'd like to follow the linear plotline of the Lord of the Rings as a secondary character.

The above is my "opinion" on why LOTRO is not kicking WOW's butt.

Originally posted by maji

Played the trial, liked it. What I didn't like was the character creator. I couldn't create a char I really liked, and since I see my char constantly, that made me not play past the trial.

Exact same problem that i have, plus the world is sooo boring, quest sooo boring....

just my view...

 The PvP was not at all interesting for me. 

But the huge deal breaker for me was the lack of leveling up an Evil character from level 1. 

Seems very disjointed to just pop into the role of a "Creep" but never having that gratifying feeling of making a creep really my character.

I like the more gritty and dark side of mmos and well Lotro just felt all goody goody.

For me its the lack of pvp, the all good guys thing just doesnt cut it for me. If it had good pvp i would most likely play it. And im not a big pvp person but i like it to be an option.

Originally posted by gnomechef

Well i have been following LOTRO ever since the web domain was first registered and i went through the phases with more and more info about it coming in, and i got into the closed beta as soon as it started and i was a real huge lord of the rings fan so i thought this game was gonna be so great and when i got in it actually was really great, infact the best game i had ever played.

And then i continued as a happy LOTRO player for around 2 years, then turbine failed really badly with Mines of Moria (like as bad as SOE in SWG) they turned the game into another gear gated, raiding, repetitive, WOW style game, WHen the game was first released in shadows of angmar, it was really great because it focused on the story and roleplay, not about how long it takes you to kill a giant octopus with your 600 member large elitist guild. Thats where they failed so badly, i quit about a month or two after the release of MoM expansion. The thing i loved about Lotro was walking around feeling as if i really was a character in middle earth. then the Lotro General chat on most servers turned into some sort of barrens chat replica from wow and people were not friendly and everyone just cared about how much gold they can get and how much more +HP their gear gives compared to yours. It turned from a game all about story, immersion and roleplay into another one of "those clones". Nowadays i think only like 1/10th of lotro players even read the quest dialogs, when it was first released that was what it was all about and reading the story.

 

Its so sad how they could ruin such a great game but you know its happened and previous games before and it will happen again in the future so, just gotta move on i guess.

 

So thats my experience with LOTRO, great when it started, FAILED LIKE SWG after the first paid expansion called mines of moria.

 

Also in response to OP - the friendly community that used to be is now a rare find as most of those people got driven out by the arrogant hardcore players.

 

So in conclusion i dunno if it was too many players from other "clone games" ruining it for the originial lotro players or if the developers just stuffed up bigtime, but one things for sure it just hurts me so much i can never return to LOTRO ever again unless they completely remove the changes laid down in MOM.

Thanks for reading my opinion

Well-put
 

I'm still playing it, but the game has lost some of it's soul to hardcore. 

The reason LOTRO isn't as popular.  

Lore Nerds

I played to the end of what content was available in beta on a champ.  I tried it last month and had no interest in doing it all again.  Once you do the main story its very tedious doing it all again.  Many of the issues people addressed, MVP sucktitude, no evil faction etc were all addressed in beta notably by yours truly.

I started many threads in Beta suggesting improvements to MVP and why not simply make the creeps a playable race.

The lore nerds went ballistic.  Waaahh its not in the books waaahhh.  The lore nerds complained saying I harrassed them by calling them idiots or  something for not adding things to the game the competition already has because it wasn't lore so a mod banned me for calling someone an idiot.

Look at the official forums, there was a ridiculous thread that was multi pages long where the lore nerds complain about some insignificant aspect of lore and its called "Fail,"  just because turbine didn't follow lore exactly.

To conclude Dev's for a game to succeed use lore as a guide not as the bible.

Lore nerds + LOTRO = Fail

Originally posted by Axehilt

Originally posted by bastii

I thought it was quite popular, Xfire shows it as second most played P2P game after WoW. Xfire might not be very reliable, but a lot of my friends are playing it though.

 

Where do you see that?  I haven't perused Xfire much, but all I could find was this (sort by rank) which ranks things as:

1. WOW
2. Aion
3. Silkroad Online
4. Guild Wars
5. EVE
6. Cabal Online
7. Basma (a foreign MMORPG I've never heard of before.)
8. Runes of Magic

Is there a better way of ranking the games?

 

He said P2P (Pay to Play). Excluding Aion, which doesn't count at this point in time since its new, and excluding EVE since it is weird as hell, Lord of the Rings online would be the second P2P mmo.

If it was like uo or darkfall set in middle-earth I'd play in a second.  Right now it's just ddo with instanced pvp.  

2 reasons why it's not more popular: 

1. The UI is very clunky and unpolished

2.  The class skills are very "meh" and not very creative or well thought out.

Let me first say that I have played the game and hold a lifetime membership.

However, there are a few things LOTRO did not do well imo:

The combat Que System does not work well for melee. Melee is more of a hit the button make the swing. There is a slowness to the melee combat that hurts the overall combat system.

While LOTRO has the best enviromental design/grphx, the charachter models and animation are not that great.

Lack of consistent pvp hurts it as well.

But to be honest it is a GREAT questing, pve mmo. Crafting feels right, caster classes feel good, and you have personal houses in multiple designs. Lots of things to do endgame other than raid, raid, raid.

Lord of the rings online is a very popular game. Sure it may not have the 10mil+ WoW has but it can easily say its holding its own in a realistic mmorpg market with Everquest, Lineage 2 US, FFXI, and CoX. Its got a steady population I would say roughly 150,000-200,000 active. Just a guess from my experience.

LoTRO Is to a PvE fan what Aion is to a PvP fan. If LoTRO got some cool looking armors and fixed up some of the animations it would be the perfect PvE game. 

i can only answer for my self and why I never last more than 3 weeks in Lotro;

Its boring.

I find it insanely tedious after a short time and i just cant get my self to log back in.

As a second reason i find the character-classes and development boring.

Originally posted by gtwhalley

He said P2P (Pay to Play). Excluding Aion, which doesn't count at this point in time since its new, and excluding EVE since it is weird as hell, Lord of the Rings online would be the second P2P mmo.

Oh, we can exclude things just for being "weird as hell" now?

MMORPG.com is getting more scientific with each passing day!

(On a side note I find it amusing that I stopped listing MMORPGs at #8 because I felt that was excessive -- forgetting that listing LOTRO was the entire point of creating the list.)

It's a wow clone and the world is quite small.  I don't understand how you can say you feel miniscule in comparison to the world.  Those were some of the smallest zones I've seen.  However, I do agree the graphics are quite nice, but I need a lot more out of a mmo than pretty graphics.  

The lack of conventional PVP kills it for me.

I wanted to really like Lord of the Rings but i just couldnt. First off the story was great. The graphics are are very nice. The game was not hard to play. Thats about all the cons for me tho. I did not like the fact that it was based around only one side(good). I played for about 3 months and only was able to get in a group maybe 4 times. The people didnt talk very much to each other either. Overall maybe if i played it when it first came out i would have had better results.. but alas i guess i missed the boat on it. I'm not hating on the game but it just wasnt for me. I hope it keeps doing well and the players have the time of their life.

Can't understand the posts saying there is no pvp but alright.

To clarify LOTRO has pvp.

You either use your pve toon or you make a max lvl monster player. Both sides don't talk to each other but have their own chat channels. Both sides play against each other. Hunters can track monster players and monster players can buy trinkets to hunt but only according to race.

Monster players are meant to hunt in numbers to get any equality. Monster players start with 5 or less skills. They don't wear armor and they don't have leveling on their side. They can change their visual slightly by increasing their rank - killing freep players. They quest to earn enough reputation to have maps that will instantly port them around to pvp keeps/ holds because they don't have mounts. These, of course, are on timers and the freeps have mounts that are usable anytime but don't offer a quick port away. Freeps also have long timers but a few maps.

There are diminishing returns in pvp but if you time it well you can still near lock someone down.  While a freep may have a skill like stun immunity - for a creep to get such a skill (short of the warleader snap out) they must grind for money or items to turn in for potions. There are potions to pull a creep out of freep effects but given server time to use a potion and time spent grinding it - things can seem futile when you were taking damage the entire time.

LOTRO pvp is fun when there are large groups. The overall problem with creep side is that after you get your maps... quests are not needed unless you are building up reinforcements to keeps(buildings) you own. The only thing to do other than hunt for stray freeps is to go grind in Delving of Fror for stones and money. This makes ppl not want to play a creep and invest the time in them. Having fewer skills and NO  progression without players to fight can be disheartening. A creep will never improve their character unless they pvp... in turn... a freep can improve their character 24/7 via gear and leveling in the pve realm. In that way, freeps control how strong their creeps get on their server.

THAT'S the core issue I see with pvp. It's easier to work on a freep when it can go pve too. Saying this I do NOT think the developers should introduce multiple zones for creeps to quest 0-60 - it would just take too much development time.

As for the rest of lotro - there is one problem they have made.

When I started the game , max lvl was 50 - at 50 crafted gear was as good as dungeon gear. This meant that a player did not have to raid at end game except for slight skill adjustments via bonuses from Rift gear.

When moria came and the cap increased... things changed.They did a few good things by putting in smaller dungeons like 3 person ones. They did a bad thing by introducing rad (radiance) gear. Radiance is a type of optimism that your character has - the opposite of it is dread (fear). Lots of dungeons or creatures create dread - the way to combat this is to wear rad gear to even yourself out or actually improve your skill bonuses.

Now that they have done this once.... they created a tier system.

New dungeon? put more dread out and that will combat those wearing rad gear but it also forces those without rad gear to go get it. Why? because there is a state called "cowering". Your toon cowers when the fear/dread overwhelms them and they lose all hope. You cannot move and you just wait for the next dread tick to see if you will be released and overcome it. 

Additionally - crafted gear does not have radiance on it at 60. This reinforces that the only method to go into dungeons will be a tiered progression. Painted in a corner. If they give you crafted gear, why should you raid and the reverse but it was their choice.

LOTRO otherwise has lots of great things going on - its attractive and realistic looking - the quests are nicely written - the legendary weapons are fun if not a little grindy , the concept is great and give an end gamer something to use their grinding on - it has housing - lots of dungeons - you can change your skill bonuses in towns and pay a few hundred silver - they have a appearance  tab so that you can look like you are wearing something different than you questing gear - they have few actual game bugs outside of the dungeons and creature pathing that crop up in beta testing. They do offer you to test on the preview server if you like. They are always sending out content updates, new zones fishing, appearance, new mounts and factions, the legendary weapons, lots of stuff was introduced since I started. etc. etc.

LOTRO is a decent game and I have even got messages from a dev on the forums so they do seem to care but I don't know if these rad issues are going to change the game in another year into just another wow - which I personally NEVER saw it as and spoke against ppl saying.

Having left wow I didnt want to go to another just like it and with the boards here that whined it was just like wow - I had to talk myself into trying it. See, you can't always believe what you read on the net but in this case I thought that ppl interested in games wouldn't lie to me, surely they would talk about a good game in a good way - there goes that idea.

The game was not and is not at this point a wow clone but with tiered gear they are following the tiered gear pattern and I'm not sure that they can stop now. Otherwise they still have things wow doesn't but as long as someone claims its a wow clone they may keep some ppl off it. To this I say - test it yourself and don't believe everything you read about something being like wow. Sometimes I think there are ppl that just like saying things are like wow so that they don't ever have to leave it - they believe they have the original lol

They may test the game for 10 levels and see - oh this game has skills you click - oh this game has buffs and debuffs - oh someone just passed me on a mount - oh this game has quests - look ma it's a wow clone! .... Anyone that plays these games to the max level can assure you whether something is a wow clone or not... not the person that trials it and sees 1% of the content.

What they don't recognize is that the items they notice from wow are things that are what I call "warm and cuddly gui features". If a game uses WASD it's not because they are copying - it's because they want you to be comfortable with what you have learned and feel like you can play the game easily. This is the same thing that windows does in their programs.You expect the "File" menu to have options to save and open files in your programs. Is every program a clone because of this or just trying to make a standard for you for ease of use.

You should not have to relearn every part of a new mmo - sharing some common functions especially that you experience at lower levels keep you from running off screaming wahhhh this game is too hard - why didn't they just make it like wow, we understood that!

How is that for irony...

For anyone that thinks LOTRO is a wow clone, look up fellowship maneuver and tell me where that exists in wow. Don't get jealous either, yes It's fun as heck and you can't have it.

Definitely a visually appealing game. My biggest gripes with it, as I'm sure many share, is character models were weak and combat was SLOWWWWWWWWWWWW (hyperbole intended). Models I could deal with, combat I could not.

Originally posted by rmk70

Definitely a visually appealing game. My biggest gripes with it, as I'm sure many share, is character models were weak and combat was SLOWWWWWWWWWWWW (hyperbole intended). Models I could deal with, combat I could not.

Check the expac notes for Mirkwood, they are revamping the combat because of the slowness. I am not sure what and how they are doing it but details are posted on Turbine's site

IMO, it is a poor mans WoW.  It is definitely a clone of WoW, but many MMOs are so that's not it's biggest downfall.  The thing that sticks out the most in my mind is that it is boring.  It is a classical theme-park, level based style MMORPG that doesn't have much new content to offer.  They have a player housing feature that interests me a lot, but all other features of the game do not interest me in the slightest.  I've been there and done that with WoW and I'm sick quest grinding. 

With that said, I feel LOTRO is more popular than you give it credit.  I think it gets a lot of attention on most major MMO sites.  I deem it a kiddie MMORPG though and don't find it very fulfilling for veteran MMO gamers.

Originally posted by Stellos

 I deem it a kiddie MMORPG though and don't find it very fulfilling for veteran MMO gamers.

Kiddie as compared to what? WoW? EQ/EQ2?