General Discussion

Turbine launched LotR with 2 unique billing offers under their 'founders' program.  You could either get a 9.99 monthly membership or pay 200 bucks for a lifetime membership. Now here was the rub, you could only secure these options within the first month of launch. After that, you can only get a monthly rate of 14.99.

Getting a starting monthly rate of 9.99 is great! I mean, you get to try it out at a reduced rate, and if you like it, you get that great rate for as long as you play it. If you hate it, you can cancel and no skin off your nose. Not a bad offer!

What aboutthe lifetime membership...200 bucks up front for a game you've never played. Now Turbine did allow players who pre-odered into open Beta, a short time before the launch. However, they did cap those players' toons at lvl 15, limiting the amount of the game they could try.

Those players could continue with that toon after launch, but most have made their selection between the 9.99 monthly rate or the lifetime rate when they set up their account. Now, you'd have to play the game for more then 2 years at the 9.99 rate to make the 199.00 lifetime rate a value.

Does this seem like Turbine trying to get their hands on as much of your cash as possible before you can discover you hate the game and bail on it? We are seeing ore and more threads posted here about people who have already grow bored of the game. It would seriously suck if some of them forked over 200 bucks.

So, is a lifetime membership on a new game a good idea? Is it shady to make a player choose before he/she can even be sure if they're play it long enough to be a worthwhile investment? How many of you did the lifetime membership who were NOT in CLOSED beta? Is this a genious trend or russian roulette with your wallet?

/sound off

During beta, I thought LotRO was mediocre at best.  I never understood the hype for the game.  So to me, that lifetime membership option seemed like a scam.

If you like the game it's a good deal.  If you don't like the game it's a bad deal.  There is not absolute value in this.

Its like purchasing a car you've never seen, its your own fault if it ends up a trash heap.

Scam!

people who bought LotR lifetimes ---->

I never said a single bad word about the game in the LotR forums, either.  I feel I should have warned people, but oh well!

I didn't think LoTRO was good enough to do the $200 deal, but I thought the $9.99 a month was great. It evens out with the avg $15/month game at around 14 months, so its a good deal if you stay with it that long at least.

it mainly depends if you play a game longer than 15 months or not in the case of lotr, or if you are the kind of person who contiueously switches between MMOs.

for instance swapping every other month between guildwars and lotr would not be that bad if you're slightly hard core.  get halfway through the next GW expansion switch to lotr, enjoy the new instances, finish up the GW expansion, enjoy lotr's new content, enjoy the end game expansion of GW, lotr's content, start GW's next expansion.  it works out perfectly if you are the raider type of person.

While I don't see it as a straight "scam" per say, I really do think its a bad deal. Very bad deal. You lose your option of saying 'nuff said' and bail out of the game. And that's pretty much the only vote that counts that we get as MMO players.

I wouldnt call it a scam.  It's a great deal for people who actually like the game.  If WoW had this option I would probably jump on it.  I get sick of wow once in a while and take a month or 2 off, then come back and have fun.  It would be nice if more MMOs had this option in the future.  I definitely wouldnt pay the lifetime fee untill I knew for a fact I would like to play this game for a long time (even if it is on and off).  Though, if more MMOs did use this method I'm sure there would be many garbage games actually scamming people.