Losing interest already if it's third-person only but I'll keep my eye on GAs development.

What exactly is "persistent" about it? 10v10 (so far) instanced battles on large urban environments sounds like Frontlines: Fuel of War maps but with fewer players. But Frontlines is just "there" like any other shooter; the map ends, check your score, go to the next. Is there a "persistent war" going on behind the scenes like Tom Clancy's EndWar where eventually your Alliance/Agency's victories or losses will count towards something "bigger" than just a leaderboard?

I haven't been reading beta info because I'd rather discover it for real while playing, but:

Eregion is southeast of the Trollshaws, and the Trollshaws map does show a big "to Eregion" on it. Riding into Giant Valley, there's a path that dead-ends at a closed gate; Eregion lies beyond that.

Book 14 includes a swift travel from Rivendell to Mirobel in Eregion. Currently that is only a tiny instanced portion of the zone and I do not know if it will lead to the "real" Mirobel or not once the servers come back up or not.

I'm also told you can swim/walk down the Bruinen river in the Trollshaws, which flows into Eregion as well.

I'll be trying all three tomorrow. In fact I logged my lore-master at the gate in Giant Valley so I'll be ready to roll when the servers go live.

At the risk of shameless self-promotion, I wrote a somewhat more in-depth article of my Preview Night experience last week if that would provide any additional information for you...

I've only used a level 6 hireling so far, the first Preview Night. They control with their own hotbar. 6 standard controls to tell them to follow, stay, passive, active, etc. then the last (up to) 4 slots on the hotbar will be class-specific skills. You can manually have them cast spells or on active they'll do it when they think it needs to be done. The current cleric AI won't cast a heal spell until you dip below 75% HP, and then it only gets you back above 75%. If you want to get topped off, you'll have to manually tell it to cast, or use potions/wands of your own.

If you've played GW, they're controllable like Heroes, but their "builds" are pre-configured like Henchmen.

The AI is still being tweaked this month during a few more events before they go live next month.

They're only similar in the sense that both are designed for groups not soloing (DDO does have a solo difficulty on some quests, and in GW you have to work up to a specific build to solo certain zones or certain mobs) and both use towns as public lobbies while the actual adventure/quest/dungeon are all private instances for your group.

DDO is kinda a mix between normal Diku-MMORPG and console-ish action RPG with some Tomb Raider on the side. You have to make each swing, each dodge or block, and it's very fast-paced. (I guess you could consider the pace another similarity with GW.) Jumping, climbing, grabbing ledges, detecting and disarming traps (or using the traps against the mobs) all come into place here.

Most quests are dungeon crawls, though some are in pretty big outdoor areas with smaller dungeons located within them. There are several "wilderness landscapes" which would be similar to any world zone in GW.

Wait til Turbine puts the new trial out with the brand new starter area they released a few weeks ago and give it a shot then. Occasionally they run promotions to get DDO for $10/month too.

I play both DDO and GW but other than the technicalities of being instanced with public lobbies, they both are very very different games and each plays very differently from the other.

If you enjoy the dungeons in Eye of the North, and/or if you enjoyed dungeons/raids in normal MMO's you might like DDO. There's no travel times, everything is similar to "map travel" to get where you're going, but all the adventures take place in hand-crafted dungeons or zones kinda like EOTN.

Both games also offer a ton of customization. GW is all about how you put your skills, gear, and attributes together for a specific (or general) purpose. DDO is D&D so it's all about the levels, but like GW you can multi-class (up to 3 classes I think?) and there's a ton of customization available. A lot of DDO players get really into creating new builds, just like GW players do.

I'd thought the game's original soundtrack was available but Google isn't coming up with anything.

With a few updates, more music has been added to the game, and I wouldn't mind loading some of the better ones onto my ipod but the filenames don't give any clue to the actual song titles.

I don't suppose anyone has actually listed out the titles of the current soundtrack to each file have they?

I plan on doing just that, Bill! I think I've decided on Mortal Voyage. They just don't know it yet... :D

LOTRO does have a slower combat pace (ie. a slightly longer "combat round") than some other games, namely WoW which is one of the faster ones. AoC also has very fast rounds.

The other thing that throws people with LOTRO is that it will queue skills. If you're used the the WoW feeling of click a button and instantly see the animation, LOTRO will seem "off" to you. On the other hand, in WoW you have to wait for cooldowns or get a "action not ready" type warning, same as in many other games.

WAR also uses a slower combat pace, as well as skill queuing... just for comparison.

I mainly notice the slower pace in both LOTRO and WAR when solo, when I have time to pay attention to such things. In groups, the sensation of combat pace seems to speed up dramatically due to all the action and the inter-class synergies, so it's a non-issue for me then.

Ah, good points, and I'm sure my sentiments of community are tainted because I participate in our server's global LFF and OOC user channels. The normal channels are limited to your current zone, and places like the Lone Lands have always been fairly low population areas. But within GLFF and GOOC, players server-wide were very interested in things and promoting people to get involved and have a good time with things. That made the difference, aside from the silliness in Rivendell with all of us hanging out (and crashing the server, oops).

The event in that article (I was there too) was just all of us who gathered in Rivendell to countdown the final ring lore collections. Dancing, spell-casting, music-playing and aoe emoting galore, but the only "thing" that happened was a world broadcast telling us it was done.

After that, all those waiting to finish up Book 14 rode off to Mirobel. I rode there to take a peek (the Rivendell stables takes anyone level 50) but I'm not on Book 14 so I couldn't do anything else and we don't have the whole zone to explore until Moria launches anyway.

As for "not feeling like you were part of it" you absolutely were. 70,000 items at 5 per character, per day is a lot and we all appreciated everyone chipping in and participating in unlocking the new content even if everyone (myself included) doesn't get to utilize that new content immediately. So many quests and activities are centered around just you or at best, you and your small group, so it was great to have a single activity that everyone on the server (well, everyone above level 21) was able to participate in towards a greater goal. That type of thing can help build a sense of community on your server.

Has Turbine ever clarified how the books will continue?

Book 16, 17 and so forth? Or will MoM be Vol II, Book 1-6 when it launches?

#1: Steefel does not say he thinks LOTRO will overcome WoW. What he said was that WoW is the only MMO to date to achieve critical mass. MMO's are social games, and within the context of sociodynamics critical mass means sufficient momentum is achieved where it becomes self-sustaining and continues to grow based on that momentum. WoW has done this by slick marketing but mostly word-of-mouth. "Everyone" plays WoW, "everyone" has heard of WoW, it's the "in" thing. That's what Steefel is hoping for, that between the game itself, the movie marketing, etc. that LOTRO will gain its own critical mass for its own growth and success. At no point is Steefel laying out numbers or saying LOTRO will "beat" WoW, WAR, or anything else. He's just wanting it to gain a self-sustaining growth.

#2: Like it or not, the subscription model's days are probably numbered. That doesn't mean it's going to happen in the immediate future, and that also doesn't mean the only other alternative is the F2P+Item Mall model. 15 years ago I was paying hourly to play what became MMO's. In the present I'm paying monthly. 15 years in the future, I suspect I'll be paying on a different model.

Stuff like this is what I was referring to when I commented on Darren's thread about your tendencies to come to these forums and put up material in an intentionally provocative manner.

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Originally posted by Angelbound
I want to try playing a creep but I cannot stand playing evil sides partly because of the community the other reason is lore, usually there are evil quests which my tastes very much differ.

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What about the community? Back in WoW I primarily played Alliance, but trying the Horde it was pretty amazing how much more mature and helpful they were. That may have changed in the past couple years though since Horde is "cool" now. I see the same thing when I play my creep. There's a little bit of friendly freep vs. creep trash-talking but it's all in fun because most of the time we're fighting our kin-mates, then we'll all laugh about it later in kin chat.

As for "evil quests" I'd have to call the majority of quests we do in any MMO into question. We're supposed to be the "good guys" yet all we do is go around murdering everyone and everything in our path. Violence is the solution to every problem. Death and murder are the only form of justice. The creep quests are no different.

Here's a quote on PvMP from Jeffrey Steefel in an interview posted today on EuroGamer:

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Eurogamer: Is Monster Play the limit of what you're going to do with PVP, and playing the dark side?

Jeffrey Steefel: What you see in Monster Play is the tip of the iceberg. Now that we're moving across the Misty Mountains into the place where war is really happening in Middle-Earth, it opens up a lot of possibilities. One can imagine that by the time you get to Minas Tirith, you want battles to be happening there, and you don't want it to be an army of NPCs against a bunch of players, you want players to be able to battle against each other.

But, it's really important that players know that at the end of the day we believe that this is a world game, a PVE game, the best of its kind. We're not going to do anything to destroy that in any way. The story is always going to be predominant. But I think there's a way to weave the two together when we get to the more martial parts of middle earth. Also, the launch in Asia exposes us to a lot of players who really, really, really love Monster Play and want more of it.

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I can easily foresee opening some high-level zones for creeps, but not the Eriador zones we currently play in. That won't make sense for the timeline of the game within Eriador. But later on, after some expansions when the Fellowship is closer to Mordor and the armies of Sauron are marching through the areas in between Morder and Eriador... yeah, I can see creeps rolling along with them.

As for the "kiddies" thing, PvP in general seems to attract them. Look at AoC, for all the PvP hype, it never actually worked. The beta community was pretty cool overall in chat and in groups, but the moment the game went live all the PvP kids came in and turned the game (and its forums) into a very "XBL kiddies" experience. The point of WAR revolves around PvP (RvR whatever) and I'm concerned about that experience when it goes live as well. Darkfall and Earthrise each have TONS of features that sound attractive, but I get in the forums and the PvP/PK fanboys leave me with a very negative impression.

Congrats Bill and all of Sublime! That's friggin awesome!

I'm still terribly interested in doing PD. I think I've decided to take the plunge once Module 8 goes live. Now I'm just deciding between Sublime since you guys are on my home server, or jumping over to Argo for Mortal Voyage.

The channel commands are:

/joinchannel <channel>
/leavechannel <channel>
/listchannels

To talk into a user channel, use /# <text> where # is which channel number you want, shown to you by /listchannels

If GLFF is the only user channel you've joined, then it's /1 <text>

You can join up to 4 user channels.

Character slots could go either way. When DDO released the Monk class, they didn't give an extra slot. But I do recall reading a MoM interview where one of the devs mentioned something to the effect that it would suck if we got two new classes and no extra slots.

Also don't set yourself anonymous. There's little reason to these days, the spam filter catches most of the spam tells. I see (at least on my server) a LOT of people flat out won't invite anonymous people to their groups.

Also see if your server has a popular global LFF user channel you can join. My server has GLFF and I think several other servers use that same channel name. Try /joinchannel GLFF otherwise check your official server forums. Sometimes I get groups easier from GLFF since people not in my current zone might see it and want to help. Don't skip the normal LFF either, since the majority of players don't read forums and therefore may not know about popular user channels.

A lot of us wish they would, but sadly I don't see it happening.

I'm still ticked that WAR isn't offering a lifetime either. But then EA is behind it all...