On the 27th I went to our local gamestop as its the only gamestore in my area and I like the way they run pre-orders. Kinda like a layaway. Unfortunatly I dont have the $80 to drop on the CE right away or I would be canceling all of my pre-orders with them and do my shopping exclusevly online.

As I said I went in on the 27th to pre-order the CE. Did all the crap that goes with it and when I asked where my codes for the open beta, early access ect where the guy had no clue what I was talking about. He looked around and didnt find anything and said "I'm sure I will get them sometime this week, stop by monday". I thought ok, no biggy so long as I get the codes. So I stop in yesterday and still, no codes. He called someone in the corprate office and guess what..........they have no more codes to hand out! While they are talking I hear the guy say "Hey if you got extra codes I need them, this customer ordered the CE". To make a long story/rant short, he wrote down an open beta code for me and told me to come back tomorrow (which is now today) to get the other codes since they where being sent in an email. Cool, they are trying to make things right.........or so I thought. When I got home yesterday and put in the Open beta code guess what I got? Invalid code. Tried it again, same thing.

I am a verry unhappy customer and I partially blame how Mythic handled this but most of the blame goes on Gamestop. I am in limbo on if I am still going to get the CE or cancel it and just pre-order a regular copy from amazon or something similar. If I had the money I would happily try to find a CE online. Needless to say whatever I do, gamestop will not be getting anymore of my money after this little fiasco. I plan on going in today, getting the other codes (just incase they work) and giving them a piece of my mind, even if I dont cancel my CE there.

I have made many, many purchases from gamestop. Many thousands of dollars probably with everything totaled but this one, bad incident is enough to make me find somewhere else to spend my money.  Unfortunatly this really put a damper on how much I am looking forward to WAR and the saddest part is its really not Mythics fault.

Look for druids to drop off alot unless they change some of the nerfs in 2.4   Also keep in mind kill tradeing. Not saying balance is great, its anything but. There are mitigating factors though.

I dont play the tabletop but and I have asked our local tcg/comic/minature store why they dont carry Warhammer and his response had to do with the cost of it. So if this is true (and someone that plays the tabletop could confirm) look at this CE. Your getting a mini which if there are only 60k made could be concidered a rare or uncommon mini? How much would one of thoes cost to buy as a single? Now add an artbook and a graphic novel. I bet thoes 3 alone make up the assumed 30$ extra the CE will be.

Everyone complaining about the IG items stop, please just stop. In no game have thoes ever been a large advantage. If you really think items, cosmetic or otherwise that will only effect you for the first few levels really gives me an advantage over you in a game..............you really REALLY need to question yourself as a gamer. I'm sorry but feeling someone else has "paid" there way to an advantage for the first couple levels is ludacris.

Its a great CE and it is the first I will have ever ordered.

Not suprising really. Actually somewhat smart. Let AoC release, let WoTLK release. Let people see one is worse than expected and the other the same thing thoes players have been fed for a long time and then release your game.

I as others are am alittle disapointed but understand it completely. My biggest disapointment will be if we wait all this time, being told how great the game is for it to be a flop. I dont think thats the case but lets face it, its always a possibility.

Also in a cynical way I see this as an PR ploy. "We are delayed again but look! Pre-order our CE and get into open beta!" Verry tempting to others who had not planned on getting the CE but now just may. Lets not forget that even if this isnt a mythic move, it smells of EA all over it.

Ah well, it will come out eventually.

It hasnt changed. At most they have added a few more sets to make you think you look diffrent.

At GDC there was some mild talk of how EA has handled there games in the past and if I remember correctly they are making changes to direct the company to a brighter future. Now granted you can say your going to do this and that to make your product better, but you need to prove it.\

I wanted to post again here however on the topic of WoW and its possible exodus again. Never underestimate the power of friends and community. Like I said in my last post, I found a group of old guild mates from AC and while I still dont like WoW as a game I am subscribed for the time being. I log on, chat and do the occational quest with my friends. While I am not a fan of the game, I'm having fun just spending time with old friends. Thats what WAR needs. A solid community with friends reuniting from other games. You can actually overlook faults of people or games if your with friends. As an example my friends and I where killing our way to an escort quest when a lone player runs by us, starts the quest and says "Stole Motherf@(*s" Now normally I would just shake my head, remember why I hate that community and log off............. but god we had alot of fun making fun of this guy. Not to him but just between us.

I guess what I'm saying is when the game releases MAKE FRIENDS. Help someone out. Find what looks like a good item and you cant use it? Give it to someone who can. Ask someone if they need help. All of these things can get you a new friend which makes a game that much more fun!

Regardless of how WAR ends up turning out......be it a smash hit or just a niche game to thoes of us that love it if you have friend, and the community is pretty decent its going to be well worth our time.

When will some of you learn that numbers dont always mean best. I saw someone a while back use the mcdonalds analogy and it really fits lol. Just because millions are served, doesnt mean its the best hamburger. Just because WoW has millions of subscribers doesnt mean its the best. Just because Blizzard made it doesnt mean its best. The most popular? Yea. Best? Matter of opinion.

Frankly I dont want to see any other games get as large as WoW. WIth large groups comes the WoW community which is the biggest sesspool of idiots in the world. Sure there are some nice people that play, but for ever 1 nice person you find you will run into 10 others that are complete idiots.

Its funny that most of the WoW killer threads are started by WoW players. Like angel said, we dont give a crap either way. So long as the game we choose to play is a good one.

I will give you an idea though. I resubscribed to WoW a couple days ago. Now most of you know I HATE WoW but I found out nearly all of my old friends from AC where playing. I figured wth, a months subscription to say hi to them is worth it. So after a couple days, pointing them to WAR podcasts ect most of them are going to join me in WAR. Whats funny is the ones that have no intention of leaving WoW not only harassed me for talking about WAR but ended up leaving the guild because I was friends with the guild leader/officers.

Long story short....Some will try something new, some still cant see past what they are currently playing. At least these last couple days in WoW reminded me of why I hope most of the WoW community stays where they are. Immature and childish is not something I want to see in WAR.  I like a community that can disagree, even flame eachother and laugh about it the next min. I so dont want to see "Your mom" jokes and "pwnzorz j00" names. If thats the type of community WAR ends up being it will ruin the game regardless of how good of a game it can be.

Originally posted by puma713

What gets me is - why would you create a mature game, one rated so because of blood and gore, one targeted at an older audience - and not target the gameplay medium to a more mature audience?

Free2play and item malls are not the devices of mature mmorpg'ers, especially ones in the western mmo market.  Not in my experience, anyway.  If you want to attract more players and limit the amount of children and scumbags logging in new free accounts every few minutes, make it pay to play. 

True, there are still instances of the aforementioned stereotypes in pay to play games, but it so much more limited.

Overall requim has some potential. It has some bugs to fix, some lag to take care of and some class balancing (this is just my guess but all games have balance issues)  and some things here and there and it could be one of the better f2p games available right now. Grinding from 1-10 seemed fastest to me but once I hit 10 on my 3rd toon I started doing some of the new quests that pop up and its starting to get better.

After 20 min I wasnt paying attention to chat. I was more paying attention to how crappy the game is right now. From its preformance, to controlls, to skills, to grind......bah. This game has potential but it has ALOT of work. After roughly 3 and a half hours of play I'm level 9 and a half and you cant even really select your class untill level 10?!  Also things like a mob 2-3 levels lower than me kicking my ass? I am going to finish getting to 10 tonight and get a few levels of whatever class I take and see if things seem to get alittle better. There is a list of about 20 bugs I have written down and when I am not even to the actual classes yet thats not good. I will go through the bug reports on the forums and post what hasnt been said after I end my play session tonight.

I would love a good horror MMO and this has potential but if it doesnt get much better after you get a class, I will probably just post the bugs I found, post some suggestions and move on. Right now I would suggest not spending your time with this game unelss your actually playing it to test.

I was going to DL from there site but 30 hrs? screw that. Currently down to 3 min till starting fileplanet but if it shows 20+ hours for another f2p game I'm going to have to pass. This game looks fun but I'm just not that patient when I have p2p games to play to :P

Though for a chance to play what looks to be a decent horror game I may put up with the DL :)

Originally posted by Stytch

Ok so assassins at range would be a better way to look at it.  I just read the archers being weak thing on a website so I decided to ask here since you two seem to know wtf you're talking about.

Gah, I want more information so I can pick my class and start getting hyped about it.  Skill trees ftw :(

One thing I want to point out. While you may be able to somewhat plan out your skills.......its not exactly a tree but a mastery system there are finer points to classes that you wont plan out if you believe the devs, and I do. My brain is failing what its called, but there will be options you change on the fly out of combat to fit the situation. That is another great point to WAR for me. While there is going to be set masteries people will go for, there seems to be many many more options to further customize your character that can change whenever.

Now let me say, everyones opinions and flames are welcome on this thread. Its just my thoughts up till now in LOTRO. I have been playing since about a month after release.

Polish. 7/10. Before book 12 I may have given it an 8/10 but with book 12 some bugs that wherent to terribly bad revealed themself in a verry bad way. The anti exploit mechanic is running overtime and ruining some area's for ranged combat, and a raid. Another reason the 7/10 is I have been playing Turbine games since the old, old AC days and I know there track reccord with bugs. All of that said, This is one of the more polished games out right now.

Quests. 5/10. I give this a 5/10 because its basicly the same quests as most other MMO's. The ideas behind some of the shire quests, had they added more of thoes, would have driven the score up alot. Great ideas on quests in a beginner area and verry, verry rarely anywhere else isnt going to get you a high score.

Quest story lines/epic book story arcs. 10/10. Turbine is verry good at writing story arcs. Even if the quest itself is dull, usually the lore/storyline that goes with it is either witty, funny, or downright just a good read. Book 11 to me is one of the best story arcs implimented with a pretty good quest series I have ever seen in an MMO.

Graphics. 10/10. My explination for this is simple. On high end computers you can have amazing graphics. On low end computers you can still play most of the game. 24 man raids and large PvMP raids are out. I play this on my laptop with duel 1.4's 1 gig of ram and vista 32 bit. I can do any 6 and 12 man instances with no extras turned on and verry little lag, I get patches of it but its verry playable. Any game that can have nice graphics for thoes with great gear and still playable for us poor people will get good scores from me.

Armor artwork. 6/10. Lets get one thing straight. I do not want, or expect WoWesq armor. I understand and even like the more realistic armors but since I mainly play medium armor characters (and a LM so light armor) I feel I got the shaft. Some things are nice looking but verrrrrry few unless your in heavy armor. The new cosmetic clothes they added are not a solution IMO. The artwork on alot of the medium and light armors are just bad.

Monster artwork. 7/10. They look good, there just arent a whole lot of variations. Some angmarim armor makes you wish they would add thoes looks to the cosmetic armors. Just because I'm the good guy doesnt mean I should have to wear clown hats.

Now for the meat and potatoes.

Gameplay. 7/10. Its simple but it works. Its kind of slow except when you get to some end game instances.

Character customization. 5/10. I'm not talking how the characters look. I'm talking about the fact that every class plays the same. The virtues where a great idea but dont give a large enough variaty to make your burg feel any diffrent than the next. The devs have said thats a focus for book 13 though, so this score may jump by 3-4 points if they do things well enough. This leads me to.....

Class balance. 7/10. The classes are pretty well balanced. The problem I have is for a PvE game they sure do change skill mechanics alittle to much. Overall they do a good job though. Tanks tank, healers heal, burgs debuff, LM are CC, champs are AoE dps, hunters single target dps, and captains buff. The great thing is thats not all they do. Each class has alittle secondary ability they are decent, but not great at and they can all deal dps just some alot more than others....but its all doable.

Loot 5/10. Its not a loot based game BUT.....rares are to rare. For example LM's get non combat pets. Now I understand the idea behind making things rare so not everyone can have everything without some work however I am a grinder. I grind mobs for drops and I enjoy it. However I have been lvl 50 since shortly after evendim was introduced and I can count the amount of purples I have found on one hand. I am yet to find a teal world drop. I know some people have much better luck than I do but the drop rate is just to low. Another reason loot gets such a low score is frankly there is no need to have teal armor if you cant get it. Purples are almost as good and the stat bonuses dont make a large diffrence. Also everyone shoots for pretty much the same armor.  Not enough variations on looks and stats.

Overall game. 8/10. This overall is a good game. It offers something for everyone. Casual friendly yet offers some for raiders, some for grinders and some for PvMP. It doesnt do any one thing extreemly well but does everything fairly well.

If you havent tried LOTRO yet, but have been thinking about it I would reccomend it. In this time of MMO woes its good enough to keep your attention for 4-6 months if your a "hardcore" player and it will keep your attention for a long time if your casual.

I hoped this helped and if you have any questions feel free to ask. I have no loyalty to any game and this is my honest review of LOTRO. It does some things well and has much room to improve on other things.

Maybe I am missing something but the more transparent Turbine is, wouldnt that make the players MORE suprised at what the updates give?

Anywho, Turbine has a gem on there hands with LOTRO. Unfortunatly streamlineing it seems to include makeing sure untrained monkies can play it. Its a good game, with a great storyline and the books are awesome (only half way through book 12 but book 11 was one of the best story arc quests I have ever seen in an MMO). Book 13 is sposed to add class customization so we will see if it changes enough that every hunter, guardian, captain, champion, loremaster, and minstrel arent the same.

Originally posted by DuraheLL

Just the amount of people coming here to bach WoW shows it's success!

If you haven't tried WoW, do it, everyone must have tried it at least. It's one of the most polished and simple MMORPG's you probably ever will play.

And in all seriousness, can people please come to their sences and stop being so negative everywhere. And can all fanboys stop being so freneticly annoying and deluded (at many times) and just calm down so we can have more fun forums instead of constantly beating old dead horses trying to figure out which game beats which when it all just comes down to opinions and personal preferences.

You don't NEED to come here to BASH WoW (because every sane person on this planet knows the game is good)

-AND-

You don't NEED to come here to DEFEND WoW (because of the same reason as previously stated)

I play LOTRO 3 hrs a day 4 days a week. Its enough for me then I play cabal (best f2p mmo out right now though thats not saying alot) or my console games. Unfortunatly for the MMO market right now its just flat dead for alot of us. Maybe its because alot of us came from games that where made for people who didnt mind taking time to level and get attached to our characters. My first MMO was Asheron's Call and way back in the day leveling took FOREVER. The thing it pulled off no other MMO I have played was the ability to not make you feel left out. It didnt matter than after a year I was still not even half way to max level....the story arcs got everyone involved.

WoW is a good game to alot of people but to say only a sane person thinks so is insane.

Originally posted by DeaconX

 

Originally posted by Shogoo

 LoTR 2 Hmmm sounds like AC 2 LOL Surprised the Masses still play the game as it should be named Lord of the Spammers.... 

It's true it was really bad but since the last update to report spammers, I have seen ZERO SPAMMING going on.  I never even get spam mails in game for gold anymore.  I'm lovin it

 

NO MORE SPAM in LOTRO  so good job Turbine.  [If anyone has seen spam, just report it... but I really have not so... not sure if there is at all anymore.]

Gold sellers and Power leveler spammers are actually a sign that a game is doing well. Not that I like them :D

Originally posted by Raztor

Nice, taking jabs at competitors. Really shows how professional they are... oh wait. Not even SOE go that low.

Its some comedy to pass the time. Most of the people on this board trash WoW so its an easy target to get the targeted audiance for this post to laugh.

If you look really really hard (actually just read the questions and awnsers) she takes jabs at EVERYONE includeing some Mythic staff. Its humor.......something it seems you need alot more of in your life.

Actually I dont think you need humor, you need a reading comprehension class, just like I need spelling classes.

Lol thanks for this wrenn. This is some great stuff :)

To awnser the casual vs non challanging content and which I liked, there where somewhat challanging areas you just had to find them. Thoes places are where I spent most of my time.  I dont like to raid so I usually dont do the rift, helgerod or CD. CD is a mini raid basiclly with the length of it but they took my favorite area away which was imlad balchorth.

To the other poster I understand that it made alot of people happy I just needed to vent and this seemed like the logical place to do it. You cant vent on the official forums without 100 flames. Thats why I mentioned alot will disagree with me, and I will disagree with them. I

To both of you I apriciate the replies but like I said I just needed to vent alittle. If book 12 was as bad to me as I made it sound I would have hit the cancel button right then and there. I guess I'm just hoping as time goes on they add a challanging area or 2 for soloers. I'm not talking packing in a bunch of elites or even sigs but make me pay attention to whats going on.

Originally posted by baso80

Stop releasing vids in that quality. Pls just stop. I can't wait for warhammer but the quality in those like pre-alpha type of vids just makes me sad.

 

Q2 is coming up fast and the only nice vids I've seen are from gamesdays. I can't w8 until NDA is lifted so beta testers can post and say something that makes me feel good about the visuals.

 

 

I somewhat understand your concerns but I would gladly pay for an MMO with 16 bit graphics if it got the gameplay right. Graphics arent everything.