I just got an email with an offer to buy Mines of Moria for $9.99 including one month free. I have played LOTRO for maybe one day before and never really got into the game. Would I be able to live without the next expansion? How is the game for grouping? Will I have trouble as a casual player?

Thanks for the help!

 I was thinking Fallen Earth, might give that a look. Does it have a trial?

I have quit MMO's for about 3 months now and looking to get back. I will reconsider playing any game as long as I am able to advance some by playing for a couple of hours on weekends or so. I have quite a beefy computer so I think it can handle any game. I have played:

Vanguard, Age of Conan, Everquest II, World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons Online and a few more.

I do not mind paying a subscription as long as the game is good. Suggestions?

What version of CCC are you using? What is your CPU temperature under load?

I'd go for a Core i5 system.

You can get a HD4850, which can play any single player games on maxed out settings (except for Crysis), for under $100. Why use an IGP unless you want to save power?

Upgrade that to 2GB RAM and she'll run things much smoother. Next upgrade would be a whole new system, haha!

My main problem with EQ1 is that it's first-person, EQ2 isn't.

Originally posted by noquarter

 

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Originally posted by maskedweasel

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Originally posted by Jallen02

 

lol Start with the cheapest one and if you could, give me a couple links so I can look into it. I won't be able to afford the biggest, most expensive one i already know

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Ideally you would say "I don't want to spend more then 800 dollars" and then we would come back with a build around that amount.  If you say start with the cheapest, I can build you a PC that would run LOTRO for 350 dollars, but you wouldn't be happy with it.

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Heh we have an old machine sitting around with a 6600gt in it that runs lotro and doesn't even have to be at the lowest settings, that game engine can scale surprisingly far. :)

You don't necessarily need the raptor in drags build though - hard to sell me on fast HD's when working on a budget, but it is nice if you want it. You could put 20 bucks more into the high capacity drive though for a 640gb or so.

For daily use Raptors are better performance than a 2-disk RAID0 setup and since this system wasn't really budget, thought I'd throw that in. I guess you could, but that was the first HD I found that was quite cheap, didn't really research much.

AMD Phenom II 955 Black Edition $245
DFI LP 790FXB-M3H5 $170
OCZ Special Ops Urban Elite 4GB $69
2x Sapphire HD4770 $220
OCZ ModXStream Pro 700W $100
Western Digital Raptor 74GB $80
Seagate Barracuda 250GB $48
Antec Three Hundred $55

There you go, roughly $1000.

This should run any MMORPG out there and nearly all single player games (except for Crysis at a 2560x1600 resolution and 16xAA).

Originally posted by HaoleBoy31

Hmm well I am not sure then what you should do because as you said prices are double that of newegg.com but you can still use them as a reference for items you may want because they still give great detail on the items they sell. On the other hand sorry mate was just trying to help you out there & I hope you find something more useful for yourself.

Good Luck,

HaoleBoy

I appreciate you actually posting though, thanks!

What I find to be a problem is that most games have servers in the USA and Europe, sometimes Australia. I live in South America, which is pretty freaking far from any of those, which dooms me to a bare minimum of 250ms. If there were more servers, the general lag would be reduced.

Originally posted by HaoleBoy31

You should take a look at www.NewEgg.com for the parts you want because they give good detail & specks, and then search the web for the lowest prices on what you want. I most times will use newegg.com to find out about the items that most interest me, then I turn around & do a search for them on Shopping.Yahoo.com, and PriceWatch.com

As for what type of CPU really just depends on you & what you want

 

Good Luck

I guess that'd work great if I lived in the USA or Canada. I live in Brazil and so we don't have such a big variety of components and the price is around double that of Neweggs, that's why I'm going to buy the computer in Paraguay. Their taxes are lower and so I end up paying only a bit more than they get the products for in the USA, but the variety is lacking. I have an idea of what I'd want if I were to buy this in the US, but since I am not, I have to decide from what I have.

Originally posted by Nizur

I decided to get the full game last night. I left Isle of Dawn and went to Qalia. There were quite a few people running around and lfg (on the Seradon server), so it wasn't that hard to get a small group going. I'm still only level 10, so that might change later on in the game, but for now I'm not too worried about finding groups.

The hardest part IMO is to get people that are on the same step as you on the quest lines. Hunter's League is easy, but some other lines are harder.

Originally posted by chiefarchon

With regards regions etc in EQII, what is the world like? Is it instanced or is it continuous like Warcraft and LoTRO?

The world has a lot of instances, which is something people get angry about. The only part I hate about it is Qeynos and Freeport where you have to zone a lot. Besides that, SOE made an effort and on RoK and TSO they seemed to reduce instancing drastically. The EQ2 crafting system is pretty fun and somewhat of a challenge, although I do think Vanguard's is more challenging. EQ2 also has a lot of depth, which I think you might enjoy.

Originally posted by noquarter

Are you looking at that P5E Deluxe for the Crossfire? If you are dropping the extra $100 on the mobo so you can put an extra video card in in the future then you should get a beefier PSU now as well so you don't have to upgrade it when you do so.

Yes, I was actually considering a Corsair 550W, but I'd have to buy that here in Brazil, since the store doesn't sell any better, well know PSU's. The Corsair 550W is going for roughly $120. I also calculated it and I would need around 440W total including the second HD4770 GPU in Crossfire.

This week I'm finally going to buy my new computer and I need help. I only have $600 to spend, I'll post the items/prices for the items I consider interesting on the store I'm buying them at in Paraguay.

CPU's
Intel
Dual Core E5300 $88
Core 2 Duo E8400 $180
Core 2 Duo E8500 $212
AMD
Athlon 64 x2 7750 $77
Phenom 8750 $143
Phenom 9950 $171
 
GPU's
nVidia
XFX 9800GTX+ 512mb $159
XFX GTS 250 512mb $158
XFX GTX 260 896mb $258
ATI
XFX HD4770 512mb $123
Sapphire HD4870 512mb $209
2x XFX HD4770 512mb $246
 
Motherboards
AMD
ASROCK N68-S $50
XFX 8200 $89
Intel
Asus P5N73-AM $59
Asus P5QL-E $117
Asus P5E Deluxe $174
 
HDD
Sata II Seagate 500GB 7200RPM $63

Memory
2x DDR2 2GB 800Mhz OCZ Value Series $26 (each)
2x DDR2 2GB 800Mhz Kingston $28 (each)

PSU
Corsair 450W $80

My favorite combo so far is:
ATI HD4770 $123
Dual Core E5300 $88
Asus P5E Deluxe $174
2x 2gb 800mhz Kingston $28
HD 500GB Seagate $63
Corsair 450W $80

That'll leave me an extra $50 I can spend on an after-market CPU cooler.

Extra info:
I run on 1280x1024 resolution and I intend on overclocking the CPU. If there is any money left over I will most likely invest it on an after-market CPU cooler.

The closest to EQ2 crafting in the old days you can get is in Vanguard.This game has come a very long way since launch and I'd reccomend you to try it. It's now hard to come across a bug and it has enough content to keep you busy for months. Besides Vanguard, Age of Conan also improved and it now has lots of quests and no more level gaps. There is a big itemization update coming, which you might want to check out.

I say if you want PvP, go for AoC. If you want crafting, go for Vanguard.

Originally posted by chiefarchon

Originally posted by drag9999

I felt like you pretty much outlined Vanguard in your post. I assume you've tried that, why did you quit?

 

I tried vanguard very early on because of the detailed crafting that It spoke of before it was released (omongst other things), but then as many know hardly anything worked in the game.

 I also found that the monsters were pretty harsh from a very early stage, far harder than any other game that I had played, which made gathering very difficult indeed. This was part of the Early vanguard ethos that everything would be "hardcore", which was not something that I had wanted but I was willing to give it a try. I think that this policy might have changed when the game nearly went bust and was taken over by another company.

I tried it again later and found that there were still many faults.

I liked two things from vanguard, crafting and boats, but generally I don't think that the quality of the game was what I personally was looking for.

You should consider trying it again. Unless you are a skinner you have a place to harvest for any skill which is nearly or completely free of monsters. I leveled both Lumberjack and Reaping to 450 in a couple of days not getting killed once (at level 20-ish). Get the trial again and see for yourself on the isle, the game has come a long way. If you want me to I could give you directions as to where to go to train each harvesting skill. I'm on Xeth server and my guild is the Xeth Trading Company.

I can't see Phasing work anywhere, but in single player games. It just feels kinda awkward if you have something happen like someone above stated as an example. It would be nice to have a world where say, after a certain number of things are done you see it change physically, but for everyone, not for only one person.