Open Beta --

[Aeron Serabien]

At 11:55 last night my screen blacked out and the message: "You have been booted from the world" appeared on my screen.

I guess my beta access is done. What an ignominious way to end a beta!

[Sollo]

That IS retarded. You didn't violate the ToS or anything, did you? As of 11pm last night I was still in with 5 days remaining. That means Friday is my last day unless they moved things up. Either way I won't have a lot of play time left.

Will be interesting to see if mine says that when I get home tonight.

I wonder ... Saturday morning I submitted a bug report using the /bug command. Maybe they extended me because of the assistance?

[Quintare]

aeron said:

At 11:55 last night my screen blacked out and the message: "You have been booted from the world" appeared on my screen.

I guess my beta access is done. What an ignominious way to end a beta!

Certainly not a positive reflection on their customer service skills.

[Aeron Serabien]

Definitely not the nicest way to end our relationship. You'd think they could've said, "thank you for playing in our world tour! To continue playing LOTRO, please purchase a retail game."

But noooooo, I got booted.

My only crime was not buying the game.

Sollo, I'm wondering if you have a pre-order key somehow instead of a world tour key? Or maybe it was just an 11:55pm problem and when I get home tonight it will magically work again for 5 days.

Either way, not such a great experience there. :-)

[Sollo]

I pre-ordered a copy. That's probably it then. I just got a notice Friday that my copy was shipped. I've been playing on the key they sent me after pre-ordering. I wasn't actually selected for the closed beta so this was the only way I could play before release.

[Sollo]

I'm still in. They made some changes to allow for levels higher than 15. Most noticible is the skill trainers will train skills much higher than 15 now. The game also seemed deserted. They have the servers closed off this morning so they can make final preparations for the grand opening.

[Aeron Serabien]

The game has already been released. Hence I got booted and that's why the level cap is lifted. Release date was 4/24 and they have a grace period for pre-order customers until the 29th or 30th I think.

[Sollo]

You had the Beguine Guild name, right? I don't believe you will be able to play that account any more since it wasn't on a pre-order key. I'm thinking I should try to snatch up that name later when I'm in game again.

[Aeron Serabien]

I didn't get the name, I just bought a charter, but never used it. Problem is the charter says that Kinships will be deleted if they have less than 6 members. That's why I never used it. Should've mailed it to you tho along with everything else in my inventory, sorry.

[Tremor]

I started the first Beguine in LOTR. I almost picked the game up today, but decided against it for now.

[Sollo]

I picked up a charter yesterday but need 6 of us to log in the same day to activate it.

From the looks of it, we may have a hard time getting 2, let alone 6.

[ronin]

I have a level 38 guardian on the euro servers, but it's starting to get really slow. The solo quests more or less stopped around level 36. Oh well, back to grinding.

[Sollo]

That's one of the things that's really annoying about the game. They designed it to be a team play game and a great many quests require 3 or more people. I absolutely HATE standing around for an hour spamming the chat practically begging someone to help with a quest. Plus there doesn't seem to be a way to res someone so if you die, you drop out of the group.

Something I stumbled across early this week; they have horses that you can buy for your character. But apparent it is so difficult to control a horse that you can't possibly operate one until you have reached level 35. Totally retarded. By the time you reach level 35 you no longer have a need for a horse because you can get maps to map-travel to all the key parts of the world.

Another thing that they did is to create professions that have elements that require cooperation from other players. For example, if you become a weaponsmith so that you can make bows, you can't harvist your own wood. No NPC vendor sells the wood anywhere. The only way that you can get it is through a woodsman player. But they won't likely sell you their wood because they need it to advance their woodworking skills.

lotro is becoming fairly lame for those like me that want to just do their own thing most of the time. I'm about to shelf it and return to the GW world. At least they know how to make a functional user interface.

[Tremor]

Unless they removed it...
You can buy different types of wood from the Woodcutters shops. I did it in beta. I ordered wood from the woodmill place just outside of Combe.
You have to get a purchase order from them and fill it out i think, then give them the purchase order. Your order will take some time to fill, but none the less it gets filled. I think my wait was 6 in game hours.

[Fate]

6 in game hours? geesh not only grind but now timed grind. Wow. (not WoW).

[Sollo]

Oh, that's what those are for. That's a retarded way to do it considering that everything else in the game shows me what I'm going to buy then I can buy them one at a time, or hold the shift key down and buy a whole stack.

This is another example of how they are making this game harder than it needs to be.

In a past game I played, bulk order deeds were orders that the VENDOR gave so that the PLAYER could fill the deed and sell material to the vendor. It was for a very large quantity that would take hours or even days to fill and the player would get something good in return for the effort. For example, the NPC vendor tells the player that he needs 5,000 boards and the lumberjack player would have to go out and cut enough trees to get the lumber, then process the wood to get boards to apply toward the deed. Once completed, the player would return to the NCP and sell the wood for the agreed upon price, which would usually include a good item as well as gold.