LOTR Open Beta Starts Today
 

Doesn't sound much like my cup of tea, but a few people from my long time guild are playing, so I thought I'd at least download it and give it a whirl. Those who pre-ordered got it March 30th, everyone else gets it today.

Runs from today till April 24th.

Dola.

I'm getting stable 768k/s download speeds right now. So stay off my lawn till I'm done downloading. :)

3.79 GB download, damn! MAYBE I'll get in there tonight.

EDIT: Are you using the Downloader from them or the Bittorrent file?

The downloader. I am amazed at the speed I'm getting (already 27% done after about 20-30 minutes).

I'll try that then. The Bittorrent seems to fluctuate between 5 kB/s and 8 kB/s....bastards probably all have their upload speed limited. Don't they know how this is supposed to work?

Damn, the download moves FAST. I am getting between 800k/s and 1m/s.

Tellin' ya. I wanna freakin' know how many tubes they hooked up to that bastard.

Tubes with frickin' laser beams.

Very first impressions......eh. Not impressed with the graphics. Is there a way to lower the font size of the names above everyone's head? I know I can get rid of them, but I just want to lower the damn font size of just about everything in this game so far.

And it's very crowded right now.

No one else playing?

Haven't got too much into the crafting yet. The game kind of feels somewhat like EQ2. Of course, it's pretty crowded right now. Not quite sold on the game yet.

I've been playing since closed beta, i've had a lot of fun with the game

Agreed on all counts.

Also been playing since closed beta and I liked the game enough to pre-order. My server (Meneldor) is crowded but not too bad. Still a few bugged quests and balance issues but nothing too bad. I'll be splitting time between this and EQ2.

One of things I like is the Deeds system. Getting traits and other things for doing certain things (that aren't quests) is nice. It would be nice if I didn't have to pay everytime I wanted to "equip" the new trait I got, though....

Another thing that I REALLY like is the music playing. It really adds atmosphere to game to be wandering a village or town and hear a player or two playing their instruments. I love anything that adds atmosphere to an MMORPG (since they are so incredibly static). I can imagine heading to town to train or sell off junk looted off mobs and running into a 3 or 4 man/girl group of musicians playing songs (giving a concert, so to speak).

Of course, I can also imagine walking around town and hearing 40 people randomly playing badly...

Hmm is it really a Open beta.. if you gotta pre-order to download it?

:)

You don't have to pre-order.

Unless I'm missing something, you have to pre-order.

You're missing something. I did not pre-order.

How then? I looked into this wen the thread was started, and couldn't find a way to join open beta without pre-ordering?

Go to http://www.lotro.com and click on the "Join the World Tour" stuff. You will be asked for email address and they will send you an open beta key and info on downloading the file.

Thanks for posting...

Heh. I woulda been one of the ones giving a concert. I play a mean lute.

Aestus & Aedrik on Brandywine, if anyone cares to play there. It's one of the busier servers (which sucks).

My early impressions, after a weekend of casual play...eh. As I expected, it's not really my cup of tea, and I can see it getting old rapidly. I'm somewhat enjoying it, though it might be because it's new. They came up with a few fresh ideas, but in all honesty, it really seems like there's nothing we haven't all seen a million times now.

My wife and I are going to give it a whirl. It seems fun so far. This will be her first game of this sort, so she has the steep learning curve to overcome right now.