I think those were all in the closed. Definitely titles.

I've been running the game for about 30 minutes and I withdraw all my optimistic predictions about it drawing a large part players away from WoW. It's only going to draw in players new to MMOs in general, but the WoW population will remain largely untouched.

This game doesn't hold a candle to WoW, and it is below City of Heroes in quality as well. Several observations:

1) Character creation is no more versatile than WoW.
2) The "inertia effect" when pressing A and D keys is unforgiveable. Someone during the design phase thought it was cool ? The only way to escape it is to zoom into first-person view, which, just like WoW, lacks a first-person view of one's hands and weapon.
3) Why is the staff sticking out of my character's back ?
4) The game's visuals are generic and lack an identity.
5) The UI is a poorly implemented attempt to ape WoW UI. Monkey see, monkey fail.
6) Character attack animations suck. There's no other way of putting it.
7) The whole point behind WoW's spells "charging" and then "shooting off" is to create an illusory lack of "downtime" for the most often used spells. The ones which have a long downtime are executed instantly, without charging.

LOTRO starts off a spell by "charging", fires it off, and then also has a cooldown time ! This kind of design approach signifies a thorough lack of understanding on the part of the game designers. It is also a perfect little summary of what went wrong with their attempts to imitate features of a superior game without bothering to understand why. My desire to see what else the subpar brains at Turbine have to offer is waning by the minute.

Yeah I guess I'm a snob. But I don't reject everything - I think C&C 3 is a great game, for instance. It took me a lot less than 30 minutes to see that. That's why it's lying on my table right now. But I do think LOTRO is crap.

re: the A D thing. That's not what I meant. I mean when you pan the view, rotate your character left and right, it doesn't stop immediately. It's wobbly.

By the way, the game doesn't run anywhere as smoothly as WoW on my 2.8 P4 core duo, 1gb, ATI 850XT . Maybe what you meant is "WoW ran ok on systems that were below stellar when it came out, and this game does the same, only in 2007".

I was pretty excited about the music implementation - an original idea it seems - but it seems to be pretty broken so far. When they fix it, I hope they don't introduce scriptable music, because that will result in something akin to a bunch of people walking around with cellphone ringtones on a loop. In-game music playing should actually take real skill IMO. No cheating.

P.S. Another thing about this game - they rip off WoW, but you can't kill chickens ? For shame.

Figured I jump in here since played game for over a month.

First open beta build right now is basically the same as the last closed beta build. There was a small patch between open and closed beta but not much difference.

As for some other points.

1) Character creation is no more versatile than WoW.

Going to call you out on your first point. There are more options in this game then WoW but it certainly is not SWG or City of Heros. You can change head, hair style, facial hair (for some races), eyes, eyebrows, mouth, details (depends on race but a few options of stuff like scars or frekles per race), eye color, hair color, skin color, and body type (depending on race again on what you can do with this but basically fat/skin to muscular). You also get to pick your origin for your race and it will influence your color options and your starting title. Nothing earth shattering here but certainly more then WoW.

2) The "inertia effect" when pressing A and D keys is unforgiveable. Someone during the design phase thought it was cool ? The only way to escape it is to zoom into first-person view, which, just like WoW, lacks a first-person view of one's hands and weapon.

What are you talking about "inertia effect"? Game movement seems fine for me.

3) Why is the staff sticking out of my character's back ?

Guessing you are talking about graphica error with stuff poking through cloaks? Yeah is a bug and hope they will fix with the month of beta left.

4) The game's visuals are generic and lack an identity.

I can play the game on Ultra High but because of some Vista driver issues that I am still hope to get sorted out soon I usually play on Medium to High. With those settings game looks decent to me and I like the art direction. This is certainly a matter of taste and while I like the visuals I do not think they are as stylised as WoW.

5) The UI is a poorly implemented attempt to ape WoW UI. Monkey see, monkey fail.

I think the UI is a lot better then WoW but that is because I hate using add-ons in WoW and despise the fact WoW was missing what I though of as basica functionality like the ability to drag arround my UI elements. This game supports add-ons and about every element in the game can be repositioned something that can not be done in WoW. Ctrl-\ I believe is the command to lock and unlock the UI which is sort of cool. Other then that the UI is similiar to every other MMORPG out there which is good in that it is familiar to players but nothing revolutionary here either.
6) Character attack animations suck. There's no other way of putting it.

You are low level so skill animations are not always the best but this again is matter of taste as I am fine with the animations of all my different guys. I am guessing you are a lore master based on your staff comment though and will say they were one of my least favorite for animations of guys I played and I played them all but Minstrel.

7) The whole point behind WoW's spells "charging" and then "shooting off" is to create an illusory lack of "downtime" for the most often used spells. The ones which have a long downtime are executed instantly, without charging.

Not sure what or if you are complaining about here but lets talk about skills in LOTRO for a moment.

Almost all skills are instant to use. There are a few with induction times but not many. Once you use a skill the animation has to play out. So some skills may fire off instantly but have a delay till when they really take effect. A good example of this is gaurdian bash skill. You hit the hot key for the skill and your guy goes into the animation of the skill and if stuned while in mid animation my skill would not work. Other skills are basically instant in that the animation is so fast it is nearly impossible to interupt them. Then there are skills with induction times. Lore Masters and Hunters are good examples of these for things like summoning a pet, gust of wind drawing blank on real name), and some hunter shots. These are more like your classic casting skills/spells in other games where there is a casting bar on your screen and you can not move arround while it is going on, can get interrupted, and I believe if I am remebering right have your progress set back when hit while in middle of using the skill.

Most skills are on a realatively short timer. The burglar seems to have the most on longer timers of 1 minute or more but these are that way for balance reasons. Obviously your class will dictate the sort of skills you have and the different mix of casting types.

Lore Masters to me are one of my least favorites. I really wanted to like them as the skill set seems great on paper but it did not suit my play style. A lore master has a pet to control (pet AI and pathing needs a bit of work), needs to melee with his staff and use his melee based skills, has basically ranged spells (although in the game not really called spells but that is splitting hairs), has to use corwd control skills, and off heal.

As for the music system what is broken about it? I played some 'music' just the other day and it worked fine. Well if I could actually figure out a song it would be a lot better but hey I have looks and brains so should not complain about my lack of musical talent.

My big complaint about open beta right now is that resources are really hard to come by. This will be a lot worse durring release and it is because there are too few nodes for the number of people. Not sure how they fix it without flooding the area but I think it needs some looking in to.

Also some issue with this game and Vista64 but not sure if it is Nvidia drivers or this game that is the reason behind the trouble.

Finally they been tweaking with the economy in last couple patches and things still seem a little tight. So far I can afford all my skills that I need to get but really do not have much more then that and I walk most places instead of using the horse system as the prices are a bit high for my income.

maladen and karmajay have presented thoughtful replies, and even though they didn't get some of the things I was complaining about, I read every last word of them. After all, I spent less than an hour with the game thus far, and I welcome any chance to be pointed at things that I may have overlooked or misinterpreted.

I have to admit though ender, that I read your reply diagonally, because you can't separate your opinion of a person from your opinion on their thoughts. Also, you've got the worst case of "assumptinitis" I've seen in some time. Putting a smiley face at the end of something like that doesn't make it any better. Which is why I largely avoid using them.

Any idea of the actual 'hit' truly depends on the client side animation? Now that I have a more 'manly machine' to play on, I can max out the settings with (so far) no 'video lag'. However in days past I was always annoyed when my inexpensive video card had a negative impact on my in-game abilities.

I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to, as it's never bothered me. I saw this post on the LOTRO boards, though:

By the way, there is a check box under "settings" that enables First Person Rendering. Turning this on allows you to see your hand and weapons when in first-person mode.

Nevermind I am getting my games mixed up... Vanguard has this feature. You are right it is annoying and maybe they will add the hands and weapon.

I have self edited my post.

Sometimes all we are left with is our sarcasm, " , and our

Please specify where I did the bashing, because I feel I was being even-handed.

I responded to his post earlier point by point but it was modded. My definition of a troll is: someone who posts derogatory or otherwise inflammatory messages about sensitive topics in an established online community such as an online discussion forum to bait users into responding.

"LOTRO is Crap" is clearly both derogatory and inflammatory.

Certis I think you are making this whole thing into MUCH more than it is. There is no hostility here, at least as far as I am concerned. If I made a derogatory comment about a game and then gave my reasons for this I would expect no less of a response. You can all call me an insensitive prick if you want and guess what... it's OK cause we are all adults here and we can take someone having an alternate point of view. You can't honestly expect people not to respond to a hostile inflammatory remark in-kind.

Hi all. New to the site and love it!

I should preface my opinions by saying I don't have a lot of experience with MMOs, so you can view me as a relative newbie (I have played City of Heroes for almost three years, but it's my only experience with MMOs). I've been looking forward to this game since I heard about it because I'm a big fan of the books and the movies and the chance to actually be a part of that world goes beyond awesome for me. My intention was also to take my time and not worry about leveling at all but rather try to enjoy and absorb everything around me.

I love the atmosphere of the game. From the opening "stories" for your characters to the graphics, to the stories implemented within your quests. I created three characters and enjoyed the little stories for each upon entering the game. It took me a bit to understand how much larger the world actually was than what I'm used to (I didn't grasp right away that "northwest of here" could mean *miles* NW of here in-game). Some of the quests were vaguely worded and that seemed to be intentional so I took it in that spirit making discovery of what I was looking for part of the fun (I ended up having to turn off the OOC channel since so much of the chat was questions and answers concerning the where and how tos of the quests). Upon entering The Shire for the first time, I was awestruck (and felt like a total dork for my reaction) at seeing the hobbits and the little hobbit houses. It was beautiful. Of course, I made it my own personal quest to find Bag End, which I did, and had a fan girl moment upon seeing it for the first time. It was great.

Of the three characters I created, I played my Elf Minstrel the most (I got her up to level 11 by doing quests). I loved the fact that several of her powers were implemented by pulling out a lute and playing it! I laughed with delight the first time I saw that. I eventually ended up buying a lute in the game and experimented with playing it during some down times. While messing around, sort of attempting to create a song, another guy came by and pulled his lute out and we sort of started this jam session, which was just amazing to me. We ended up making friends and doing some quests together.

The quests themselves were interesting. I liked that fact that things didn't always seem to be what you expected them to be once you arrived at your destination. Sometimes it required that you pay attention to your surroundings. I liked that. It sounded like some people might have been frustrated by some of those quests though, based solely on some of the conversation I saw in the chat channels, so my opinion might be a minority on that.

One quest that did frustrate me required that you kill this named boss character. He was a spawn and there was down time between his spawns, so when I arrived at the location there were tons of people camping to get him (this was Saturday night and the area was pretty crowded anyway). I hung around for a bit, but it was obvious I wasn't going to get him any time soon (I don't even know if there's any sort of social agreement about that kind of thing"”there didn't seem to be, it seemed to be a sort of free-for-all "first to see him and hit him wins" kind of thing) so I left and came back early Sunday morning where I turned out to be alone there and got him right away. I know that thing is probably normal for MMOs but I found it extremely frustrating that I couldn't continue the story for that quest until the area was less crowded.

Deeds are great. I like that there are so many goals within each area of the world, giving you the ability to earn extra titles and traits, etc.

As is probably obvious, my first impressions were mostly positive. I'm leaving a lot out. They've definitely hooked me so I'm in for the foreseeable future.

If anyone would like to say "Hi" in-game and do some quests together (I tend to love to duo) I'm on the "Landover" (sorry, I may have that spelling wrong, I'm at work and can't double-check) server and my main's name is Voladura.

Welcome Gina Since you're on our server, feel free to join our guild. Just check the Landroval Server Roll Call thread.

Amen, I kind of ignored them in the beta, but I'm really into them now. The deeds are an awesome feature. I just got a racial skill, head butt, through doing deeds.

As for named bosses being camped, you can usually ask the people hanging around the spawn point and they will invite you into a group so that the group can all get the named boss at once.

I'm a devoted WoW player, but I'm enjoying this as a diversion when I need a break from grinding rep in Azeroth. I must admit, I wasn't very impressed with the starting introduction area, but once I made it to the Shire the quests really started to get interesting. Sure, they're basically variations on the standard kill/Fed Ex quests we've done a thousand times, but they all have a very distinctive Hobbit angle. The visuals are also more impressive than Archet; the Shire is quite beautiful at sunrise and sunset. I'm not sure about the other starting areas, but they have Hobbit-land nailed.

If you really want to get a feel for the game, definitely play past the Introduction. It's too bad that part isn't better, because I'm afraid a lot of people who get in the open beta are going to drop it after only playing for an hour or so.

I'm not sure if I get what you're asking, so this is based on what I'm assuming your asking about.

Turbine likes to end beta's with a bang. Don't expect anything to carry over. Expect your character to die many horrific deaths... at launch, they will most likely be deleted.

Since I only played it for roughly 30 minutes to an hour, I can't really say much about it. What had me uninstalling it from my machine within a day of installation was it's lagginess, though that might have been fixed by now (2.26GHz P4, 512MB RAM, GF4Ti, cable net). I was running everything on the lowest settings, and could barely move. There weren't any animations that looked even half-way ok at that rate. Wolves looked to be taking 3-4 steps per second more than they needed to to cover the ground toward me. The instanced beginner area ran smooth though. If they do a free trial later on, I might try it again just to see if it'll run better.

Players crowding around named mobs happen in every game, though it's gotten a little better since most MMO's use instanced areas now, for at least some of the game. I remember back in Asheron's Call we actually had a Line mod where you messaged the person with the list, and your name was automatically added to the line. Right before each respawn the mod would say the full list, so everyone would know who's turn it was. When someone looted the mob, they were removed from it. When the person with the list left, they would PM the list to another person with the mod, and it would pick up from there.

Thankfully I haven't really hit on anything in WoW that was as bad as that... nothing killed the atmosphere more than "going into a dungeon crawling with bad guys to kill big bad MobA who frightens all those around him," finding said dungeon pretty empty of anything but players, and seeing 150 people making MobA their bitch every 5 minutes.

Sweet. So I could potentially get bitched at for drive-by healing/buffing?