LotRO Volume III: Book 1 releases today

me wants more free weekends :((

This Volume III: Book 1 update contains about 3 hours worth of questing to do. About 2.5 hours of that time is spent riding around to various locations you've seen before to talk to NPCs you've seen before.

There's one new buggy skirmish.

There is 1 new combat skill "upgrade" for each class, which for the most part are unexciting, and in the most extreme cases are not upgrades at all.

The existing content for epic quests in Volume I: Books 3-15 has been made completable solo or in small groups, with about half a dozen caveats and bugs.

The remaning changes in this update are bug fixes that took 3 months to get out (while still leaving half of the known issues from 3 months ago unresolved), or minor revisions to a handful of crafting recipes.

In short, if you don't have an active subscription, I wouldn't recommend resubscribing just to experience this update. Wait another 3 or 4 months, and maybe by then there will be a full day's worth of new content for you to experience.

The PvP is still borked. Warg's ability to conjunction and stun a freep for about 10 seconds without any way to counter the stun - Turbine didn't even bother to fix.
Even though this problem was strongly criticized by the PvP player base and is well known.

Creeps continue for the most part to dominate an imbalanced PvP environment, where fights have become more based on chance & numbers - rather than skill.

Meanwhile there is a continued emphasis on PvE like play called "skirmishes" which at best is low-level arcade fun that doesn't require an MMO tagline - and one could purchase many other computer games that have far more sophisticated arcade like games than what LOTRO is turning into.

It seems this game has lost a bit of its vision and focus. Maybe because DDO is also taking up management resources and company time in parallel. But the PvP aspect is in decline and the PvE is growing stale with nothing really that new except arcade like play.

The CEO of this company needs a kick in the rear or a kick out the door.

As for the WoW icons - Massively has them set up to be the default icon for users. I really with they would come up with something different - even their green dot would be better in my opinion.

Yes, I think it's really unfair to promote WoW that way. I'm a D&D Online player, but having played most good MMOs on the market, would put LotrO above WoW anytime.

LotrO is incredible when it comes to atmosphere. If only it was free to play to some extent, I would play it regularly along with DDO. Trust me, WoW players, that it's really better - I was a loyal WoW player once too.

I love how in LotrO there are those vast, stunningly beautiful environments, and then you suddenly meet someone in the wild. Outstanding experience, in WoW it feels more bland and without that special spirit to me.

And no, I'm not a fan of Lord of the Rings lore. But this game is just outstanding, once I tried, I knew I'd love to be able to play it. Unfortunately, I won't afford playing 2 MMOs in the near future... I'm too casual for LotrO :(.

But if you haven't played it, I encourage you honestly. Best open world MMO in my opinion, Turbine are genius minds.