LotRO's Update 5: Armies of Isengard storms servers today

@Mr Angry

Agreed with everything you said.

I truly believe Turbine has their sights set on other games. It's plainly obvious development suffers now in LoTRO. After all the pissing off founding members they did, me included; and after all the feat dragging on content to develop the Middle Earth-Mart to release what they did was a slap in the face.

Bye and no buy.

@Mr Angry

You can be both a business and a virtual world to explore.

@Contains Moderate Peril

Absolutely agree, one look at this

http://forums.lotro.com/showthread.php?435258-U5-Known-Issues-list

...just makes me wonder who is in control over at Turbine...

@Contains Moderate Peril

The worst part is that they took this build off of the public test server way too early, preventing people from duplicating and logging any weird glitches they noticed.

I think that everyone knows (regardless of what the official Turbine line is) that these dungeons should have been included with the Rise of Isengard expansion. I don't think that rushing this release has anything to do with SWTOR, I think that Turbine realized that if they took the time to fix all the bugs in the new instances, they wouldn't be able to get this content out until after the holidays, meaning that an expansion released in 2011 wouldn't have all its content on the live servers until 2012. Pretty hard to justify.

@Contains Moderate Peril

Yeah I was going to take the week before SWTOR and try to level from 65-75 in Lotro just to get caught up with the book. Well the very first town when you enter Dunland bugged out on me. I was trying to finish the solo instance where you get ready for some kind of festival and when I clicked Travel Now, endless loop. I am sure I could have got a GM to let me in, but that pretty much killed it for me. I instead put together a 2,000 pc. puzzle...

@SwarlesBarkley

Odd, I didn't run across a single bug going from 65 to 75th doing solo play. I hit the new cap on November 1st, sort of took longer then many. Anyhow I've not finished everything, currently I am in the midst of being a prisoner of white wizard.

I haven't done all aspects of the release by any means, though I have done very quest to the point of where I am at currently. I do hear there are some serious bugs with the dragon raid or at least on my server I read a lot of issues on GLLF.

I'd have finished quest line by now if I hadn't gotten side tracked leveling a loremaster. A class that I could never get into and had one sitting at 22nd for the past few years. Anyhow my son was playing his and after watching it I got curious about the higher levels. Needless to say I've leveled mine now 10 times and really am finding it a fun class. Who knew.

@Ardra Diva

I reserve the right to bitch and moan about any and every game. I don't quite share the same pessimism here, but the bug list for this cluster is depressing. I was excited to fire up lotro and have a go at the new instances, but I might decide to wait until they've got some more polish. At least playing through the epic should eat a couple hours.

@Nerves

I'm sure you do

@Ardra Diva

No, that's not the case at all. These are not bugs, these are known issues that they decided not to fix prior to going live. Here is a list of just the raid stuff. These were reported in testing, they chose not to address them.

•Raid - The Tower of Orthanc - Boss - Saruman - Destroying the fifth ring does not halt Saruman's Elemental Shift.
•Raid - The Tower of Orthanc - Event Tracking Panel - Default position of panel covers view of Target's vitals.
•Raid - Tower of Orthanc - Bukot's vitals will remain in the player's UI after defeating him.
•Raid - Tower of Orthanc - Challenge Mode - Quest Log is not displaying Challenge rewards.
•Raid - Tower of Orthanc - Challenge quests: Conductivity, Acid Wash, and Pinnacle of Orthanc not re-bestowing to players after wipe.
•Raid - Tower of Orthanc - Event Tracking UI - The Event Tracker UIs are tracking specific effects but are failing to generate a tooltip which more clearly explains what they are tracking
•Raid - Tower of Orthanc - Giant Bosses - Crisiant and Usgarren – Are appearing as giants before they should, then they shrink, and then they become giants again.
•Raid - Tower of Orthanc - Laboratory - Exit door doesn't stay open after the final encounter is defeated, which may require players to backtrack in order to advance in the instance.
•Raid - Tower of Orthanc - Lightning Boss - Kalbak does not display escort-style vitals.
•Raid - Tower of Orthanc - Saruman - Environmental effects are not cleared after the fifth successfully completed Ring sequence.
•Raid - Tower of Orthanc - Saruman Encounter - Frost Ring's tactical skill: Ring of Frost tooltip missing information.
•Raid - Tower of Orthanc - Saruman Encounter - Shadow Ring's skill: Ring of Shadow missing information in the tooltip.
•Raid - Tower of Orthanc - Skill cooldowns are not resetting properly for the fight with Kalbak.

Some people want to play this game and really enjoy it.

Now let's tackle the SWTOR thing. I think you are really confusing the argument here, this release was timed by WB to jump the gun on SWTOR. There is one thing that will definitely cause people to leave a MMO, while people might go from game to game, it's a lot more telling that releasing unfinished content is causing the real problem for fans of this game and leaving a sour taste.

Turbine really got this backwards, and it's driven by the commercial reality of what they need to do with their cash shop. This again was a decision made by management and something we all have to endure. That's not to say we have to like it, or remain silent while we get poor service, we are customers after all.

This argument isn't about LOTRO vs SWTOR in terms of what players chose to play. It's about Turbine being so concerned with this issue, that they put out shitty product and think it's OK to get around to doing stuff 'later'.

When you mention hardcore fans, I'm sure they are thrilled about the long list of known issues on a game they love. It is a good MMO, but quality is rapidly slipping now, and as a community we have to raise objections to allow Turbine that they need to do a better job.

I hope you don't mind me addressing your post directly, but I think you've taken an extreme position that doesn't reflect the problems people have highlighted. This release is unfinished, and hardcore fan or not, that's what you have to endure until they get around to fixing it up, and given the timeframe of the Pit of Iron, that's not looking good for us as customers.

@Ardra Diva Aaah yes because the game is objectively interesting, and the Turbine is incapable of putting out boring, repetitive or buggy content. Yes, that must be it. Why didn't I see it before?

Honestly, I think the game is wonderful if you're just starting to explore the world. However, when f2p came around (after a year of no new content) Turbine promised more resources towards Lotro, more frequent content updates, etc. None of which happened. This is a game that I loved, that I felt a real community with, meeting people irl in my kinship, etc. I think my opinion on the game is just as valid as others.

@Leandra You're not :) I came back recently and having loads of fun. I'll be playing this one when I take breaks from SWToR :)

@Leandra

You're most definitely not alone, just in the wrong corner of the web to see it.

@Leandra

I am concerned about bugs and known issues that need to be fixed and I'm currently reading through the updated list of them. That said I am currently happy with the over all state of LotRo. :)