I have been a LotRO player since open beta. I was fairly enthusiastic about the game, as my love for Tolkien was unrivaled as far as my favorite authors came and went in my book, and I immediately took upon the journey that Turbine was offering players. A month after the game launched I was sold; I subscribed and immediately began to immerse myself in the enjoyable world of LotRO. I had tried other MMOs in the past, but none of them had held my interest enough to subscribe to them, so when I say that I was enjoying the game, you'll understand that it comes from the word of someone that has very picky tastes. Needless to say, LotRO was my "first" true MMO experience.
A year later that experience was still proving to be amazing. Turbine was Johnny on the spot with the updates and the service was without complaints. These were the days when it was absolutely rare for the servers to come down for no reason at all--so much a rarity that in December 2007, when such an instance did happen, Turbine offered everyone in-game buff items to appease some rather unruly players who were none too happy about the unexpected downtime. This was the sort of quality you could have expected from Turbine staff, and it was what eventually sold me to become a Lifetime Subscriber. Dropping $200 large seemed like a small price for what I thought was the MMO of my dreams.
However, all that is gold does not glitter. When Turbine announced their Mines of Moria expansion pack, people were excited--it was the first true testament that Turbine was succeeding with their MMO. But that elation soon turned into worry when details began to emerge from the expansion pack. It would appear that many changes were coming as a result of being "necessary" in the operation of an MMO. Such "necessary" additions was the World of Warcraft Warlock class known as the Rune-Keeper, which is something that is not, in any way, supported in the lore, and is even stated as much by Jeffrey Steefel, producer of LotRO, who claims that the class "must exist."
When I look back on that, however, those sort of announcements pale in comparison to the biggest offenses perpetrated by Turbine. When Mines of Moria came out, I still bought it, hopeful that my fears were just the product of the forum hate machine, but they unfortunately proved true. Areas that were promised to come with the expansion pack were left out, and much of the content was still rather sloppy. And so I wrote a critique about my experience on the forums about it. It was completely civil, it was completely legitimate, and it was my honest opinion. It was also immediately censored and deleted.
Much of what happens next is detailed on a blog entry I wrote about the ordeal and how I lost much of my faith in Turbine. You can read that here if you wish:
Link. However, it was not the final nail in the coffin for me. The final nail in the coffin for me, even after being permanently banned off their forums simply because I didn't agree with a Turbine developer, was my hope that the Book 7 update would be the redeemer of quality in what was shaping up to be a three-ring circus show of sideshows and shams.
Unfortunately no such redeeming feat happened with that update. Instead, as a player who only plays a Hunter, I was subjected to some of the worst updates I had ever experienced in my playing time of LotRO. Now the servers were always stressed, or they were coming down unexpectedly, and Turbine was performing rollbacks without any sort of compensation--people were losing rare items and money and all submitted tickets to GMs resulted in, "Sorry, we can't do that," and any further pursuing of the issue resulted in an insult to injury, or suggesting to seek another game if they were unhappy with this one. And so, updates later, nothing has still changed, and the game is still in a terrible state--nothing like it was in the golden days of when it first started out.
And now Turbine even plans to push out ANOTHER expansion pack by the end of this year before all of the content already within the game, most of which isn't refined or fine-tuned, is fixed, leaving many of their overhaul changes with bandaids over them in hope that players will be patient enough to wait for the next shiny object to distract their attention from the rust that is gathering on what was once a polished and beautiful game. Now I regret that I ever spent $200 on a lifetime membership on a game whose developers don't seem interested in wanting to fix or admit to their mistakes, but rather are on the unfortunate path that many MMOs face when trying to establish their longevity--unfortunately they are taking the wrong path into believing if they can turn most aspects into the game to draw in the WoW subscribers, then that would then establish MMO longevity for LotRO. Unfortunately if WoW players want WoW in their game, they'll just stick to WoW. All us LotROers ever wanted was for LotRO to stay as LotRO. But it seems our wishes fall on deaf ears.
I felt it was necessary to share my story with others, considering that Turbine has been gearing up a lot of media buzz about how "well" they are doing. I really wish they were, but that is simply not the truth at all, and hopefully my story has at least enlightened you with what goes on with what they would call "a few minor instances with players." Unfortunately I just happen to fall under that category, and so have a lot of other players in recent times too.