Wednesday, September 15, 2010

One Week In...

Well, it's been a week since the LotRO F2P Servers came up for the Headstart. Let's see what has happened in a week's time:
  • Servers came up.
  • New LotRO community site launched.
  • Community site had issues.
  • Servers nearly came to a crashing halt due to network problems.
  • Server queues were in the hundreds and thousands while network problems were addressed.
  • People complained because they didn't get their points immediately upon logging in.
  • People complained because they didn't realize they had to re-purchase the original content as non-subscribers.
  • People complained because items were disappearing from the new wardrobe and vault system. 
  • People complained about the way the new vault system looks.
  • People complained about the new Dynamic Layers.
  • People complained because they couldn't get into the community site to complain.
  • Veteran players lamented the introduction of "F2P Noobs" into LotRO.
  • New players lamented the rude comments and treatment by veteran players.

And now?

Most of the chaos and turmoil has settled down. Of course there still is some complaining about various issues, and every day there is a new "I have to pay for content as a Premium player?" thread in the forums, but overall things are smoothing out. The technical issues were addressed and now the servers are running much faster and with minimal queues in the evenings. New players are settling in and finding kins to join. Old players have been helping new folks out, giving them food, potions, gear, weapons, and advice to get them started. On Landroval, there have been several Welcome Concerts hosted, to the great delight of new players who had never seen the equivalent of an interactive arena rock concert in an MMO before. The Advice and OOC channels are hopping in the starter areas, as well as Lone-Lands and North Downs, since there's actually new folks in those areas again. The RPers are figuring out ways to work around the new Dynamic Layering system.

The only really bad day was Saturday, when a faulty network switch caused major lag spikes and client crashes on all the servers. The queues are something new that many folks are still getting used to, but they've been fairly short and even on Landroval, I've not had to wait longer than 5 minutes or so as a VIP.

I'm also really enjoying the new LotRO store. I ended up with 5000 Turbine Points due to being a 3-year Lifetimer beta-tester. I bought a few cosmetics, plus upgraded my Wardrobe and Shared Storage as high as they would go. I have to say that I'm really liking the LotRO store, so much so that I bought the 6900-Points bundle that was on sale over the weekend. I don't mind spending the money, considering that at this point I'm basically "freeloading" on their servers as a Lifetimer.

Overall the launch wasn't the smoothest I've seen, but it's certainly far from the worst as well. I've also met a LOT of new and returning players to the game over the past week.  If the amount of new players that we're seeing is indicative of the game's future, I'd say it's looking very bright indeed.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please note that comments are moderated to stop spam messages. It may take a while for your comment to show up on the post.