Did anyone see this!?!?!

[Leo_Dan]

The real facts are that they have gone free to pay and have not needed to open up any new servers. And other than that first week or so there havent even been any queues on any of the original servers. So that tells me that there are about as many people playing now as there were before F2P was introduced. And most of the long term 'newbies' are actually lifetime account holders (the original F2P playerbase) just rolling multiple alts so they can multibox content solo.

So what about the servers they opened with F2P (Crickhollow, Dwarrowdelf, Imladris, Riddermark)? If the game was hurting in terms of population, why would Turbine keep all of the old Codemasters servers? Why not just consolidate now that they have control over every LOTRO server?

But until we get into at least Rohan and maybe even into gondor and into the meat of the story this game will continue to be a disgrace to the IP it is representing.

The IP for this game is not the movies. It's the books. So when you consider what Turbine has built upon this foundation, it is actually really interesting.

Personally, I like the stuff that Turbine does. We all know the LotR story. Turbine gets to flesh out all the other stuff in Middle Earth. If they were going strictly on events in the books then this game would have been done 2 years ago. Instead, we get Angmar, Evendim, Forochel, Mirkwood, and other places only really mentioned once or twice during the War of the Ring. Forochel was created based on 3 lines in the appendix of Return of the King.

This game was never meant to be WoW-killer. It was made for people who enjoyed the books to experience aspects of Middle Earth that other games and stories have not yet done.