Real complaint and questions for the development team

[TheSploidah]

I have been playing now of and on with my wife for years now LOTRO.

And we love it. There is nothing out there that comes even close to LOTRO.

But there is one major thing that has not been fixed for many years now.

Have you, the nice people of the development team, *ever* installed this game on a freshly installed Windows 10/11 machine?

My instincts says you probably have not.

Because if you would have, then you would have know that it is one big drama to get the game up and running on a freshly installed Windows 10/11 machine.

It starts all right after the installation..

The launcher launches (If you are lucky....) for the first time, but a soon as the player wants to change the resolution of the game it crashes with an error because its missing DirectX files.

Or its missing Visual Studio files, dot NET files or any other related newer versions of DirectX.

Now I am a PC user for a long time now so I can handle my own to eventually getting the game up and running for myself and my wife with all the stuff it needs to run. Still, this costs so much time figuring it all out.

But a normal PC user with not so much computer experience will go to your site, download the installer and expects a running game after installation. I actually expect that also from an commercial game here in the year 2023.

Could you please make a complete installer that includes all the program dependencies that makes the game run out of the box on a modern system like Windows 10 or Windows 11?

And if that isn't possible. Then by all means, please do your own players community a big favourite and provide on the Download section of the LOTRO site a list with file links to what the game needs to run.


Thank you for your time reading this.

Greetings from The Netherlands.

[WeirdJedi]

There has been several renditions in the past of how things should be downloaded. They tried offering redirects when you were downloading the game. It would try and detect if you had the right files and then load the page in your browser if you didn't. Unfortunately, there were a lot of false positives where people with absolutely no problems were being shown the page every time the game loaded, multiple times if you were missing more than one specific version. This happened with me for about... 3 weeks I think.

For awhile there, they offered links to the official Windows page... except people pointed out that Windows themselves no longer supported them: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/end-of-support. The very page that had all the files was pulled from their official website.

So the first thing the company did was officially discontinue support for specific Operating Systems which included - Windows XP https://forums.lotro.com/forums/show...for-Windows-XP and MacOS https://www.lotro.com/news/lotro-macos-deprecation-en.

The second thing that they started working on was their Launcher (9/16) https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1592604020 (29min - 31min). The thing is that there were a lot of things wrapped around it. So they decided to officially discontinue 32-bit: https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Upd...April_20,_2022.

It sounds like they are still working hard on it but has a few other systems like 2FA that is tied around the system: (1/20) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht8pSSSDugY (42min, 44min). Hopefully, we will get one of the systems done by this Spring.