Lord Of TheRings Online - My Experience by DowCow

I should first make one thing clear, and that is that I do not normally play Online Roleplaying Games. My usual pastime is First Person Shooters, and I've always kept my distance from the likes of Warcraft and its ilk as I have personal experience of seeing just how addictive they are. To be fair, I already spend similar amounts of time in-front of my computer as a Warcraft addict might.

I am a member of a clan, and although the main focus has always been first person shooters, the MMO Lord of The Rings Online, has recently attracted a fair few followers from within our ranks. It seems everytime I have joined Teamspeak lately, I have been listening to people chasing spiders and battling elf demons and although I protested initially that I wouldn't be playing it with them, curiosity eventually got the better of me. And so... I embarked on the quest to get it installed myself.

The game has been made free to download legally, and free to play too, with a few restrictions in place that the developers hope you will want to upgrade to a monthly subscription system to unlock. This means it can't hurt to try it for a while to see what the fuss is about, it won't cost anything and there is nothing to loose if one were to get bored after a few hours.

On visiting www.lotro.com and registering a new account, I downloaded a client which would download the rest of the game for me. I went for the high resolution version as my PC is a good spec and would not have any trouble running a game a few years old such as this one. High resolution textures tend to be quite large however, and this game turned out to be 10 Gigabytes in size.

In some areas, people in Britain can enjoy broadband speeds of upto 50Mbit/sec. At such a speed, 10 Gigabytes of data would take over half an hour to download at best. I live in the countryside a good few miles from the telephone exchange where such speeds wouldn't even be available to someone living right next door to the thing. This means I have less than 1/10th of the maximum speeds available today, and although it's still quick enough for most purposes, 10 Gigabytes of data didn't just download overnight like other large downloads do. It took a day or two in fact.

It was only after the download finished and I installed the game, that I came to entering my username and password for the account I created earlier. I received the following error message:

The Username and/or password is incorrect. Please try again. Username and password are case sensitive.

No worries I thought, I must have entered my password with caps-lock on or something when I registered. I applied to have my password changed. Then I did it again, and made sure I was using the right account name. It was absolutely futile... I had made no mistake in the first place in fact. It was only when searching the internet that I found out there were two different game clients available.

In Europe, there is a client by Codemasters, which connects to their servers and plays the European version of the game.

In America, there is a client by a company called Turbine. It connects to American servers, and plays their version of the game.

There are two different downloads, and the clients are not compatible with each others systems. No mention of this was made before downloading, or during the download. It was only when searching that references to the potential problem was found in forums. My word.... how could this have happened. Surely I must have done something rather stupid to have ended up with the wrong client?!

On speaking to my friends in Teamspeak though, it seemed I was not the only one.

To the Guys at lotro.com. YOU INEPT, USELESS BASTARDS. I won't be playing.