On April 24th, the Lord of the Rings Online officially launched. Everyone can go to their local retail stores and buy the game to play online. April 29th was the end of the 5 day extension for late preorders and now everyone playing has actually paid for the game. I bought mine at fry’s and so glad I knew I could get $10 off if I bought the preorder before. I had to ask for it or they wouldn’t have given it to me. I hate when that happens!
I felt it was a good time to go through my experiences I have had since my last posts. My friend and I started from the very beginning of open beta with new characters in a fellowship. I have to say the quests in bree and the shire are the best and doesn’t take a lot of running around. This is true especially for the bree area where the quests are in a small area and can get you to level 10 easily. The dwarfs quest with the gears take so long to run back and forth which really gets tiring just to get to level 10.
There are also some fun unknown quests to get titles like the pie-eating champion. For this title you need to get to the festival grounds in bree which can be seen on the map north of bree town. The contest can happen anytime in the day but never at night. I just waited at the table near Humbert Sandheaver until he started the contest. Then I just had to eat six pies before time ran out. There are couple of more deeds I didn’t know about mentioned in the PC gamer magazine TD posted about here.
I have my main minstrel character, johnsono, who plays on the elendilmir server. He’s mostly going to be a solo character like I was before in closed beta. Already have my first gold and going for my second gold. Already got my prospecting to the master level. My second character is a captain and It’s a fun character which I will level up in the months to come. The other characters on that server is a lore master, guardian and another minstrel to play with my friend. A minstrel and a guardian plays well together especially when they know what they are doing.
On one quest called, Rescue By The Moonlight, the minstrel and guardian team finished it with the minstrel sacrificing his life at the end for the guardian to finish the quest. The lore master and guardian failed miserably half way into the quest and still haven’t finished it. I probably could do a bit better with the lore master by practicing more with his skills. I usually let my bear do most of the fighting when I solo so in a group I have to change my strategy.
We also started a kinship to try things out. You must have 6 people in a kinship but they don’t have to be all 6 separate accounts which means you can add your alt characters. It’s a good way to talk to your friends without using /tell or forming a fellowship all the time. We also just bought some headsets to use the voice chatting option to coordinate attacks. Many times I wasn’t able to type fast enough before we were defeated or trying to tell the guardian to be careful of a mob nearby before going in.
For right now I am still having fun doing the quests I have already done in the past. My main character just got to level 18 so I’m in no rush. I have a full month of playing before I get billed first. I am planning to go with the $9.95 special founder price but if I make more money I might try the lifetime $199 price. No other MMO game has interested me except for guild wars just because there is no monthly payment for it. Maybe I’ll try that game in a year. I still like my offline games like command & conquer 3 which I just got. I am very competitive against the computer but not so much against other people.