Things LOTRO shines on:

When you ride from city to city, you can jump off at any time. Can’t jump off a bird in wow. This is so nice when leveling up your mining or heading to a quest in the middle of a flight path.

Max quests is 40 vs 25. I hate this in WoW because sometimes I want to be working on a few quest chains in several zones, then add the seasonal quests. I run out.

Graphics are different, sometimes better. Water looks good, but a river has to go uphill at the last second before becoming a waterfall. If you have a good video card the graphics are awesome. There are huge fields of tall grass and flowers that sway in the breeze, looks good on the tv computer.

There are really cool combo moves we haven’t quite figured out yet. So different classes working together can end up with a combo move coming up where if you all hit the same color, it does something awesome like summon an Ent to stomp your enemy.

The pace of some of the instances is fast and exciting.

WoW is better:

Plugins!!!! The biggest strength of WoW is the vast library of plugins available. If you use the curse gaming client you can download, search, manage all of your plugins in a snap. Things like healbot, bagnon, dpsmeter just aren’t available for LORTO yet. I haven’t studied the API, but so far I don’t think you can do much for LORTO besides skin the UI.

standing in a fire burns you in WoW

Bag space! UGH. I am so used to bagnon in WoW, having one giant bag pop up that I can’t stand the individual bags on LORTO. I don’t know yet if you can upgrade the bag slot numbers. If you can’t it is going to really suck long term.

Even after they opened free players up, the population of WoW is so vast that everything works better. The autodungeon finder, auction house, battlegrounds. Life is a lot easier because  there are always people online outside your guild/kinship to accomplish what you need at the moment.

Autorun works with a mouse button (easily fixed by mapping in LOTRO)

Dragging items from bag to bag, or bag to vendor is awkward, slow, jerky in LORTO

For a 10GB download, the background music sucks. WoW music gets turned off on my machine, but once in a while i flip it back on cause i love running in to Stormwind and looking around. They picked their majestic music well. LORTO music is more accurate for the theme of the game. It sounds like a wandering band of minstrels with old instruments. Others may love this, just personal opinion.

No signs to be found in LORTO, I can’t find a trainer anywhere. Well that is how it started. Once you learn the interface it is easy to find things. I like being able to ask a guard in WoW and have my destination show up red on the map, or use the tool built in to the minimap. Questhelper handicapped my ability to go find things myself, it is a time saver that I would love to see in Lorto.

The map sort of kind of tells you an area. Sometimes it is right. I don’t like the icons they use to explain different points of interest because they aren’t very obvious.

The button interface is just awful. This weird grey wicker looking thing. The buttons make very little sense so far. I’l figure it out as I go.

It seems you have to have a bag open to keep your 3 additional spell bars open. This is easily fixed by going in to the options.

The learning curve for a minstrel is high, and the effects of each action you are capable of are confusing. The buffing doesn’t last very long, and you need to memorize what each one does because they aren’t self explanatory in the name.

Just different, not better or worse either way

jumping down far hurts you in WoW, jumping down breaks your leg and slows you down in LORTO.

Overall-

I like LORTO a lot. It is different and refreshing to play something that is easy to pick up with WoW skills. I love the graphics and the theme. My concern is that it won’t pick up enough players to drive development. And what happens when they finish the books? Do they have the rights to build new story or will the movie studios shoot them down? For now I’ll keep switching between both.

1. There is a chat channel for newbies. Clear sign the game isn’t very self explanatory. That chat channel is a steady flood of confused, lost and bewildered new people. BIG red flag. The game leaves a little too much important information out as you get started and you can easily feel stuck and bored.

2. Rude people in chat. Very condescending comments to newbs about reading directions and only intellectuals are capable of playing Eve online. If you don’t get it, apparently you are stupid. The feel of chat is about the worst I have seen in any game. You can stereotype age of players per game all you want, but there are 12 year olds on every game. Everyone I know who plays WoW is 20s to 30s. People in my guild are younger, but play well all the same.

3. The directions you are provided with don’t make much sense. It gives me some blueprint to build some afterburner thing. At first I thought I was going to make the part myself. After some reading using the ingame browser (very cool) people said I should just buy it. Even though I had a bunch of extra mining stuff I had just sold, I didn’t have enough to buy the parts for my quest.  According to my training schedule, it was going to be 4 hours until my prereq skill was done cooking. I can’t build it without some manufacturing skill that gets done about 2 hours from now. So I’m stuck. Can’t build it, can’t buy it. I personally hate the need of a game like Evony or Eve to set an alarm so I know when I need to log in and start up the next action.

Why on earth would they make me wait 4 hours to complete my 3rd quest? Unbelievable. So I asked in the chat. I got bitched out and cursed at for being stupid and making the game less fun because I’m obviously trolling the chat to piss people off??? Very odd.I wonder if Eve put the newbie channel there just to deter new users. One more hurdle to keep the new people out, by constant ridicule.

4. The interface starts off too cluttered. That sure is nice that you can do all this amazing stuff later in the game. Eve needs to learn from WoW and start with a bunch of the buttons missing. Focus players on core skills that must be complete in order to get past say level 10.

5. mouse look. I looked around for a while in the menu, couldn’t figure out mouselook inversion options.

6. The ingame browser is really cool because you don’t have to tab out or stay in windowed mode. The idea behind it though bites. The game sucks so bad that you have to be able to google how to play it every other minute. Eve online doesn’t feel like a game. It is more like a writing a research paper.

After 3 hours of wandering around, reading too much online and in game, and getting blasted by other users for asking polite questions I gave up. I got in to general chat and said I didn’t think this game is for me, I hope you all have fun with it, I’m going back to WoW. I got a few “fuck yous”  right away and then logged out and uninstalled.

Eve online is a game for people who can only see black and white. For the few percent of the world that sees only in black and white it is great. But for the rest of us who see in color, the game makes as much sense as a newspaper that has been through a crosscut shredder. I would have quit after about an hour, but decided I better give it a chance. I will never get that 3-4 hours back. what a waste.

So now the count is World of Warcraft 2, Eve online 0, WW2 online 0. Evony is oddly addicting, LORTO is good. Starcraft2, Halo(s,) Half Life- awesome.I would just recommend steering clear of Eve unless your personality is an elitist snob with too much free time.

To the people saying why compare to WoW? WoW is a game. I like games. I play games. If they are fun I pay for them. I compare games to games. The end.

I hope Blizzard goes the way of Eve online and does a few more rounds of cutting off the gold farmers. I’m getting really tired of the whole thing. Please don’t go to G2by.com and purchase gold. Please don’t go to their website and give them hits. If you want to know information about them, do it with a whois search or google.

PURCHASING ITEMS FROM G2BY.com VIOLATES YOUR EULA. I hope your account is banned.

I had a compuserve account in those days. We didn’t have things like central patch management or easy websites. I have to say I’m amazed at the power of wordpress now vs my hand written web pages from 97 on. The web has really changed things as more and more people use it.

For Magic Candle 3 from 1991 click here. I’m going to go to sleep and try to forget that I’m now that guy saying, “magnetic core memory will never go away! how do you keep your data if a nuke goes off” God I’m old. Oh yeah and you will need this to play it… or a 386 running windows 3.1.