Comments on: Side Note: Turbine Games Still Need More Polish

By: Saylah

Saylah — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 22:12:47 +0000

I had a jaw-dropping positive experience with the streaming download of EQ2. It was too shocking to be true. I kept waiting for the game to fail, hiccup or sit me at a long download somewhere else after materializing in the game but that never happened. Color me impressed and all “Welcome Backs” need to wake up to how W101, WAR and EQ2 are streaming the download now.

By: Pavon

Pavon — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 11:42:12 +0000

You are right! Turbine downloading is truely appallingly slow and tedious. Especially if loading from scratch! Paint-drying is a zippy and adrenaline-fuel danger sport in comparison.
If they solved this problem, as stated, they would make their money back quickly with happy (and quickly patched) new players. How hard would it be to offer a fully updated DvD at their on-line shop?

Made a hard copy of all the updates and have a copy of the game on 16Gb flash just incase. However it’s guaranteed, that if I ever lose this backup there is no way in heck I’m going to sit through the patching no matter how good the new expansion is – and it’s pretty good.

FYI if reinstalling from scratch load the MoM expansion – it’s a clean install I’ve been told and so doesn’t need to patch the whole of SoA – and download the standalone SoM patcher while waiting. Should cut out 4-5 hours ;)

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 21:30:51 +0000

[quote]While it is vastly improved from launch, there is still a lot of lack of polish and attention to detail in the game. There is still no viable LFG system and they haven’t caught up on making the game entirely soloable, so there are some dead spots for quests.[/quote]

Not soloable? Wow, you need to try the game again with an open mind. I’ve solo’d my way with a RuneKeeper to level 35 so far and have no sign of needing to stop now. This is compared to my Guardian that I created when the game came out and was forced to group for epic quests and many others along the way.

Notable epic quests (such as book 1, Chapter 11, the Great Barrows) are now entirely soloable where they used to be fellowship-only. In addition, they entirely revamped areas around Bree and the Lone Lands adding lots and lots of quests. Certainly no down time for new players.

The new content is quite great and the skirmish system is pretty neat.

Can’t speak for the downloading, though I’ve never had any trouble when reinstalling. Agreed on the point about a free-trial weekend should take a lengthy download into account first.

By: Argon

Argon — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:25:39 +0000

When I reinstalled LotRO last year, they recommended you just download it from scratch instead of installing it from the CD and then patching.

By: ethereal.wolf

ethereal.wolf — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 01:07:30 +0000

i remember the time they let the ssl certificate expire for the lotro servers, you had to set your system clock back a day to log on. i stopped playing soon after that.

By: zupa

zupa — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 03:01:00 +0000

Just wanted to say I really enjoy your blog, and I think a large part of the reason why is that your opinions are always informed, considered and reasonable, making them among the minority in the blogosphere.

Cheers to you!

By: Numtini

Numtini — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:48:40 +0000

I recently got back into LOTRO. Their Turbine patcher was useless. It failed repeatedly to download doing exactly as you described, downloading and then just stopping. After opening ports, resetting it, leaving it overnight and nursing it remotely during the day from work, I gave up and downloaded the “full high resolution installer” which worked without a problem.

While it is vastly improved from launch, there is still a lot of lack of polish and attention to detail in the game. There is still no viable LFG system and they haven’t caught up on making the game entirely soloable, so there are some dead spots for quests.

My award for the worst bit of lack of polish was the “Stop repeated keys in chat.” This is a feature added in the latest expansion that I’m familiar with from EQ2. If you hold down a movement key while in chat, it erases the keystrokes from chat and puts you into move mode. No more shouting “aaaaaaaaaaaaa” to your guild. However, LOTRO’s version only erases one letter so if you type sssssswwwww it will only erase the W’s, but leave the S’s. And it fails to remove you from chat and put you into movement mode unless you release the key and press it again. Effectively, it’s useless. A trivial complaint, but why bother to do a system like that if you’re not going to do it correctly?

By: John D

John D — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 20:33:36 +0000

This is a pretty typical example of Turbine’s sloppiness and disorganization. It shows up everywhere in their games. I can’t believe that none of the devs see these problems, so it must be that management sucks. Despite Steefel admitting that they screwed up in early 2009 with the Moria expansion, I see they same problems happening again with Mirkwood, and there’s even less content this time around.

By: Morien

Morien — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 15:07:15 +0000

This past weekend I installed Windows 7 64 bits and needed to reinstall LOTRO (I had Vista 32bits previously). I downloaded the full game (high resolution) from the LOTRO download page. It’s a bit less than 10GB and it completed overnight. The day after I installed it, it patched in a few minutes and I was ready to go.

By: Ysharros

Ysharros — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 13:50:31 +0000

Lots of MMOs need to learn that “come back for a free week!” (or whatever) shouldn’t include “and spend 2 days of that downloading the client, isn’t it exciting?!!”

I was gobsmacked when I was able to try Wizard 101 within minutes of deciding to do so, and that was back in the murky days of 2008, so it’s not ALL MMOs, just most of them. EQ2 is apparently available as a streaming client now too, but their beta versions of launchers and the like are so flaky that I haven’t dared get near it until they’ve banged it into relative reliability.

Either way, it’s really past time we should be able to say “Oh, I think I’ll try {insert MMO} today” and actually be playing the damn thing a few minutes — rather than 48h or not at all — later.