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The closed beta for LOTRO (Lord of the Rings Online) ended on Monday with a big event. It was a fun and chaotic experience. They had high level monsters invading major cities. Hundreds of people started to fight them but the lag was terrible for people with slower computers like me. I could hardly move or fight for the first couple of hours. The servers did well but some of them crashed due to all the fighting in one area. The developers started raising the levels of the majority of players. This was a bit confusing because we had to wait in lines. After a whole lot of waiting and complaining they started to raise characters faster.
- Video of a fight against a tree on the last day
- Video of a fight with drakes on the last day
- Video of a battle with trolls everywhere on the last day
- Cool video of a fellowship fighting
So I finally became a level 50 minstrel and was able to protect rivendell and bree from big drakes. I still had lag so it was very hard to fight at this time but after most of the people left I was able to attack with all my abilities. There was around 60 people beating up this high level drake and I had no lag at all. We all were defeated many many times but were able to get back into the fight easily. This had to be the best time I had in any multi-player game. The first couple of hours was terrible but the last hours were terrific.
- End of Closed Beta : A Day at Turbine HQ [Article]
Woot Radio Interview of the Lead Systems DesignerOver Million people invited to the world [Press Release]
The open beta starts for people who pre-ordered on friday March 30th. On April 6th the world is open to everyone for free who sign up to the World Tour! They are expecting 1 million people playing in the game. This might be a high expectation but I know there are a lot of people excited about this game. They will be starting with 7 servers and prepared to turn on more if they need them. All characters will be deleted before April 24th unless you have pre-ordered the game. Also you can only go up to level 15 so have fun making more characters.
My plan is to get all my characters out of the introduction areas and as high as I can get them. I haven’t decided which server to have my main character yet but probably will have at least one character in each server. I believe they should allow people to transfer their characters to another server but haven’t seen anything about this. I would hate to have the server I play on get full and can’t play on it anymore.
