Lord of the Rings Online can be an incredibly beautiful game and it always seems to suck me in when my subscription runs out. We resub (and bought two new expansions) and once again LOTRO goes and does something foolish and I regret the “investment” we made not to be nickel and dimed to death. Look, $200 a year isn’t going to kill us but it is more a sign of faith in the future. This year however, LOTRO has finally managed to kill my interest in the game completely.
They just released the Producer’s Letter for April and in it, they once again break yet another promise to the player base. There will be no update to housing this year despite it’s repeated promises that the update was coming. However, there will be a new class which I am sure will be heavily monetized and poorly implemented.
The competition is too good for a seven year old game to be fooling around with crap like a new class and broken promises to an already frustrated and fleeing population. Realms are empty, trying to play on a new realm means losing real world money tied to the old realm, housing is a joke, the game play can be incredibly boring, and gorgeous screenshots aren’t enough to keep players logging in. If you want to retain a player base, don’t nickel and dime them (ESPECIALLY players that subscribe to your game), don’t break promises, don’t have secret player councils, and don’t have you corporate heads buried so far in the sand you don’t even realize you have serious competition.
My twitter feed alone shows long time players leaving LOTRO for games like Landmark and Elder Scrolls Online. The team at LOTRO seems oblivious to the fact that players are finding new games to play and sink real world money into, I’m being kind. I actually believe that the LOTRO team is intentionally burying it’s head in the sand and break promises and ignoring the flight of customers so that they feel “justified” in closing the game down in the next six to eighteen months. I know that we won’t be buying any more expansions and that we definitely will not be paying for two yearly subscriptions this year.
Rant over, opinion spoken and now I’m off to write for my ESO character blog and get in some ESO playtime before exploring the awesome changes to Wildstar in the upcoming beta weekend.
No comments:
Post a Comment