Lord of the Rings Online MMORPG

[Farael]

Originally Posted by Durelin

I find the founder deal - the one payment of $199 for "lifetime membership" in particular - mighty enticing, but then I think... I haven't even seen it or played it (though I applied to beta testing recently...heh, what are my chances?), I don't know if it will work on my computer, and I don't know how much time I'll have to play when I go off to lovely college next year...etc., etc.

I have to say that your chances might not be great... but you loose nothing by trying! I think I read somewhere that there's a higher likelyhood for kinships to be invited to the Beta than for individuals alone, but since then I've heard nothing of the like.

And of course it's only after you pay that you're guaranteed the beta test. Do you think I could pay for a month, and then pay for the lifetime membership? Hmm...

Don't quote me on this, but I THINK SO. If you pre-order you are guaranteed a spot in the open beta (which starts by the end of March/beginning of April I think). You don't have to pay until the day the game is released (I believe late April) therefore you'd get to try it for about month, and then you could still opt for the 199 "lifetime membership". Keep in mind that founders get a lower monthly fee regardless.

Goodness...apparently it requires 1 GB of RAM for the beta (backs down to 512 for the regular release, at least)... Farael - You said the game worked fine for you, though on low graphics (which is no problem with me) - how much RAM does your machine have?

512

I should mention two things:
*First of all, the game did not run perfectly though. Usually, after I'd log in I'd have about two hours of gameplay where it would run from extremely smoothly (as good as it would if I was just playing it alone on my computer and not on the Internet and connected to servers and whatnot) to just a tad slow, but nothing that would hinder gameplay... just movements a little jerky and perhaps the occasional two second freeze. After a while though, the game would REALLY start to slow down... until it became unbearable. I believe I wasn't the only one having this problem, it's been reported and I'm sure it'll be fixed.... even then, it could be easily solved by logging off and back on. I should also mention that my computer is slightly messed up, so the fact that it ran smoothly at times is quite encouraging.

*While I'm greatly impressed by the game, I'm actually waiting to see if I get in the closed beta so that I can try out the game after fixing up my computer to see exactly how much of the troubles was the fact that it was a stress-test and how much was my computer not being up to it. I'm pretty sure it was just the fact that I barely have enough disk space to run the game, and that there are some errors that I never managed to fix.