Oizu

Looks really, really bad.

I mean it LOOKS very nice on the whole, good foliage and once they sort the shadow flickering it'll be quite nice, but I have serious worries about the performance, they can't even show us a video that runs at 30fps, and the combat still has big question marks hanging over it.

Ok, probably controversial, but if they are going to do this sort of silly marketing crap where absolutely nothing gets donated, why not donate it to people who actually NEED it? Australia is coping absolutely fine without international aid, its Brazil and Sri Lanka that need the aid right now, not Australia ffs!!

@Caerus

I don't know why you have been down voted, but whoever it was is in the wrong. You are completely right, prior to F2P, the game got absolutely no new content for nearly a year, and the only content before that was a very disappointing 'expansion'.

I played Vanilla Lotro and thought it was great, but ever since the game has just got progressively worse in my eyes, the expansions and updates just added grind, and the new content got more and more unbelievable.

@greeneggsnoham

I'm not one to 'call death' on a game lightly, but look at it, right now, the grind to a super competitive level is circa a year, unless your playing 4-5 hours a day (that's casual in your average DF player's eyes) I've seen a few people try the game, like the game, begin to progress, move out the starter areas with a clan, and then suddenly realise they are weak as hell, and they have months of essentially grinding to get to where they need to be to have a lot of fun. The game's stream of new player's has dried up, and although the vet's are sticking with it, long term a couple of thousand vets won't be able to sustain the game all that well.

I want this to work so badly, but I can't help thinking that this isn't going to go anywhere near far enough to remove the grind, they say they want to eliminate macroing, but that wont reduce the grind, because it is assumed you are macroing as part of the enormous grind, they need to cut down on the grind drastically or the game is going to die.

I've hit level 80 twice completely solo without issue, what forced grouping?

O.o

And where did you hear that from Evalia, it is a niche game, it was obviously never going out to Topple any game (it was an empty niche when it launched) and is now easily the top game in it's niche, with an ever expanding dev team, world and sub base.

What a ridiculous thing, how can you possibly try to analyse a days old community and try to compare it to communitys on servers that have been around years like EVE, EQ2, LOTRO, Vanguard e.t.c. e.t.c.

What exactly were you trying to show here?

And to some of the idiots above saying the pvp servers are dead so focus on PvE, the servers ARE dead, because PvP has had no love what so ever for about a year (Bori was a joke), but at launch, there was much more demand for PvP than anything else, if they had focuses solely on the pvp the game would be doing much better than it is now.

he has a point though even if you don't like it, the blogger should show some balance and restraint, all i see is a pretty misinformed paragraph or two that is really nothing more than a personal attack at all pvpers. Whether he likes it or not a lot of people brought the game because of the pvp, and they have been getting the cold shoulder ever since, now this guy might be delighted by that but given that this is the only column for this game he needs to show balance and look at it from both sides, we dont need raging fanboys and trolls here, while he likes to look down on the pvp community for being just that all I see in this coloumn is the exact same thing.