I still love Lord of the Rings Online. It still has enough people to feel alive, to the point where they even upgraded their servers recently, and still keeps that old school feel. You can even earn LOTRO points through hunting monsters and quests, so if you put the work in you don't even need to buy anything.

Do I miss the days before MTX? Yeah, but I feel like they are fairly less greedy about it than other games. Fairly. There's still the VIP subscription while double-dipping into MTX that rubs me the wrong way a bit, but they still actively try to listen to the players. I'll be sad when its gone...

Its mostly much older generations that play, though, but that really cuts down on a lot of the toxicity. I've had so many polite conversations in world chat with programmers and sysadmins offering advice. One of the most helpful players I met was a 72 year old vietnam veteran. He helped me get started and gave me a ton of gear just for having a nice talk with him.

[–] A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 3 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

I love lotro. I played it for 10 years. From release, until mordor.

I was madly inlove with lotro. It was a beautiful game. the only MMO where you actually read lore and quest text and anything else, because of how immersive it was all.. and the game was perfect (before mordor). Casual, relaxing, but challenging in all the right places.

and the community was just absolutely amazing. Kind, considerate, helpful, generous. Like you said, i think the average age of lotro players was over 40.. Until there was there was some issue with WoW that caused a lot of WoW players to immigrate to lotro... Then chat got less friendly, and more obnoxious, and the community got less kind, and less helpful.. cause all the kind helpful people got burned by the jackholes being jackholes.. Still a pleasant community overall, but no where near what it was before that WoWpocalypse.

My love and faith in the game changed with Mordor, though... Mordor broke me, It was just so pointlessly difficulty spiked on even the landscape mobs were slaughtering raid-ready players, that most of my kin, myself included, ended up just quitting the game. A few people eventually got the gang back together again for southern mirkwood, but that mordor level of difficulty was still there. No one in the kin, except for the hunters and the champions, seemed able to even 1v1 the landscape mobs. that also reflected group content.. no one wanted anything but healers and hunters. was the same with mordor, but even worse with southern mirkwood. Mobs were so dumbly overpowered that only the lotro character equivalent of tactical nukes were wanted in groups.. I, sadly, was not a tactical nuke class.

It really breaks my heart. I loved that game. I made great real life friends in that game.. I met my Ex in that game (though in retrospect that probably shouldnt be viewed as part of the happy memories lol), Spent so many evenings bullshitting in voice chat while we did instances and group content, or just ground out old content for deeds. Was such a magical fucking experience, that I'll probably never experience again for the rest of my life. The pre-mordor game was absolute perfection. Especially with the revamps to some less ideal/polished game areas like Moria.

And killed, to me, because devs listened to a vocal minority that wanted moar harderer.

I'm sad now.