About all the hype... LOTR Online - let's just say, after you give it about a day or two of continuous play - ROCKS!!!
PROS: - Awesome looking graphics for the most part (if you have the machine to really prove it)
- Awesome crafting / vocational options! One could spents months alone just having fun with this, and making in-game money, and really neat weapons, lores, armor, food etc.. cause the LIST GOES ON!
- a reality sense to the lore series, both in costumes, and with weapons, armor, enemies, and beautiful locations (cities, ruins, statues, etc)
- The group of people that play on here are generally mature, and truly have FUN with the game, and there's not a lot of immature bickering.
- The fellowship system rocks, as it allows for temporary clans through which you can beat difficult objectives, and gain a variety of good friends along the way.
- Plenty of objectives with which to level up, if you want to do so in that manner... but if you just want to grind, this option is open as well.
CONS:
- servers become choppy at times in crowded places (mostly related to the amount of other players/info. download, as well as chat domains)
- respawn times of some NPC's are too quick, and others are too slow - but on average - ok.
- The option to truly design your own character's face and body attributes are simply too simple, and not enough options; leading to very similar-looking players many times.
- Not enough different NPC voices (example, when you speak to an in-game character for an objective, they respond with the same answers often)
- Voice chat needs to be enabled for kinships, and not only for Fellowships. The result is that many of the kinships use Ventrilo instead.
- horses need patching, as sometimes (but not always) there is a Crash to Desktop.
All in all, this is a very fun and addicting game, and players should refrain from comparing to other MMORG's, as this one seems to take the best of those, and combine them to make this game truly fun for most, if not all, players. There will always be room for improvement though.