On a whim I fired up LotRO, which was a mistake.
I’m not sure the last time I played LotRO, but it’s been a while, perhaps as far back as the F2P change. My history with LotRO is that initially I enjoyed it quite a bit, especially as a duo game with my wife, but then we lost momentum and stopped playing. Then the game went dumpster-tier F2P, and that was that.
Well in addition to all of the expected dumpster stuff of F2P still being firmly in place, there are other laughable shortcomings with the game now. My default resolution is 3440×1440. LotRO supports that, only not really. None of the loading screens scale that high, so they stretch horribly. The character selection UI looks like its stuck at 2005-sized scale, so looks worse than $.99 indie games on Steam. In-game, the UI doesn’t scale up, so those lovely LotRO icons are basically tiny specs on your screen, while the in-game map is also stuck in 2005, so is pretty close to one giant ugly pixel. Honestly why enable 3440×1440 if you don’t actually support it?
And that was talking LotRO in 2017.
Hardcore Casual 
What are you talking about? It looks GREAT on my 2004 Dell monitor!
While I am in for Mordor as a tourist… the LOTRO landscape still looks pretty good if you turn off the UI… wrestling with the game itself is inevitably what makes me stop playing. It is tolerable in zones where you are having fun and seeing the sights, but once you hit a bland zone… and I am looking at you Mirkwood… it quickly stops being worth the effort.
The most surprising aspect of this post though: Lack of complaint about the patcher, which sorts through files slower than my grandmother.
Yea patcher ran in the background for who knows how long, I stepped away.
I hated the UI even when the game was brand-new. All the icons were far too tiny and nondescript. I was always having to mouseover them to remember which was which.
Most disappointing MMO ever, IMHO.
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I loved LOTRO at first as well, I just became bored with the questing once I got into the 30’s.
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