Lord Of the Rings Free to play?

Lord Of the Rings Free to play?
Is this a good thing or not?   - VOTE HERE -

Teldrassil says ....... I have a lifetime subscription to Lotro. I hope, as they have said, that my account will not lose anything and will gain full perks. I played DDO just to see what it was about and did not see anything in the DDO store that sparked my interest enough to buy with the points I had earned. One good thing I saw was that the free accts can purchase from the AH but can not post, and many will not be able to craft either. That will help offset the cost of leveling crafting, i think. Instead of going free to play I wish the Devs would have done more with making the game less grindy and crafting less tedious. Lotro is a stunning game imho but I find myself sitting and just gazing at the screen uninterested and uncertain about what to do next. I recently went back to playing WoW (never inactivated acct there) and Blizzard has added a very nice feature-The Dungeon Finder. IMO something like that would add a lot of "bling" to Lotro.

Spraynard says ...... Voted no. I can't see this being a good thing. All you have to do is look at two things that will likely happen: More young people. (sorry...I'm pretty cynical about this)  Item shops.  In my experience, the first ruins a community, the second ruins a game. I'm not happy about this at all, especially considering the announcement occurred only a few days after I bought a 3-month subscription. I canceled it yesterday, actually. I think I'll keep playing until the game becomes free to play simply because it is so incredibly fun. That's what makes this so much harder.

Guest says ....My vote is Yes, but some reservation. Everything evolves. Businesses always go through phases where they think the next best answer is in the cow patch in the next meadow until they find out there are just as many cowpies there as they see in their own cow meadow. Meaning simply, FTP will have its benefits but its downside too. My biggest concern is for future kinship recruiting. Meldor and the officers roughly recruit 100 new members a month to our kin. So are they going to draw from the FTP pool of players for this? If so? Then how will that effect our kin community? If not? Then how are we going to discern kin recruits?  The lifeblood of any kinship is recruiting. Kill that and you kill the kinship in time. I am sure Meldor is well aware of this as he is very diligent week after week purging and recruiting constantly. So here is my suggestion:  When the FTP goes live, I think we should go on as business as usual to the most part. Embrace the FTPers, however, as a blacnket policy I would extend the kin promotion period to 4 weeks to give the kin more time to find out if the new recruit is going to be an asset to our community or not. By asset I simply mean obey our rules and contribute to our kinship community in a healthy manner.  The reason for the longer wait period is because FTPers are not really that committed to the game yet at lower levels. They haven't paid anything and the likelyhood of them quitting in the first 30 days is much higher.  I am sure Meldor and the officer core have already thought about these issues. i am just tossing out my 2 cents on the subject. Thank you for your attention.


Meywords: 
Warner Brothers, Warner Bros, Trubine, Lord of the Rings Online, MMO, Lotro