The LOTRO developers have been doing a tremendous job of adding features with the many updates they’ve been doing recently, but perhaps quality control has been suffering. This latest update (#10) made a number of significant changes, including adding some instances around the Lonely Mountain (surely to try to exploit the publicity surrounding the Hobbit), as well as changing the primary stat for Wardens from might to agility and changing/nerfing some of the armor set bonuses.
Those are mostly good changes, but a number of bugs were introduced as well, and they vary from trivially annoying to show stoppers. A trivially annoying one is that the game forgets which Legendary Weapons you are tracking (displaying their level on the screen). You can turn it back on, but the game forgets when you log out. A worse problem that hit me last night was that as I entered the Great River region, everything stopped. I couldn’t move, get off my mount, activate any skills, or even log out. Eventually, I killed the game, which resulted in a graphics driver hang. Upon trying to log in again, it hung pretending to try to clean up the old connection. Killing the client a few times had the same result. Eventually, I waited a while, rebooted, and it worked. So not a terrible thing, but annoying and unfortunate. Lots of others are running into the graphics driver hangs that are making the game unplayable for them. At least in my case, it didn’t prevent me from playing once the crazy server connection issue timed out.
Another bug that I’ve noticed since the patch before Update 10 is that the goats in Eregion, Dunland, and Great River are gliding rather than walking. Obviously their animation is broken. Their run is okay, because if you attack them, they run like crazy to get you, but their usual walking behavior is messed up. Again, not a big deal, but it sure breaks the illusion of the game world to have magic gliding goats.
In short, I’m happy that LOTRO is getting new content and is being actively developed, but some of these bugs are annoying and should have been fairly obvious to catch. So the devs should keep up their good work and QA should stop drinking on the job. 😎