It is Friday and that means another update from Dnote on the status of the Free-to-Play launch in Europe.
Update 08/10/10
Dear players,
Whilst we don’t have any dates or concrete information to share with you as yet, the good news is that it looks like the major challenges we were facing are nearly resolved and we will be moving forward with the next step of Free to Play implementation for the European service shortly.At this stage we are optimistically looking to have plans finalised sometime next week at which stage we will be able to give you more solid dates of when we hope to proceed with the launch.
Still no launch date but a mention of perhaps knowing more next week! That is at least something, right?
Still already a month behind is a bit difficult to bear. I received an email from a German friend today saying that many people on his server simply were not playing until they get new content. Not to mention any of the Europeans that would have been on Codemaster servers that have given up waiting to try their latency luck playing on US servers.
Even with the news of LOTRO being such a smashing success on the F2P model, this delay is a bit of a blackeye. Perhaps even worse for those living with it overseas.
October 8, 2010 at 3:33 pm
german forum users are furious. me too. they obviously lied to us when they said they had high hopes to actually make it for the f2p start on 9/10. now it´s over a month and still they are not even able to say ANYTHING. this last post is a slap in the face of all european players. ia it at least something? no – i´ts nothing!
October 8, 2010 at 3:49 pm
Oh yes it’s even worse… For me it just seems as if they just don’t care anymore to pretend to not be playing with our sanity
October 8, 2010 at 3:59 pm
Unfortunately this is a huge lost chance for the European LotRO community to get a lot of fresh blood in. I am a new LotRO player and started playing the trial in August, on EN-Laurelin. I fell in love and subscribed, but always in anticipation of F2P, which never happened.
I did create a free account on US-Brandywine, and it’s such a different low-level experience. Brandywine has soooo many players now. Laurelin is great, but it’s mostly empty while leveling.
The delay will cost EU LotRO a big market of F2P players: the WoW converts, like me. The third WoW expansion will be out in early December, and the content patch 4.0.1 to introduce all game changes is expected shortly. That’s a lot of potential players who are not going to start playing LotRO. A shame.
October 8, 2010 at 5:01 pm
A big disappointment because although i am very patient and im still not making a really big fuzz over the delay i cannot understand anymore what the reason can be that takes this long to solve and most important, they cannot say anything about. I mean, if it is a legal issue with european or some countries law, isnt it just easier to say that they are trying to solve legal issues? It would at least get people to show some understanding. Saying absolutely nothing just makes people plain angry!
October 12, 2010 at 5:00 am
Caelas point is for me the key one. One month on and counting and weekly updates that say nothing. The worst of it is that “Nothing is said as to WHY specifically” there is a delay at all. To leave the community clueless for over a month is appalling. Is the reason so bad that it cant dare be mentioned ?. Clearly CM must be working very hard to get F2P released but on what? Major Challenges is what they refer to them us? Come on, some of us are adults we can take it, tell us whats been going on for all these days.
Telling us nothing weekly for a month is down right insulting.