As previously stated there are a lot of nuances between World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings online, but there are a couple that really make the game awesome. First and foremost they give you bags, big bags, five twelve-slot bags. Right from the start, at the very beginning, you know, a place you can store things while you’re adventuring. This takes away so much frustration out of the early game, though I could see it causing some problems, maybe in the end game, since your bags don’t appear to be upgradeable.
Awesome? Forty quest limit! Yes, much better. I never understood why Blizzard decided to cap your quest log at 20 and then when they upgraded it, they upgraded it by five. Oh yeah, gee thanks for that.
Crafting seems purposeful. The items you can create, at least the armor, are so far and away better than the crap you scrounge or get for quest rewards that it actually makes sense to spend time collecting the materials. A downside is that materials and recipes seem hard to come by, I know I’m having a dilly of a time collecting enough medium leather.
One small, but nice thing is that you only have to mine a mineral node once. No repeated, um, whacking with your pick.
The Auction House is pretty difficult to navigate and search. There’s no really easy way to find materials or recipes unless you know the precise name of the item, but I hear they’re going to enhance it in the next patch.
Oh yeah, one more thing. Your spells and skills auto-level as you do. So when you go to your trainer to buy new skills you’re buying totally new skills and not simple upgrades to the ones you already have. I can kind of see an argument for wanting to have access to lower level spells of the same type, but I can’t help but think that the game should do that for you. Automatically select the most efficient level of spell for you.
Something I find funny about LOTRO is that Turbine must not have really considered geography in how mineral nodes spawn. For instance I started with a dwarf character and you spend a lot of time in the mountains, so once I got the Prospecting skill (to mine ore) I ran around the mountains and caves expecting to see tons of nodes. Not really, not that many. Later as I journeyed through the Shire I was really shocked to see so many places to mine. Evidently Saruman was right to start scouring the Shire, the place is ripe with copper and tin. Bree-land too, I mean you just run through a field and you’ll spot a big copper tumor sprouting right out in the middle.