Taking the plunge with LOTRO

In a hole in the ground there lived a gamer. Not a casual gamer, with only an hour a week to play, but a proper "been there since Space Invaders" gamer, and yet this gamer has refused to play an MMORPG before now.

OK, that's not strictly true because I've played a bit of World of Warcraft on a friend's spare account, and I've seen almost all of them at some point, but I have never given in to the commitment required to take on an MMO properly. I have played pretty much every fantasy RPG game going (Baldur's Gate II still my favourite, fact fans) on most platforms (PC, Xbox 360 and PSP are my current gaming platforms) and completed nearly all of those I've played. A lot of hours put in, but never had a character to call my own in an MMO.

Having a general loathing of other people has always slightly dampened my enthusiasm for MMO gaming.

Why? I've always enjoyed gaming as a retreat from the real world, a place where I don't have to interact with other people for a couple of hours. I don't want the real world intruding on my gaming. But when The Lord of the Rings Online came along, I realised that if any MMO were going to be able to snare me, it would be this one. After all, if Tolkein's rich universe cannot get me into MMOs, well then, nothing can.

So, I decided not only to buy the game, but to chart it in this blog, seeing how I found the whole experience from the perspective of a dedicated gamer, but MMO agnostic.

I bought The Lord of the Rings Online this afternoon and it's sat in its shrink wrap right next to me now, because I realised that the first thing I need to sort out is my internet connection. While my broadband has been fine under Windows XP, my new PC is Vista, and in case anyone in the world hasn't discovered this yet, Vista bites. My wireless connection has been flakey on the Vista PC since day one, but I haven't found a solution, despite trying various driver upgrades. While I've lived with resetting the connection, albeit through gritted teeth, that's not going to work for an MMO.

A few dedicated hours of Google later, I seem to have a solution, which is to find the hardware itself in the device manager and stop Vista from powering it down to save energy. The next post will be after I've installed Lord of the Rings Online on how I found the installation process.

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