While my honeymoon with LOTRO still isn't over, I thought I'd followup my last post about criticisms that don't really bug me-- with some that do.

These are relatively minor for me, but I'm fairly tolerant. I found none of them show stopping, they're just things I wish Turbine would fix:

• Pathing problems. Pets and mobs both get "confused" sometimes and literally stuck because they cannot find a path to their target. Usually the solution is to walk up in melee range, but that can get messy for groups. Pathing is hard to code, I'm aware, but I would have hoped that a game that's been out since 2007 would have advanced this by now.
• Quest Text cannot be resized. It's small and although they've enabled customization in much of the rest of the UI, for some dumb reason the font size cannot be changed on the Quest log.
• Minimized Crashes. This is minor, it only happens when the game is in fullscreen and I'm travelling (horse paths). The solution is to switch to Windowed-mode and that's pretty typical of a lot of games, but still it bugs me to some small degree.
• DX10 isn't stable. Not for me at least. I get the blank screen of death everytime I try to use DX10 with LOTRO. It's most certainly driver related and Nvidia could be to blame, but it's also the only game I'm having this issue with currently. I'm not going to take Turbine to task over this, as it kinda goes along with the whole 'Vista sucks' paradigm. Hopefully it's fixed by the time Windows 7 gets released.
• Rubberbanding on zone change. This past week or so, something has been up with Turbine's servers. When you change areas, sometimes you'll hit a 'rubber wall' just as you're making the zone change (when the area's name pops up). This doesn't seem to be lag related, it's more as if that area just isn't accepting players for a few moments. Turbine says they're working on the issue and I didn't see it happen at all yesterday, so hopefully they've resolved it.

These are listed in the order of importance by my reckoning, so you can see I'm not too concerned with temporary server-related troubles or getting a few extra shadows in DX10. Your own mileage may vary.

I'm clearly in the honeymoon stage with LOTRO right now. It all feels great, I'm having a blast and I'm not seeing any glaring flaws, at least from my perspective.

I've seen the complaints from others, but this game really suites me and it's reminding me that different people have different expectations from MMORPGs. Here are some of the common critiques:

• Classes start out slow: Check. Works for me. I enjoyed the big splash and overpowered feelings of classes in Age of Conan recently, but that also illustrated sharply that characters need room to grow. Even if it bores some people, I don't mind starting off with just a basic attack, basic mobs and basic starting areas.
• Combat is slow: Check. And methodical, which lends strategic choices. This topic was all the rage last year, it still holds true. I have come to realize that I equally enjoy fast visceral combat and slower paced combat where strategic ability choice is key.
• There's a lot of fluff: Check. I love it. Player music, chicken quests, housing decorations, silly hats. It all fleshes out the world for me, that's part of playing in a virtual world. Most MMORPGs by my reckoning need a whole lot more of this kind of 'fluff'.
• Another Fantasy MMORPG: Check. I love the fantasy genre and I think it suites this style of gameplay best. I don't think sci-fi or present-day works as well in the same paradigms (IE: tank, heal & dps model), especially if they have shooter elements. And geez, this is Middle-Earth, so it's the creme de la creme for me.
• It's a WoW clone: Not really, but I can see that at first glance. The UI is very similar, the base mechanics are the same, but hasn't that been the trend in MMOs for awhile? Natural evolution of the Diku model and all that. From that perspective, for me LOTRO feels more refined in the evolutionary chain than WoW.
• There's not much raiding content: Check. Although I can't comment much on the high level content I haven't seen yet, this sounds promising. I'm much more interested in small-team and solo content.
• It's a bit of a grind: Check. I don't mind leveling up slowly, my take is the current trend where players try to fast-track leveling to get to an Endgame is well, flawed game design and perhaps some of these games shouldn't have levels at all. But if there is good content to match, I'll take my time leveling up. So far, the questing in LOTRO is the best I've seen, I stop and smell the roses constantly.

  I'm also happy to grind out gear, professions, reputations, etc.. If I wasn't, I think I'd be playing the wrong genre.

This really feels like the right game for me. =)

It's not that I'm trying to be fair or balanced here, but after the glowing praise it only feels natural for me to let out the gripes too. Here's a list of things that I hope Funcom addresses ASAP for Age of Conan. It's not a nicely rounded top ten list because I'm not dredging the bug list, these are actually the bugs I find hard to ignore.

These are listed in the order in which they affect my fun factor:

• Polearms became toothpicks. Someone at Funcom was overzealous in fixing the animations and they went and made Polearms all the same length. Aside from the blandness that delivers on the weapons that already have the worst itemization, many of them haven't scaled well: appearing toothpick-thin and pathetic.
• Falling through floors. This happens to NPCs and mobs more than players, but regardless the collision detection needs work. It's no fun getting attacked by an 'invisible' mob or having a boss you need for a quest just drop out of existence.
• No one can visit our guild city?!? Funcom has locked the guild city instances so only ourselves and our direct neighbours have access, no one else can be invited to see our guild city. I strongly detest that guild cities are primarily just a timesink toward PvP Battlekeeps, they need real PvE usage and customizations. Let us have more pride with our cities!
• That 'Out of Memory' error. Memory leaks are pretty common with any MMO, hell WoW still has some, but they pile up pretty quick in AoC. Zoning in particular has a nasty habit to either lockup or provide this notoriously useless error message.
• Dismounting in combat is broken. The animation for getting forcibly dismounted often repeats multiple times or makes you skate around a bit before resetting your character. Worse, if you try to dismount manually while in combat you can get stuck not able to attack.
• Unknown PF. On my friend's list everyone's location is 'Unknown PF' followed by a long number. I keep getting requests to meet people and have to ask where they are because they assume I can see their location.
• The Guild Bank does not sort. On a daily basis I have to manually move items to my bags to sort the guild bank because items won't automatically stack. As a result of this annoyance our guild bank is constantly 'full' and our guild members are selling items we would otherwise store.

None of these are show stopping for me, they're just the glaring problems that I'm patiently waiting to see fixed.