This week’s video highlight is 100% a LOTRO ad. What I want to point out though is at the end the video there is text that says “Join millions of players.” This is fairly surprising because the trailer came out three days before Free-to-play.
Assuming LOTRO has gained many players since the change to the new pricing model, I wonder how big that number is now. LOTRO is usually thought of as a fairly niche community but in reality I wonder what the numbers really are. This is the last official reference I know of that refers to numbers so we will likely never know just how many players are playing or have ever played LOTRO.
“The Lord of the Rings Online – The Ultimate Adventure” was released on September 7th, 2010 on Turbine’s official YouTube channel.
Do you know of a good LOTRO video and want it to be featured in this series? Send an email to lotroplayers.mymiddleearth@gmail.com with a link to the video and it might end up in a future article.
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Merge servers and let the players enjoy the game together 🙂
Amen to that! While it seems they’d never merge the US with the EU servers (due to the same technical reasons that prevent server transfers between US and EU servers), US and EU megaservers would be awesome.
But realistically, they do have to balance how dead the servers feel on average (and thus the effect that has on revenue from subs and store sales), versus how much money they make from server transfers.
Of course, people should just re-roll on Landroval, which feels plenty busy to me. 🙂
Yeah trust me dead servers are not fun,, when you have to wait hours to fill up a darn raid.. Didn’t some site publish lotro revenue n it was like number 3 or 4 on the list., so I’d say the number of players is quite high. Not sure it’s million though
Is the purpose for a server to fill up raids only? I think we have to take into account many people play LOTRO for a whole variety of reasons. Some people seek out quieter servers and wish to play in them. For others who like the more populated areas we can point them in the direction of Brandywine.
raids is one example..it can be anything which requires a fellowship, a group of people..I’d like to think purpose of an MMO is to play it with other people..one M in MMO is for multiplayer..if one is not into ‘other people’, they wouldnt be playing an MMO but some other single player game..I doubt anyone is seeking servers with 5 people on..that said offcourse there are different play styles and it would be just better if maybe they reduced the amount of servers.maybe have 2 US servers, one ole play, one for rest, same with EU servers, one role play and one for rest..that would only help lotro and increase the playerbase even more and easier for newer players as well
Much as I’d love it to be otherwise, I suspect that “millions of players” was something of an exaggeration even then.
Consider this Google analysis of search trends, showing relative popularity of the bigger titles (leaving out WoW because it’s still 10x the rest even now). I’d say a fair estimate of LOTRO’s playerbase would be approximately 200K to 250K, given its relative popularity contrasted to Elder Scrolls Online (which recently pegged its subs at 770K).
Note that I love LOTRO (as well as SWTOR!), and really want it to succeed. But probably best to be realistic as to just how popular it actually is. 🙂