This page is outdated, although still relevant, an install script is available. Just look for the post on this site for the script.

About The lord of the Rings Online

Out of all the MMO’s out there, there is one that stands out in my opinion.
Lord of the Rings Online is a beautiful MMO based on the works by J. R. R. Tolkien, and not based on the films by Jackson.

What makes this stand out more than the others is it’s emphasis on roleplay.
Now don’t worry if your not a fan of roleplaying, since the game is built with features that make it perfect for roleplaying, it certainly isn’t designed for just that.

In the past Turbine (the company behind the game) had shared this game with Codemasters. Where Turbine concentrated on the American servers, and Codemasters on the European. The game had the usual pay per month subscription and everything you expect from a game of this kind.

Fast forward to now and Codemasters are no longer a part of this venture.
Also, all servers are merged into a long list of worldwide servers meaning you are able to play alongside Americans if you are European and the other way around too.

The pay per month subscription has now been altered to a Play For Free subscription.
This means that you are able to play for nothing and still have access to everything(however, with sacrifices which I will get to).
If you so wish you can get a VIP account, this means that you pay per month or per few months and have no limits to what you do.

In order to make money, there are some restrictions to the free user account, however, in my opinion they have been done perfectly.
There are a few MMO’s out there with a free play model where you can purchase additional elements. However, in my experience they have led to unfair advantages to those who put their hands in their pockets. An example of this is for instance where certain weapons can only be purchased or special buffs meaning that you can never be as good as your paying friend.

Lord of the Rings Online does not work like this.
Their system uses Turbine Points. This is seen as a currency system whilst within the game, not being a part of the game as it is only used for the Lord of the Rings Online store.
There are however no unfair advantages.
Every player will earn Turbine Points, whether playing totally for free, or paying.
Everytime you have completed certain deeds you will earn Turbine Points, for fairly easy ones you gain 5, for more difficult ones you gain 10 etc.
With these points you can purchase horses, outfits, accelerators(in order to gain XP faster for a certain amount of time for instance) and extra storage.
If you are a saver, and don’t use your Turbine Points whenever you get them, it is even possible to buy the expansion packs with TP.

I have also mentioned the roleplaying capabilities of this game, but I will now outline those for roleplaying fans out there.

Emotes are an essential part of the game whether roleplaying or not. And there are many included, from laughing, to crying, to fainting and clapping.
But sometimes you may want to emote something that simply is not there. Well they even have that covered.
Let’s say I want look shady around a room of Dwarves. Well, in the chat window I simply start with ‘/emote’ (no quotes) followed by my action. Eg. ‘/emote looks shadily around the room filled with Dwarves’, this will then result in that specific emote being sent.

But what about music?
Everyone within the game can play music.
You just purchase an instrument (with the real in-game currency, either copper, silver, or gold) for a tiny amount of money and in the chat window type ‘/music’ and it turns your number keys at the top of your keyboard into music notes allowing you to play a tune.
However, if you are musically disabled like me, then you probably don’t want to hurt anyone’s eardrums. Well, there is even a way for you to play music you can’t really play.
Simply go to http://www.thefatlute.com/ which has a huge selection of music for the game, download your favourite track in an ABC format and then drop it in the ‘My Documents/The Lord of the Rings Online/Music’ folder.
Then in the chat window first type ‘/music’ and then ‘/play <abc file name>’ and it plays that tune for you.

Looking good is also a major part of the game. It’s not all about having the strongest armour.
If you are going to walk around, at least walk around in style.
Cosmetic outfits are therefore a big part of the game, allowing you to customize your look.

And what’s more, cosmetic outfits stand alone from your armour, allowing you to hide your armour from view whilst showing your cosmetic outfit.
This means you look amazing whilst still being strong.
And if you buy a cape that looks great but isn’t your favourite colour, you can buy some dye in the colour you like and transform it.

You can also smoke and drink to your hearts content, but be careful, you can get drunk and it makes walking difficult.

Another element that makes this game so enjoyable is that there is always something happening. Festivals, concerts, everything to be social when you don’t want to be crafting or fighting.

Crafting I won’t go into much detail as most MMO’s have this ability.
You can get a crafting skill that is made up of three different directions.
Two of those you can just do entirely by yourself, but the last you will require someone’s help for.
For instance, I am able to mine for copper, silver, iron ore, gold or whichever, then smelt them into the right substance, and then create armour out of it.
However, my last of these vocations is Tailoring. The problem is that the needed provisions aren’t able to be collected with my vocations. So in order to tailor, I must ask someone to provide me the provisions.

All in all, this is a great game for both gaming and being social.

Give it a shot.

The system requirements are a little strange. I have had a few people who weren’t close to the requirements but encountered no problems playing this game.
But here they are anyway:

Minimum System Requirements

O.S.: Windows® XP
Processor: Intel Pentium® 4 1.8 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 512MB
Video: 64MB NVIDIA GeForce® 3 or ATI® Radeon® 8500
Disk Space: 7GB available
DirectX: DirectX® 9.0c
Optical Drive: 2X DVD ROM
Connection: 56kbps Modem

Recommended System Requirements

O.S.: Windows® XP/Vista
Processor: Intel Pentium® 4 2.8 GHz or equivalent
RAM: 1GB
Video: 128MB NVIDIA GeForce® 6800 or ATI® Radeon® X850
Disk Space: 10GB available
DirectX: DirectX® 9.0c
Optical Drive: 2X DVD ROM
Connection: Broadband DSL/Cable

 Installing The Lord of the Rings Online

Firstly, if you have downloaded the installer from the lotro website, please discard it.
Although it is possible to use this, it tends to be tedious and very long.

1)Download the Lotro installer, this can be downloaded from the following location, but this is a big download and will take some time. However, it is significantly faster than using the official downloader on the lotro website: http://www.fileplanet.com/213014/210000/fileinfo/The-Lord-of-the-Rings-Online-Client-%28Free-Game%29

2)After it has been downloaded, don’t install it yet. We first need to have everything needed to install it. Open up a terminal and type in the following:
‘sudo apt-get install wine1.3’ without quotes and hit enter

After you have done this, keep the terminal open and type the following(press Enter after each line):

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks
chmod +x winetricks 
./winetricks d3dx9_36

This will install the VC++ libraries which can be installed in the terminal with this command:

./winetricks vcrun2008

3) First unzip the earlier downloaded EXE file (I am here assuming it’s installed in a folder called lotro in the Downloads folder). I recommend the terminal for this. To do that, open a terminal and type the following, pressing Enter after each line:

cd Downloads/lotro/
wine LOTROSetup.exe

Go through the steps and it will install the game.

4) Now to install the launcher. The official Lotro launcher does not work well at all, so we use a Linux launcher to run Lotro well.
Head over to https://launchpad.net/~ajackson-bcs/+archive/ppa/+files/pylotro_0.1.15precise_all.deb

This will download a .deb file which will install pyLotro for you.

5) Either using the Dash or menu find Lord of The Rings Online (pylotro) and open this, you will most likely find it does nothing at the moment.

6)On the top click on Tools, then Options.
A new window will appear,  you should see ‘Game Directory’ which is probably empty, with a button and three dots in there. Click on that button.
First hit Ctrl+H to also display hidden files (those with a dot in front of their names) and go to the following directory:

.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Turbine/The Lord of the Rings Online

Then hit open until you are there, and save.
The program should refresh and you should have a server list, language etc.

What you could now do, is right-click on the icon in the Unity Launch Bar and  click ‘Lock to Launcher’

7) It is all set up now, but you will need to update it the first time it’s installed. To do this, have the launcher window open, click Tools at the top, then Patch.
Then when the new window has opened click on Start.
***NOTE*** There is possibility that you see a list of errors, ignore this, it does not affect the updates. You should also see a list of dots begin to appear, this shows it’s updating.

After you see ‘***FINISHED***’, then you are ready. You can make a new account at http://www.lotro.com or if you already have one, log in.

Extra notes:

I encountered two minor problems, both of which are easily fixed.

a) If you notice that when loading, your game displays a gray background and little squares, then you do not have the loading backgrounds.
I have taken my backgrounds and put them in a tar file which can be downloaded here: http://db.tt/OE9hvgAt

Simply extract the contents of that tar file to ‘.wine/drive_c/Program Files/Turbine/The Lord of the Rings Online/raw/en/logo

After that, you should have proper loading screens.

b) My character was just black.
If you have this, it means your graphics card isn’t totally dealing with the graphics, inside the game set the game to low graphics and it should be good again.

c) Adding ABC files – If you have downloaded ABC files, add a folder inside ‘.wine/drive_c/users/<YOURNAME>/My Documents/The Lord of the Rings Online’ called ‘Music’ and drop the ABC files in there. Then you can play them in game

d) When you start the game you see ‘hardware texture compression support was not detected’.
This is common with Nvidia and Intel graphics cards. If you have a Nvidia card, install the proprietary drivers.
If you have an integrated Intel Graphics card, open the terminal and type

sudo apt-get install driconf

After this, open driconf and under ‘Image Quality’ tab, set ‘Enable S3TC texture…’ to ‘Yes’

e) After logging in my screen goes black/screen freezes but can still hear the sound:
This one is a pain to fix, trust me, it took me the whole day to figure this baby out.
The problem here are the settings inside of LotRO, they are quite simply too high.
But the problem is that in order to set them straight, you need to be able to get to them.
And there's the catch 22.
If your screen goes black at the character select/character create screen, first start regedit from a terminal window.
Then click on HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Software > Wine > Direct3D (if it doesn't exist, create it).
Create or change the key 'DirectDrawRenderer' to 'gdi'.
I am using PlayOnLinux to host my install, so the other options were preloaded and I'm not certain if they are important or not. I most likely will host my registry key some time.
The next step is to go to 'The Lord of the Rings Online' folder in your home directory, not the one in .wine or .PlayOnLinux.
Inside there you should find a file called 'UserPreferences.ini'. Open this file with your favourite text editor.
At the bottom of this file are all the settings for graphics. Wherever you see the word 'High' change this to 'Low'.
Also mentions of shadowing, blooms, and lighting set them all to false.
At the end, save the file, and close it.

Now open pyLotro and log in, with a bit of luck it should show the screen correctly and not freeze. From here go to the settings and select adv.graphics. 
There you can change graphics to your pleasing but I highly recommend setting them only as high as medium, and whatever you really do not feel you need, to leave them as low, or turn them off.
Otherwise, the higher you enable the graphics, the slower the game, and in worst cases, you get the crash again.
This is for both the black screen and the freeze screen.