Shoved kicking and screaming into Middle Earth

I was talked into trying out World of Warcraft once upon a time and installed the 10 day trial. My first two quests were killing different varieties of boars and tigers. I didn't make it to a third quest.

A friend recently decided he wanted to give Lord of the Rings Online a go. He had never shown a desire for MMO gaming. In fact, I tried to get him into Guild Wars previously and was not successful. He played for a while, but lost interest. Much to my surprise, I received a Christmas gift from him of not only LotRO, but enough dough to pony up for a 3 month subscription.

Damnation, now I have to play. I read that LotRO is similar to WOW and if I have to kill 5 of whatever foul creature inhabits Middle Earth as my first quest...this is going to be a long 3 months. Steeled, however, by the enthusiasm shown by my comrade, I have dove in and setup my first MMO subscription. After all, it's always more fun to game with friends. Why not give it a try? Well, lots of reasons, but I choose to ignore them.

I created a character and my first quest was escaping jail and helping some hobbits. Ok, no "kill 5 of X monster" quests yet. I escape with the help of a ranger and get the hobbits to safety. There are multiple quests to be found around the starting area, and while some of them are killing 5 boars, etc... they are enough different ones to break it up and make the game bearable. It seems to get better as I go.

I'm still getting used to the menus and the inventory system is not as robust and easy to use as I'd like, but so far so good. We just finished up the first instanced quest to open up the rest of Middle Earth to us and I'm looking forward to the next session.