So on Friday, Turbine opened the floodgates in the Lord of the Rings Online Public Beta (which they are calling the "World Tour"), inviting up to a million new "Beta testers".

Keep in mind that thousands of pre-order customers are already in game, so these are not exactly empty servers. Thankfully, Turbine launched four new servers Friday, and encouraged (not forced) new people to make characters on them. We still got a LOT of new players on Gladden, I can tell you.

No servers crashed. No zones crashed. I had one disconnect all day.

Make no mistake, many of these people did not act like Beta testers. They acted instead as if they had just spent $125.00 on the game, and bitched like it too. The sense of entitlement and sheer GLEE when they could pounce on a rare bug issue was palpable.

"OMFG!!1!!1 I cant beleve that they let this into the game!!" An actual quote. Turns out to be user error - he was not using the right command.

Hot on the heels of the hoi polloi were… yep… gold sellers. I reported two yesterday. One was repeatedly spamming the OOC channel in Archet with his "LOTRO Gold cheap, sell at -nameofsitewitheld.com". I know that I was not the only one who petitioned it. It was my first opportunity to test the petition process, so I consider it a constructive exercise overall, hehe.

I eventually switched off OOC, because the sheer volume of "where is X?" and "where do I get Y" and "shut up u useless @#*$" and "wy arent u jerks ansering me!!!" and "how this game is/not like/as-good-as/sucks-compared-to WoW" was making it such that I kept missing my kinship chat. Given that the quests at low level are extremely descriptive, I could only assume that the players were simply not reading the text. At all. Too busy yelling in OOC, I guess.

The complaints about lag were rampant, possibly because many could find nothing else to fault. Yes, it was laggy. I was in Archet (prequel version) on a young character, with wall to wall people. I had expected it to be much, much worse. I was checking to see how it handled such a heavy load. Answer? Pretty darn well.

Outside of the crowded village areas, lag was very mild or nonexistent. Nice work, Turbine!

Bad names? Oh…. You know it. We all knew that was coming. I am not even going to list them here. I think I sprained an eye with all the rolling going on yesterday. Let us hope that these are the "plinkers" who have no intention of playing in Live.

I cannot lump all of these testers in the same boat, however. I actually had some very interesting and pleasant conversations with good folk who had just gotten in the door. Seeing people like that still coming new to the game made it worth while to tolerate the idiots.

Brasse's Public Beta score:
Stability of servers: 10
Stability of connection: 9.9
Lag-o-meter: Rough in towns, almost nonexistent in the open.
Increase in dumbass names over open Beta: 43%
Estimated ratio of idiots to good people in the new influx: 5:1
Really nice new people that I met in two hours in Archet: 2.

Now we'll wait to see how this massive marketing gamble works out for Turbine.
Feel free to join in on rampant speculation, or to complain about the twit who just stole Frostmantle out from under you after you waited your turn politely for a half hour.