Limited Time Offer | The Ancient Gaming Noob

Turbine, and later Standing Stone… or Daybreak, as we found out… has done some odd things with their LOTRO level boosters, starting with them boosting past only the first fifty levels when there were a couple of expansions still ahead of that. And they stuck to something like this routine for a quite a while, which I will sum up as follows:

Every other MMORPG: Our level boost gets you into the latest content
LOTRO: Our level boost gets you… most of the way there… maybe…

They have gotten better with this over time, but still their reputation is still that of being a bit goofy on the level boost thing in my book. It is like they hang out with the EverQuest team, which is the other MMORPG with a level boost plan that Bhagpuss has explained to me but which I still don’t quite get the reasoning around.

For a limited time… you have until April 13th to buy this… LOTRO is offering a boost straight to the level cap, which is currently level 140 if I am reading things right.

Available until April 13th

This I had to see in person, so I brought the LOTRO launcher up… and then went and did something else because it had to patch, which is another thing that certainly hasn’t gotten better or faster as the game has aged… so I could log in and see what the actual deal was.

Are you kidding me here?

This update felt like it took twice as long as it probably did because I kept coming back to check on it. But 30 minutes or so down the road… it has been 7 months since I last patched and I guess there was a new content drop since then… I was able to get in and start looking around the LOTRO Store to find this special boost.

Of course, on the main store page there is a big banner about boosts being on sale, but if you click on it the level 140 boost is nowhere to be seen because, technically, it is NOT on sale. You can, however, find it under Featured Items or, if you go drilling into the store, under Character Upgrades and Level Skip, which is I guess the new term of art in Middle-earth.

Skip this

There you will find the current range of level boosts available.

How much do the Valar love you?

I had to crop together two pages of the in-game store to get that all in one image.

Level 140 will run you 6,695 LOTRO Points, which is about $70 or so given the current pricing of the RMT currency.

April 2023 LOTRO Points pricing

If I was paying cash out of pocket I would let this deal pass. I love LOTRO, but until they do some work on the UI to make it playable on wide-screen monitors, it is on the back burner waiting for my return.

However, back at the end of beta, I bought a lifetime subscription to LOTRO for $199, which remains the best money I have ever spent on an MMO. That means I am an eternal VIP and I get 500 LOTRO points a month and they don’t even make me log in to claim it like EverQuest and EverQuest II do. So I had over 300K LOTRO Points on my account when I finally logged in.

So I immediately grabbed the boost, only to realize I was on my level 95 captain on Brandywine, which I had previously used a level 95 boost on. That left him with full bags on the wrong side of the Paths of the Dead with gear not up to the job of getting him into any further content without going back and working on his new legendary weapon.

Still a bit salty about that.

But the main point of that is his bags being full… well, three open slots, so effectively full… because I knew once I clicked on that Valar boost box I would need inventory space to deal with all the stuff that no doubt comes with the boost. There was a vendor close by, so I could have juggled it, but I didn’t have the patience.

So I logged off and first rolled up a new character, whose bags would only be half full because of all the crap I get handed every time I start a new character.

At least there are six bags

It is probably more than that now… but I didn’t want to do the tutorial, so I picked a level 25 hunter I had laying around. His bags were also full… literally this time… but he was in the Esteldin crafting hall, which has bank. So I dumped all his stuff in the bank… buying 6 bank slot upgrades along the way… until he was clear, then bought him the upgrade. I opened the box and there were a few sub items, including a box of gear.

The magic dingus that gets me to level cap

So I clicked it, and all sorts of things blew up over his head.

336,180,086 experience please! There is probably some Easter metaphor in this…

He was already level 25, so didn’t need the full 336,391,144 xp that the level chart says you need for 140.

He was also, as noted in the tool tip, teleported to Carn Dum to begin whatever the tutorial is. I skipped that for the moment. But, while I was there I did go back to the LOTRO Store and purchase the content I was missing.

I was missing two

If nothing else, I took about 150K LOTRO Points off of the company’s balance sheet. I know I didn’t straight up buy them, but I know from my accounting background that they are still counted on the books as an obligation. If you want to help the game you love you can’t just buy the RMT currency, you have to spend it.

Now, some day when they make the game usable to me at 3440×1440 resolution, I’ll be ready to explore quite a bit more of Middle-earth. Unfortunately, UI work is never on Standing Stone’s list of things to do.