With Rohan finally released, I felt the itch to try out LotRO again. Nevermind I hadn’t even preordered the Rohan expansion. My highest level character, Hiltibrant, the Hobbit warden, is still where I left him months ago, at the 21st Hall in Moria. Realistically speaking, I won’t even reach the newly released content this year.

Nevertheless, LotRO is one of the games I always come back to. And I was interested to see what else had changed in the UI, at lower levels, and so on. So I fired up the patcher and let it run. And run. And run.

And run.

After two hours or so in the background, I got somewhat suspicious. It was still stuck at “Checking game data”, and it didn’t seem to do much of anything, except grab a lot of CPU power without any noticeable progress whatsoever. A bit of searching around found lots of wildly implausible theories as to the reasons, one remotely probable solution, and no official comments by Turbine. Oh well.

I learned that the patcher had a tendency to get stuck on the main asset files, and that one solution was to figure out which one it was (thankfully denoted by an additional “.jrnl” file pointing to the culprit), and moving it out of the way to see whether it would help. It did. The patcher went through and greeted me with the login screen. I was happy. So happy that I went and deleted the removed file. (Because, hey! problem fixed! Big rookie mistake.)

Until I actually tried to start the game proper, when I found out that solution had been… well, less than optimal:

Oh well, that’s helpful.

Thankfully, that error had an official page on the Turbine support site.

Not so thankfully, it described the problem, but no solution. “One of your data files is missing.” No shit, Sherlock. I learned the hard way that the patcher doesn’t seem to recognize missing files, that there is no “recheck everything” option, and that I couldn’t find a way to redownload that missing file via the patcher. In short, I was hosed.

So this morning, before I went to work, I decided that there was a painful, but probably effective solution to the problem. I started redownloading the full installer. It crawls and doesn’t use my full line rate, but it should still be done by tonight.

Oh look, it already got the Rohan skin! (Plus some weird graphic glitches.)

The new design of the downloader makes me hope that I won’t have to patch for another 6 hours after installation to get it to a current state. We’ll see.

In the meantime, there’s other games that beckon.