Lord of the Rings Online switched on yesterday and after one day, we present to you our review of the game's launch. This is not a review of the product, only of how the company did in getting it online, a traditional stumbling point for most MMO companies.

After having participated in Closed Beta, Pre-Order Founders/Open Beta the day was finally here where Lord of the Rings Online officially launched. Here it is 11am on a Tuesday morning and the queues were slowly starting to increase. I noticed that four of the servers had a short wait time. In fact my server was one of them. I clicked on the server and my wait was less than one minute. Not a big deal in my opinion.

It was great seeing all of the new players wandering around the world, so I decided to hang out for a bit and try and answer any questions in OOC that I could. I knew these quests backwards and forwards, so I felt the least I could do to help the launch was offer assistance to new players. As new players came and went through the starter instance, the lag never seemed to get bad. Well it was time to take a break and do some real work.

Later in the day, I hopped on to see how the queues were going and they were holding about the same as in the morning with a few of the servers going in and out of short wait periods. The day was looking good for the launch with minimal issues. Not bad for a major MMO title on launch day. So off to the forums I went to see what others had to say. For the most part it was all good. Mostly the topic of conversation seemed to be around confusion over the billing plan options and questions about re-installing to get the hi-res client and such.

Well I finally made it home from the office and it was time to join the prime time players, the wait was a bit longer for my server, but not to bad on a few minutes and about 60 people ahead of me. I can tell you I have waited longer than that before in other games. The only time I seemed to really run across lag was in Bree around the Prancing Pony. So I tried to avoid town if possible, of course being a Hunter I tend to avoid town anyway.

As the evening wore on I decide to give the ultimate test and log out close to 9:00 PM Eastern to see how the queues were. According to an interview we did with Adam Mersky this was the true test time period for Turbine. Well the queues were the longest I had seen all day on what appears to be the four major servers with a couple of them being in long wait periods, but I didn't have to wait that long to get back in. Overall, the 11 servers carried over from Open Beta remained online and as of publish, no new ones had been added. Once inside, things were pretty smooth, with only a few minor laggy areas.

This was one of the smoothest launches of a major MMO title on record. Turbine having previously launched three titles has shown that they have learned from past mistakes and improved on past successes while successfully bringing the world of Middle-earth to everyone.