Reinstalling the game in Steam.

[LordUther]

Ok the Steam installation setup is a major waste of time and wear on my hardware. I already had the game fully installed and patched up until 11-2015. But I wanted to integrate it into Steam, so I moved my LOTRO directory into my Steam games directory and told Steam to install the game. It found and examined my previous game files, then proceeded to delete them and download the whole 18gb installation again. Ok I can accept that.

Then the game launcher runs and it starts downloading patches, again not a problem. After a considerable time downloading patches, it then begins to apply 12461 forward iterations, which also takes a good while. So now it should be ready to play right? No, now the patcher decides it has to update 95% of the Steam installation files again, only at about 1/10 of Steam's download speed. Why are the Steam install files still the old 2012 install build? And why bother having Steam download and install them at all? When the patcher client, is just going to have to patch and re-download them all anyway? So even if you already have the game fully installed, it still takes 4-6 hours to reinstall it under Steam, on a 6700K pc with 71Mbps internet download speed.

[Ar0xA]

Yah, i came to the same conclusion. Downloading through steam is a serious waste of time since it needs to update more than 12k files after it at a much much slower download speed.

It's so stupid, I'm not sure why they bothered.

[cheshirm]

the steam version is from 2012 when I first downloaded it. There have been 21 updates and a number of patches since then. so when you moved the game and told steam to install it, steam compared your files (which were updated) to its files which havent been, so it downloaded steam's copy overwriting yours. you start the game and lotro servers see you have 2012 files, so the lotro servers apply the 21 updates and many patches. would be nice if the steam copy and the lotro copy were the same but that is beyond our pay level.

[oreyos]

Originally posted by Ar0xA:

Yah, i came to the same conclusion. Downloading through steam is a serious waste of time since it needs to update more than 12k files after it at a much much slower download speed.

It's so stupid, I'm not sure why they bothered.

The only differnce is the ability to purchase LP & subscriptions using the Steam wallet.
The game is exactly the same.
The install you download from Steam is slightly younger than 2012, but it's still way behind.
(The download from SSG itself was probably out of date as well, seeing that Mordor was just released last week).

Anyway, LotRO doesn't use Steam to update its files, so you won't have any benefit there (or disadvantage), and if you ever think that verifying your files through Steam is a good idea: It will revert to the old state of the install, and then you'll have to redownload & patch LotRO again).

LotRO's patch framework is the worst/slowest I've ever seen. The download is reasonably quick but the patching takes forever and day :-(

[LordUther]

Thanks for the input. Moral of the story? "Don't reinstall through Steam, unless you absolutely have to"

[ķＥŇｐＡ𝓬𝓱𝐢]

It took mine about 3-4 hours.

[LordUther]

It ended up taking 4 hours for mine to complete. The current install through Steam process is worthless as is. It essentially reinstalls the game 3 times. They need to repackage the Steam installer, to just install the TurbineLauncher.exe and it's needed support files. In order to allow it to start at what is now the 3rd installation process. Which would at least cut the install time down to 2-2.5 hours and save a lot of needless wear and tear on our drives.