LoTRO

[Nas]

Hi guys, I'm new to this page but a BIG Lotro fan. I also want to try out multiboxing in Lotro and already have some experience with boxing in other games. However for Lotro I have to get an adequate harde setup in place for multiboxing. I plan to use at least 3 maybe 4 toons, one on the main computer and the other ones on a second machine. However Lotro seems to need much more hardware power than WOW.

So that brings me to my question. If I plan to run 3 Lotro instances on one computer, what kind of machine do I need. Is it possible to do that? Does anybody has any experience with multiple Lotro instances on one machine?



Would be nice if you could give me some advise or maybe a final setup for a machine.

Thx

Nas

[Slats]

I found the Turbine Luancher wouldn't let me run more than one instance of the game.

I did however find that if I had ONE Turbine Account and 2 Subscriptions, I can play two characters on two seperate PC's just happily using the one login. Just using seperate subscriptions. Pretty awesome feature. Dunno if its intended but it works.



I'm finishing my team off to 70 and once there ready for WotLK will probably cancel WoW and wait for it and play around in some other MMOs.

[Nas]

Of course it's possible to run multipile Lotro instances on one PC. You just have to copy the directory and start the seond launcher out of the new directory: it also works with 3,4,..... launchers.

Any suggestions on the hardware setup? It would be nice to run 3 instances on one PC. So does anybody have an experience?

Regards

Nas

[Titus]

Since is asked for other LotRO Dual-Boxers i have taken steps to start into a 3 Char boxing, using 3 machines.

My Setup so far:

3 Comps, AMD Athlons all of them 2 dual Core one single Core, running Vista64 1x and WinXP 2x as systems.
One main keyboard (Logitech G11) and main mouse (Logitech MX518 ) in combination with Synergy (broadcast version) on all of the machines.
Each machine has also another mouse and I plan to use Rush Boards as secondary keyboards.

Currently i use the key broadcasting to send makros (following, small battle order chains) from the G11 keyboard. That only works from the comp where its installed... strangely. But i am still getting the taste of it. :whistling:

My combined groups are 2 Guardians/1Champion... probably will replace one of the guardians with a captain. And i have a group of 3 hunters which are ... deadly... 8o

@nas: Exactly where did you copy the directory? I have tried multiple times to run 2 instances on one machine... from a second harddisk and several different ways of copying. Every time i come to the point when the second instance is trying to contact the authentification server the game breaks off. I wonder how you did that?

@Ellay: Well i cant say that much about beyond level 20 because my groups are composed of different leveled chars. And they just start to reach beyond the 20s. But basically the way i control the chars, equally classed groups are slightly easier to handle. Different classes can bring more options in, but need a bit more work on the placement of which skill or special attack in the quick access panels.

Generally, the play gets not real easier but you gain more synergy between the chars considering loot and such. The internal functions of following and the relay through a main char is working fine. Its fun with 2 chars and it gets more challenging with 3. I wonder if someone will go beyond the 4 one day, because the hardware requirements are bigger than those of other games. Nevertheless Multi-boxing LotRO rocks!! :thumbup:

Oh and i play on EU-Server Vanyar... anyone else from there around?

[Nas]

@ Titus:

Mmmmmhh, I'm aslo using the EU client and multiple clients work perfect on one computer. I jsut copied the Lotro folder and renamed it. Afterwards made a link with the turbine launcher in that directory, and that's it. The only thing I still have problems with is the performance. Three instances need a lot of resources. I jsut tried three instances and it's lagging espcially in cities (everything on low). As far as I know Lotro just uses one CPU core. maybe it's possible to advise the cores to the instances and improve the performance. Anybody with experience on that?



Cheers

Nas

[saris]

Would love to hear more about this.

I currently dual in Lotro, and am Loving it, never had so much fun (for those starting out, I have a dualboxing Kinship on landroval, would love to have you there).

as for three boxing, and system requirements, there are some issues I can see, Lotro Eats RAM for Breakfast, and I find that even if the system is powerful, that there are sections in the game that lag down.

my setup is this
Main Comp toon1
AMD X25200
2Gb DDR 4200
Nvidia 8600 X2 SLI
Gbit Eth to second computer

Second Comp toon2
AMD 3800
2Gb DDR 3700
Nvidia 7800GTOC (single)

I find that on my second computer (I have the graphic turned down) that I have no troulbes, but because I am always looking at the first toons screen, I have the graphics almost maxed. After running through a bunch of Tweaking with the system, and Lotro client, as well as rolling back the Nvidia drives (DX9) I finally got rid of most of the graphical anomilies, but still when I enter PvP or the old forest I lag out, as well as Bree (though bree is so huge that I think the lag is an equation of their server)

I use mutliBox Server/Client to transfer keys from primary comptuer to secondary, and I have since installed AutoHotKeys allowing me to map out some simple macros on the second toon for casting Spells and healing (she is a Minstrel)
I think that I would find three toons Too much, as the only real "Macro" that the game has is a /follow, and you would have to be Extremely creative with AutoHotKeys or another program in order to have the characters space out and attack correctly without being able to "SEE" their screens, and adjust them individually from time to time, specially because the /follow command breaks very easily though the use of target assist is very handy.

Let me know if you are interested in helping Vae Victus, the unofficial dual boxing Kinship on landroval, grow in size. Currently we have one dual boxer (me) and a bunch of my close friends, one of which is looking into getting a second computer to dual-box.

[ralfsch]

@ Titus:

Mmmmmhh, I'm aslo using the EU client and multiple clients work perfect on one computer. I jsut copied the Lotro folder and renamed it. Afterwards made a link with the turbine launcher in that directory, and that's it. The only thing I still have problems with is the performance. Three instances need a lot of resources. I jsut tried three instances and it's lagging espcially in cities (everything on low). As far as I know Lotro just uses one CPU core. maybe it's possible to advise the cores to the instances and improve the performance. Anybody with experience on that?



Cheers

Nas

Hello.

I'm interested in your solution to the problem that each instance of lotro binds to a specific socket on your machine and thus a second instance of lotro is unable to bind to this socket on the same machine and quits with an error message if the first instance has this socket already allocated.

The Errormessage from the lotro-software describes exactly this behaviour.

This problem is definitely not solveable by copying some files around so i'm very interested in your solution.

[TFPriest]

I'm also definately intrested in doing this, and any extra information anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated.

I've tried multiple ways of doing this, and nothing has been successful so far

Seems to be a socket problem, but I'm not quite sure.

[Moxy]

IMO lotro would not be advantageous to box unless you did it with creeps.
The only real ranged classes are Hunters and LM's, LM's probably being the best bet. I still can't see this being very effective or easy to utilize.

I have a 50 mintrel and rank 5 creep, but gave up the game due to the broken, limited, and poorly thought out PvP.
PvE will be cool as they add more content- but I need PvP in a game.

[Elistrea]

You can definitely get multiple instances of LotRO to run on one PC. I have only ever tried 2 at a time though. If you have made a copy of your Lord of the Rings online folder inside of the Turbine folder and renamed it(example: LotRO 2ndClient), made a copy of the LOTROinvoker.exe file inside of your renamed LOTRO folder, rename it (example: Client 2) and then dragged that to desktop you should be able to run 2 instances now, make sure you have both of the login windows opened and ready to login. If you do one and enter the world before you have the second one started and ready for login, you will usually get the message "LotRO is already running, would you like to bring it to the front?" message. Also I am running a Core2Duo e6750 over clocked to 3.66Ghz with 8G of ram with the paging file size minimized and then disabled. I also set the CPU affinity of each LotRO client so each one is on a separate core independent of each other. This has reduced the overall % of CPU usage during play compared to having both clients utilizing both cores as the system sees fit. The one issue I do have is that I am using Keyclone to broadcast my keys to my third character on a seperate PC and would really like to get my second Instanced character more involved. Is there a utility I can use to lock that window in the forefront so that it accepts the broadcast from Keyclone??