LOTRO - Beta Mac version

The Game Room
1

Because the latest WoW expansion is causing serious framerate issues for Mac players (even those with brand-new Macs, apparently, not just players like me with 4-year-old iMacs), I’ve started playing the game on my Windows 7 laptop. So while I’m on the PC I’ve been trying out other MMOs, including Lord of the Rings Online.

I haven’t played far, but I like what I’ve seen in LOTRO so far. While looking at the site I noticed they had a Mac client, in beta version, available for download, so I thought I’d give that a look as well. I’d really rather be playing all these games on my Mac, mainly because I’d rather be looking at its 20" monitor instead of my laptop’s 15". It doesn’t help that my laptop’s keyboard is damaged (spillage), forcing me to use an external keyboard, which means that my laptop’s screen has to sit much further away from me than my iMac’s screen.

Anyway, have any Mac users here successfully downloaded and run the LOTRO Mac client? I’ve attempted it twice (17.74 GB each time), only to end up with a “This application is damaged. You should move it to the Trash.” alert popping up both times when I attempted to launch the app.

So it would seem that it’s either getting corrupted during the download, or there’s simply something wrong with the file to begin with. I haven’t had this issue with anything else I’ve ever downloaded, and the Windows version downloaded to my laptop just fine.

Alternatively, since I’ve never seen this particular error message before, I wonder if the message could be coming from my recently-installed Sophos Anti-Virus software, not from OS X. The alert box gives no indication either way.

2

Can’t help with the Mac questions. However, if you pick up a cookbook holder at a thrift shop or dollar store, you can open your laptop, stand it up in the cookbook holder and the screen will be closer and more at eye level.

3

I sort of fixed it (and relayed my findings to the tech support people).

After downloading it for the third time and encountering the same error, I decided to poke around inside the app “package” (with OS X apps, you can right-click on the icon and select “Show package contents” from the contextual menu, which will open a Finder window containing all of the various files/scripts/etc. that make a program “go”). In there I found a Unix executable file with “launcher” in the name. So just for fun I double-clicked that. Success! The proper launcher launched, and started into what turned out to be a rather lengthy patching process. When that was done I was able to launch and play the game. After quitting out of the game, an experimental double-click on the actual application icon resulted in the game launching properly, so it would seem that whatever was missing and/or broken in the original download got fixed during the patching process. It is “beta” software after all :smiley:

Alas, after all that the game turned out to be a bit sluggish on my Mac, even with all the graphics settings turned down to “Low”, so I may end up just playing on my laptop anyway.