[Pc Games] After 3 years of trying, Lord of the Rings Online's 'Great Hobbit Run' ends in confused success as a mob of low-level players gets lost inside Mount Doom and decides it's close enough: 'Sauron can kiss my butt!'

[King_of_dark]

The Great Hobbit Run is a Lord of the Rings Online tradition based on a simple premise: What if, instead of adventures and experience and becoming the savior of Middle-earth, a bunch of newbies just showed up at Chez Bilbo and then booked it straight to Mount Doom? It sounds like a terrible idea, at least in the very serious in-fiction context of saving the world from enslavement to evil. But as a silly good time in a very long-in-the-tooth MMO, it actually seems pretty great.

Organized by Twitch streamer BurkeBlack, the Great Hobbit Run (via GamesRadar) is an express trek from Bilbo Baggins' house to the fiery heart of Mount Doom, specifically for level one hobbits. That's not a hard-and-fast rule: Pre-run conversation mentions the LOTRO tutorial putting players to level 5, and someone in the party is judged rather harshly for joining in at level 41.

Low-level characters are obviously more in the spirit of the thing, but nobody's going to put too much effort into enforcing any rules, in part because the mob of non-stop hobbits attracts no small amount of attention, and latecomers, as it goes.

"Generally speaking, I encourage everyone to be level five hobbits, or level one hobbits, whatever they can get," BurkeBlack explained in a chat with PC Gamer. "If [people on] the server, though, they're high level and they see an army of hobbits running, and they're like, 'Wow, I'm gonna follow this, I wanna see what's going on with this,' we can't stop that.

"And I encourage the server to enjoy the fun too—it's a little bit of a game for them, like, 'Protect the hobbits! They're going to Mount Doom!' And they try to protect us a little bit."

Perhaps predictably, the first two runs did not go well. In 2023, the group apparently met its demise in the dark depths of Moria, and in '24 the wheels came off in Rohan.

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/mmo/after-3-years-of-trying-lord-of-the-rings-onlines-great-hobbit-run-ends-in-confused-success-as-a-mob-of-low-level-players-gets-lost-inside-mount-doom-and-decides-its-close-enough-sauron-can-kiss-my-butt/