LOTRO's insane pricing for Mordor

I've been a long term supporter of Lotro - I keep up my sub even when I'm not playing, and I've rarely had anything bad to say about them. This however is appalling.

The base edition of the expansion costs $40 with no extras (except for a one off level boost, like most games). Sounds ok so far?

Here's the first ridiculous thing. It doesn't include the High Elf race. This is something they've hyped for months as being a major part of the expansion. And yet it doesn't come with the expansion.

You have to pay more. Not a bit either. Literally double.

At $80 you get a few fluff items, a pet, a mount, a title etc. The usual stuff that comes with deluxe editions of MMOs but at a pretty steep price. So they gate the new race behind an over priced 'deluxe edition'. You don't get any in game currency or any real incentives to spend this much.

It doesn't stop there. At $130 comes the ultimate edition. Now it's the same as the last one with some more fluff, an extra mount and set of exclusive cosmetics, and a month's subscription (worth $10-$15). Obviously this one is for the whales who want every exclusive item available.

What disgusts me frankly is the gating of an integral part of the expansion behind a literally doubled price bump. The base one should contain the race, and the mid range one should be around $60-$70 and include 1000-2000 LP points, then it'd actually have some value.

And to make things even worse, the expansions still don't contain any content from previous expansions, so a new player has to buy all of those on top.

Update: the livestream has been full of spin, effectively saying people just misunderstood and the high elf was never meant to be included. You can compare Moria's expansion, which included two new classes and was £30/$40. If you paid twice that for the special edition it included the base game, two months' sub, a soundtrack CD, a physical map, etc. You will be able to buy the high elf class from the in game store around six months after launch, so the only way to get it at launch is behind the $80 gate.


tl;dr: They've taken out stuff from the 'base' expansion so you need to pay $80 at double the cost to get everything. And that doesn't include any in game currency/sub time.