zExplorer 5 and Map Pack Released for LOTRO

Many years ago, Asheron's Call was my MMO of choice. It was my first MMO beta and first MMO, which gave it a special place in my heart.

One of the cooler third party utilities for AC was AC Explorer. This was a windows client map utility which connected to a central database of AC locations, items, and stuff. The map was generated from actual game data so was very accurate. This is back in late 1990's. Well before "map" sites and web services/SOA were all the craze.

In 2000 AC Explorer Pro came out. Seeing how much I was using it, paying $20 was an easy choice... 

Fast forward seven years

Yesterday I saw a LOTRO map pack for zExplorer (the child of AC Explorer Pro) was released... Oh yeah, had to check that out.

What amazed me was that after seven years Zuggsoft still had my purchase record available. That after just a few seconds I was able to recover my license key and plug it into this latest version of zExplorer. And that it worked and was honored

Seven years.

How many major online software houses do you think there are where you could do that? That your purchase still "counted" toward a free upgrade? Where it was actually pretty easy to recover a seven year store info and license key?

This was just outstanding customer service. Zuggsoft, you rock.

 

All that gushing aside, zExplorer and the LOTRO map pack is very darn cool. Again the map is generate from the game's DAT files, so it's very complete and accurate. I mean amazingly complete (see it here). It shows all the areas in the file, even those not currently available (like where Moria will be in the south-west, etc ;). It appears that only about 1/2 of the total area is currently accessible in-game to date. And this is only one major zone, just that east of the Misty Mountains. This is by far the most complete LOTRO map available anywhere today...

Locations (NPC's, items, places, etc) are based on the real coordinates (i.e. /loc and not ;loc) so are also very accurate. And again, everything is tied to web service, so it's easy to add and get map and location updates.

If you're playing LOTRO, you owe it to yourself to give zExplorer a trial run...

(via LOTRO Warcry - zExplorer 5 - LOTRO Support)